the Cross:

"O God, give me strength!" he prayed in consternation....

8

Next day, through the guard of honour of the grenadiers, the people
filed past the little prince's body. The following morning, it was
removed to Altara and interred in the imperial vault in St. Ladislas'
Cathedral. Princes Gunther and Herman of Gothland had come over for the
ceremony, but the Duke of Xara was forbidden by Professor Barzia to take
part in it: he remained at Lipara.

The Gothlandic princes and their suite returned with the Emperor Oscar
to the capital, where, at her sister's pressing request, Queen Olga had
also come, with Princess Wanda. And, in the mourning stillness of the
Imperial, the family drew together in a narrow circle of intimacy. After
her first tears, the Empress Elizabeth had lost her unnatural calm and
constantly gave way to violent fits of sorrow, which Queen Olga or
Othomar had difficulty in allaying. The emperor was inconsolable,
indulging his grief with childish vehemence. Nobody had ever seen him
like that before, nobody recognized him. The fact that he had lost his
favourite child aroused his soul to rebellion against God. In addition
to this, he had very much taken to heart his last conversation with
Othomar, in which the prince had spoken to him of abdicating. The
emperor had not returned to the subject, but it was never out of his
thoughts. He feared that he would have to discuss it with Othomar again.
He was furious when he felt how powerless he was to prevent the
crown-prince from taking this desperate resolution. And he pictured the
legal results if the prince maintained his purpose: the Archduchess of
Carinthia empress, the archduke prince-consort and the house of
Czyrkiski no longer reigning in the male line on the throne of Liparia.
The possibility of this contingency, taken in conjunction with his
sorrow at Berengar's death, made the Emperor Oscar suffer with that very
special suffering of a monarch in whose veins still flows all the
hereditary attachment to the greatness of his ancestors and who hopes to
see this endure for all time. And he was also inconsolable for the loss
of the child whom he loved best, more profoundly but also more silently,
in greater secrecy, since he did not speak of it; and this probably made
him feel more bitterly the thought of the future which he saw imaged
before him. He had not even mentioned it to the empress, because of a
certain superstitious dread.

And wi