Viennese society still laughs about a little adventure which occurred to him when returning from a hunting expedition in the mountains above Ischl. Through some extraordinary chance the Archduke had wandered from his party, and losing his way among the narrow wooded paths descending to the valley, he determined to reach the first yâger hut which he could succeed in finding by himself. Quickening his pace, he hurried on in the gathering gloom, until he reached a steep incline covered with slippery grass. A little ahead of him he soon discerned a dark figure seemingly heavily laden. Wishing to inquire his way home, he hailed the unknown in a stentorian voice, and the figure came to a stop. To his surprise the Archduke found that it was that of a young girl of nineteen or twenty years of age, who, with the usual pluck of the Austrian peasant woman, had burdened herself with a gigantic load of firewood, on top of which was perched a chubby baby about two years old, who maintained his perilous equilibrium by means of a long scarf tied by his careful mother around his fat little body and her own neck.
“What do you want?” cried the girl, scanning the belated hunter with anything but a friendly look.
“Can you tell me the shortest road down to Ischl?” replied the Archduke.
“I am going there — you can follow me,” she retorted, curtly.
Accepting this rather ungracious invitation, the imperial sportsman resumed his way beside her, but his sense of courtesy making him feel annoyed at seeing a woman carrying so exaggerated a weight, he said, pleasantly:
“This is far too heavy for you, my good girl. Give me that child; I will carry him.”
“Much you must know about carrying children, you old fool!” politely exclaimed the girl. “No, you take the firewood and I will keep the youngster. You may well do that, for had you not met me you’d have run a good chance of spending your entire night on the mountains.”
Hardly able to repress his amazement, the Archduke undid the scarf, transferred the little urchin to his mother’s arms and the ponderous bundle of fagots to his own shoulders, and what with his gun and his game bag, he was a pretty heavily burdened archduke indeed! To add insult to injury, the girl continued to chaff him unmercifully about the comical appearance he presented, and, as he later on asserted, he soon became a little tired of his bargain.
For a full hour he trudged wearily along, wishing himself anywhere but among the high mountains with a load of wood on his back; but at last relief arrived in the shape of his party, which came upon the ill-assorted couple at the crossing of two paths. No pen could describe, or pencil portray, the amazement of the hunters at seeing their august master thus accoutered, and their exclamations betrayed the Archduke’s identity to the appalled girl. Falling on her knees, she craved his pardon for the crime of lèse-majesté which she had unwittingly committed, and tears of shame sprang to her bonny blue eves as she watched two of the Prince’s hunters remove the fagots from his bruised shoulders.
“Don’t cry, there’s a good girl,” pleaded Albrecht, much distressed. “You did quite right, and I am mighty glad to have met you to show me the way!” So saying, he lifted the girl from the ground, and pulling a well-filled purse from his pocket, he pressed it into the baby’s wee hands, adding, with a kindly smile: “Here is something to buy your mammy a donkey, for she might not always find old fools to help her carry her firewood!”
Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, The Martyrdom of an Empress (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1902), 182-4.
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 395
