The Archduke was in love, and love is an incalculable force, driving all of us at times irresistibly to deeds of civil and ecclesiastical wedlock.  He was a soldier, a good soldier, in itself an unusual and suspicious characteristic in one of the Hapsburg blood.  He was a musician and a man of culture—­qualities that, in a prince, must be taken as dangerous indications of an unbalanced mind.  He was an intimate friend of the Crown Prince Rudolph, that bewildering personality, whose own fate was so unhappy, so obscure.  Skill in war, intelligence, knowledge, friendship all marked him out as a man only too likely to bring discredit on Archducal tradition.  His peers in birth shook their heads, and muttered the German synonym for “crank.”  Worse than all, he was in love—­in love with a woman of dangerous virtue.  What could such a man do against temptation?  Struggle as he might, he could not long repel the seductive advances of honourable action.  He loved, he fell, he married.

In London, of all places, this crime against all the natural dictates of Society was ultimately perpetrated.  We do not know what church lent itself to the deed, or what hotel gave shelter to the culprits’ shame.  By hunting up the marriage register of Johann Orth (to such shifts may an Archduke be reduced in the pursuit of virtue), one might, perhaps, discover the name of the officiating clergyman, and we can confidently assume he will not be found upon the bench of Bishops.  But it is all many years ago now, and directly after the marriage, as though in the vain hope of concealing every trace of his offence, Johann Orth purchased a little German ship, which he called by the symbolic name of Santa Margherita—­for St. Margaret suffered martyrdom for the sin of rejecting a ruler’s dishonourable proposals—­and so they sailed for South America.  By what means the wedded fugitives purposed there to support their guiltless passion, is uncertain.  But we know that they arrived, that the captain gave himself out as ill, and left the ship, together with most of the crew, no doubt in apprehension of divine vengeance, if they should seem any longer to participate in the breach of royal etiquette.  We further know that, in July 1890, the legal lovers sailed from Buenos Ayres, with a fresh crew, the Archduke himself in command, and were never heard of more.

An Austrian cruiser was sent to search the coasts, in vain.  No letters came; no ship has ever hailed the vessel of their iniquity.  The insurance companies have long paid the claims upon the Archduke’s premiums for his life, and that fact alone is almost as desirable an evidence as a death-certificate to his heir.  But one Sunday in July 1910, the Imperial Court of Austria also issued an edict to appear simultaneously in the chief official gazettes of the habitable globe, declaring that, unless within six months further particulars were supplied concerning one, namely, the Archduke Johann Salvator, of the House of Austria and Tuscany,