EVEN while I was on my way from the Princess Christina’s house I began to realise the consequences of the mistake we were making. I had been miserably weak to give way, and, although my head was half giddy with the rapturous remembrance of her words and glances, and dazed with the thought that she had appealed to my love, I was angry with myself for having yielded.
I half dreaded to meet Zoiloff. I knew what that sturdy fellow would say, and was inclined to fear lest he should make a shrewd guess at the reasons which had influenced me. One thing was certain, he must not be present when I saw the Countess; for I knew that she would blurt out the truth in her sneering, vindictive tone.
She would publish it, too, far and wide, and in a few days all Sofia would ring with the secret of my love for Christina and of hers for me. That alone was enough to ruin the cause, since it must inevitably rouse old Kolfort’s suspicions.
When I reached the house I was told that Zoiloff was with the Countess Bokara, and I sent for him. I said in as few words as possible that it had been decided to let the woman go free, and I gave some more or less fictitious reasons of policy for it. But they did not impose on him for an instant.
“It is wrong, Count, absolutely wrong, and you should never have consented. She will ruin everything. I propose that we just ignore the Princess’s wish and keep that fiend close all the same.”
“I have passed my word, Zoiloff.”
“I am very sorry to hear it, but I haven’t; and there’s nothing to prevent your setting her free and my taking her again. Everything is ready, as you know, and the thing would be easy enough.”
“No, I can be no party to it,” I answered firmly, although the notion pleased and tempted me.
“Then you may as well throw up the sponge.” He spoke angrily.
“It may still be possible to blind the General’s eyes.”
“You are more sanguine than you look or your tone implies if you think so. I don’t believe it for a moment. There’s always something goes wrong where a woman is concerned.”
“I will send this one packing, and then we can consult.”
“There’s not much left worth consulting about,” he answered as I left him.
The Countess greeted me with a sharp, shrewd look, and then her face showed a keen disappointment.
“I have failed, I see. You needn’t tell me,” she said.
“You are not yet a murderess—at least of the Princess,” I returned, harshly, for I hated the woman.
“You have taken a long time over your rescue and love business; but I suppose you had much to talk about. It’s the way of lovers!” she cried with a laugh. “Besides you had to settle what to do with inconvenient me. I am afraid I am very much in your way, Count—quite as much trouble to you as if you had remained faithful to me.”
“If I had my way you would not give me much more trouble.”
“Ah, then I was right. I knew that she would never dare to try and keep me a prisoner. Will you see that a carriage is ready for me?” She spoke in a tone of indifference.
“If you have any gratitude in your nature you will remember that it is to the Princess that you owe your liberty—to the woman whose life you have just failed to take.”
“And am bitterly regretting my failure. That is my gratitude. But why cant to me of gratitude. Do you suppose she has done this for my sake? Nonsense; I told you her reasons before you went to her. Am I a fool, that you prate to me in this childish strain? I tell you I am an enemy, and a woman to be feared. She is a fool to let me go, and I know it as well as you. Were the positions reversed—but there, she has given you a heavy task, Count, heavy enough to tax even your cleverness; and you can lay your plans on this one solid and sure foundation—that I will do my worst against you and her.”
I made no answer, and, ringing a bell, ordered a carriage to be brought round at once.
“You look very solemn, Count,” she said, when the servant had left the room and I was going. “And you have plenty of reason. But I’ll do you one favour, and tell you that I have already begun my work, and have told that ill-bred soldier who was here and seems to be in your confidence the whole story of your love for the fair Christina; and it had a very pretty effect upon him. But it prepared him, no doubt, for this step,” and she laughed insolently. “At any rate you can be frank with him without that shamefacedness with which one man speaks to another of his love. What he is thinking about it to-day—and I was careful to sow the seeds of fruitful contemplation in his mind—all Sofia will be openly talking to-morrow, including your new Russian friends. It was injudicious of you, wasn’t it, to leave me such a companion?”
I could endure no more of her taunts, and went out of the room, closing the door quickly to shut out the sound of her mocking laughter. When the carriage was announced I went back to fetch her, and, as if her malicious instinct could always hit upon the mood most exactly calculated to jar upon my nerves, she was now disposed to play the high society dame, and, with all the airs and graces of a capricious beauty, was for delaying me to chatter idle nothings, in a tone of empty frivol, about the weather, the recent ball, and my health, until I cut her short by saying sternly:
“The carriage is waiting for you, Countess, and I have no time for this wearying badinage.”
“I thought you might wish your servants to think this was merely a call of ceremony;” and, as if to irritate me with these little peltings of frivolity, she continued to chatter in the same tone until she had taken her seat in the carriage. Then, with a quick change of manner, and a malignant glance at me, she said:
“When we meet again you may find the positions reversed, Count, for I warn you to look to yourself.”
I gave no sign of even having heard her, and watched in silence as the carriage drove off.
“There goes our last hope,” said Zoiloff, looking moodily after the carriage, as though he would have given all he was worth to have dashed after it, and have torn the Countess out of it back to captivity.
“Now let us consider what to do next,” I replied.
“There is nothing to do next, or after,” he said, in the same moody tone. “When such a woman holds the future of our scheme in her hands we can do nothing but prepare for the worst, and look out for the best means of escape. It will soon be a case of sauve qui peut.”
“I shall fight on till it comes, then, and so will you, my friend, when this mood has passed.” I took him into my private room and, putting wine and cigars before him, set to work to try and shape a course to suit the altered aspect of affairs.
My own opinion was not much brighter than his; but I sought to persuade him, and myself too, that matters might yet be mended. There was one possible door of hope. The Countess meant to have her revenge, and, as she had frankly said, we must base all our plans on her implacable enmity. But she had other ends than those of mere personal vengeance. She hated Christina bitterly, but she loved the Russians no better. Her aim was to keep her Prince on the throne, and to betray us at once would certainly injure him by forcing General Kolfort to act immediately, not only against us, but against the Prince. The latter would be frightened and jockeyed out of the throne, to make room, not for Christina, but for some more pliable tool; and the Countess was quite shrewd enough to foresee that.
“I am inclined to believe,” I said, after we had discussed the position at great length, “that she will seek her ends first by other means than by betraying us to Kolfort—some scheme or other against the Princess or myself personally, perhaps; but something which may take time to work out. She will cling to the hope of retaining the Prince on the throne to the last possible moment; and she may reckon, as she has done hitherto, that by removing the Princess the Russian scheme will be so maimed that the Prince may be able to retrieve and retain his position—at all events for a time. She may now include me in some such plan of assassination. The question for us to consider is, then, how soon we can complete our arrangements, by hurrying them forward at fever heat, so as to make us indifferent to what Kolfort can do.”
I continued to urge this from every standpoint, until I saw with great satisfaction that Zoiloff’s enthusiasm began to heat again. But suddenly his face clouded, and he said:
“Are you forgetting the strange story she is going to tell about yourself and the Princess? I know nothing of it, of course,” he added, as though in assurance of his faith in me. “But if such a tale should reach old Kolfort—and she seemed mad enough to scream it from the housetops—you can judge what he may think.”
“There is a ready answer to it,” I returned, gloomy now in my turn at the thought behind my words.
“You mean denial. I don’t like to speak of this, Count.”
“I do not mean denial only in words. They count for little enough in a time like this,” I replied bitterly.
“What then?”
“The Princess’s only answer will be the hurrying forward of her marriage with the Duke Sergius. It is the inevitable corollary of her decision to-day.”
“By God, but you are a man, Count!” cried Zoiloff, with a look of genuine sympathy, as if he felt instinctively what such words must cost me. “From this hour I will never again question a single order you give or decision you take.” He held out his hand, and grasped mine in a warm pledge of earnest friendship. “We will go on, as you say, and frustrate this she-devil yet—or fall in the effort.”
A long silence followed, in which we were both busy with our own thoughts; and when the silence was broken we went on with a long, detailed discussion of the means to be adopted to quicken our preparations and expedite the arrangements that should make us indifferent to any action by General Kolfort.
The work interested us both absorbingly, and while Zoiloff remained with me, and my thoughts were occupied in planning the work to be done, I was even inclined to accept my own arguments that all was not yet lost.
But when he had left me a relapse came, and I seemed to be overwhelmed with a sense of the weariness and futility of it all. I had nothing now to gain. A few hours had changed everything for me, and all my enthusiasm had evaporated, like the sparkle from flat wine.
Bulgaria might profit, but what was Bulgaria to me? I had not been fighting for Bulgaria, but for Christina; and what prospect was there now for her but the gloomiest? I had gained the priceless treasure of her love; but with the very ecstasy of the knowledge had come the bane that I could never even win happiness for her.
I laid bare my heart to myself in this bitter self-communing. I had tried to persuade myself before that mine was that rare thing—the rarest on earth, indeed—selfless love; but I knew now that that had been the flimsiest gauze of self-deceit veiling the secret hopes and desires that had urged me forward. Out of the inmost thoughts came up now the skeletons of my lost desires, gibbering and mouthing and mocking me with the hopelessness of my love.
If I could have made her happy, have helped her to realise the dream of her life as the Virgin Queen pouring on this distracted people the infinite blessings of freedom and happiness, herself a bright, conspicuous example of innocence and purity to all the world, I might have been content to worship even while I served her. But to think of her as the wife of the sensual brute I detested, forced to submit to his loathsome endearments, and to smile and frown upon him in his humours, was like a very torment of hell to me. And for her it must be ten thousand times worse. Her life, mated with a man she abhorred, would be one long, living lie, the canker of which must blight her every purpose, and destroy every hope in her heart.
And yet I, loving her and beloved by her, was to help her to this life of fair-seeming misery and honoured dishonour. I could not and would not, I cried in my heart—and yet I knew I must. There was no escape now from it. As I had told Zoiloff in my despair, the hastening of the marriage was the one possible means of averting that instant ruin in which the power of the at present all-powerful Russian agents could involve us all.
Harder than all else to bear, however, was the thought that I myself must pass that inexorable sentence upon her. She had made it essential by her shrinking woman’s fear of how her act would be read in the eyes of Europe; but it was left for me to show her the full consequences of what she had done.
In my frenzy I was tempted to regret that I had saved her from the infinitely more merciful fate of death. Deeply as I loved her, I would vastly rather see her dead than the wife of the man whose wife she was now inevitably bound to be.
For a moment a wild thought rushed through my mind—that I should induce her to fly the country with me. But the thought was as great a treachery to her as the act would be treacherous to those whose cause she championed with such pure-souled enthusiasm. I recalled with the iciness of a lover’s despair her declaration that she would even become the wife of this man, if no other path were open, rather than abandon the cause she had espoused.
There was no escape; and when at length I threw myself on my bed, brain-wearied with the long wild fighting against the inevitable, it was only that the torture of my waking thoughts should be reproduced with all the grotesque horrors of oppressive, sickening dreams.
I awoke with the dawn, dreading the coming of the hour that would bring with it the ordeal of the interview.
For myself my course was soon decided. I would keep my word, and go through with the task of leading the movement to such a successful issue as we could yet snatch from the dangers surrounding and threatening it. But the hour that saw her safely seated on the throne should be my last in the country.
I was revolving these gloomy thoughts over an untasted breakfast when Spernow came.
“You look ill, Count;” for the struggle had written its effects in my face, “Yesterday’s doings have upset you.”
“It is nothing worse than a headache,” I answered carelessly.
“I hope your nerves are not unstrung. You will need a clear head to-day unless I have read things wrongly.”
“What next?” I felt that nothing which could happen now would either interest or trouble me. I had lost the one thing which I desired, and life itself might go for aught I cared.
“I was at a house last night and heard something which you must know at once. It concerns you closely, and spells danger.”
“What was it?” Feel interested I could not, feign it I would not.
“The Duke Sergius has resolved to force a quarrel upon you. He has some deadly grievance. I heard it incidentally, but—— Why, Count, what is the matter?”
He might well be astonished. The news was the one thing on earth that could have changed me, the one thing that might yet change everything. In an instant my lassitude and despair fell away like a cloak. My blood warmed, my heart beat fast, my cheeks glowed again, and life was worth living and risking. Even if I were destined to go straight to my death at the hands of the rival I hated, I should have a moment of real enjoyable life, while, if my hand were true and my skill what I believed it and I killed him—— I could not stay to think, but in my eager hope that the news might be true I plied Spernow with question after question, testing his story, till he might well have deemed me insane.
“Of all the gifts and riches of the earth that you could bring me, Spernow,” I cried in my vehemence, “there is none I would have in preference to this news. By Heaven, man, but you have made me live again!”