WITH the following day came startling confirmation of Captain Wolasky’s warning. While I was with the regiment a letter was brought to me from the Prince requesting me to wait upon him.
I found him labouring under considerable excitement, pacing the floor restlessly and awaiting me impatiently.
“I thought you were never coming, Count,” he said, irritably. “There seems to be no one now on whom I can rely.”
“I came the instant I received your command, your Highness.”
“Then there must have been some strange delay in giving my message. I cannot understand it.”
“Is there anything in which I can serve you?”
“I wish to Heaven you could get me out of this wretched kingdom honourably. That would serve me.” The words burst from him in obedience to an irresistible impulse. “I am sick and weary to death of it all;” and he continued his restless pacing for three lengths of the room. He stopped abruptly and threw himself into a chair close to me.
“Sit here,” he cried, pointing to the chair next him. “I want to speak frankly to you.” He paused again, and then laying his hand on my arm said very earnestly: “My friend, you are playing a deadly game—and, mark me, you are going to be defeated.”
“Your Highness means——?” I asked steadily.
“That your ideal is magnificent and worthy of you, full worthy of any Englishman—but impossible.”
“I am flattered to hear such words from you,” I replied cautiously, but he caught me up and answered sharply:
“For Heaven’s sake, Count, don’t answer me with any courtly phrasings that come tripping off the lips and mean nothing when spoken. I don’t ask you for your confidence, unless you care to give it to me. I’ll tell you what I know about you first.”
“The Countess Bokara has no doubt——”
“Yes, of course she has; she has told me all she knows, or guesses, or suspects, or whatever it may be. But while it was only what she said I did not think of seeing you or interfering with you. But I have learnt it now from another source—one vastly more important. And that’s what I mean when I tell you that you are steering straight for the rocks and are dead certain to be shipwrecked. Listen to me. You are in love with the Princess, and naturally enough people credit you with the intention of trying to climb into the throne by——”
“It is monstrous,” I cried, unable to keep silent.
“I hope your repudiation comes from your heart—I hope it for your own sake; for there is no happiness under such a crown as I wear, Count Benderoff,” said the Prince bitterly. “Men think of the dazzle, the pomp, and the grandeur, the magnificence, and forget the dangers, the cares, the awful loneliness. If you seek happiness, seek it not in the glitter of a king’s garb, but in the frank enjoyment of true manliness. A monarch has mighty opportunities of making others happy, but himself is doomed to sorrow and solitude. There is no solitude that this life can know half so awful in its depression as that which hedges a king. You seek advice, you find intrigue; you hunger for the truth, and they feed you with the bitter apples of flattery; you yearn for the sweet counsel of a friend, and you meet the tempered phrasings of a courtier. Your every word is weighed in the balance of your hearer’s self-interest, your every thought is caught still-born and distorted, your every action is judged by the sordid standard of some intrigue, and every motive twisted and dissected, and analysed and maligned, till your very face becomes a mask to hide your mind, lest your enemies should use your looks to help the plans which their malice is spreading under your very eyes. God, it is unbearable.”
I listened in silence to this outburst.
“You wonder why I speak like this to you. I can read it in your eyes—for am I not trained to find the truth in the face and hear the lies in the voice? Well, I would warn you, and more, I would warn that good, true, noble woman whom you love. Time was when I hated her, and believed all the harm that was said of her; but now that I have learnt her real object—to act, not with, but against, the bloodsuckers who seek to devour the land—I know her goodness and sincerity. But the movement must fail. The Russians know of it, General Kolfort best of all, and he has already taken his measures to thwart you all. And you will find his hand a heavy one, Count. If the Princess Christina had succeeded in gaining the throne on her own terms—I mean by means of the men you and those with you were seeking to train as her adherents—she must still have failed in her object, and have doomed herself to a lot as miserable and hopeless as mine has been. But Kolfort does not mean her to succeed; and, I warn you, the measures of prevention will be sharp, sudden, and terrible in their severity.”
I sat amazed and disconcerted at his words.
“You wonder how I know all this, and set it down to the Countess Bokara. Of course, she has told me; but I have my news straight from General Kolfort himself. You little know Bulgaria or the Bulgarians, or you would have seen the consummate hopelessness of trying to avoid treachery. Every man you have added to your band has been a fresh centre of probable treachery. The rule here is each man for himself; and some one of the men with you was bound to ask himself in time whether he could not gain more for himself by carrying the news to the Russians than by standing true to a desperate cause like your Princess’s. Someone has betrayed you; and the betrayal began when your love was known. They do not believe in disinterested love in this country, Count. The peasants may, but no one else. And when that secret leaked out, General Kolfort’s task of suborning a traitor became easy enough. If I knew the scoundrel’s name I would give it you, that you might cut his heart and tongue out for his cowardice. But, believe me, everything is known—everything. And your knowledge of that grim Russian leader may tell you what to expect.” He spoke with all the earnestness of a troubled friend; and I could not doubt him.
“When did your Highness learn this?” I asked after a pause.
“Yesterday. Three days ago, the General came to me with proposals that showed he had some fresh plans in mind. He was all for my remaining here as reigning Prince, and offered to concede more than half the conditions of freedom of action I had before demanded. It was a pity to disturb the country by a change of rulers; the country was thriving under my wise rule; the people were growing more contented, and the malcontents could be overawed; the advantages of my rule were appreciated in St. Petersburg, and the basis of achieving mutual ends might probably be arranged with honour to me and substantial benefit to the country; and so on for an hour or more he prated. I asked the reason for the change of tone, and he hummed and hesitated, and, in a word, lied. I said I must have time to think; and he gave me till yesterday. Last night he came with his tale prepared—that the Princess was conspiring for an end hostile to both my aims and those of Russia; that you were her right hand and had been set on by her to fight and kill the Duke Sergius, but had succeeded only in wounding him; that your plot was to use the Russian influence to gain the throne and then yourself marry her and reign as her consort; and to gain this end you were both prepared to throw the country into the throes of a civil war which God forfend, and so on, till I was sick to death of his intriguing slanders. I tried to lure him on to tell me what he proposed for you, but he contented himself with saying he had all but completed what I might rely upon would be effectual measures of precaution.”
“May I venture to ask how your Highness answered him?”
“How should I answer him but as I have always answered? That I would never bend the knee to Russia; that I did not believe St. Petersburg would ever sanction any such arrangement as he outlined; and that if what he stated of the objects of the Princess were true, I would be the first to abdicate in her favour and join with her in her efforts, shouldering a musket if need be, in the ranks of the men to fight for her; and that would I, Count, if I saw the faintest gleam of a hope of success. But there is not a chance, no jot or tittle of hope.”
“Now that we have been betrayed, that is.”
“Before the betrayal the chances were not one in a hundred; now they are not one in a million. There is but one course for you and for her—flight, and at once.”
“She will not desert the men who have stood by her. Nor shall I,” I answered firmly.
“As you will. The Russian preparations are all but complete; Russian troops are being hurried to the Black Sea; the slightest sign or movement on your part will be seized on as the pretext for measures as drastic as Russian measures commonly are; and you yourselves, you two in particular and all associated as leaders with you, will be treated you can guess how. Russia knows how to treat her friends badly enough; but no one ever yet accused her of not dealing effectively with her enemies. You have been blind, Count; but then a man in love is seldom anything else.”
It was useless to pretend that I was not vastly affected by what the Prince told me. I read in it ruin and worse than ruin to everything, and my heart sank at the prospect before Christina.
“Your warnings, and more, the kindly motives that have prompted them, have moved me deeply, your Highness.”
“They had better move you out of Bulgaria. But that is your personal affair. I have told you, because of the service you rendered to one who is now, I regret, your enemy.”
“Your Highness knows of the attempt on the Princess Christina’s life,” I asked.
“To my shame and sorrow, I do. She must not think that I would have countenanced such a thing for a moment,” he said in tone of deep pain.
“She does not,” I assured him.
“That you thwarted it is another service you have rendered me, which adds to my eagerness to help you both to safety. But even on the throne here I am powerless to help my friends. Ay, and even my friends are driven to inflict deeper wounds upon me than my enemies.” His manner was that of a weak, hopeless, dejected, sorrow-broken man. “You have spoken of that deed, and I will tell you. Since I knew of it, I have refused to see the Countess. I cannot see her again; and I learn that in the mad hope of helping my fallen cause she has been in communication with Kolfort, leading him to think that I could be induced to remain here. And I declare to you, Count, I do not pass an hour, day or night, that is not care-ridden by the fear of some yet more desperate deed she may attempt—the consequences of which must fall on my head. Every step she takes adds to either my danger or my disrepute. And I can do nothing.” He wrung his hands in weak unavailing despair.
I rose to leave; and, looking up half-eagerly, he asked:
“And will the British Government do nothing?” The question was so absolutely inconsequential, and suggested motives behind it so utterly at variance with his attitude and words, that I was surprised. At one moment he was declaiming against the miseries of his position, and yet now he was clinging to the throne, like a drowning man to a spar, with a vague reasonless hope that even England would risk a war with Russia to maintain him upon it.
“I have not the remotest right to say a word on that matter, your Highness; but personally I do not think for a moment that any interference can be looked for.”
“Then all is indeed lost!” he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, and sighing heavily. “Farewell, Count, let it be farewell; and do your utmost to snatch that brave girl you love from the ruin that threatens to overwhelm her.”
I needed no words of his to spur me to such an effort, and as soon as I left the Palace, in grievous trouble at all that I had heard, I sent a message for Zoiloff to come to me at once, and hurried home to try and strike out some line of action to meet this most dire emergency.
My impulse was to fight—to strike our blow without a day’s delay; to take the Prince at his word—if he had meant it; to get him to abdicate on the very next day, and have the Princess proclaimed ruler in his stead. Our preparations were not ready, and the coup would be much less effective than if we could have had time to complete everything. But then neither was General Kolfort. He had not openly abandoned Christina’s cause, and might be half afraid to oppose her, if once on the throne, and without the aid of the troops which the Prince had told me were being hurried up to his support. For him to cause a civil war was to take a step in the face of Europe which might cost him dear, and force the other Powers to interfere—the one step that Russia dreaded.
Unprepared as we were, and much as we had to gain by a few days’ delay, Kolfort had much more to gain. When once his grip had tightened in the way he projected, there would not remain a vestige of hope for us. Clearly, then, if we meant to fight, we must do it at once.
It must be fight or flight.
In regard to the latter, I found Markov had returned, and he assured me he had carried out my plans to the letter—had even improved upon them, for he had told me he had arranged for the last stage of the journey to be by a very slightly known route to the frontier.
“I did this,” he explained, “because I heard rumours of certain changes as to the guardianship of the frontier roads, and I thought it well to choose the route which would be the least difficult in case of trouble.”
“You have done well, Markov, and have earned your reward,” I said.
“You will let me stay with you to the last, my Lord?” he asked.
“I wish it above all things, for I need faithful men about me.”
When Zoiloff came I explained my views, putting bluntly the alternative of fight or flight, and he was all for fighting. But he shook his head gloomily at the chances.
“We have left to the last the most hazardous work of all,” he said, “and yet in some respects the most important. I mean the winning over of some of those men, the politicians, the men of tongues not deeds, whose names are most before the public. They are the most dangerous of all to meddle with, and yet without them I fear for the result. And we cannot draw them to us until we can show that the army is on our side.”
“We have done all that human effort could achieve in the time—but we could not do impossibilities. On the troops in Philippopoli I believe we can count surely. General Montkouroff is Bulgarian to the core, and where he leads the majors will follow. He has been sounded and will act with us. But here in Sofia there is not a regiment, except that to which I and Spernow belong, which would not turn against us. This disposition of the troops has all been arranged by Russia and the traitors who are Russia’s friends. The risk is tremendous.”
“There is no alternative but flight, remember.”
“And fly I will not. Come what may, we will strike.”
“If the Princess will,” said I. “We must see her at once.” And in this mood we started for her house, Zoiloff urging me on the way to see her alone.
“You have more influence with her than all of us put together,” he said quickly. “I will remain at hand, and you can call me in if you cannot prevail. But you are right, Count, and I am with you hand and heart. We must either strike an imperfect blow at once or abandon everything.”