“Write it, write it, sir, and then tell me that, seeing that I am I, and that I should not be different from myself were I the daughter of the Emperor, all this matters little to you since we love each other.”
I put her from me: my hands were trembling, but I was very gentle. I brought her round to face me, and she awaited my answer with a triumphant smile. It was that smile undid me and her. She made too sure of me—she had conquered me too easily all along.
“You ask overmuch,” I said when I could command my voice enough to speak, “you take overmuch for granted. You forget how you have deceived me; how you have betrayed me. I am willing,” I said, “to believe you have not been all to blame, that you were encouraged and upheld by another, but this does not exonerate you from the chief share in a very questionable transaction.”
The words fell cuttingly. I saw how the smile faded from her face, saw how the pretty dimple lingered a second like a pale ghost of itself, and then was lost in the droop of her lip, which trembled like a chidden babe’s. And I took a cruel joy to think I had hit her at last. But in a second or two she spoke with all her old courage.
“It is well,” she said, “to blame where blame is due. If you wish to blame any one for our marriage, blame me alone. The other Ottilie never received your letter; never knew you wanted to marry her; had nothing to say to what you call my betrayal of you. She would have prevented this marriage if she could. Nay, I will tell you more: I believe she might even have married you had I given her the chance. But I knew you would marry her solely because of her position, of her title; that you had no love for her beyond your insane love of her royal blood. I thought you worthy of better things; I thought you could rise above so pitiable a weakness; I thought you could learn of love that love alone is worth living for! And if you have not learned, if indeed, my scholar, you have been taught nothing in love’s school, if you can lay bare your soul now and tell yourself that you would rather have had the wife you wanted in your overweening vanity than the wife I am to you, why then, sir, I have made a grievous mistake, and I am willing to acknowledge that I have committed an irrevocable wrong both to you and to myself.”
Now, as she spoke, I was torn by a strange mixture of feelings, and my love for her contended with my pride, my wounded vanity, my sense of injury. I could not in truth answer that I would rather have been wedded to the Princess, for one thing had these weeks made clear to me above all things, and that was that married life with her would have been intolerable. But my anger against the woman I did love in spite of myself was not lessened by the tone of reproachful superiority she assumed; and because of the truth of her rebuke it was the harder for my self-love to bear. Before I could muster words clear enough and severe enough to answer her with, she proceeded:
“Come, Basil, come, rise above this failing which is so unworthy of you. Throw that musty old pedigree away before it eats all the manliness out of your life. What does it mean but that you can trace your family up to a greater number of probable rascals, hard and selfish old men, than another? Be proud of yourself for what you are; be proud of your forefathers, indeed, if they have done fine deeds of valour, or virtue; but this cant about birth for birth’s sake, about the superiority of aristocracy as aristocracy—what does it amount to? It is to me the most foolish of superstitions. Was that old man,” she asked, pointing to my uncle, who frowned upon her murderously—“was that old man a better man than his heiduck János? Was he a braver soldier? Was he a better servant to his master? Was he more honest in his dealings? shrewder in his counsel? I tell you I honour János as much as I would have honoured him. I tell you that if I love you, I love you for what you are, not because you are descended from some ignorant savage king, not because you can boast that the blood of the worst of men and sovereigns, the most profligate, the most treacherous, the most faithless, Charles Stuart, runs in your veins—I hope, sir, as little of it as possible.”
I sprang to my feet. To be thus rated by her who should be kneeling for forgiveness! It was intolerable.
“I think,” I thundered, “that, considering your position, a little humility would be more becoming than this attitude! You should remember that you are here on tolerance only; that it is to my generosity alone that you owe the right to call yourself an honest woman.”
“What do you mean?” said she, as fiercely as I had spoken myself.