"You would have spared us all this trouble."
"I should have spared myself also the humiliation of having no sufficient answer to your Majesty's question," was my reply. "I see it now. My motive was that I feared the enmity of the Ostenburg family would reach the Countess Minna wherever she might be. I was told, and believed that indeed, that they would suffer no Gramberg rival for the throne to remain alive and at liberty. I knew that they had compassed the death of the brother and had plotted a dishonor worse than death against the countess herself, and I believed there were no limits to their venom and hostility."
"But how could you hope to save her by allowing things to go on?" he asked again after a pause in the same sharp, indicting tone.
"I thought I had devised a scheme by which I could put the countess in a position of such strength that she could dictate virtually her own terms, and so secure that liberty which I feared they would never otherwise concede. My plan was to allow the conspiracy to go forward for putting the countess upon the throne, to postpone the marriage with von Nauheim, and then to watch for and thwart the attempt I knew would be made to get her into their power; and at the same time to deliver a counter-blow and to get the Ostenburg heir, the Duke Marx, into my own hands. I calculated that then I could make my own terms in the countess's interests."
"'Fore Heaven, sir, you don't lack daring to play fast and loose with thrones in this way," cried von Augener; while the Emperor stood sternly silent, revolving what I had said.
"Tell me the rest," he said abruptly.
"My scheme broke in my hands, because I was myself betrayed to them. The Baron Heckscher succeeded in gaining information of my plans, or rather of that part of them which I had made for the safe-keeping of the countess, and he outwitted me at the last moment," and I described the whole ruse by which Minna had been carried off at the ball and Clara Weylin put in her place.
The story was interesting enough to them, and both listened closely. When I ended, von Augener bent to read some of the papers on his desk, in order, as I saw, to compare what I had told him with what had been previously reported to him.
But the Kaiser needed no notes; that extraordinary memory of his carried every detail, item, and particular, and as I was telling him my version he was comparing it link for link with what he already knew, in a process of subtle mental analysis.
"And your next step?" he asked sharply after a short pause.