"Do you think to keep my love by threatening me with death?"
"Have I not inflicted death to keep you? Why do you wish to bandy phrases? My deeds speak for themselves. They shew you well enough what I will dare to keep you true to me. You are mine, Alexis, and no power shall ever part us. I have told you this often before. It was you who sought me, who proffered me your love, who poured on me your caresses and roused the love in me, and roused it never to cease. Do you think me a silly simple fool to be wooed and won and, when deserted, willing to do no more than wring my feeble hands and shed silly tears, and prate and maunder between my stupid sobs, that my heart is broken and that I fain would die—Bah! I am not of that sort. I am a woman who can will and act, and fashion my own ends in my own way. It is not the stream that carries me, but I who turn the stream even though it be mingled with blood. No, no. If you play me false, Alexis, it is you, and not I, who shall die because my heart is broken."
She shewed this determination in every line of her beautiful face and movement of her magnificent figure, as she stood before me a lovely hateful type of a vengeful woman. She changed her mood, however, with astonishing suddenness and turned all softness and tenderness.
"But under all this lies my love," she said. "It was love drove me to everything. Your pledge, too, that made me feel, as nothing else could have done, the wall of separation between us while he lived; and my love could not endure it. Ah, how I love you!" and then in words burning with the fever of passion, she spoke of her love for me, lingering over the terms as if the mere utterance of them were an ecstatic delight. She laid all to the account of this love, and then went on to name her terms—that I must marry her.
While she was speaking, I was thinking; trying to see some flaw in the devilish coil she had spread round me. But I could see none. Time might find a way: but even time she grudged, and did not mean to give.
"But we can't be married now at the moment when your husband is scarcely lying cold in his grave," I said, aghast at her cold-blooded proposition. "Every man and woman in Moscow would immediately think we had murdered him together in order to marry."
"Every man and woman will not know," she answered calmly. "Do you think there is no such thing as a secret marriage possible in this Holy Russia of ours, or that gold cannot buy silence here just as anywhere else in the world?"
"I know that a secret marriage under these circumstances would put the lives of us both into the keeping of anyone who knew of it, however well you paid them. The more you paid, indeed, the more certain the inference."
"I care nothing for that; nor will you if you love me as you have often sworn you do." She uttered this with the energy and passion which always were shewn when she was crossed. But in this I was naturally as resolute as she.
"I will not do it," I said very firmly. "Understand me. I will not do it. It is nothing to do with love in any way at all: but simply self-protection. It would be sheer suicide, and that I can do much more simply in other ways. I refuse absolutely to put both our lives into the keeping of any man in Russia, however holy and however well bribed. When we are married, it must be openly, in the light of day and before men's faces; and that most certainly cannot be until all this excitement about your husband's death has died down, and the marriage can take place without causing suspicion. That must be at least six months hence—and probably a year or even two years."