She shook her head and tapped her foot on the ground.
“Say no, bluntly, if you will, but do not try to slip away with words of cheap and empty flattery. I am not appealing to you to join for my sake, gladly as I would welcome you, but for the sake of the Prince, for the cause of truth, for the honour and safety of Bulgaria. Stay——” as I was about to answer, “I have seen you act and I have read your character. I do not make mistakes. I know you are to be trusted. You have saved my life, at a greater risk than you may think, for you will be a marked man now; and I will do more than put my life in your hands—I will tell you everything. You will not reveal it—though, Heaven knows, betrayal is the religion of most men here,” she exclaimed bitterly.
“I would rather you told me none of your secrets,” I said, but she swept my protest aside with a wave of the hand.
“You wonder why you find me here in this house alone at night. You must wonder; I will tell you. It is my mother’s house—my own is across the city near the Palace—and to-night her own maid came to me with an urgent message that my mother had been stricken down suddenly and was dying, and that I must come at once. It was a lie, of course, though for the moment it blinded me. I hurried here on foot, too anxious even to wait for a carriage to be got ready, and when I arrived the place was empty. While I was wondering whether I had been betrayed, the men you saw—to whom keys of the place had been given—entered, and would assuredly have murdered me but for your arrival. That is how Russia plays her cards in Bulgaria.”
“How do you know they were Russian agents?”
“How do I know that when I am hungry I want to eat? Wearied, I need sleep? Bah! do you think I have no instincts, and do not know my enemies? How do I know their plans and plots?” She fired the questions at me with vindictive indignation and a smile of surprise that I should even ask such a thing. Then her expression changed to one of deep earnestness, her tone hard and bitter.
“I will tell you how you shall know it, too. They have tried every other means but this to separate me from my Prince. Threats at which I laughed; bribes to be anything I pleased, which I scorned; hints of his assassination, which I carried to him; everything—till only this was left; and now this,” and she touched her wound lightly. “And even this, thanks to your valour, Count, has now failed. And their object, you will ask? They have a plot to drive my Prince from Bulgaria, because he will not be their tool. You know he will not; all Europe knows it, and knows too that the only chance for Bulgaria’s real independence is that he shall remain on the throne here. And remain he shall, I swear, by the great God they all profess to worship, in spite of all their crafty intrigue and bloodthirsty plotting. And yet, mark you, the worst danger lies not with them, but with the fools and traitors in Bulgaria itself whom they delude or suborn. There is not a self-interest to which they do not appeal, from the ambition of the fool to the corruptness of the knave. And God knows, both knaves and fools are plentiful enough here.”
“And their scheme?” I asked, moved by her intense earnestness.
She looked at me sharply.
“Then you do wish to hear it?” she asked, referring to my former protest. “You shall. There is a woman—a seemingly innocent, soft-natured thing, all sweetness and grace, but a devil; with the beauty of an angel and the heart of a vampire—a devil.”