“The Princess’s only answer will be the hurrying forward of her marriage with the Duke Sergius. It is the inevitable corollary of her decision to-day.”
“By God, but you are a man, Count!” cried Zoiloff, with a look of genuine sympathy, as if he felt instinctively what such words must cost me. “From this hour I will never again question a single order you give or decision you take.” He held out his hand, and grasped mine in a warm pledge of earnest friendship. “We will go on, as you say, and frustrate this she-devil yet—or fall in the effort.”
A long silence followed, in which we were both busy with our own thoughts; and when the silence was broken we went on with a long, detailed discussion of the means to be adopted to quicken our preparations and expedite the arrangements that should make us indifferent to any action by General Kolfort.
The work interested us both absorbingly, and while Zoiloff remained with me, and my thoughts were occupied in planning the work to be done, I was even inclined to accept my own arguments that all was not yet lost.
But when he had left me a relapse came, and I seemed to be overwhelmed with a sense of the weariness and futility of it all. I had nothing now to gain. A few hours had changed everything for me, and all my enthusiasm had evaporated, like the sparkle from flat wine.
Bulgaria might profit, but what was Bulgaria to me? I had not been fighting for Bulgaria, but for Christina; and what prospect was there now for her but the gloomiest? I had gained the priceless treasure of her love; but with the very ecstasy of the knowledge had come the bane that I could never even win happiness for her.
I laid bare my heart to myself in this bitter self-communing. I had tried to persuade myself before that mine was that rare thing—the rarest on earth, indeed—selfless love; but I knew now that that had been the flimsiest gauze of self-deceit veiling the secret hopes and desires that had urged me forward. Out of the inmost thoughts came up now the skeletons of my lost desires, gibbering and mouthing and mocking me with the hopelessness of my love.
If I could have made her happy, have helped her to realise the dream of her life as the Virgin Queen pouring on this distracted people the infinite blessings of freedom and happiness, herself a bright, conspicuous example of innocence and purity to all the world, I might have been content to worship even while I served her. But to think of her as the wife of the sensual brute I detested, forced to submit to his loathsome endearments, and to smile and frown upon him in his humours, was like a very torment of hell to me. And for her it must be ten thousand times worse. Her life, mated with a man she abhorred, would be one long, living lie, the canker of which must blight her every purpose, and destroy every hope in her heart.
And yet I, loving her and beloved by her, was to help her to this life of fair-seeming misery and honoured dishonour. I could not and would not, I cried in my heart—and yet I knew I must. There was no escape now from it. As I had told Zoiloff in my despair, the hastening of the marriage was the one possible means of averting that instant ruin in which the power of the at present all-powerful Russian agents could involve us all.
Harder than all else to bear, however, was the thought that I myself must pass that inexorable sentence upon her. She had made it essential by her shrinking woman’s fear of how her act would be read in the eyes of Europe; but it was left for me to show her the full consequences of what she had done.