“The sorrow should be the lighter if divided,” she whispered, with a tender reproach for the selfishness of my words.
“The thought made me a coward for the moment. And no man should be a coward whose ears have been blessed by the words which you have spoken, and the knowledge I have gained. Forgive the cowardice.”
“I would I could as easily spare you the sorrow,” she murmured.
“To do that now would be to rob my life of its one great happiness. Come what may for me, I shall never love again;” and with that assurance, which brought all the love in her heart in a rush of eloquent, speaking tenderness to her eyes, I left her, caring little indeed what might happen to me if our union were impossible.
CHAPTER XXIII
IN FULL CRY
The night that followed was a memorable one in the history of Bulgaria and, as an incident of the great event, it brought the crisis in our affairs.
It was the night in which by the machinations of the Russian agents the Prince was abducted, and at the point of the pistol was forced to sign an abdication of his throne. It is not necessary for me to write about an event which has been often enough described, nor to tell how the crowd of unpatriotic and disloyal officers led their troops to surround the Palace, ordered them to fire into it, and then breaking in forced his Highness to leave, and hurried him off to Nikopolis, making him a prisoner on board his own yacht, to be landed on Russian territory.
Exactly what led up to this crisis I do not know. My opinion is that General Kolfort’s offer to maintain him on the throne on certain relaxed conditions was genuine and would have been fulfilled, but at the same time the alternative plot was already in progress, and this scheme was hastened forward on the Prince’s refusal of the Russian terms.
Had our own preparations but been a couple of weeks more forward the issue would have been different; but, as it was, that coup set the final seal on our failure.
The event took us absolutely by surprise. I had retired for the night wondering what the morrow would bring forth, when my household were roused by a loud summons at the door. My first thought was that the General had again sent his men to arrest me; and I was for resisting to the utmost, when it was discovered that the summons came from Zoiloff and Spernow, who had come in hot haste to bring me the great news and to confer with me as to our actions.