"If he had merely failed to reciprocate my love," she said to herself, "I should have been too proud to hate him. But he draws me to him, bestows upon me, as if in mockery, the name of wife, leads me to the very brink of happiness, and then contemptuously thrusts me down into the night of unspeakable humiliation! And why all this? For the sake of an empty sound the Gothic kingdom! For a circlet of gold! Woe to him, and woe to his idol, to which he has sacrificed me! He shall repent it. Without mercy he has destroyed my idol--his own image. Well, then, idol for idol! He shall live to see his kingdom destroyed, his crown broken. I will shatter his ideal, for whose sake he has sacrificed the bloom of my life; and when he stands despairing and wringing his hands before the fragments, I will say: See! thus my idol, too, was shattered!"
So, with the unstable sophistry of passion, Mataswintha accused the unhappy man, who suffered more than herself; who had sacrificed not only her happiness, but that of his well-beloved wife, to his fatherland.
Fatherland!--Gothic kingdom! The words fell chilly upon the ear of the woman who, from her childhood upward, had connected all her sufferings with these names.
She had lived solely absorbed in the egoism of her one feeling, the poetry of her passionate love, and her whole soul was now possessed with the desire of revenge for the loss of her happiness. She wished that she had the power to destroy the kingdom at one blow.
But the very madness of her passion endowed her with demoniac cunning.
She understood how to hide her deadly hatred and her secret thoughts of revenge from the King--to hide them as deeply as the love which she still entertained for him. She was also able to show an interest in the Gothic kingdom, which seemed to form the only tie between herself and the King; and indeed she really took a deep interest in it, although in an inimical sense. For she well knew that she could only injure the kingdom and ruin the King's cause if she were initiated into all its secrets, and intimately acquainted with its strength and weakness.
Her high position made it easy for her to learn all that she wished to know; out of consideration for her powerful party, the knowledge of the situation of the kingdom and army could not be withheld from the daughter of the Amelungs. Old Earl Grippa furnished her with all the information which he himself possessed. In more important cases she was present at the councils which were held in the King's apartments.
Thus she was perfectly well acquainted with the position of the kingdom; the strength, quality, and divisions of the army; the hopes and fears of the Goths, and the plans of attack formed by the generals. And she longed with impatience for a speedy opportunity of using her knowledge as destructively as possible.
She could not hope to enter into relations with Belisarius himself, therefore her eyes were naturally directed to the Italians in her vicinity, with whom she could easily and unsuspectedly communicate; and who, though neutral in the presence of the Goths, were, without exception, secretly favourable to the Byzantines.
But on recalling their names to her memory, she found that there was not one to whose wisdom and discretion she could entrust the deadly secret: that the Queen of the Goths desired the destruction of her kingdom.