“Pay a Nero crossed with a Haroun-al-Raschid. I fear her reign would be diversified by many a midnight escapade, like the merry Caliph’s, only without his intermixture of wrong-righting. She’d seek her own amusement solely; though to seek that in X———! you might as well seek for blood in a broomstick. Oh, she’d make no end of mischief. The devil hath no agent like a woman bored.”
“That’s rather true.” I agreed, laughing, “And Conrad? What of him?”
“Oh, Conrad’s a beast; a squint-eyed, calculating beast. But a beast might make a good enough Grand Duke; and anyhow, a beast is all that a beastly little Grand Duchy like this deserves. However, to tell you my secret feeling, I don’t believe he’ll have the chance to prove it. Mathilde, for all her ennui, is described as tenacious of her rights, and as a cleverish little body, too, down at bottom.. That is inconsistent, but there’s the woman of it. I can’t help suspecting, somehow, that unless he has really killed and buried her, she will contrive by hook or crook to come to her throne.”
That night was long, though we accomplished a lot of talking: cold it seemed, too, though we were in midsummer. I dozed a little, with the stone wall of the castle for my pillow, half-conscious all the while that Sebastian Roch was carrying on a bantering flirtation with the two young girls. At daybreak our guard was changed. At six o’clock we were visited by a dapper little lieutenant, who looked us over, asked our names and other personal questions, scratched his chin for a moment reflectively, and finally, with an air of inspiration, bade us begone. The gates were thrown open and we issued from our prison, free.
“It’s been almost a sensation,” said Sebastian Roch. “So one can experience almost a sensation, even in X———! Live and learn.”
“You are not a patriot,” said I.
“My dear sir, I am patriotism incarnate. Only I find my country dull. If that be treason, make the most of it. I could not love thee, dear, so well, loved I not dulness less. It is not every night of my life that I am arrested, and sit on a barrel smoking cigarettes with an enlightened foreigner. The English are not generally accounted a lively race, but by comparison with the inhabitants of X———they shine like diamonds.”
“I dare say,” I acquiesced. “But I’m not English—I’m American.”
“So I perceive from your accent,” answered he impertinently. “But as I told you once before, it amounts to the same thing. You wear your rue with a difference, that is all.”
“Speaking of sensations,” said I, “I would sell my birthright for a cup of coffee.”