In the last resort the issue lay with Sonia. Her husband had the wisdom to recognise that; although his own happiness was at stake, the matter was beyond the restricted sphere of the personal equation.
In the crisis of his fate it has always seemed to me that Fitz displayed the inherent nobility of his character. Once the King, with immense force and cogency, had revealed the situation in its true aspect, his son-in-law, without abating a single claim to his wife's consideration, yet refrained from unduly exercising the prerogative conferred upon him by their spiritual affinity.
It was wise and right that Fitz should detach himself as far as possible from the conflict that was being waged between father and daughter. But, although he did what lay in his power to simplify the issue, he could not banish the image of himself from his wife's heart. He furnished the motive power of her existence. Emotion held the master-key to her nature. In any conflict between love and duty, love could hardly fail to win.
Fitz suffered intensely as the struggle went on. He even threw out a hint to me that he might be tempted to take a certain step to help his wife to a possible solution of the problem.
"The longer this goes on," he said to me in the small hours of the morning, "the more clearly I realise that Sonia's place is with her own people. I have been blind, and I have been mad, and I owe it to Ferdinand that I have been able to see myself in my true relation to the issue in which fate has involved us. It is six years since I first saw Sonia on the terrace of the Castle at Blaenau. I was travelling about the world trying to find ease for my soul. I knew that she was unhappy, and she knew that I was, but we were young and not afraid. We met continually, for I had the entrée to the Castle as the grandson of the Elector of Gracow, whose daughter married my grandfather, George Fitzwaren of tragic memory.
"We used to sit out on the Castle terrace, Sonia and I, night after night, watching the stars in their courses, while her father dragooned his parliament and hoodwinked his people. She was lonely, outcast and unloved; there was none to whom she could speak her thoughts; she was oppressed with the sense of her destiny.
"She said that when she first met me she wondered where she had seen me before. She said that my presence haunted her like a half-remembered vision, until it began to merge itself into her dreams of a former existence and a happier state. And as she said this, her voice grew strangely familiar. For me it unlocked the doors of memory. It was like the faint, far-off music you can hear sometimes, the music of the wind in winter sweeping across infinite, illimitable space.
"She allowed me to kiss her, and we knew then we held the key to the riddle of existence. We were twin-souls made one again, and together we would go through all time and all eternity.
"But I think we are beginning now to realise that the sense of oneness is alien to the human state, and that the hour is at hand when we must separate and go out again into the night of ages alone."
In a condition of desolation the unhappy man rocked his meagre body to and fro as thus he spoke.