“A childless empress is always a disappointment both to her husband and to his people. Hence the reason, according to this morning’s newspapers, of her visit this week to the Convent of the Holy Madonna, not the first of such pilgrimages. There, prone upon the cold stone pavement, before the picture of Our Lady, she will spend nights of devotion, praying that her husband’s desire, her own, her people’s, may be answered. If Heaven will not take pity on her tears, then will the Czar grow colder and colder.”
Marie shivered all over with sudden fear. If the Czar’s alienation from the Czarina should reach a point such as to cause him to obtain a divorce, he would be free to set his love upon any woman he pleased. What if he had already made her his choice? What if his anger at the masquerade was prompted by a jealousy that saw in Wilfrid a successful rival? How could she, one weak woman, offer resistance to the will of the mighty Czar? She glanced again at his likeness, deriving from it a more distasteful impression than before. During her course round the hall she had surveyed more than twenty portraits, but none of them had exercised so strange a fascination over her as this one. It seemed to defy her to remove her gaze from it. Whether she stepped to the right or whether she stepped to the left, its eyes, like those of a living being, would follow her movements with the stare as of a person reproaching her for some wrong suffered at her hands; and the longer she gazed, the more this fancy grew upon her.
“Perhaps,” said Wilfrid, in answer to Pauline’s remarks, “it is as well that Alexander should have no children.”
“Why?” asked Pauline, with an intonation so sharp as to show Wilfrid that he had said something to offend her, and he wondered wherein lay his offence.
“There must be a touch of madness in his blood,” replied he.
“Why must there be?” asked Pauline, looking almost as much concerned as if it were her own mental state that was in question.
“If the father Paul were mad is it reasonable to believe that the son Alexander can be altogether sane?”
“And so you think that if Alexander should have a son——?”
“That son might develop the madness that may be dormant only, not extinguished, in Alexander. Such a fear would ever be present to the Empress. Picture her, in the long, slow course of months and years, hanging over her child, studying every look and every word of his, every mood and every act, watching and waiting for the fatal sign——”
“That might never come,” interrupted Pauline, in her voice a touch of contempt, very unusual with her, at least when speaking to Wilfrid.