“Elizavetta!” said Alexander, his face darkening with a noble but mistaken scorn. “Elizavetta! A wife who from her wedding-day never loved her husband.”
“I think your Majesty is wrong.”
“Nay, I will prove myself to be right. Do princesses ever marry for love? Is it not their duty to take the suitor whom political interest prescribes? Princess Marie of Baden was only fourteen when her parents bade her prepare for her wedding. The Empress Catharine desired that she should be the wife of her grandson Alexander, then a youth of fifteen.”
Princess Marie! The title dropped lightly from the lips of the speaker, but upon the woman behind the curtain it fell with a shock more startling, perhaps, than if it had been the voice of the archangel calling her to her final doom.
In one swift moment all the sweetness and brightness of life was extinguished for Marie by the ghastly revelation that she was already a wife. What booted it that her consort was a Czar? Better, far better, so ran her wild thoughts, had she gone down in the waters of the Nevka, or died on reaching the Silver Strand, than live to see this sudden mockery of all her sweet hopes.
Her fingers were still locked within Wilfrid’s, but as she realised that her love for him was now a sinful thing, that henceforth she must live apart from him, that she must be handed over to a husband, who, at that very moment was playing her false, a husband, who, in her present state of mind was a stranger to her, nay more, utterly abhorrent, there broke from her a low wail of anguish, which the Czar and Pauline would surely have heard had not their attention been absorbed in each other.
As for Wilfrid, he, too, was completely stunned, as much by the thought of losing Marie, as by the discovery that, purposing to deliver a beautiful princess from the attentions of a too-amorous Czar, he was really guilty of attempting to steal a wife from her husband. In the matter of the duel it was now clear that the right had been on the side of the Czar, a mortifying and humiliating thought for Wilfrid. Still, his position was a blameless one, as far as he was concerned, being due, not to intentional wrong-doing, but to ignorance.
“How could a girl of fourteen,” Alexander continued, “be expected to love a man whom she had never seen? She married me because she was told to do so. Without a murmur she accepted a new religion, the Greek; a new name, Elizavetta. In the same way she would have accepted the Sultan and Islamism.”
“In blaming her you blame yourself, who were equally submissive to Catharine’s will.”
“For her submission I blame her not, but for—you shall hear.