My hour has sounded—ah! many days ago. I heard it, but my hands were tied and your guards were ever about me. Now you will give me my last freedom, will you not? so that I may join all the dead heroes who are awaiting me. To keep me back would be unworthy of you, my noble enemy. You would not do that!——
EMPEROR [After a pause]
Keep you back, you?——O! no, not I——But your duty——Daughter of the Mings, you are incapable of failing in your duty!
EMPRESS [Excitedly at last]
My duty! What duty? Already have I been decoyed by that word. They urged me thereby to flee like a common woman beset by fear. While all my brave defenders knew how to die heroically, my soldiers, my princes, even my ladies-in-waiting, I like a coward escaped through the subterranean passages of my palace——to fulfil my duty! It was the hour when my soldiers were falling by the thousand, struck down by yours, when my walls were crumbling under the assault of your armies——the draught of the Great Deliverance had been brought me in a cup, and I was calm as I am now—but smiling. I was about to raise the cup to my lips, to pass beyond the reach of all, proud and inviolable, in my imperial attire. The vaults beneath the ground, the sleeping place of my ancestors, unknown to your Tartars, stood open close at hand, and there was still time to carry me down into them——But duty! Ah! my duty, it appeared, was to flee, and I yielded——And until the day when your soldiers took me captive, I wandered on and on through the country, at the head of my defeated troops——I, the Empress, the Invisible, desecrating my majesty among all those thousands of men——marching before them like some mad woman!——
EMPEROR
Say rather that you were the sublime heroine, the great warrior-Empress, the goddess of battle, who braved arrows and bullets, and will live on eternally in poetry and history!
EMPRESS
I sought to justify my flight, that was all. I did all I could, but none can ever atone for a cowardly action. It was in my own palace that I should have met my death, in the funeral fire lighted by my own hand, in which so many heroes were consumed——My ashes should have mixed with theirs. Duty, do you say? But do you believe that I still belong to Earth? My cities are in ruins, my armies annihilated, my son dead. And at this very moment I know that one by one the heads of my few remaining soldiers are falling into the dust beneath your high Tartar walls. Then what duty remains, I ask you? [She takes the dagger from the fold of her robe and raises her hand to strike herself.] Nothing, nothing but this! [The Emperor rushes towards her with a cry, seizes her wrist, takes the dagger, and hurls it to the ground.] Ah! So you dare to touch me now?
EMPEROR [Bowing very low]