"Oh, my queen, you know not what you ask! Your calm, pure heart knows nothing of love."
"You say that I know nothing of love?" cried the queen, passionately. "You know not that my life is one great anguish, a never-ceasing self-sacrifice! Yes, I am the victim of love—a sadder, more helpless, more torturing love than you, Laura, can ever know. I love, and am not beloved. What I now confess to you is known only to God, and I tell you in order to console you, and give you strength to accept your fate bravely. I suffer, I am wretched, although I am a queen! I love my husband; I love him with the absorbing passion of a young girl, with the anguish which the damned must feel when they stand at the gates of Paradise, and dare not enter in. My thoughts, my heart, my soul belong to him; but he is not mine. He stands with a cold heart near my glowing bosom, and while with rapture of love I would throw myself upon his breast, I must clasp my arms together and hold them still, and must seek and find an icy glance with which to answer his. Look you, there was a time when I believed it impossible to bear all this torture; a time in which my youth struggled like Tantalus; a time in which my pride revolted at this love, with its shame and humiliation; in which I would have given my crown to buy the right to fly into some lonely desert, and give myself up to tears. The king demanded that I should remain at his side, not as his wife, but as his queen; ever near him, but forever separated from him; unpitied and misunderstood; envied by fools, and thought happy by the world! And, Laura, oh, I loved him so dearly that I found strength to bear even this torture, and he knows not that my heart is being hourly crushed at the foot of his throne. I draw the royal purple over my wounded bosom, and it sometimes seems to me that my heart's blood gives this ruddy color to my mantle. Now, Laura, do I know nothing of love? do I not understand the greatness of the sacrifice which I demand of you?"
The queen, her face bathed in tears, opened her arms, and Laura threw herself upon her bosom; their sighs and tears were mingled.
The king sat in the ante-room, with pale face and clouded eyes. He bowed his head, as if in adoration, and suddenly a glittering brilliant, bright as a star, and nobler and more precious than all the jewels of this sorrowful world, fell upon his pallid cheek. "Truly," said he to himself, "there is something great and exalted in a woman's nature. I bow down in humility before this great soul, but my heart, alas! cannot be forced to love. The dead cannot be awakened, and that which is shrouded and buried can never more be brought to life and light!"
"You have conquered, my queen," said Laura, after a long pause; "I will be worthy of your esteem and friendship. That day shall never come in which my lover shall reproach me with selfishness and weakness! 'I am ready to be offered up!' I will not listen to him; I will not flee with him; and while I know that he is waiting for me. I will cast myself in your arms, and beseech you to pray to God for me, that He would send Death, his messenger of love and mercy, to relieve me from my torments."
"Not so, my Laura," said the queen; "you must make no half offering; it is not enough to renounce your lover, you must build up between yourselves an everlasting wall of separation; you must make this separation eternal! You must marry, and thus set the prince a noble example of self-control."
"Marry!" cried Laura; "can you demand this of me? Marry without love! Alas, alas! The prince will charge me with inconstancy and treachery to him, and I must bear that in silence."
"But I will not be silent," said the queen, "I will tell him of your grief and of the greatness of your soul; and when he ceases, as he must do, to look upon you as his beloved, he will honor you as the protecting angel of his existence."
"You promise me that. You will say to him that I was not faithless—that I gave him up because I loved him more than I did myself; I seemed faithless only to secure his happiness!"
"I promise you that, Laura."