The emperor started. Absorbed in his passion—filled with the idea now agitating his soul, he had not heard the door of the cabinet softly open, and was unaware that one of the imperial pages, holding a golden fruit-plate, had entered. Duroc also had not noticed that he was present while the emperor was still speaking, and that he must have overheard the last words of his majesty. The page leaned, pale and exhausted, against the wall near the door, and the golden plate was trembling in his hands.
Napoleon cast a glowing glance on him, and rushing toward him, snatched the plate and threw it on the floor. As the peaches rolled across the room, he seized the page's arms, and drew him toward the window. "Who are you?" he asked, scarcely able to master his emotion. "Who are you? Speak, that I may hear your voice!"
The page looked in his face, aglow with anger, and his large blue eyes filled with tears. "I am a demon who delights in torturing you," he said in a low voice.
Napoleon did not utter a word. He tore the velvet cap from the page's head, and when his long silken hair fell on his shoulders in heavy masses, a smile of unutterable bliss overspread the emperor's face. He seized the fair ringlets with his hands and kissed them; he laid them on his own head, and they covered his face like a golden veil. He then shook them off with a merry laugh, and encircled the page so violently in his arms, that he uttered a cry. "Mary, Mary," he exclaimed passionately, "you are in my arms at last—you are here! Duroc, just look at this wonderful page. Come here, and look at the angel I slandered just now!"
But Duroc did not appear. He preferred to move quietly out of the room and to lock the door after him. Napoleon, therefore, was alone with his mistress, and thanked Duroc in his heart for this discretion. He clasped the weeping and blushing lady in his arms, and tried with gentle force to remove her hands, in which she had buried her face. "Mary," he asked, in a tone of suppliant tenderness, "Mary, you weep, and yet you say you love me?"
"Yes, I do love you," she exclaimed, sinking on her knees. "I love you intensely! Ah, have mercy on me! Do not condemn me because I come hither in spite of my conscience and my honor! Napoleon, I have no longer any thing on earth but you! I have no longer a country, a family, a name! I gave up every thing for you—my life, my honor, my happiness, are yours! Remember it, and do not despise me!"
He raised her from her knees and pressed a kiss on her quivering lips. "Mary," he said, "this kiss shall have the same effect upon you as of old the gift of knighthood had on the warrior—it will impart to you a higher and more sacred life, and confer the highest honor on you! Henceforth you are mine, and shall be as immortal as myself; and when posterity mentions the name of the Emperor Napoleon, it shall at the same time remember his beautiful mistress, and repeat the name of Mary Walewska together with that of Josephine!"
"Oh," murmured Mary, "you mention the noble and generous Empress Josephine, whom I worship, and against whom I am committing a crime! May fate enable me to atone for my guilt one day by sacrificing my life for you, and proving to you and to the world that I loved you truly and faithfully."
"No, you shall live—live for me," said Napoleon, ardently; "do not complain any more, Mary; dry your beautiful eyes. Come, sit down with me and tell me how it happened that you conquered your heart, and why I see you in this disguise?" He drew her to the divan and wound his arm around her waist. She laid her head on his shoulder, and gazed up to him with dreamy eyes.
"How it happened?" she asked. "I cannot find words to tell you. I reenacted the part of Penelope. Every night I tried to fasten a coat of mail around my heart—to protect it as with a net-work of virtue and duty. But your letters were the wooers that destroyed in the day the resolutions of the night. Your complaints rent my heart; your reproaches tortured my soul. I felt at last that I was irretrievably lost—that I loved you boundlessly, and that I was anxious to prove it to you. But my husband watched me with lynx-eyed vigilance; he was constantly at my side, now threatening, in the fury of his jealousy, to assassinate me should I leave him, and now imploring me with tearful eyes to spare his honor and pity his love. I felt that I would have either to die, or renounce my married life, and enter upon a new existence—an existence of true happiness if you love me, but of suffering and self-reproach if you despise, me!"