Moreover, Joan and Felix occupied separate carriages, and the Belgrade officials, concerned only with the examination of tickets, gave no heed to them, though one man seemed to recognize Felix and grinned in a friendly way. Passport formalities did not trouble them till the train had crossed the Tave River and was already in Austrian territory. The frontier officers could not possibly know them. Their papers were in order, and received only a passing glance. Even Joan, adrift in a sea of trouble, saw that it was a far easier matter to leave the Balkan area than to enter it.
They arranged to meet in the dining saloon, when all necessity for further precaution would have disappeared. Felix was astounded at the self possession Joan now displayed. She was pale but quite calm. Her eyes were clear and showed no traces of grief. Even her very manner was reverting to that good humored tone of frank camaraderie that the unavoidable ceremoniousness of the last fortnight had kept in subjection. Felix was secretly amazed at these things; but in the depths of his own complex nature were hidden away, wholly unknown to the little hunchback himself, certain feminine characteristics which enabled him dimly to understand that the woman who suffers most is she who has the strength and the courage to carry her head most proudly before the storm.
"Well," said he when the mail train had left Semlin far behind and they were speeding northward through the night to Budapest,—"well, Joan, now that the severance is complete, do you still refuse me your confidence?"
Her luminous eyes dwelt on his with a sad smile. She had closed the gates of her paradise, and there was to be no faint hearted looking backward.
"No," she said, "I have attained my end. It is due to you, my friend, that I should tell you why I have abandoned the only man I shall ever love. It lay with me to choose between his success or failure; perhaps there rested on my frail shoulders the more dreadful issues of life and death. If I had married Alec, I should have pulled him down to ruin, even to the grave. What else would you have me do but save him, no matter what the cost to myself?"
He propped his chin on his hands and surveyed her quizzically. Felix, despite his protests, was not enamoured of Delgratz, and his mercurial temperament rejoiced in the near approach of his beloved Paris.
"All this sounds heroic and therefore unconvincing," he said. "I do not want to condemn your motives before I know them, Joan; but I hope you will allow me to criticize false sentiment," he added, seeing the expression of pain that for an instant mastered her stoicism and threw its dull shadow across her face.
"Say what pleases you, Felix," she replied gently. "I shall not suffer more than I have already endured. I think I am benumbed now; but at least I am sure that I have acted right. There were influences at work in Delgratz of which even you had no cognizance. Popular as Alec seemed to be, every prejudice of the Serb was arrayed against him. He appealed to the imagination of the people as a brave and gallant figure; but he is and will ever remain a foreigner among them. They are a race apart, and Alec is not of them, and it would have been a fatal error to give them as a Queen another foreigner like himself.
"Alone, he will win his way. In the course of years he cannot fail to identify himself more and more with their interests; he will—some day—marry a Princess of the blood to which he belongs. That will help Kosnovia to forget that he was neither born nor bred in the country, and the presence of a Serbian consort will tend to consolidate his reign. It would have been quite different if he and I were married within a few weeks. Those who are opposed to him—and they are far more numerous than you may guess at this moment—would have been given a most powerful argument by the refusal of the Greek archimandrite to perform the ceremony. You see, Alec himself is not a member of the national church, nor am I, and a drawback that may be overlooked when a Slav Princess becomes Queen of Kosnovia would have been a fatal thing for me."
Poluski could not but admire Joan's splendid detachment in speaking of Alec's hypothetical wife. His thin lips creased in a satirical grin. "Is that it," said he, "the everlasting religious difficulty? No, my belle, tell that to the marines, or, at any rate, to some guileless person not versed in Kosnovian history! There never yet was bloodstained conqueror or evil living Prince in that unhappy city of Delgratz who failed to obtain the sanction of orthodoxy for his worst deeds, whether in beheading a rival or divorcing a wife."