“What do I know?” he echoed; “Why, what should I know, blockhead, save what all who have eyes to see, know as well as I do! Sergius, your grasp is none of the lightest; let me go!” Then as the other’s hand fell from his arm, he continued. “It is you who are the blind man leading the blind! You—who like all thick-skulled reformers, can never perceive what goes on under your own nose! But what does it matter? What does anything matter? I told you long ago she would never love you; I knew long ago that she loved his Majesty, ‘Pasquin Leroy!’”
“Curse you!” said Thord suddenly, in such low infuriated accents that the oath sounded more like a wild beast’s snarl. “Why did you not tell me? Why did you not warn me?”
Zouche shrugged his shoulders, and began to sidle aimlessly along the roadway.
“You would not have believed me!” he said; “Nobody believes anything that is unpleasant to themselves! If you had not some suspicion in your own mind, you would not believe me now! I am foolish—you are wise! I am a poet—you are a reformer! I am drunk—you are sober! And with it all, Lotys is the only one who keeps her head clear. Lotys was always the creature of common-sense among us; she understood you—she understood me—and better than either of us—she understood the King!”
“No, no!” whispered Thord, more to himself than his companion; “She could not—she could not have known!”
“Now you look as Nature meant you to look!” exclaimed Zouche, staring wildly at him; “Savage as a bear;—pitiless as a snake! God! What men can become when they are baulked of their desires! But it is no use, my Sergius!—you have gained power in one direction, but you have lost it in another! You cannot have your cake, and eat it!” Here he reeled against the wall,—then straightening himself with a curious effort at dignity, he continued: “Leave her alone, Sergius! Leave Lotys in peace! She is a good soul! Let her love where she will and how she will,—she has the right to choose her lover,—the right!—by Heaven!—it is a right denied to no woman! And if she has chosen the King, she is only one of many who have done the same!”
With a smothered sound between a curse and a groan, Thord suddenly wheeled round away from him and left him. Vaguely surprised, yet too stupefied to realise that his rambling words might have worked serious mischief, Zouche gazed blinkingly on his retreating figure.
“The same old story!” he muttered, with a foolish laugh; “Always a woman in it! He has won leadership and power,—he has secured the friendship of a King,—but if the King is his rival in matters of love—ah!—that is a worse danger for the Throne than the spread of Socialism!”
He rambled off unthinkingly, and gave the only part of him which remained still active, his poetic instinct, up to the composition of a delicate love-song, which he wrote between two taverns and several drinks.
Late in the afternoon—just after sundown—a small close brougham drove up to the corner of the street where stood the tenement house,—divided into several separate flats,—in which the attic where Lotys dwelt was one of the most solitary and removed portions. The King alighted from the carriage unobserved, and ascended the stairs on which Sergius Thord’s steps had echoed but a few hours gone by. Knocking at the door as Sergius had done, he was in the same way bidden to enter, but as he did so, Lotys, who was seated within, quite alone, started up with a faint cry of terror.