“Nay, mademoiselle,” I said gravely; “but soldiers have, and I am a soldier.”
“So is the czar,” she rejoined at once. “Truly, monsieur, do you think he loved mademoiselle so deeply?”
She had assumed a coaxing manner, laying her white hand upon my arm; but I am accustomed to woman’s wiles, and hardened my heart.
“How should I know, mademoiselle?” I asked her tormentingly, “being but a weather-beaten veteran? Ask some fair dame of the court. Never saw I yet a king who could not love.”
She stamped her foot impatiently upon the floor. “Ah, M. le Vicomte,” she cried, “you mock me. You saw the czar alone—and in a moment of passionate vexation: he showed his feelings to you, doubtless, and why not admit it?”
“Mademoiselle,” I replied gravely, “when you have lived as long as I, you will know that it is a perilous thing to know a king’s heart and far more perilous to betray it. Moreover, you forget that to a soldier his honor is as dear as his life.”
She looked at me a moment in silence, and then a smile broke over her handsome, passionate face.
“Yet you have told me, M. l’Ambassadeur,” she said with a woman’s triumph. “I know that he loved her—but she is gone!”
She paused, and stood there a picture of triumphant beauty; a woman with the tigress in her nature, passionate, bold, ambitious; a peasant, a slave, an empress to be. I have never forgotten her, her haughty head erect, her eyes sparkling with emotion, her full red lips parted and showing her teeth; young and handsome, and marked out by a strange destiny to be the favorite, the mistress, the secretly wedded wife of Peter the Great, and, at last, Empress of all the Russias.
She took a step toward a door near her, and I saw that, failing to draw all the secret from me, she intended to cut short the interview.