“I am your husband,” I said brutally, for my heart was bitter.
She wrung her hands. “You are not!” she cried pitifully, “how can you be? I do not know who you are! I was forced into it, I——”
“You knew me,” I interrupted, with cruelty, watching her agony.
She hung her head, and the silence of the room oppressed me. The old house—usually full of creaking noises, as old houses are wont to be, as if the spirits of past inmates walked there—was suddenly so still that I heard her heavy breathing. Her bowed head—the white arch of the brow, the soft flowing hair, the humiliated aspect—moved me more than her words.
“You mistake me, Princess Daria,” I said coldly. “Though a poor man, I am a gentleman.”
At that she laid her head on the table and fell to weeping, like a child, and I was seized with so keen a longing to take her in my arms and comfort her with caresses, with the deepest protests of my love, that I had to turn my back upon her and force my thoughts on other things.
Indeed, I had need to think of her safety. Any hour, any moment, this house, too, might be sacked. I could not keep Voronin’s daughter here, nor anywhere in Moscow, and there was no time so propitious for flight as night. I cast about in my mind for the means, and found them, and then I looked again at her bowed head. She had ceased to weep and lay there, half prone across the table, a picture of despair and weakness, and it was so foreign to all that I had seen of her, of her high spirit and fortitude, that a cruel thought smote me. Was it for her lover she mourned?—for Prince Galitsyn? I set my teeth. If she desired him, doubtless, she would find a way to cut off my claim upon her—if Sophia did not cut off his. In this, at least, the czarevna and I were of one mind and purpose, and I smiled grimly at the thought.
But it was many moments before I schooled myself to speak to the princess with composure, and to tell her of my plans, and the necessity for them. When I finally spoke her name, however, she raised her head and, pushing her disordered hair back from her white face, she looked at me and listened quietly, while I told her of the impossibility of keeping her in that house or even in Moscow, and explained my belief that Maluta had delivered a message to her father ere this, if the dwarf had escaped with his own life.
“You told me that your cousin was at Troïtsa, did you not?” I asked.
She bowed her head, scarcely enough a mistress of herself to speak as yet.