He knew her very well. A jealous woman would go far. He knew now that she was jealous. When he spoke it was with calculating brutality. “You mean, in view of my impending marriage?”
So it was arranged! Finally arranged. Well, she had done her best. He knew the truth. She had told it fairly. If, knowing it, he persisted, it would be because her power over him was dead at last.
“Yes. I do not know how far your arrangements have gone. You have at least been warned.”
But she saw, by the very way he drew himself up and smiled, that he understood. More than that, he doubted her. He questioned what she had said.
The very fact that she had told him only the truth added to her resentment.
“You will see,” she said sullenly.
Because he thought he already saw, and because she had given him a bad moment, Karl chose to be deliberately cruel. “Perhaps!” he said. “But even then if this marriage were purely one of expediency, Olga, I might hesitate. Frankly, I want peace. I am tired of war, tired of bickering, tired of watching and being watched. But it is not one of expediency. Not, at least, only that. You leave out of this discussion the one element that I consider important, Hedwig herself. If the Princess Hedwig were to-morrow to be without a country, I should still hope to marry her.”
She had done well up to now, had kept her courage and her temper, had taken her cue from him and been quiet and poised. But more than his words, his cruel voice, silky with friendship, drove her to the breaking point. Karl, who hated a scene, found himself the victim of one, and was none the happier that she who had so long held him off was now herself at arm’s length, and struggling.
Bitterly, and with reckless passion, she flung at him Hedwig’s infatuation for young Larisch, and prophesied his dishonor as a result of it. That leaving him cold and rather sneering, she reviewed their old intimacy, to be reminded that in that there had been no question of marriage, or hope of it.
“I am only human, Olga,” he said, in an interval when she had fallen to quiet weeping. “I loved you very sincerely, and for a long time. Marriage between us was impossible. You always knew that.”