"With your Imperial Highness's permission, I will stay the night. But Chevalier Galban has left the castle already, I see from a note he left for me. He says he was compelled to hasten his departure; the ground was burning under his feet, for Duchess Johanna had threatened him with a horsewhipping for a speech which had displeased her."
"A horsewhipping!" cried the Grand Duke. "What! my Johanna order any one to be horsewhipped? Come on my right hand, wife!" And releasing Johanna from the embrace in which he still held her, he offered her his right arm, with face beaming with joy.
"Go back to those who sent you, my good friend, and tell them that I am about to wed Princess Lovicz in right-handed marriage. And as she may not accompany me to St. Petersburg, I will go with her to Ems, with the Czar's permission. And now get ready your trumpery papers that I have to sign."
With these words he turned away, and what he had further to say to Johanna was inaudible from kisses and laughter.
That which Krizsanowski had promised in the sitting of the Szojusz Blagadenztoiga had come about—the incredible fact that a man could voluntarily resign his succession to the throne of the mightiest empire in the world, and in such a manner that, did he ever repent, he might never undo his act. That incredible fact had become not a possibility, but a thing accomplished. The solution to the riddle was, as Zeneida had divined at the time, Johanna. For the present, however, none knew of it save the participators and the trees of the ancient forest about them.
Ah! what a terrific, world-wide catastrophe was this idyl to bring about!
CHAPTER XXI
THE MOST POWERFUL RULER OF THEM ALL
While the members of "the green book" were at work on their wide-spreading plans, those of the Bear's Paw had made others to their way of thinking. Passing over the military, and turning their backs upon the league of the aristocrats, they took up a ground of their own, calling themselves "Napoleonists!" What induced them to choose that extraordinary name for themselves?
Well, it is easy enough to make the poor believe their lot to be a hard one; it was at that time that the Russian Volkslied was written—