"I see it all now!" he cried. "This is the reason the Kernsberg traitors were so willing to give her up. It is all a plot against my life. I will not go near. Let the court physicians be sent! Cause the doors of the Summer Palace to be sealed! Set double guards! Permit none to pass either way, save the doctors only! And let them change their clothes and perfume themselves with the smoke of sulphur before they come out!"
His voice mounted higher and higher as he spoke, and Ivan of Muscovy watched him without speaking, as with hands thrust out and distended nostrils he screamed and gesticulated.
Prince Ivan had never seen a thorough coward before, and the breed interested him. But when he had let the Prince run on far enough to shame him before his own officer, he rose quietly and stood in front of him.
"Louis," he said, in a low voice, "listen to me—this is but a report. It is like enough to be false; it is certain to be exaggerated. Let us go at once and find out."
Prince Louis threw out his hands with a gesture of despair.
"Not I—not I!" he cried. "You may go if you like, if you do not value your life. But I—I do not feel well even now. Yesterday I kissed her hand. Ah, would to God that I had not! That is it. I wondered what ailed me this morning. Go—stop the court physicians! Do not let them go to the Summer Palace; bring them here to me first. Your arm, officer; I think I will go to my room—I am not well."
Prince Ivan's countenance grew mottled and greyish, and his teeth showed in the sun like a thin line of dazzling white. He grasped the poltroon by the wrist with a hand of steel.
"Listen," he said—"no more of this; I will not have it! I will not waste my own time and the blood of my father's soldiers for naught. This is but some woman's trick to delay the marriage—I know it. Hearken! I fear neither Black Death nor black devil; I will have the Lady Margaret to-day if I have to wed her on her death-bed! Now, I cannot enter your wife's chamber alone. Yet go I must, if only to see what all this means, and you shall accompany me. Do you hear, Prince Louis? I swear you shall go with me to the Summer Palace if I have to drag you there step by step!"
His grasp lay like a tightening circle of iron about the wrist of Prince Louis; his steady glance dominated the weaker man. Louis drew in his breath with a choking noise.
"I will," he gasped; "if it must—I will go. But the Death—the Black Death! I am sick—truly, Ivan, I am very sick!"