Fräulein von Staubach appeared to find the question a hard one to answer, for it was some time before she said unwillingly, as she went back into the hut, “No, Count; you are not to blame, and certainly her Majesty is not. It is circumstances.”
“Circumstances!” muttered Cyril to himself somewhat later, as he crawled on hands and knees into the little lean-to which he had assisted old Minics to build as a kind of spare bedroom to his log mansion, and made himself as comfortable as he could on a couch of branches very imperfectly covered with a rug. “That is what the Baroness said—‘I am not afraid of either the Queen or you; but I am very much afraid of circumstances.’ How long ago was it—a hundred thousand years? Is it possible that it was only the night before last? It feels as if I had lived whole lifetimes since then—since she said she trusted me and would obey me. And a pretty farce it is! She will obey me when she likes, and when she doesn’t she tries to make me feel like a blackguard for giving her orders.”
He laughed angrily, and turned over on his unrestful bed. But sleep would not come to him, in spite of the fatigues of the day and the disturbed character of his last two nights. The Queen’s face floated before him—now white and terror-stricken, as when they had hidden behind the gate; now rosy and confused, as he had seen it when she had made some dangerous blunder; now lifted to his in eager interest, and again suffused with tears, as when he had come upon her in the wood,—never twice the same, and at no time strictly beautiful, perhaps, but always fascinating from its ever-changing play of expression.
“Her infinite variety!” he said to himself sarcastically, remembering the line he had once quoted to Drakovics with reference to her; “infinite fickleness, I call it—wish she would cultivate a good serviceable workaday frame of mind, and stay in it, for once. And why—why, when I have been bothered with her all day, I should want to be thinking of her all night, I don’t know——” He stretched himself vigorously, and came into such violent contact with one of the poles of the lean-to as almost to send the structure flying; then resigned himself to lying passive and watching the stars through the crevices of the roof. “I really could not be more taken up with her if I was in love with her. Why—well, and what if I am in love with her?”
“In love—and with her!” The idea was so ludicrous, and at the same time so unwelcome, that Cyril could not contemplate it lying down. He sat up, leaning against the supporting wall of the hut, and regardless of the risk of fire, lighted another cigar to calm his nerves, and thus fortified, prepared to face the situation. That he—he, Cyril Mortimer, of all men—should have fallen in love, and that with a lady who had not merely done her utmost to testify her dislike to him, but who could, and doubtless would, ruin his career with a ruthless hand if she should gain the slightest inkling of the state of his feelings, was too utterly absurd. It must be that he possessed a double personality, and one self loved the Queen, while the other not only perceived how fatal to all his chances in life such an attachment would be, but actually disliked, despised, and disapproved of Ernestine and all her doings. But—double personality or not—he was in love with her, and, so far as he could tell, for no earthly reason. This consideration was peculiarly trying to Cyril. As he had told Caerleon long ago, he had had many love-affairs, but to have called them affaires du cœur would have been a serious mistake. They were purely affaires de la tête, political or social speculations deliberately entered upon with an eye to the realisation of an underlying purpose. Cyril undertook them with the same zest that characterised him in his schemes of a more purely political nature, and enjoyed them fully, without once losing his head. The ladies concerned enjoyed them also, of course—such of them, at least, as understood that a tendresse, and not a grande passion, was the utmost to be expected from him—and the affairs had never yet afforded occasion for scandal. Cyril was not the man to compromise any woman—and far less himself—unless he was playing for very high stakes indeed.
And now he was honestly in love—just as Caerleon had been! The thought was so exquisitely absurd that he laughed until the tears came into his eyes. No, not like Caerleon, very far from it. It had not been Caerleon’s misfortune to fall in love with his sovereign; his difficulty was just the other way about. And the avowal that his love was returned, the hope that one day he might call the loved one his own—these things, for which Caerleon had lived, Cyril did not even desire. If he should ever be so unfortunate as to come to desire them, it would be the signal for him to leave Thracia, and take his susceptible heart to some other country, where Queens were less attractive, or, at any rate, less given to demand knight-errantry from their followers. His susceptible heart!—the term in connection with himself struck him as so ridiculous that he began to picture himself as laying that heart at Ernestine’s feet. What would she do?—turn away from it in disgust, or take it up in her disdainful little hands and throw it down again, just for the pleasure of seeing it break? But that pleasure she should not enjoy. He could not secure his heart in his own keeping, it seemed; but at least he could prevent any one else from guessing that he had lost it. He smiled again as he thought how easy the task would be. There was not a man in the kingdom who would not be suspected of such folly before himself, not a man to whom the Queen was less likely to condescend by way of inspiring in him such dreams.
“I’ll go on,” he said to himself, “and so long as she treats me decently I’ll stay and look after her; but if she makes herself disagreeable I shall cut, and before I go I’ll tell her! That will punish her,” and happy in the thought, and also conscious that his cigar had gone out, he lay down again, and slept peacefully.
He did not wake until late in the morning; but the host was the only member of the party who was before him. He was busy making up the fire as Cyril went down to the lake for a hasty toilet, and received him with a friendly smile when he returned.
“Can you let me have a snack of some kind, Minics, before the ladies come out?” Cyril asked him. “I want to be off without their knowing it.”
“But where are you going?” asked the charcoal-burner.