“I made you, and I will break you!” he cried furiously. “I might have done it before. Perhaps you did not guess that it was I who persuaded your husband to patience when he was goaded into wishing to seek a separation on account of your conduct towards him? That is new to you, is it? It was not for your sake I did it—it was for the sake of Thracia, that no slander might touch my country’s royal house. But it might have been well if I had allowed my master to take the course he proposed. Then at least I should have been spared the knowledge that I had bestowed my charity upon a treacherous, heartless coquette”—this was not quite the word which M. Drakovics used—“scheming to place her lover on the throne from which she had successfully removed her husband.”
“Drakovics!” cried Cyril, springing forward, but Ernestine waved him back.
“This is my affair, Count. M. Drakovics, you may go; and never venture to present yourself in my presence again. Your services are dispensed with.” M. Drakovics hesitated, tried to speak, then recoiled, unable to face the eyes burning with indignation which seemed to pierce him through and through, and departed; while as he went he heard the Queen’s voice saying in very different tones, “And now, Count, let us return to our account-books!”
But the words were the last effort of which Ernestine was capable. Cyril, stepping forward to close the door behind the fallen Minister, returned to find her cowering in her chair, with her face turned away from him.
“My dearest,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder; but she shuddered and shrank from him.
“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “I can’t bear it. You heard what he called me, Cyril?” her voice rose almost to a shriek.
“He was really not responsible for his language at the moment, dear. And you faced him splendidly. You certainly had the best of it.”
“That he—or any one—should be able to say such a thing to me!” she wailed, not heeding his attempts at comfort. “I know that I behaved wrongly to my husband—that I was hard, cold, proud—but never in word or thought was I—and that other thing he said—Cyril. Cyril, say that you don’t believe it.”
“Believe it? My dearest, the man doesn’t believe it himself. He wouldn’t have said it if he had been in his right mind, but he wanted to hurt you, and he said the first thing that came into his head, though he knows that no human being would credit it for an instant. It would stamp him as mad if he ever uttered it to any one.”
“No, no; I don’t mean that, though I should die of shame if I thought that any one knew it had been said. It is that he said it to me, and that you heard it. Oh, you can’t understand; it hurts, it hurts! Say something to me; make me forget it, or I shall go mad.”