“None whatever—at present; but with a woman one always fears a change of mind. There is something most wearisomely convincing about the youth Smith. A man of any other nation, convicted of base treachery in the presence of a lady whose good opinion he must surely prize, would have protested, entreated, asseverated his innocence. But this stolid Englishman does not even give himself the trouble to offer a statement. He contents himself with asserting that he is in the right, in a tone which implies that it signifies nothing whether she believes it or not, and proceeds to drive her to frenzy by insisting on his pretensions. There is something impressive in this brutal simplicity.”
“Quite so,” said Mme. Ladoguin. “And you think it impressed her, or will yet succeed in doing so?”
“I am trusting to your influence that it may not. I will own that I have had moments of alarm. I imagined that I distinguished on her face a look resembling relief when I first revealed to her the nature of the deception. But it passed quickly when I pointed out its sordid motive, and the bourgeois origin of the plotters. A peasant would have been infinitely more welcome as a rival than a respectable youth of the middle class.”
“But I had the idea that these Teffanys—these Smiths, I should say—belonged to the petite noblesse, what the English call ‘gentry,’” said Mme. Ladoguin. M. Kirileff smiled meaningly.
“That is an idea I must beg you to banish from your mind. For the purposes of conversation with the Princess, they are of a superior order of agriculturists. I brought the thing home to her when I pointed out that she would have been offered a marriage with young Smith as the price of her life had she fallen into the hands of Panagiotis.”
“You have prepared the ground well, Boris Constantinovitch. She exhibited disgust?”
“More than disgust—agony. And thereupon the innocent Monsieur Smith spoils the effect by demanding with fury what I have been saying to make her unhappy!”
“Ah, these unrehearsed effects—how they ruin our best scenes! But the young man is certainly impossible. I suppose”—with sudden keenness—“it has not struck you to hint to the young lady that in case of any further escapades on her part, Scythia might be driven to abandon her claim, and take up that of this pretender instead? That would make it easier to manage her.”
“You terrify me!” cried M. Kirileff, with genuine alarm. “Is it possible you do not see that our only hold over her is to maintain her in the assurance that hers is the only claim worth considering? The merest suggestion that the youth might conceivably have right on his side would ruin everything. Down would go the barrier of disgust I have erected with so much pains, she would see herself as the usurper instead of him, and even if we continued to support her, the moral support of her own whole-hearted confidence in her rights would be gone.”
“I see,” said Mme. Ladoguin slowly. “Well, frankly, if that is the case, I wonder at your bringing her here. I will keep a careful watch over her, of course; but in a place like this there are endless opportunities for mischief. Panagiotis is always at hand, and that Captain Wylie is a perfect terror. Since he was tricked into paying the ransom without rescuing his friends, he has given the city no peace. The consular body are just as tired of him as the authorities are, and he is bringing the Ambassadors at Czarigrad into the matter. He is certain to insist on seeing the Princess when he finds out she is here, to try and discover from her where the Smiths are, and he may persuade her of the truth of their claims.”