“She loved me, my darling, my own, she loved me!” he cried. “Maybe she loves me yet!” and again his heart beat wildly. “For ten years she remained unmated. But yesterday she married this German nobleman, this Baron Von Eulaw. Surely love could not have moved her to the union. Surely with her nature she could not have forgotten her first love. She was outraged and humiliated and incensed at the silence and seeming indifference of the man she really loved, and so she married, for reasons common enough in society.”
Was this tie irrevocable? Could it not be severed? Might it not be possible that happiness should yet be in store on this earth for his darling and himself? He was now in possession of the lever that moves the world. Should he not use this power for her and for himself, as well as for the benefit of mankind?
Who was this German baron that he should stand against him? There were hundreds of barons, but only one owner of the Morning mine. He would use millions piled upon millions to bring his Ellen to his arms.
Napoleon divorced Josephine and married Maria Louisa. Cæsar put away one wife and married another. David placed Uriah in the front of the battle. Many kings had used their power to readjust to their liking their own domestic relations and those of their subjects.
He was a mightier king than Darius. He ruled greater armies than any ever commanded by Bonaparte. Not the Kaiser or the Romanoff upon their imperial thrones could exercise so great a power as David Morning.
He would bid his golden armies serve their master. Walpole had truthfully said that “every man has his price,” and the Baron Von Eulaw probably had his. How many millions would this titled Dutchman take for his wife? ten? fifty? a hundred? a thousand?—he should have them multiplied again and again.
Morning smiled grimly at the grotesque fancy. Von Eulaw aspired to the American embassy. Mayhap he was not covetous but ambitious. Very well, he would ask the Hohenzollern to name his figures for offices and ribbons and rank to be accorded to the baron in exchange for a surrender of his American wife. He would pay off the national debt of Germany if necessary. Or he would buy the baron a kingdom. There were always thrones for sale for cash or approved credit in the Danubian country. That of Servia was just now in the market, and even that of Spain or Portugal might be purchased.
Maybe the baron loved his wife. How could he help loving her? Curse him, what right had he to love her? What if Morning emulated the example of the Psalmist and caused the Baroness Von Eulaw to be made a widow? Money would accomplish this, and none be the wiser.
None? Ah, what of the God that rules worlds and directs the eternities, the God that was in and a part of David Morning, the God that punishes and pities, the God that smote David, that struck down Cæsar, that gave Napoleon to an exile’s death, and Henry Tudor to centuries of infamy?
If Morning gained his Ellen’s arms through wrong to another, through wrong to his own imperial and impartial conscience, there would be bitterness in her kisses, and misery in his soul; they would go maimed and chained to the gates of death, and in the other land they should meet not again.