EVENING NEWS, FRIDAY, JUNE 26th.
DEATH OF THE KING OF MARBURG.
EVENING NEWS.
She halted, staring at the words.
Then she bought a newspaper, and opening it at once upon the pavement, amid the busy throng, learnt that the aged King had died suddenly at Treysa, on the previous evening, of senile decay.
The news staggered her. Her husband had succeeded, and she was now Queen—a reigning sovereign!
In the cruelly wronged woman there still remained all the fervour of youthful tenderness, all the romance of youthful fancy, all the enchantment of ideal grace—the bloom of beauty, the brightness of intellect, and the dignity of rank, taking the peculiar hue from the conjugal character which shed over all like a consecration and a holy charm. Thoughts of her husband, the man who had so cruelly ill-judged her, were in her recollections, acting on her mind with the force of a habitual feeling, heightened by enthusiastic passion, and hallowed by a sense of duty. Her duty to her husband and to her people was to return at once to Treysa. As she walked with Leucha towards Trafalgar Square she reflected deeply. How could she go back now that her enemies had so openly condemned her? No; she saw that for her own happiness it was far better that she still remain away from Court—the Court over which at last she now reigned as Queen.
“My worst enemies will bow to me in adulation,” she thought to herself. “They fear my retaliation, and if I went back I verily believe that I should show them no mercy. And yet, after all, it would be uncharitable. One should always repay evil with good. If I do not return, I shall not be tempted to revenge.”
That day she remained very silent and pensive, full of an acute sense of the injustice inflicted upon her. Her husband the King was no doubt trying to discover her whereabouts, but up to the present had been unsuccessful. The papers, which spoke of her almost daily, stated that it was believed she was still in Germany, at one or other of the quieter spas, on account of little Ignatia’s health. In one journal she had read that she had been recognised in New York, and in another it was cruelly suggested that she was in hiding in Rome, so as to be near her lover Leitolf.
The truth was that her enemies at Court were actually paying the more scurrilous of the Continental papers—those which will publish any libel for a hundred francs, and the present writer could name dozens of such rags on the Continent—to print all sorts of cruel, unfounded scandals concerning her.