“What escapade?” my friend echoed. “Why, you know well enough! I’ve heard it whispered that it was owing to your cleverness as a diplomat that the matter was so successfully hushed up—and an ugly affair it was, too. The suicide of her lover.”
“That’s a confounded lie!” I said quickly. “He did not commit suicide at all. At most, he left Russia with a broken heart, and that is not usually a fatal malady.”
“Well, you needn’t get angry about it, my dear fellow,” complained my friend. “The affair is successfully hushed up, and I fancy she’s got a lot to thank you for.”
“Not at all,” I declared. “I know that you fellows have coupled my name with hers, just because I’ve danced with her a few times at the Court balls, and I’ve been shooting at her father’s castle away in Samara. But I assure you my reputation as the little Grand Duchess’s intimate friend is entirely a mythical one.” Captain Stoyanovitch only smiled incredulously, stretched out his long legs and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well,” I went on, “has she been very terrified about all these reports of conspiracies?”
“Frightened out of her life, poor child! And who would not be?” he asked. “We didn’t know from one hour to another that we might not all be blown into the air. Everywhere the railway was lined by Cossacks, of course. Such a demonstration is apt to lend an air of security, but, alas! there is no security with the very Ministry undermined by revolution, as it is.”
I sighed. What he said was, alas! too true. Russia, at that moment, was in very evil case, and none knew it better than we, the impartial onlookers at the British Embassy.
The warm June sun fell across the rather faded carpet of that sombre old-fashioned room with its heavy furniture, which was my own sanctum, and as the smart captain of the Imperial Guard lolled back picturesquely in the big armchair I looked at him reflectively.
They were strange thoughts which flooded my brain at that moment—thoughts concerning that pretty, high-born young lady whom we had just been discussing, the girl to whom, he declared, His Majesty entrusted the greatest secrets of the throne.
Stoyanovitch was an extremely elegant and somewhat irresponsible person, and the fact that the Emperor had allowed the Grand Duchess Natalia to write his private letters did not strike me as the actual truth. The Tzar was far too cautious to entrust the secrets of a nation to a mere girl who was certainly known to be greatly addicted to the gentle pastime of flirtation.