An Uncrowned King Chapter 9 Part 4

“It is right,” she answered, slowly.

“Let me kiss you once, only once,” he entreated.

“Oh no, no, no!” she almost shrieked, feeling that her resolution must give way at the touch of his lips. “Keep your kisses for your bride!”

“I don’t think I have deserved that,” he said, bitterly. “Understand once for all, Nadia, that you need not lay the flattering unction to your soul that I shall comfort myself as you please yourself by imagining I shall do. I can’t marry you against your will, but I won’t marry any other woman. Until I met you I thought that I should never marry, and now that you won’t have me I know it. It is you or no one, and you will cheerfully sacrifice me to a fancied scruple——”

“You see that you are well rid of me,” said Nadia.

“Nonsense!” cried Caerleon. “I love you more than ever. I can’t do without you. Just think of the life to which you are condemning me. To be alone always, never to be able to get away from the glare and rush of public life, never to have any one to cheer me on, never to have a home. I thought you would have helped me. I thought you would be there to advise me when I could not see my way clearly. You always seem to be sure of the right path at once. Do you really think that marrying the Emperor of Scythia’s daughter—if I had the faintest intention of taking the advice you have been giving me to-night—would ever make up for that? I don’t mean to marry to strengthen my position in Europe. I want a wife who will look at things without fear or favour, and help me to do what is right. Isn’t this a mission for you? Tell me, my dearest, is there no chance for me?”

“None,” she answered, with difficulty, the fervency of his pleading almost destroying her power of speech. “Please, please, say no more. You cannot tell how my heart is longing to say Yes; but I dare not yield. Don’t you see that all the course of our lives has been leading up to this—to the great choice between right and wrong? It is right now to think of the kingdom, and not of ourselves, and so I can be strong to refuse you for your own sake. It is hard for you, I know, but I think it is harder for me. You can stand alone, but I—oh! I could not do it if I was not sure it was right. Never, never think that I did not love you. Please let me go.” He loosed her hands, and she drew aside the curtain and passed out, looking back at him as he stood watching her in despairing silence, then tapped Cyril on the shoulder with her fan. “Will you kindly take me back to my mother, Lord Cyril? She was intending to leave early.”

Mr Hicks, when in after days he related his impressions of the incidents of that evening, whether in conversation or in the columns of the ‘Empire City Crier,’ was wont to remark, with much originality and force, that coming events cast their shadows before them, and that there is no accounting for the sympathetic movements of certain finely constituted minds. This was his way of leading up to the striking fact that while he and Madame O’Malachy were in the midst of a pleasant chat, in which the reputations of various Thracian notabilities suffered rather severely, the lady broke off suddenly in the course of a sentence and sighed deeply. In response to his anxious inquiries, she assured him that she was not ill, but that she felt a presentiment of coming misfortune,—“and at such a time as this,” she added, “you, monsieur, as a friend of the family, will be at no loss to understand the subject of my anxiety. You will pardon a mother’s weakness, but it is hard to see two young lives wrecked by an obstinate pride. You have watched with interest the course of the attachment—the royal idyl, as I might call it—between the King and my daughter, and I know you will sympathise with me in my fear lest Nadia, in her sensitive delicacy, should have refused her lover through fear of being supposed to covet his throne.”