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.
During the past few days she had scarcely taken up a single foreign
paper without finding the heading, "The Great Court Scandal," and
something outrageously against her; for her enemies, who had engaged as
their secret agent a Jew money-lender, had started a bitter campaign
against her, backed with the sum of a hundred thousand marks, placed by
Hinckeldeym at the unscrupulous Hebrew's disposal with which to bribe
the press. A little money can, alas! soon ruin a woman's good name, or,
on the other hand, it can whitewash the blackest record.
This plot against an innocent, defenceless woman was as brutal as any
conceived by the ingenuity of a corrupt Court of office-seekers and
sycophants, for at heart the King had loved his wife--until they had
poisoned his mind against her and besmirched her good name.
Of all this she was well aware, conscious of her own weakness as a
woman. Yet she retained her woman's heart, for that was unalterable,
and part of her being: but her looks, her language, her thoughts, even
in those adverse circumstances, assumed the cast of the pure ideal; and
to those who were in the secret of her humane and pitying nature,
nothing could be more charming and consistent than the effect which she
produced upon others.
As the hot, fevered days went by, she recognised that it became hourly
more necessary for her to leave London, and conceal her identity
somewhere in the country. She noticed at the Savoy, whenever she dined
or lunched with Leucha, people were noting her beauty and inquiring who
she was. At any moment she might be recognised by some one who had
visited the Court at Treysa, or by those annoying portraits that were
now appearing everywhere in the illustrated journals.
She decided to consult Guy Bourne, who, Leucha said, usually spent half
his time in hiding. Therefore one evening, with "the Ladybird," she
took a cab to a small semi-detached villa in Wolverton Gardens, off the
Hammersmith Road, where she alighted and entered, in utter ignorance,
unfortunately, that another hansom had followed her closely all the way
from the Savoy, and that, pulling up in the Hammersmith Road, the fare,
a tall, thin, middle-aged man, with a black overcoat concealing his
evening dress, had alighted, walked quickly up the street, and noted the
house wherein she and her maid had entered.
The stranger muttered to himself some words in German, and with a smile
of self-satisfaction lit a cigar and strolled back to the Hammersmith
Road to wait.
A fearful destiny had encompassed her.