‘He has asked me to be his Consort.’
I did not succeed in quite concealing the astonishment with which I
heard this piece of news, as yet unsuspected by Europe, and for which
my friend Baron Rothschild would gladly have paid 1,000,000 francs.
‘I refused him,’ the Countess added; ‘I have refused him not once but
twice, but he persists.’
‘Kings ought to marry kings’ children,’ I observed, as she seemed to
wait for some expression of opinion from me.
‘Add that boys ought to marry girls and not grown women, and you
will say what the world will say as soon as it hears of this,’ she
returned, with some bitterness. ‘That is what I have told Alexander;
and he has sworn upon the crucifix in my presence that he will marry
only me.’
‘Leave Servia. Spend a year on the Riviera--or in Paris’--she glanced
swiftly at me as I said this--‘and he may change his resolution.’
The Servian’s reply startled me.
‘I cannot. At this moment I am under secret arrest.’
‘Under arrest?’
‘You forget that Alexander has made himself master, and that reasons
of State cover a great deal in Servia which they would not cover in
France.’
I was staggered. A stranger situation I had never encountered in all
my strange experience.
‘He holds you a prisoner till you consent to become his Queen!’
‘Till I become his Queen,’ she corrected.
I sat still for a minute, considering. The chancelleries and the
public of Europe would never believe this story. They would think,
they were already thinking and saying, that the Countess was an
adventuress, luring the young King to his ruin.
‘There is one very simple solution,’ I said at last. ‘I will arrange
your escape.’
‘Impossible!’ she sighed.