been the flimsiest gauze of self-deceit veiling the secret hopes and desires that had urged me forward. Out of the inmost thoughts came up now the skeletons of my lost desires, gibbering and mouthing and mocking me with the hopelessness of my love.
If I could have made her happy, have helped her to realise the dream of her life as the Virgin Queen pouring on this distracted people the infinite blessings of freedom and happiness, herself a bright, conspicuous example of innocence and purity to all the world, I might have been content to worship even while I served her. But to think of her as the wife of the sensual brute I detested, forced to submit to his loathsome endearments, and to smile and frown upon him in his humours, was like a very torment of hell to me. And for her it must be ten thousand times worse. Her life, mated with a man she abhorred, would be one long, living lie, the canker of which must blight her every purpose, and destroy every hope in her heart.
And yet I, loving her and beloved by her, was to help her to this life of fair-seeming misery and honoured dishonour. I could not and would not, I cried in my heart—and yet I knew I must. There was no escape now from it. As I had told Zoiloff in my despair, the hastening of the marriage was the one possible means of averting that instant ruin in which the power of the at present all-powerful Russian agents could involve us all.
Harder than all else to bear, however, was the thought that I myself must pass that inexorable sentence upon her. She had made it essential by her shrinking woman's fear of how her act would be read in the eyes of Europe; but it was left for me to show her the full consequences of what she had done.
