o could understand
the heart of his King. Wetter was my sympathizer, and Wetter was my
rival. The relations between us in those days were strange. We did not
quarrel, we felt a friendliness for one another. Each knew the price the
other paid or must pay as well as he knew his own price. But we were
rivals. Varvilliers was wrong when he said that Coralie cared nothing
about Wetter. She cared, although it was in a peculiar fashion that she
cared. Truly he could give her little, but he was to her a sign and a
testimony of her power, even as I myself in another way. Mine was the
high rank, the great position. In conquering me lay the open and
notorious triumph, but she was not insensible to the more private joy
and secret exultation that came to her from dominating a ruling mind,
and filling with her own image a head capacious enough to hold imperial
policies and shape the destinies of kingdoms. Wetter and I, each in our
way, broke through the crust of seemingly consistent frivolity that was
on her, and down to a deep-seated tendency toward romance and the love
of power. She could not rule directly, but she could rule rulers. I am
certain that some such idea was in her head, alloying, or at least
refining, a grosser self-interest. Therefore Wetter, no less than I, was
of value to her. She would not willingly have let him go, even although
he could give her nothing and she did not care for him in the only sense
of which my friend the Vicomte took account. I came to realize how it
was between her and him before very long, and to see how the same
ultimate instinct of her nature made her long to gather both him and me
into her net. Thus she would have bowing before her the highest and the
strongest heads in Forstadt. That she so analyzed and reasoned out her
wishes it would be absurd to suppose, but we--he and I--performed the
task for her. Each knew that the other was at work on it; each chafed
that she would consent to be but half his; each desired to rule alone,
not to be one of two that were ruled. All this had been dimly
foreshadowed to me when I sat in the theatre, looking now at Coralie as
she sang her song, now at Wetter's frowning brows and tight-set lips. I
must add that my position was rendered peculiarly difficult by the fact
that Wetter not only owed me deference, but was still in my debt for the
money I had lent him. He had refused to consider it a gift, but was, and
became every day more, incapable of repaying it.