Читать книгу When I Was Czar онлайн

34 страница из 105

Boreski had been described to me, however, as an adventurer, who was angling for his duchess in order to secure her private fortune. He was also unquestionably blackmailing the Government in the matter of the million roubles.

Yet the room I was in might have been the parlour of an American millionaire, so costly and precious were many of the pictures and ornaments.

Coffee was served to me by footmen who might have stepped straight from an English peer’s household; and altogether, as I say, I was completely mystified.

My embarrassment came from a quite different cause. It was one thing to meet an adventurer like this Boreski with his own weapons and fool him into an appreciation of his own short-sightedness; but it was something very different to treat Helga in the same way. Rightly or wrongly I had come to the fixed conviction that, although I had met her in this very questionable association with Boreski’s sordid scheme, she herself was as good as she was beautiful. And the idea of cheating her, of palming myself off for the Emperor, was more repugnant than I can say.