Читать книгу The Lands of the Tamed Turk; or, the Balkan States of to-day онлайн

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It was to his indiscretion and contumacious perversity that was accredited one of the most horrible royal tragedies in the history of the world. In fact, it was on one of Alexander’s imprudent escapades that he met Draga Maschine, then lady-in-waiting to his mother and the adventuresome widow of an engineer in the Servian army. An illicit union with this woman kindled the spark of love between them, which ignited, as time wore on and the number of their meetings increased, into the burning flame of passionate devotion.

Of the women of Belgrade, Draga Maschine, at the time of her ascendency, was an acknowledged star in point of beauty of face and figure. She was tall and graceful in bearing; her eyes were dark and lustrous; her hair was said to have been black like the hue of a raven; the curves of her mouth were bewitching; the type of her chin was indicative of determined character. Beyond these attributes she was vivacious and alluring. While yet a mere girl of seventeen she had been married to a young army engineer, but even at that tender age she had had the reputation of being a maid of uncertain morals, and her marriage failed to act as a curb to her perverted desires and inclinations. She had been wedded barely a year when her husband took his own life because of her alleged disregard for the holy bonds of matrimony. It was then that Colonel Maschine, her brother-in-law and her enemy from the first, plotter against the King and the man destined to act the role of arch-murderer in the final scene of the greatest of Servian tragedies, swore he would have retribution for her conduct, which, he said, had been the cause of his brother’s suicide.