Читать книгу Peter and Alexis. The Romance of Peter the Great онлайн

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His head was again beginning to ache. He longed for another glass to cure this drunken headache; but he was too lazy to go and get one, too lazy even to call out to his servants. Yet the next moment he would be obliged to dress, pull on his tight-fitting uniform, buckle his sword, put on the heavy wig, which would only intensify his headache, and present himself at the Summer Garden for a masque where all were ordered to appear, under threat of terrible punishment for the defaulter.

He heard the voices of children skipping and playing in the courtyard. A sickly ruffled green-finch twittered plaintively from time to time in his cage over the window. The pendulum of a tall upright English striking clock, an old present from his father, was ticking monotonously. Seemingly interminable, melancholy runs of scales reached his ears from the apartment overhead. It was his wife the Crown Princess Charlotte, who was playing on a tinkling old German spinet. All at once he remembered how last night, when drunk, he had railed about her to Jibanda and Lasher: “I am encumbered with a devil of a wife. Come when I will to her, she is always bad tempered, and will not speak to me. Such a mighty personage!” “This won’t do,” he thought now, “I talk too much when I am drunk, and afterwards I am sorry for it.” Was it her fault that, when but a child, she was forced to marry him, and by what right did he mock her? Sick, lonely, abandoned by all, in a foreign land, she was as unhappy as himself. Yet she loved him, perhaps she was the only one who did love him. He remembered their recent quarrel; how she had called out: “The lowest cobbler in Germany treats his wife better than you do!” He had angrily shrugged his shoulders:—“Go back to Germany then, God speed you!” “Yes, I would, if I were not——” She had not continued, but had burst into tears pointing to herself: she was with child. How well he remembered those pale blue eyes, swollen with tears trickling down her cheeks, washing off the powder she, poor girl, had specially put on for him. Her usually plain features had become haggard and plainer yet during pregnancy: a pathetic, helpless face. And yet he himself loved her, or at any rate he pitied her, at times with some strange, hopeless, desperate, poignant, well nigh overwhelming feeling of pity. Why then did he torture her? Was he bereft of all sense of sin and shame? He would have to answer for her before God.