Page:Anthony Hope - Rupert of Hentzau.djvu/377

Rh before all Europe, recognised, unquestioned, unassailed. True, he must marry the Queen again; Sapt was ready with the means, and would hear nothing of the difficulty and risk in finding a hand to perform the necessary ceremony. If we quailed in our courage, we had but to look at the alternative, and find recompense for the perils of what we meant to undertake by a consideration of the desperate risk involved in abandoning it. Persuaded that the substitution of Rudolf for the King was the only thing which would serve our turn, we asked no longer whether it were possible, but sought only the means to make it safe and yet more safe.

But Rudolf himself had not spoken. Sapt'a appeal and the Queen's imploring cry had shaken but not overcome him; he had wavered, but he was not won. Yet there was no talk of impossibility or peril in his mouth, any more than in ours: those were not what gave him pause. The score on which he hesitated was whether the thing should be done, not whether it could; our appeals were not to brace a failing courage, but to cajole a sturdy sense of honour which found the imposture distasteful so soon as it seemed to serve a personal end. To save the King he had played the King in old days, but he did not love to play the King when the profit of it was to be his own. Hence he was unmoved till his care for the fair fame of