him. But he draws me to him,
bestows upon me, as if in mockery, the name of wife, leads me to the
very brink of happiness, and then contemptuously thrusts me down into
the night of unspeakable humiliation! And why all this? For the sake of
an empty sound the Gothic kingdom! For a circlet of gold! Woe to him,
and woe to his idol, to which he has sacrificed me! He shall repent it.
Without mercy he has destroyed my idol--his own image. Well, then, idol
for idol! He shall live to see his kingdom destroyed, his crown broken.
I will shatter his ideal, for whose sake he has sacrificed the bloom of
my life; and when he stands despairing and wringing his hands before
the fragments, I will say: See! thus my idol, too, was shattered!"

So, with the unstable sophistry of passion, Mataswintha accused the
unhappy man, who suffered more than herself; who had sacrificed not
only her happiness, but that of his well-beloved wife, to his
fatherland.

Fatherland!--Gothic kingdom! The words fell chilly upon the ear of the
woman who, from her childhood upward, had connected all her sufferings
with these names.

She had lived solely absorbed in the egoism of her _one_ feeling, the
poetry of her passionate love, and her whole soul was now possessed
with the desire of revenge for the loss of her happiness. She wished
that she had the power to destroy the kingdom at one blow.

But the very madness of her passion endowed her with demoniac cunning.

She understood how to hide her deadly hatred and her secret thoughts of
revenge from the King--to hide them as deeply as the love which she
still entertained for him. She was also able to show an interest in the
Gothic kingdom, which seemed to form the only tie between herself and
the King; and indeed she really took a deep interest in it, although in
an inimical sense. For she well knew that she could only injure the
kingdom and ruin the King's cause if she were initiated into all its
secrets, and intimately acquainted with its strength and weakness.

Her high position made it easy for her to learn all that she wished to
know; out of consideration for her powerful party, the knowledge of the
situation of the kingdom and army could not be withheld from the
daughter of the Amelungs. Old Earl Grippa furnished her with all the
information which he himself possessed. In more important cases she was
present at the councils which were held in the King's apartments.

Thus she was perfectly well acquai