Sophy of Kravonia Part 24

"The Prince has received them, sir. He read them in the presence of my messenger, and requested leave to send his answer in writing, unless he might wait on Your Majesty."

"There are reasons why I had better not see him just now. Ask him to write--but very soon. The matter isn't one for delay." The King rose from his seat.

"Your Majesty still wishes me to send for Baroness Dobrava?"

The King reflected for a moment, and answered simply: "No."

His brief word broke up the conference--it had already lasted longer than suave and rea.s.suring Dr. Natcheff would have advised. The men went away with a smile, all of them--the King, Stenovics, Stafnitz, round-faced Markart--each smiling according to the quality of each, their smiles answering to Max von Hollbrandt's shrug of the shoulders.

There are things which bring men to what painful youth was taught to call the least common denominator. A horse-race does it, a prize-fight, a cricket-match, a battle, too, in some sort. Equally efficacious, very often, though it is to be recorded with reluctance, is a strong flirtation with no proper issue obvious.

The matter was grave, yet all the men laughed. The matter was grave, and Countess Ellenburg did not laugh. Was that what Stafnitz called her views and her temperament? In part, no doubt. Besides, men will laugh at the side-issues of the gravest affairs; it is not generally the case with woman. Added again to this, perhaps Countess Ellenburg knew more, or divined more. Among glaring diversity there was, perhaps, something--an atom--of similarity between her and Sophy--not the something which refuses, but the something which couples high conditions with a.s.sent. The thousandth chance is to most men negligible; to most women it is no worse than the tenth; their sense of mathematical odds is sorely--and sometimes magnificently--imperfect.

It had flashed across Countess Ellenburg's mind that maybe Sophy, too, played for a big stake--or, rather, lived for it and so would die. The men had not thought of that; to them, the violent flirtation had its obvious end and its pa.s.sing inconvenience. It might delay the Prince's departure for a while; it might make his marriage more entirely an affair of duty and of state. With this idea they smiled and shrugged; the whole business came under the head which, in their thoughts and their confidential conversations, they would style nonsense.

It was not so with the Countess. Disconcerted by that episode of Lepage and young Alexis, more moved by the sudden appearance of Baroness Dobrava as a factor in the game, she returned to prayer.

What now was the form and matter of her prayer? The form must go unformulated--and the words unconjectured. Yet she prayed so long that she must have succeeded in putting a good face on her pet.i.tions. Without a plausible plea n.o.body could have rested on their knees so long.

It is probable that she prayed for others as she prayed for herself--she prayed that the Prince of Slavna and the Baroness Dobrava might escape temptation.

Or that, if they fell--? Again it was not for her to dictate to Heaven.

Heaven had its ways of dealing with such sinners.

Yet through all her prayers must have echoed the words: "It's absurd!"

She prayed again, most likely, against being suspected of wishing that the man who uttered them--her husband--might soon be dead.

The King dead--and the Prince a slave to love--to the idle hours of an unprofitable love! It was a fine vision, and needed a vast deal of covering with the veil of prayer.

X

THE SOUND OF A TRUMPET

The Prince of Slavna's answer to the intimation of his father's wishes was dutiful, courteous, and discreetly diplomatic. The Prince was much occupied with his drills and other occupations; he availed himself of Max von Hollbrandt's practised pen--the guest was glad to do his royal host this favor.

They talked over the sense of the reply; Max then draughted it. The Prince did no more than amend certain expressions which the young diplomatist had used. Max wrote that the Prince cordially sympathized with the King's wishes; the Prince amended to the effect that he thoroughly understood them. Max wrote that the Prince was prepared cordially and energetically to co-operate in their realization; the Prince preferred to be prepared to consider them in a benevolent spirit.

Max suggested that two or three months' postponement of the suggested journey would not in itself be fatal; the Prince insisted that such a delay was essential, in order that negotiations might be set on foot to ensure his being welcomed with due _empress.e.m.e.nt_. Max added that the later date would have an incidental advantage, since it would obviate the necessity of the Prince's interrupting the important labors on which he was engaged; the Prince said instead that, in his judgment, it was essential, in the interests of the kingdom, that the task of training the artillery should not be interfered with by any other object, however well worthy of consideration that object might be.

In the result, the draught as amended, though not less courteous or dutiful than Max's original, was noticeably more stiff. Translate them both into the terse and abrupt speech of every-day life, and one said: "I'd rather not, please," while the other came at least very near to a blank "I won't!" Max's was acquiescence, coupled with a prayer for postponement; the Prince's was postponement first, with an accompanying a.s.surance of respectful consideration.

Max was not hurt, but he felt a professional disapproval; the Prince had said more, and shown more of his mind, than was needful; it was throwing more cards on the table than the rules of the game demanded.

"Mine would have done just as well," he complained to Marie Zerkovitch.

"If mine had been rejected, his could have followed. As it is, he's wasted one or other of them. Very foolish, since just now time's his main object!" He did not mean saving time, but protracting it.

Marie did no more than toss her head peevishly. The author of the original draught persevered.

"Don't you think mine would have been much wiser--to begin with?"

"I don't see much difference. There's little enough truth in either of them!" she snapped.

Max looked at her with an amused and tolerant smile. He knew quite well what she meant. He shook his head at her with a humorous twinkle. "Oh, come, come, don't be exacting, madame! There's a very fair allowance of truth. Quite half the truth, I should think. He is really very anxious about the gunners!"

"And about what else?"

Max spread out his hands with a shrug, but pa.s.sed the question by. "So much truth, in fact, that it would have served amply for at least two letters," he remarked, returning to his own special point of complaint.

Marie might well amuse the easy-going, yet observant and curious, young man; he loved to watch his fellow-creatures under the stress of feelings from which he himself was free, and found in the opportunities afforded him in this line the chief interest both of his life and of his profession.

But Marie had gradually risen to a high, nervous tension. She was no puritan--puritans were not common in Kravonia, nor had Paris grafted such a slip onto her nature. Had she thought as the men in the Palace thought when they smiled, had she thought that and no more, it is scarcely likely that she would have thus disturbed herself; after all, such cases are generally treated as in some sense outside the common rules; exceptional allowances are, in fact, whether properly or not, made for exceptional situations. Another feeling was in her mind--an obsession which had come almost wholly to possess her. The fateful foreboding which had attacked her from the first had now full dominion over her; its rule was riveted more closely on her spirit day by day, as day by day the Prince and Sophy drew closer together. Even that Sophy had once saved his life could now no longer shake Marie's doleful prepossession. Unusual and unlooked-for things take color from the mind of the spectator; the strange train of events which had brought Sophy to Praslok borrowed ominous shadows from a nervous, apprehensive temperament.

No such gloom brooded over Sophy. She gave herself up to the hour: the past forgotten, the future never thought of. It was the great time of her life. Her feelings, while not less spontaneous and fresh, were more mature and more fully satisfied than when Casimir de Savres poured his love at her feet. A cry of happiness almost lyrical runs through her scanty record of these days--there was little leisure for diary or letters.

Winter was melting into spring, snow dwelled only on the hill-tops, Lake Talti was unbound and sparkled in the sun; the days grew longer, yet were far too short. To ride with him to Volseni, to hear the cheers, to see the love they bore him, to watch him at work, to seem to share the labor and the love--then to shake off the kindly clinging friends and take to a mountain-path, or wander, the reins on the horses' necks, by the margin of the lake, and come home through the late dusk, talking often, silent often, always together in thought as in bodily presence--was not this enough? "If I had to die in a month, I should owe life a tremendous debt already"--that is her own summing up; it is pleasant to remember.

It would be enough to say--love; enough with a nature ardent as hers.

Yet, with love much else conspired. There was the thought of what she had done, of the things to which she was a party; there was the sense of power, the satisfaction of ambition, a promise of more things; there was the applause of Volseni as well as the devotion of the Prince; there was, too--it persisted all through her life--the funny, half-childish, and (to a severe eye) urchin-like pleasure in the feeling that these were fine doings for Sophy Grouch, of Morpingham in Ess.e.x! "Fancy _me_!"

is the indefensibly primitive form in which this delight shows in one of the few letters bearing date from the Castle of Praslok.

Yet it is possible to find this simple, gracious surprise at Fortune's fancies worthy of love. Her own courage, her own catching at Fortune's forelock, seem to have been always unconscious and instinctive. These she never hints at, nor even begins to a.n.a.lyze. Of her love for the Prince she speaks once or twice--and once in reference to what she had felt for Casimir. "I loved him most when he left me, and when he died,"

she writes. "I love him not less now because I love Monseigneur. But I can love Monseigneur more for having loved Casimir. G.o.d bade the dear dead die, but He bade me live, and death helped to teach me how to do it." Again she reflects: "How wonderfully everything is _worth while_--even sorrows!" Following which reflection, in the very next line (she is writing to Julia Robins), comes the nave outburst: "I look just splendid in my sheepskin tunic--and he's given me the sweetest toy of a revolver; that's in case they ever charge, and try and cut us up behind our guns!" She is laughing at herself, but the laugh is charged with an infectious enjoyment. So she lived, loved, and laughed through those unequalled days, trying to soothe Marie Zerkovitch, bantering Max von Hollbrandt, giving her masculine mind and her feminine soul wholly to her Prince. "She was like a singularly able and energetic sunbeam," Max says quaintly, himself obviously not untouched by her attractions.

The Prince's mind was simple. He was quite sincere about his guns; he had no wish to go on his travels until they had arrived, and he could deliver them into the safe custody of his trained and trusty Volsenians, and of Lukovitch their captain. Less than that was not safety, with Stenovics in office and Colonel Stafnitz on duty at the capital. But Marie Zerkovitch was right, too, even though over-exacting, as Max had told her. The letter to the King held but half the truth, and that half not the more significant. He could not go from Sophy's side to seek a wife. The desire of his heart and the delight of his eyes--she was here in Praslok.

Her charm was not only for his heart and eyes, her fascination not solely for his pa.s.sion; on his intellect also she laid her powerful hold, opening the narrow confines of his mind to broader views, and softening the rigor of his ideals. He had seen himself only as the stern master, the just chastiser of a turbulent capital and an unruly soldiery. But was there not a higher aim? Might he not be loved in the plains as on the hills, at Slavna as at Volseni?

By himself he could not achieve that; his pride--nay, his obstinacy--forbade the first step. But what his sensitive dignity rejected for himself, he could see her sunny graciousness accomplish without loss of self-respect, naturally, all spontaneously. He was a soldier; hers were the powers of peace, of that instinctive statesmanship of the emotions by which hearts are won and kingdoms knit together by a tie stronger than the sword. Because in his mind's eye he saw her doing this, the idea at which the men in the Palace had smiled, and which even Marie Zerkovitch would have accepted as the lesser evil, never came into his head. In the future years she was to be openly at his side, doing these things for him and for the land of his love and labor. Would she not be a better partner than some stranger, to whom he must go cap in hand, to whom his country would be a place of exile and his countrymen seem half-barbarians, whose life with him would be one long tale of forced and unwilling condescension? A pride more subtle than his father's rose in revolt.

If he could make the King see that! There stood the difficulty. Right in the way of his darling hope was the one thing on which the King insisted. The pride of family--the great alliance--the single point whereon the easy King was an obstacle so formidable! Yet had he despaired, he would have been no such lover as he was.

His answer had gone to the King; there was no news of its reception yet.

But on the next day, in the evening, great tidings came from Slavna, forwarded by Zerkovitch, who was in charge of the Prince's affairs there. The Prince burst eagerly into the dining-room in the tower of Praslok, where Sophy sat alone. He seemed full of triumphant excitement, almost boyish in his glee. It is at such moments that hesitations are forgotten and the last reserves broken down.

"My guns!" he cried. "My guns! They've started on their way. They're due in Slavna in a month!"

"In a month!" she murmured softly. "Ah, then--"

"Our company will be ready, too. We'll march down to Slavna and meet the guns!" He laughed. "Oh, I'll be very pleasant to Slavna now--just as you advise me. We'll meet them with smiles on our faces." He came up to her and laid his hand on hers. "You've done this for me," he said, smiling still, yet growing more grave.

"It'll be the end of this wonderful time, of this our time together!"

"Of our time at Praslok--not of our time together. What, won't Lieutenant Baroness Dobrava march with her battery?"

She smiled doubtfully, gently shaking her head. "Perhaps! But when we get to Slavna--? Oh, I'm sorry that this time's so nearly done!"