Sophy of Kravonia: A Novel

The shock was sudden, but Stenovics's answer came steady, if slow.

"Your Majesty desires her presence?"

"I want to thank her once again, Stenovics. She's done much for us."

"The Baroness is not in Slavna, sir, but I can send for her."

"Not in Slavna? Where is she, then?"

He asked what the whole kingdom knew. Save himself, nobody was ignorant of Sophy's whereabouts.

"She is on a visit to his Royal Highness at Praslok, sir." Stenovics's voice was a triumph of neutrality.

"On a visit to the Prince?" Surprise sounded in his voice.

"Madame Zerkovitch is there too, sir," Stenovics added. "The ladies have been there during the whole of the Prince of Slavna's stay."

The King shot a glance at Countess Ellenburg; she was looking prim and grim. He looked, also, at Stafnitz, who bit his mustache, without quite hiding an intentional but apparently irrepressible smile. The King did not look too grave – and most of his gravity was for Countess Ellenburg.

"Is that – hum – at this moment, quite desirable?" he asked.

His question met with silence; the air of all three intimated that the matter was purely one for His Majesty. The King sat a moment with a frown on his brow – the frown which just supplants a smile when a thing, generally amusing and not unnatural, happens by chance to occur inconveniently.

Across this silence came a loud voice from the next room – Lepage's voice. "Take care, take care! You'll upset the flowers, Prince!"

The King started; he looked round at his companions. Then he struck a hand-bell on the table before him. Lepage appeared.

"Lepage, whom did you address as 'Prince' just now?"

"Count Alexis, sir."

"Why?"

"The Count insisted."

"Don't do it again. It's absurd! Go away!"

A dull red patched Countess Ellenburg's cheeks. Lids brooded low over the eyes of Stafnitz and of Stenovics. It was a very awkward little scene – the King's irritation had got the better of him for the moment. What would the kindred of the exalted Princess have said? The King turned to Countess Ellenburg and forced a smile.

"The question of reproof is one for you, Countess," he said, frigidly. "And now about the Baroness – No, I mean, I wanted to ask if my wishes have been communicated to the Prince of Slavna."

"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 reassuring 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 assent. 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 passing 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 petitions. Without a plausible plea nobody 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 empressement. 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 assurance 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 passed 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.