Sophy of Kravonia Part 25

He looked at her gravely for a few moments, making, perhaps, a last quick calculation--undergoing, perhaps, a last short struggle. But the Red Star glowed against the pallor of her face; her eyes were gleaming beacons.

"Neither the guns, nor the men, nor Slavna--no, nor the Crown, when that time comes--without you!" he said.

She rose slowly, tremblingly, from her chair, and stretched out her hands in an instinctive protest: "Monseigneur!" Then she clasped her hands, setting her eyes on his, and whispering again, yet lower: "Monseigneur!"

"Marie Zerkovitch says Fate sent you to Kravonia. I think she's right.

Fate did--my fate. I think it's fated that we are to be together to the end, Sophy."

A step creaked on the old stairs. Marie Zerkovitch was coming down from her room on the floor above. The door of the dining-room stood open, but neither of them heard the step; they were engrossed, and the sound pa.s.sed unheeded.

Standing there with hands still clasped, and eyes still bound to his, she spoke again--and Marie Zerkovitch stood by the door and heard the quick yet clear words, herself fascinated, unable to move or speak.

"I've meant nothing of it. I've thought nothing of it. I seem to have done nothing towards it. It has just come to me." Her tone took on a touch of entreaty, whether it were to him, or to some unseen power which ruled her life, and to which she might have to render an account.

"Yet it is welcome?" he asked quietly. She was long in answering; he waited without impatience, in a confidence devoid of doubt. She seemed to seek for the whole truth and to give it to him in gravest, fullest words.

"It is life, Monseigneur," she said. "I can't see life without it now."

He held out his hands, and very slowly she laid hers in them.

"It is enough--and nothing less could have been enough from you to me and from me to you," he said gently. "Unless we live it together, I think it can be no life for us now."

The chain which had held Marie Zerkovitch motionless suddenly snapped.

She rushed into the room, and, forgetful of everything in her agitation, seized the Prince by the arm.

"What do you mean?" she cried. "What do you mean? Are you mad?"

He was very fond of little Marie. He looked down at her now with an affectionate, indulgent smile.

"Come, you've heard what I said, I suppose--though it wasn't meant for your ears, you know! Well, then, I mean just what I said, Marie."

"But what do you mean by it?" she persisted in a feverish, almost childish, excitement. She turned on Sophy, too. "And what do you mean by it, Sophy?" she cried.

Sophy pa.s.sed a hand across her brow. A slow smile relieved the enchanted tension of her face; she seemed to smile in a whimsical surprise at herself. Her answer to Marie came vague and almost dreamy. "I--I thought of nothing, dear Marie," she said; then with a sudden low murmur of delighted laughter she laid her hands in the Prince's again. She had thought of nothing but of that life together and their love.

"She'll share my life, Marie, and, when the time comes, my throne," the Prince said softly: he tried to persuade and soothe her with his gentle tones.

Marie Zerkovitch would not have it. Possessed by her old fear, her old foreboding, she flung away the arm she held with an angry gesture. "It's ruin!" she cried. "Ruin, ruin!" Her voice rang out through the old room and seemed to fill all the Castle of Praslok with its dirgeful note.

"No," said he firmly. "Ruin will not come through me, nor through her.

It may be that ruin--what you call ruin--will come. It may be that I shall lose my life or my throne." He smiled a little. "Such changes and chances come as nothing new to a Stefanovitch. I have clever and bold men against me. Let them try! We'll try, too. But ruin will not be by her fault, nor through this. And if it were, don't I owe her my life already? Should I refuse to risk for her the life she has given?" He dropped his voice to homelier, more familiar tones, and ended, with a half-laugh: "Come, little friend, you mustn't try to frighten Sergius Stefanovitch. It's better the House should end than live on in a coward, you know."

The plea was not perfect--there was wisdom as well as courage in question. Yet he would have maintained himself to be right in point of wisdom, too, had Marie pressed him on it. But her force was spent; her violence ended, and with it her expostulations. But not her terror and dismay. She threw herself into a chair and covered her face with her hands, sobbing bitterly.

The Prince gently caressed her shaking shoulder, but he raised his eyes to Sophy, who had stood quiet through the scene.

"Are you ready for what comes, Sophy?" he asked.

"Monseigneur, I am ready," she said, with head erect and her face set.

But the next instant she broke into a low yet rich and ringing laugh; it mingled strangely with Marie's sobs, which were gradually dying away, yet sounded still, an undertone of discord with Sophy's mirth. She stretched out her hands towards him again, whispering in an amused pity: "Poor child--she thought that we should be afraid!"

Out from the dusk of the quiet evening came suddenly the blare of a trumpet, blown from Volseni by a favoring breeze. It sounded every evening, at nightfall, to warn the herdsmen in the hills of the closing of the gates, and had so sounded from time beyond man's memory.

The Prince raised his hand to bid her listen.

"In good Volseni there is watch and ward for us!"

The echoes of the blast rang for an instant round the hills.

"And there is watch and ward, and the glad sound of a trumpet, in my heart, Monseigneur," she said.

The sobs were still, laughter was hushed, the echoes died away. In utter silence their hands and their eyes met. Only in their hearts love's clarion rang indomitable and marvellously glad.

XI

M. ZERKOVITCH'S BEDROOM FIRE

Often there are clever brains about us of whose workings we care nothing, save so far as they serve to the defter moving of our dishes or the more scientific brus.h.i.+ng and folding of our clothes. Humorists and philosophers have described or conjectured or caricatured the world of those who wait on us, inviting us to consider how we may appear to the inward gaze of the eyes which are so obediently cast down before ours or so dutifully alert to antic.i.p.ate our orders. As a rule, we decline the invitation; the task seems at once difficult and unnecessary. Enough to remember that the owners of the eyes have ears and mouths also! A small leak, left unstanched, will empty the largest cask at last; it is well to keep that in mind both in private concerns and in affairs of public magnitude.

The King's body-servant, Emile Lepage, had been set a-thinking. This was the result of the various and profuse scoldings which he had undergone for calling young Count Alexis "Prince." The King's brief, sharp words at the conference had been elaborated into a reproof both longer and sterner than his Majesty was wont to trouble himself to administer; he had been very strong on the utter folly of putting such ideas into the boy's head. Lepage was pretty clear that the idea had come from the boy's head into his, but he said nothing more of that. The boy himself scolded Lepage--first for having been overheard, secondly (and, as Lepage guessed, after being scolded himself very roundly) for using the offending t.i.tle at all. Meekly Lepage bore this cross also--indeed, with some amus.e.m.e.nt, and a certain touch of pity for young Alexis, who was not a prince and obviously could not make out why: in the books a king's sons were always princes, even though there were (as in those glorious days there often were) fifty or threescore of them.

Then Countess Ellenburg scolded him: the King's "It's absurd!" was rankling sorely in her mind. Her scolding was in her heaviest manner--very religious: she called Heaven to witness that never, by word or deed, had she done anything to give her boy such a notion. The days are gone by when Heaven makes overt present answer; nothing happened!

She roundly charged Lepage with fostering the idea for his own purposes; he wanted to set the Prince of Slavna against his little brother, she supposed, and to curry favor with the rising sun at the poor child's cost.

She was very effective, but she angered Lepage almost beyond endurance.

By disposition he was thoroughly good-natured, if sardonic and impa.s.sive; he could not suffer the accusation of injuring the pretty boy for his own ends; it was both odious and absurd. He snapped back smartly at her: "I hope n.o.body will do more to put wrong ideas in his head than I have done, Madame la Comtesse." In a fury she drove him from the room.

But she had started ever so slightly. Lepage's alert brain jumped at the signal.

Finally, Stenovics himself had a lecture for poor, much-lectured Lepage.

It was one of the miscalculations to which an over-cautious cunning is p.r.o.ne. Stenovics was gentle and considerate, but he was very urgent--urgent, above all, that nothing should be said about the episode, neither about it, nor about the other reprimands. Silence, silence, silence was his burden. Lepage thought more and more. It is better to put up with gossip than to give the idea that the least gossip would be a serious offence. People gossip without thinking, it's easy come and gone, easy speaking and easy forgetting; but stringent injunctions not to talk are apt to make men think. References to the rising sun, also, may breed reflection in the satellites of a setting orb. Neither Countess Ellenburg nor General Stenovics had been as well advised as usual in this essentially trumpery matter.

In short, nervousness had been betrayed. Whence came it? What did it mean? If it meant anything, could Lepage turn that thing to account? The King's favorite attendant was no favorite with Countess Ellenburg. For Lepage, too, the time might be very short! He would not injure the boy, as the angry mother had believed, or at least suggested; but, without question of that, there was no harm in a man's looking out for himself; or if there were, Lepage was clear in thinking that the Countess and the General were not fit preachers of such a highly exacting gospel.

Lepage concluded that he had something to sell. His wares were a suspicion and a fact. Selling the suspicion wronged n.o.body--he would give no warranty with it--_Caveat emptor_. Selling the fact was disobedience to the King his master. "Disobedience, yes; injury, no,"

said Lepage with a bit of casuistry. Besides, the King, too, had scolded him.

Moreover, the Prince of Slavna had always treated Monsieur Emile Lepage with distinguished consideration. The Bourbon blood, no doubt, stretched out hands to _la belle France_ in Monsieur Lepage's person.

Something to sell! Who was his buyer? Whose interest could be won by his suspicion, whose friends.h.i.+p bought with his fact? The ultimate buyer was plain enough. But Lepage could not go to Praslok, and he did not approve of correspondence, especially with Colonel Stafnitz in practical control of the Household. He sought a go-between--and a personal interview. At least he could take a walk; the servants were not prisoners. Even conspirators must stop somewhere--on pain of doing their own cooking and the rest! At a quarter past eight in the evening, having given the King his dinner and made him comfortable for the next two hours, Lepage sallied forth and took the road to Slavna. He was very carefully dressed, wore a flower in his b.u.t.tonhole, and had dropped a discreet hint about a lady, in conversation with his peers. If ladies often demand excuses, they may furnish them too; present seriousness invoked aid from bygone frivolity.

At ten o'clock he returned, still most spruce and orderly, and with a well satisfied air about him. He had found a purchaser for his suspicion and his fact. His pocket was the better lined, and he had received flattering expressions of grat.i.tude and a.s.surances of favor. He felt that he had raised a b.u.t.tress against future a.s.saults of Fortune. He entered the King's dressing-room in his usual noiseless and un.o.btrusive manner. He was not aware that General Stenovics had quitted it just a quarter of an hour before, bearing in his hand a doc.u.ment which he had submitted for his Majesty's signature. The King had signed it and endorsed the cover "_Urgent_."

"Ah, Lepage, where have you been?" asked the King.

"Just to get a little air and drink a gla.s.s at the Golden Lion."