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.