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.
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 Essex! "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 analyze. 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. God 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 naïve 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.