"And it's all through her that the guns are here at all!" said Zerkovitch, with a sigh for the irony of it.
Dunstanbury laid his hand on Lukovitch's shoulder. "It's no use," he said. "We must tell her so, and we must make the men understand. She can't let them have their homes battered to pieces—the town with the women and children in it—and all for nothing!"
"We can't desert her," Lukovitch protested.
"No; we must get her safely away, and then submit."
Since Dunstanbury had offered his services to Sophy, he had assumed a leading part. His military training and his knowledge of the world gave him an influence over the rude, simple men. Lukovitch looked to him for guidance; he had much to say in the primitive preparations for defence. But now he declared defence to be impossible.
"Who'll tell her so?" asked Basil Williamson.
"We must get her across the frontier," said Dunstanbury. "There—by St. Peter's Pass—the way we came, Basil. It's an easy journey, and I don't suppose they'll try to intercept us. You can send twenty or thirty well-mounted men with us, can't you, Lukovitch? A small party well mounted is what we shall want."
Lukovitch waved his hands sadly. "With the guns against us it would be a mere massacre! If it must be, let it be as you say, my lord." His heart was very heavy; after generations of defiance, Volseni must bow to Slavna, and his dead Lord's will go for nothing! All this was the doing of the great guns.
Dunstanbury's argument was sound, but he argued from his heart as well as his head. He was convinced that the best service he could render to Sophy was to get her safely out of the country; his heart urged that her safety was the one and only thing to consider. As she went to and fro among them now, pale and silent, yet always accessible, always ready to listen, to consider, and to answer, she moved him with an infinite pity and a growing attraction. Her life was as though dead or frozen; it seemed to him as though all Kravonia must be to her the tomb of him whose grave in the little hill-side church of Volseni she visited so often. An ardent and overpowering desire rose in him to rescue her, to drag her forth from these dim cold shades into the sunlight of life again. Then the spell of this frozen grief might be broken; then should her drooping glories revive and bloom again. Kravonia and who ruled there—ay, in his heart, even the fate of the gallant little city which harbored them, and whose interest he pleaded—were nothing to him beside Sophy. On her his thoughts were centred.
Sophy's own mind in these days can be gathered only from what others saw. She made no record of it. Fallen in an hour from heights of love and hope and exaltation, she lay stunned in the abyss. In intellect calm and collected, she seems to have been as one numbed in feeling, too maimed for pain, suffering as though from a mortification of the heart. The simple men and women of Volseni looked on her with awe, and chattered fearfully of the Red Star: how that its wearer had been predestined to high enterprise, but foredoomed to mighty reverses of fortune. Amidst all their pity for her, they spoke of the Evil Eye; some whispered that she had come to bring ruin on Volseni: had not the man who loved her lost both Crown and life?