"You're wondering what I mean?—what I'm after?" he asked her, smiling quietly. "Oh yes, I see you are. Go on wondering, thinking, watching things about you for a day or two—there are three days between now and Saturday. You'll see me again before Saturday—and I've no doubt you'll see the Prince."
"If Rastatz were right—and my memory wrong—?"
He smiled still. "The offence against discipline would be so much less serious. The Prince is a disciplinarian. To speak with all respect, he forgets sometimes that discipline is, in the last analysis, only a part of policy—a means, not an end. The end is always the safety and tranquillity of the State." He spoke with weighty emphasis.
"The offence against discipline! An attempt to assassinate—!"
"I see you cling to your own memory—you won't have anything to say to Rastatz!" He rose and bowed over her hand. "Much may happen between now and Saturday. Look about you, watch, and think!"
The General's final injunction, at least, Sophy lost no time in obeying; and on the slightest thought three things were obvious: the King was very grateful to her; Stenovics wished at any rate to appear very grateful to her; and, for some reason or another, Stenovics wished her memory to be wrong, to the end that the life of Mistitch and his companion (the greater included the less) might be spared. Why did he wish that?
Presumably—his words about the relation of discipline to policy supported the conclusion—to avoid that disturbance which the Prince had forecasted as the result of Mistitch's being put to death. But the Prince was not afraid of the disturbance—why should Stenovics be? The Commandant was all confidence—was the Minister afraid? In some sense he was afraid. That she accepted. But she hesitated to believe that he was afraid in the common sense that he was either lacking in nerve or overburdened with humanity, that he either feared fighting or would shrink from a salutary severity in repressing tumult. If he feared, he feared neither for his own skin nor for the skin of others; he feared for his policy or his ambition.
These things were nothing to her; she was for the Prince, for his policy and his ambition. Were they the same as Stenovics's? Even a novice at the game could see that this by no means followed of necessity. The King was elderly, and went a-fishing. The Prince was young, and a martinet. In age, Stenovics was between the two—nearly twenty years younger than the King, a dozen or so older than the Prince. Under the present régime he had matters almost entirely his own way. At first sight there was, of a certainty, no reason why his ambitions should coincide precisely with those of the Prince. Fifty-nine, forty-one, twenty-eight—the ages of the three men in themselves illuminated the situation—that is, if forty-one could manage fifty-nine, but had no such power over twenty-eight.
New to such meditations, yet with a native pleasure in them, taking to the troubled waters as though born a swimmer, Sophy thought, and watched, and looked about. As to her own part she was clear. Whether Rastatz was right—whether that most vivid and indelible memory of hers was wrong—were questions which awaited the sole determination of the Prince of Slavna.
Her attitude would have been unchanged, but her knowledge much increased, could she have been present at a certain meeting on the terrace of the Hôtel de Paris that same evening. Markart was there—and little Rastatz, whose timely flight and accommodating memory rendered him to-day not only a free man but a personage of value. But neither did more than wait on the words of the third member of the party—that Colonel Stafnitz of the Hussars who had an old feud with Mistitch, for whom Mistitch had mistaken the Prince of Slavna. A most magnanimous, forgiving gentleman, apparently, this spare, slim-built man with thoughtful eyes; his whole concern was to get Mistitch out of the mess! The feud he seemed to remember not at all; it was a feud of convenience, a feud to swear to at the court-martial. He was as ready to accommodate Stenovics with the use of his name as Rastatz was to offer the requisite modifications of his memory. But there—with that supply of a convenient fiction—his pliability stopped. He spoke to Markart, using him as a conduit-pipe—the words would flow through to General Stenovics.