Winds from the north, east, west, and south fought for mastery, the four beating and screaming and whirling the innocent snow in their fury, until, rising, the white confusion became like a veil concealing everything.
But wheels were approaching. They reached the road above the travellers, and then, their horses losing power any longer to struggle, suddenly stopped short in the road. Even their stamping sounded faint and exhausted, so great was the fury of the awful war of winds which nature had excited on that narrow neck of land in East Prussia.
Then suddenly came a lull. The winds retreated from their battle ground.
Both Hans and Bettina raised their heads in wonder. In the sudden quiet they heard a voice, a voice whose sweetness sounded a note quite familiar and a voice whose owner seemed ill and suffering.
"I am in a great strait," it said; "let us fall now into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great; and let me not fall into the hand of man."
Even while the voice was speaking the whirling snow fell like a curtain of white wool to the ground, and Hans and Bettina, rising, saw in the snow of the road a travelling carriage, on whose cushions, covered with a feather bed, lay a lady, white and pale, whose golden head, for want of a pillow, rested on the arm of an attendant. With her were ladies and a physician.
Hans' face flushed.
"Curtsey," he whispered to Bettina. "Curtsey, child, it is the Queen!"
Bettina forgot her own cold. She was no longer tired, no longer hungry, in her pity for the poor, ill lady, who, when she saw a child, smiled her a greeting, quite feebly, but as sweet as the one at Jena.
It was Queen Louisa of Prussia, flying still before her foe, Napoleon.