She, Madame von Arlestein, had been the confidant of the Princess in the old, old days.
The other attendants who came and went, and the changing officers of the gloomy little garrison, said that this austere, bitter old woman really knew if the Princess was innocent or guilty. Guilty the world had called her before it had forgotten her. Those few who still knew her as a living woman were not so sure.
“Innocent” or “guilty” were two arbitrary words with which to divide her conduct. She had herself always maintained her innocency of putting another man in her husband’s place, as firmly as that husband had believed in, and acted upon, the contrary.
But that she had been guilty of loving Philip von Königsmarck was beyond denial. Whether he had ever had more of her than the kiss she had given him when they were discovered together only Sophia Dorothea and the Countess von Arlestein knew. For Count Philip had died, horribly, before the dawn following that fatal night. No one cared much now, even those who waited on her, whether she had kept her marriage vows before God.
Unconsciously they thought of her as pure; they could not think one a wanton who had lived in this awful chastity and renunciation for thirty-two years.
The Captain of the Guard was a young man, born while she was in prison.
Thinking of what he had already crowded into his life, he shuddered when he saw the proud, grievous woman entering the austere little chapel on Sunday, and reflected that during his infancy, his childhood, his youth, his young manhood, she had been doing the same without rest or change, while the beauty withered on her face and hope withered in her heart.
As he rode through the courtyard to-night he looked up at her window, reluctantly but irresistibly.
There was the peaked white blur of her face, the dark, restless eyes fixed on the twilight landscape, the long white hand supporting the sharp chin.
“Herr Jesus!” he muttered. “Why does she not die?”