“Who can tell?” he replied wearily, “intrigues and counter-intrigues—all irresolute, all crying out for freedom and justice and none knowing where to look for it! Meanwhile everything goes to ruin while they are talking, and the King of Sweden advances daily deeper into the country.”
Aurora frowned; hitherto, with a woman’s evasiveness, she had refused to glance at the state of matters in Poland; now she forced herself to face them, and to apply all her intelligence to helping her lover in what seemed indeed a desperate pass.
“And the Czar?” she asked.
“The Czar needs assistance himself,” said Augustus grimly.
“But the Muscovites? Did you not tell me that he was sending some men into Lithuania?”
The King-Elector became angry at the thought of this, the sole fruit of the secret treaty of Birsen.
“He has sent some villains who are doing more damage than the Swedes,” he replied hotly. “They have turned freebooters, and are utterly deaf to discipline and orders—’tis but so many marauders the more in the wretched kingdom, and yet further inflames the Poles.”
Aurora could not forbear a smile.
“There are the troops you were to train?” she asked.
“Yes, God help me, and now they are here I have not a single Saxon officer available—not that a corps of Turenne’s veterans could train these savages!”