He looked ahead into the future and saw it dark and uncertain, and wished that he did not enjoy such perilous greatness, and that his lot had been cast in times less fierce and turbulent.
Now that he held her, trembling, but content against his own wildly-beating heart, the task he had undertaken seemed so difficult as to be impossible; Livonia was in a worse plight than she had been when he undertook her liberation; the huge conspiracy against Karl XII which had cost so much toil and pains had only succeeded in rousing a captain who made North Europe tremble, and in settling the Swedish yoke more firmly on the necks of the wretched people of the Baltic Provinces.
“Perhaps I had better have left it all alone—perhaps I was not born to do my country this service!” he exclaimed.
Hélène looked up at him, pressing her flushed face closer to the braidings on his uniform.
“You must not go, you are safe here,” she answered, as if reassuring him.
He laughed tenderly at her feminine point of view; he had not been thinking of his personal safety, but of the fierce disappointment of his apparent failure.
“I am in no danger,” he said, to comfort her; and he believed what he said; not only was he the Czar’s envoy but he trusted, without question, the protection of Augustus, nor did he even imagine for a moment that the King-Elector would enter into secret peace negotiations with Karl.
Hélène also had faith in the people who had always been her friends and protectors; it would have been impossible for her to suspect Aurora von Königsmarck of treachery; yet she felt this tremendous though vague uneasiness as to her lover’s safety.
He saw the trouble in her sweet eyes which were wide and bewildered like those of a child in pain.