The girl looked at the sugar lying in her pink palm; Aurora had always been her friend, to some extent her patroness, but she did not care to talk to her of General Patkul.
“Obstinate!” continued the Countess. “You will not even distract me from my bad news. Augustus is sick. And the fight by Riga goes ill for us.”
“Ah!” Mdle. D’Einsiedel turned her brown eyes now.
“I thought I should move you,” remarked Aurora maliciously. “Have you not heard, then, from your idol?”
Patkul, with Courlande and Steinau, was disputing the sandy reaches of the Dwina against the advancing troops of Karl XII; it was the first shock of the opening of the young conqueror’s second campaign.
“I have not heard for several days,” replied the girl in a low voice, “but why should I grieve or trouble? The cause is a sacred one, and I feel sure that God will protect it.”
Aurora smiled at these trite words which betrayed the touching confidence of youth in the continuance of happiness; she saw that the girl was so wrapt in the splendor of a first and noble passion that she could not think of misfortune as a possible thing. The Countess sighed and pulled at her waist ribbons with restless fingers; all romance had long left her life; her outlook was that of the brilliant adventuress concerned only to keep the splendid position she had attained by talent and beauty.
By now she had forgotten if she ever had loved Augustus, the handsome, generous, good-humored Prince whose favor had made her great; he was simply her world, the thing by which she must stand or fall; his ruin would be her ruin, utterly; she was grateful enough and loyal enough to scorn the thought of leaving him if he was defeated and brought to disaster, but she could not view with calm the prospect of losing her position as mistress of the second most brilliant court in Europe, and all the pleasures and honors she now enjoyed as a famous beauty and a clever and powerful woman. She was of a noble Swedish family with a wild and tragic history; the names of her two brothers had long held a horrid renown; Philip von Königsmarck had been the lover of Dorothea of Zell, the Elector of Hanover’s wife, and, betrayed by a woman’s jealousy, had been caught and horribly murdered as he left the Electress; the other brother had been concerned in the brutal assassination of a wealthy Englishman whose wife the young adventurer hoped to marry; his accomplices were taken and hanged and he had fled, to perish miserably and obscurely in battle.
These tragedies had not been without their effect on Aurora; she found the echo of them in her own wild heart; she had wept with passionate indignation for Philip and scorned the other for a fool.
As for herself she meant to be neither the victim of passion nor of folly, but in every way to avoid disaster; her impetuous spirit was governed by a cool brain; she was intelligent in large matters, clever in small ones, intensely conscious of being an extraordinary woman, not vain of her beauty nor her wit nor her charm, but aware of the value of these things, how men could be led by them, and the power they might purchase.