“This is a very happy day, Countess,” he had said.
Then the old aunt had hustled forward, and the peasants had bowed nervously, and bustle and noise had filled the old place.
For four days the royal hunters had stayed. On the third day Karl had pleaded fatigue, and they had walked through the pine woods. On that very devil’s bridge he had kissed her. They had had serious talks, too. Karl was ambitious, even then. The two countries were at peace, but for how long? Contrary to opinion, he said, it was not rulers who led their people into war. It was the people who forced those wars. He spoke of long antagonisms, old jealousies, trade relations.
She had listened, flattered, had been an intelligent audience. Even now, she felt that it was her intelligence as much as her beauty that had ensnared Karl. For ensnared he had been. She had dreamed wild dreams that night after he kissed her, dreams of being his wife. She was not too young to know passion in a man’s eyes, and Karl’s had burned with it.
Then, the next day, while the hunters were away, her aunt had come to her, ugly, dowdy, and alarmed. “Little fool!” she had said. “They play, these princes. But they are evil with women, and dangerous. I have seen your eyes on him, sick with love. And Karl will amuse himself—it is the blood—and go away, laughing.”
She had been working with the satin dress, trying to make it lovely for him. Over it her eyes had met her aunt’s, small and twitching with anxiety. “But suppose he cares for me?” she had asked. “Sometimes I think—Why should you say he is evil?”
“Bah!”
She had grown angry then and, flinging the dress on the floor, had risen haughtily. “I think he will marry me,” she had announced, to be met with blank surprise, followed by cackling old laughter.
Karl had gone away, kissing her passionately, before he left her, in the dark hall. And many things had followed. A cousin, married into Karnia became lady-in-waiting to the old Queen. Olga Loschek had visited her. No accident all this, but a carefully thought-out plan of Karl’s. She had met Karl again. She was no longer the ill-dressed, awkward girl of the mountains, and his passion grew, rather than died.
He had made further love to her then, urged her to go away with him on a journey to the eastern end of the kingdom, would, indeed, have compromised her hopelessly. But, young as she was, she had had courage and strength; perhaps shrewdness too. Few women could have resisted him. He was gentleness itself with her, kindly, considerate, passionate. But she had kept her head.