The peasants drew aside to let the Machine pass, and stared at it. They had been traveling afoot all night, and yet another day and a night would elapse before they could kneel in the church.
“A great lady,” said one, a man who carried a sleeping child in his arms.
“Perhaps,” said a young girl, “she too has made a pilgrimage. All go to Etzel, the poor and the rich. And all receive grace.”
The Countess did not sleep. She was, with every fiber of her keen brain, summoning her arguments. She would need them, for she knew—none better—how great a handicap was hers. She loved Karl, and he knew it. What had been her strength had become her weakness.
Yet she was composed enough when, before the sun was well up, the machine drew up in the village before the inn where Mettlich had spent his uneasy hours.
Her heavy veils aroused the curiosity of the landlord. When, shortly after, his daughter brought down a letter to be sent at once to the royal hunting-lodge, he shrugged his shoulders. It was not the first time a veiled woman had come to his inn under similar circumstances. After all, great people are but human. One cannot always be a king.
The Countess breakfasted in her room. The landlord served her himself, and narrowly inspected her. She was not so young as he had hoped, but she was beautiful. And haughty. A very great person, he decided, incognito.
The King was hunting, he volunteered. There were great doings at the lodge. Perhaps Her Excellency would be proceeding there.
She eyed him stonily, and then sent him off about his business.
So all the day she ate her heart out in her bare room. Now and then the clear sound of bugles reached her, but she saw no hunters. Karl followed the chase late that day. It was evening before she saw the tired horses straggling through the village streets. Her courage was oozing by that time. What more could she say than what he already knew? Many agencies other than hers kept him informed of the state of affairs in Livonia. A bitter thought, this, for it showed Karl actuated by love of Hedwig, and not by greed of power. She feared that more than she feared death.