With a reverence, he motioned his guest towards the door.
“You will at least let me bear you company, Baron?” Ludovic asked. “Our ways lie together, and I shall not rest until I know the Princess is safe.”
“I shall be honoured,” Rollmar answered. “If your Majesty will take some refreshment, while I speak a parting word with the Duke.”
Rollmar was all suavity when he rejoined Ludovic; and, at the head of some four-score men, they set out at a smart pace for Teufelswald.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE COUNT AND RUPERTA
A MAN of Count Irromar’s abnormal cunning and insight had little difficulty in guessing something very near the truth about his captives. They were ladies of rank, Ludovic had told him, and he could quite believe it. Indeed the information jumped with a shrewd suspicion already in his head, which, however, naturally stopped far short of the real truth. Tracing in his mind the probabilities of the affair, he constructed an elopement, a pursuing party, a sudden uniting of opposite interests, resulting in the parley he had held from the window. It all fitted in with absolute exactness; the circumstantial plausibility was so great that he decided he could accept and act upon supposition as certainty. With this intent he next evening presented himself once more before Ruperta. A certain urgent business which claimed him had prevented an earlier interview.
“It is as well that I have kept you safe under my roof, gracious Fräulein,” he began, with almost apologetic deference. “You have thereby escaped, if not danger, at least a disagreeable encounter.”
Ruperta’s mood had grown, during these long hours, to one of proud resentment. Fear, for herself at least, she did not know. The great effect the situation had upon her was to fill her with an almost maddening, because futile, indignation. In her treatment at the Count’s hands she saw nothing but a shameful outrage; the actual danger in which she stood scarcely occurred to her. Her fearlessness left her self-reliant, and a self-reliant woman is to herself indeed a tower of strength. As for her captor and host, she told herself that she saw through his deceit, and as for his brute strength, why—she was a woman. It was scarcely conceivable, at any rate in her experience, that this man could resort to any brutality in order to coerce her.
She replied to him, with disdainful resentment, “What may that be, Count?”
Her tone suggested that she was prepared to disbelieve whatever he might be going to tell her; but he ignored his unpromising reception.