“It is a pleasant one?”
“A fair land enough,” he answered, “with great vine-covered plains and rounded hills with lovely broad valleys and nestling towns. Yes, it is a land too pleasant and favoured to lie longer in obscurity. Our King——”
“Never mind your king,” she broke in almost haughtily; “he does not interest me. Tell me of your country. Has it rocks and dashing rivers, and great forests, like ours?”
“A few only. Scenery like yours is not general.”
“Scenery!” she repeated, with an inflection of something like scorn. “You speak of that as though it were of no account. It is everything. It is nature. It makes all the difference between romance and a dull, sordid reality. Your king”—there was scorn now in her voice unmistakably—“is, I suppose, intent upon making his country of commercial importance. The grapes from your vines are to be transferred to the taverns and shops of London and Paris, and as the drunkards of the world increase so will your country’s prosperity. Prosperity? That means money. I hate that. Why cannot this king of yours leave his people happy as they are? Does money mean content? I would rather be a mother to the poor than to the rich, rather reign over my country as Heaven made it, with its crags and torrents and forests, than over a land of wine-vats and offices where legends and traditions are ousted by account-books and bills, and the people in their insolence of wealth acknowledge in their hearts but one king—money. Here, at least, we are free, or nearly all of us,” she added, a little bitterly.
“But, Princess,” he began to argue, “if the two countries were joined, would not the best characteristics of both be united?”
“Never,” she returned impatiently; “it is impossible. Romance and business can never agree.” She gave a little shiver. “We catch the wind here,” she said, returning to her cold, indifferent tone. “Minna, it is cold. We will walk to the end of the terrace.”
The moments were precious, yet to von Bertheim it seemed difficult to make the most of them. The change in his companion’s tone showed him that she considered at an end the subject on which she had spoken so warmly. In her fascinating complexity, in the manifest struggle between constraint and inclination, between the yearning for freedom and the sense of coercion, in short between the Princess and the woman, there was something bewilderingly captivating and yet deterrent.
“You cannot think,” she resumed, breaking the silence, “what it is for those who are born to high places to be condemned to see most of the pleasures of life from a distance. They are all round us, but out of reach. We are like poor ragged children gazing into the toy-shop windows. Yes; we are supposed to have everything, and we have—almost nothing.” She spoke with a suppression of the feeling which prompted the words. Ludovic could guess why she was inclined to unburden herself to him.
“You think I must look upon our first meeting as a strange one,” he said. “But I have seen too much of the world, have speculated too much over the problems of our mysterious existence to wonder at that. Ah, Princess—forgive me if your confidence makes me too bold—I wish it might fall to my lot to free you from the grip of the world’s custom, as it was my unspeakable privilege to stand between you and that thieving ruffian.”