The ordeal over, she could scarcely keep her feet. She longed to weep. She felt herself within an inch of swooning.
He saw that she had turned pale, and he assented with a tolerable grace. 'Let me give you my hand to your fire,' he said anxiously.
'Willingly,' she answered.
It was the last effort of her diplomacy, and she hated herself for it. Still, it won her what she wanted--peace, a respite, a little time to think.
Yet as she sat and shivered in the sunshine, and made believe to eat, and tried to hide her thoughts, even from her women, a crushing sense of her loneliness took possession of her. She had read often and often, with scarce a quickening of the pulse, of men and women in tragic straits--of men and women brought face to face with death, nay, choosing it. But she had never pictured their feelings till now--their despair, their shrinkings, their bitter lookings back, as the iron doors closed upon them. She had never considered that such facts might enter into her own life.
Now, on a sudden, she found herself face to face with inexorable things, with the grim realities that have closed, like the narrowing walls of the Inquisition dungeons, on many a gay life. In the valley below they were burying men like rotten sheep. The Waldgrave was gone, captured or killed. Martin was gone. She was alone. Life seemed a cheap and uncertain thing, death very near. Pleasure--folly--a dancing on the grave.
Of her own free will she had placed herself in the power of a man who loved her, and whom she now hated with an untimely hatred, that was half fear and half loathing. In his power! Her heart stood still, and then beat faster, as she framed the thought. The sunshine, though it was summer, seemed to fall grey and pale on the hill sward; the morning air, though the day was warm, made her shiver. The trumpet call, the sharp command, the glitter of weapons, that had so often charmed her imagination, startled her now. The food was like ashes in her mouth; she could not swallow it. She had been blind, and now she must pay for her folly.
She bad passed the night in the lee of one of the wooded knolls that studded the ridge, and her fire had been kindled there. The nearest group of soldiers--Tzerclas' staff, whose harsh voices and reckless laughter came to her ears at intervals--had their fire full a hundred paces away. For a moment she entertained the desperate idea that she might slip away, alone, or with her women, and, passing from clump to clump, might gain the valley from which she had ascended, and, hiding in the woods, get somehow to Cassel. The smallest reflection showed her that the plan was not possible, and it was rejected as soon as formed. But a moment later she was tempted to wish that she had put it into effect. An officer made his appearance, with his hat in his hand and an air of haste, and wished to know, with the general's service, whether she could be ready in an hour.
'For what?' she asked, rising. She had been sitting on the grass.
'To start, your excellency,' he replied politely.