It was a personal touch, not an outcome of his immense pride. Here they met on another plane than that of the life of courts. And Stephanie was so young. He took her long slender fingers in his large masterful brown hands and kissed them both, in his heart rather amused.
Let us not be mistaken. Wallenstein was not led to Vienna by the God of Love. Nor did he imagine that he was. He came, and knew that he had come, because of the perfect circle of Pietro Bramante, who was rather the priest of Apollo, because of the secant ellipse, whose right focus was the centre of his circle.
He came because of the image of Stephanie, which he had seen, or thought he had seen, at Eger, even as Saul saw the wraith of Samuel, or thought he saw it, in the caves at Endor.
But Pietro Bramante had prophesied, or so Wallenstein had read the prophecy, that his way to the complete circle was by making the heart of woman the pivot and centre of his intelligence. It was not easy for Wallenstein to formulate the idea in words; but if there were a meaning in the mystery it must be that through the love of Stephanie he would arrive at the culminating point of success; and Stephanie was the daughter of the Emperor.
Therefore he looked curiously at her, wondering at the miracle, as any man who experiences it must wonder at the miracle of the love of woman.
Wallenstein had never been a habitant of the palaces of kings. As little as need was had he come to Vienna on sparse visits to the Emperor. He had seen and spoken to the Archduchess Stephanie, when, six years before, he had laid his offer before the Emperor. He remembered her as a tall, slim maiden with large, dark, wistful, following eyes, a child of moods. He remembered her when two years more had passed, what a glorious triumphant pair of years, in which he had gathered his army, marched against Mansfeld, overcome him at Dessau on the Elbe, then harried him through Silesia into Hungary, forced his ally, Bethlen Gabor, to throw down his arms, and driven Mansfeld over the border into Bosnia to die of a broken fame. Before going into winter quarters he had paid a fleeting visit to Vienna to receive his first meed of commendation from the Emperor. The Archduchess Stephanie had ripened to the first promise of a completer womanhood, gained in erectness, in rounder curves, and over her face and bearing had stolen virginal radiance and conscious modesty, not unmingled with the Habsburg pride of race. Wallenstein remembered how she too had greeted him in her own way with two sprigs of laurel and a little speech which died on her lips.
And now she had reached the perfect May of womanhood. "What then? At last, Albrecht von Waldstein!"
"I am here because you have willed it, Stephanie!"
"Say rather because the fates have willed it!" she said in a tone in which awe and triumph were mingled, and her eyes looked out as through a mist. Wallenstein felt a thrill go through him, something unknown to his cold intelligence, something which roused latent fire in him, and infused into him a spirit more akin in rarity to hers.