“I will try to be brave,” replied Hélène.
They went together to the door; the darkness was thick with snow; he sent his servant for the sledge and they had another moment alone; but neither spoke.
Hélène felt suddenly very tired, almost drowsy; she was exhausted by her strong emotion to the point of apathy.
When the sledge came she stepped in obediently; there was a brief ride through the cold and the dark; his chilled lips on her chilled cheek, some stammering words and they had parted. She could hear the jingling of his sledge-bells as she returned to her room; she seemed to be in a world empty of everything but that one sound.
Aurora von Königsmarck looked from the door of her brilliantly lit room; she had gay words on her lips, but after glancing at the girl’s face she went back silently to her place by the perfumed fire.
Aurora von Königsmarck, accompanied by a few servants and a small escort of Saxon cavalry, traveled secretly to the Swedish camp in Lithuania.
Karl was advancing on Grodno, and the affairs of Augustus looked daily more unfortunate; at the last moment he had wished to stop this journey of the Countess, and to send a formal embassy in his own name and that of the Polish Republic to ask the conqueror’s peace terms.
But Aurora was resolute that this depth of humiliation should not be reached, and confident that Karl could be persuaded to private means of agreement with Augustus.
In any case she was determined to try her influence on a man so singular and so famous.
“It has certainly never seen a woman like me,” she repeated to herself, not with vanity but as the calm statement of a fact.
She had no difficulty in obtaining an audience of Count Piper.
The minister was cynically interested in her mission; he was now no longer in the confidence of his master (if indeed he had ever been so), and performed his duties as a servant, not as a friend; perhaps he faintly disliked the King; in any case he was grimly amused at the idea of exposing Karl to the fascinations of a woman like Aurora von Königsmarck and facing the fair Countess with a man like the King.
“The King is bent on conquest,” he said. “He has no idea of a tame peace, but intends to dethrone all his enemies.”