“What do I know of duty?” asked Hélène desperately. “I want to be happy.”
“You have never spoken like this before, my dearest.”
“I have never been so frightened before.”
He lifted his honest gray eyes, so shining with noble love to the frail face bending towards him; she touched the curls of his blond peruke that hung on his breast.
“That I could not tell. But you do not think these things are foolish, do you? When I had left you just now I felt that I could not bear it--it was like someone tearing my limbs from me--as if I had to follow you or die--as--as if--I might never see you again----”
Her words stumbled over one another. She grasped the lapels of his soldier’s coat; her pleading eyes were fixed on his face with an expression of passionate entreaty.
“Oh, you will stay--you will not leave me!”
“My dear, my dear!” he cried deeply moved, “this must not be--you will unman me.”
He rose and raised her to his breast, clasping her tightly; he dared not voice the agony in his heart, how he entirely longed to keep her now that she had flown back to him--how wrong and wicked all further parting seemed, and how utterly paltry all his schemes and duties seemed beside the fact that they were together, and the wish that they should be forever together.
For he loved her as stern men, engrossed in affairs and indifferent to feminine influence, will sometimes love one woman--with complete trust and devotion.
He had never known what life could mean until he met her; she made his former pleasures appear pale, his former work dry and purposeless; she infused into his whole life color and joy and beauty.
He looked ahead into the future and saw it dark and uncertain, and wished that he did not enjoy such perilous greatness, and that his lot had been cast in times less fierce and turbulent.
Now that he held her, trembling, but content against his own wildly-beating heart, the task he had undertaken seemed so difficult as to be impossible; Livonia was in a worse plight than she had been when he undertook her liberation; the huge conspiracy against Karl XII which had cost so much toil and pains had only succeeded in rousing a captain who made North Europe tremble, and in settling the Swedish yoke more firmly on the necks of the wretched people of the Baltic Provinces.