Her bosom heaved beneath the rough mantle and her face was beautiful in her sincere indignation, flushed and vivid with feeling and emotion; but she might have been a hag for all the effect she had on Karl of Sweden.
“Peace in Varsovia, Madame,” he repeated sternly, and turned and galloped away down the frosty road, this time without a salutation.
Aurora gazed after the disappearing figure with eyes dimmed by tears of passionate rage; she was cold and trembling, never had she believed herself capable of any passion as strong as the hatred now inspired in her haughty heart by this young man.
“A hero!” she thought, “a boorish boy! a rude churl!”
Slowly she turned back to her lodging; useless to expose herself to further mortification--it would be only to repeat her failure, only to madden herself for nothing.
She must return to Varsovia and tell Augustus of her humiliation.
The future appeared to her desperate; she did not even care to think of it; this adamant and implacable prince clearly meant to conquer both Poland and Saxony.
Aurora saw her whole world tumbling into the dust of chaos; this man would be the master of her fate; and she could do nothing with him; he had looked at her with--first indifference, then contempt, and always as if she had been old and ugly.
In Augustus she had no hope; she knew that he was at the end of his resources, and he had no personal qualities with which to inspire confidence; she foresaw that his bewildered policies would lead to a total overthrow of his fortunes, and that his submission would partake of the nature of panic and thereby further gild the triumph of Karl.
She felt angry with her lover for the failure that had placed her in such a position of unendurable humiliation and insecurity.
In her bitterness, as she rode slowly along the hard lonely road, the cold skies above her and the unawakened landscape barren and still frozen about her, her dominant thought was a regret, almost passionate regret, that she had not attached her fortunes to those of a more successful man than Augustus of Saxony.
The unhappy Augustus went swiftly on the path of disaster; when Aurora von Königsmarck failed and returned making the best she could of a poor tale, the King-Elector appealed to the Diet still sitting at Varsovia, by means of one of his partisans, the Palatine of Marienbourg.