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To-day, she would neither threaten nor inspire; she was only a smiling, joyous, simple peasant-girl, who had returned wild with joy to her native village, and whose rapture found expression in the gay and graceful mazes of the dance. She floated here and there, like a wood-nymph, smiling, happy, careless, wonderful to look upon in her loveliness and beauty, but more wonderful still in her art.
If only he had never seen her, or seen and known her only as the Lady Louisa Moor, when the idea of loving her never would have occurred to him when she would simply to him have been a beautiful creature to look at without exciting the shadow of a thought of appropriation, and not the peasant-girl, the beautiful peasant-girl, he had thought he might possibly win and wear!
The men of war did not like to believe that a little peasant-girl of Lorraine was coming to bring the king a more effectual support than their own. Nevertheless some, and the most heroic amongst them, Dunois, La Hire, and Xaintrailles, were moved by what was told of this young girl.
"I am a poor peasant-girl," said Florina. "I come from afar to sell you curiosities." And she took out of her sack the emerald bracelets which the Blue Bird had given her. "These are pretty trinkets," said Troutina; and going up to the king she asked him what he thought of them. At sight of the ornaments he turned pale, remembering those he had given to Florina.
The poet with his sick heart sat down mournfully on a stone. He was thinking of the torment he was enduring, of his old mother crying because of his absence, of the women who had deceived him, and he had homesickness for the time of his first communion. "My heart," he thought, "my sad heart cannot change." Suddenly he saw a young peasant-girl near by gathering her geese under the stars.
They stood for a moment, smiling and measuring each other with their eyes, and then shook hands. Together they carried the box up through the town, and Peer was so much of a townsman already that he felt a little ashamed to find himself walking through the streets, holding one end of a trunk, with a peasant-girl at the other. And what a clatter her thick shoes made on the pavement!
Prince Kaunitz sat lazily reclining in his arm-chair, playing with his jewelled snuff-box and listening with an appearance of unconcern to a man who, in an attitude of profoundest respect, was relating to him a remarkable story of a young emperor and a beautiful peasant-girl, in which there was much talk of woods, diamonds, milk, and an Arabian steed.
Here, from the time of Ivan the Great to that of the present Emperor, the Tzars have all been crowned, and here Peter placed the royal insignia upon the head of his second wife, the peasant-girl of Livonia.
A look of profoundest disgust overspread his handsome young face, a face which undoubtedly lent itself to very clear expression of such feelings as contempt, disgust and scorn, an unusual face, with the thin high-bridged nose of an English aristocrat, the large eyes and pencilled black brows of an Indian noble, the sallow yet cheek-flushed complexion of an Italian peasant-girl, and the firm lips, square jaw, and prominent chin of a fighting-man.
With a little jealous association of ideas she continued: No one would ever run after Clara in a wood in the rainstorm, she would never have invited a stranger literally asked him to sail with her. "Lady to her fingertips," Carlson had said of Clara; that really was a reprimand for you, you peasant-girl Camilla!
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