The softness and radiance of the after-glow had given place to night and rain; the mists and the clouds had rolled up from the Zillerthal Alps, and the water was pouring from the skies.
Lamps, wax candles, flambeaux, burning in sconces or upheld by statues or swinging from chains, were illumining the darkness of the great castle, but in her own study only one little light was shining, for she, a daughter of the mystical mountains and forests, loved the shadows of the night.
She seated herself here by the unshuttered casement. The full moon was rising above the Glöckner range, and the rain-clouds as yet did not obscure it, though a film of falling water veiled all the westward shore of the lake, and all the snows on the peaks and crests of the Venediger. She leaned her elbows on the cushioned seat, and looked out into the night.
'Bela, my Bela! are you content with me?' she murmured. To her Bela was as living as though he were present by her side; she lived in the constant belief of his companionship and his sight. Death was a cruel—ah, how cruel!—wall built up between him and her, forbidding them the touch of each other's hands, denying them the smile of each other's eyes; but none the less to her was he there, unseen, but ever near, hidden behind that inexorable, invisible barrier which one day would fall and let her pass and join him.
She sat idle in the embrasure of the oriel window, whilst the one lamp burned behind her. This, her favourite room, had scarcely been changed since Maria Theresa, on a visit there, had made it her bower-room. The window-panes had been painted by Selier of Landshut in 1440; the stove was one of Hirschvögel's; the wood-carvings had been done by Schuferstein; there was silverrepousséwork of Kellerthaler, tapestries of Marc de Comans, enamels of Elbertus of Köln, of Jean of Limoges, of Leonard Limousin, of Penicaudius; embroidered stuffs of Isabeau Maire, damascened armour once worn by Henry the Lion, a painted spinet that had belonged to Isabella of Bavaria, and an ivory Book of Hours, once used by Carolus Magnus; and all these things, like the many other treasures of the castle, had been there for centuries; gifts from royal guests, spoils of foreign conquest, memorials of splendid embassies or offices of state held by the lords of Szalras, or marriage presents at magnificent nuptials in the old magnificent ages.
In this room she, their sole living representative, was never disturbed on any pretext. In the adjacent library (a great cedar-lined room, holding half a million volumes, with many missals and early classics, and many aneditio princepsof the Renaissance), she held all her audiences, heard all petitions or complaints, audited her accounts, conversed with her tenants or her stewards, her lawyers or her peasants, and laboured earnestly to use to the best of her intelligence the power bequeathed to her.
'I am but God's and Bela's steward, as my steward is mine,' she said always to herself, and never avoided any duty or labour entailed on her, never allowed weariness or self-indulgence to enervate her.Qui facit per alium, facit per sehad been early taught to her, and she never forgot it. She never did anything vicariously which concerned those dependent upon her. And she was an absolute sovereign in this her kingdom of glaciers and forests; her frozen sea as she had called it. She never avoided a duty merely because it was troublesome, and she never gave her signature without knowing why and wherefore. It is easy to be generous; to be just is more difficult and burdensome. Generous by temper, she strove earnestly to be always just as well, and her life was not without those fatigues which a very great fortune brings with it to anyone who regards it as a sacred trust.
She had wide possessions and almost incalculable wealth. She had salt mines in Galicia, she had Vosläuer vineyards in the Salzkammergut, she had vast plains of wheat, and leagues on leagues of green lands, where broods of horses bred and reared away in the steppes of Hungary. She had a palace in the Herrengasse at Vienna, another in the Residenzplatz of Salzburg; she had forests and farms in the Innthal and the Zillerthal; she had a beautiful little schloss on the green Ebensee, which had been the dower-house of the Countesses of Szalras, and she had pine-woods, quarries, vineyards, and even a whole riverain town on the Danube, with a right to take toll on the ferry there, which had been given to her forefathers as far back as the days of Mathias Carvin, a right that she herself had let drop into desuetude. 'I do not want the poor folks' copper kreutzer,' she said to her lawyers when they remonstrated. What did please her was the fact coupled with this right that even the Kaiser could not have entered her little town without his marshal thrice knocking at the gates, and receiving from the warder the permission to pass, in the words, 'The Counts of Idrac bid you come in peace.'
All these things and places made a vast source of revenue, and the property, whose title-deeds and archives lay in many a chest and coffer in the old city of Salzburg, was one of the largest in Europe. It would have given large portions and dowries to a score of sons and daughters and been none the worse. And it was all accumulating on the single head of one young and lonely woman! She was the last of her race; there were distant collateral branches, but none of them near enough to have any title to Hohenszalras. She could bequeath it where she would, and she had already willed it to her Kaiserin, in a document shut up in an iron chest in the city of Salzburg. She thought the Crown would be a surer and juster guardian of her place and people than any one person, whose caprices she could not foretell, whose extravagance or whose injustice she could not foresee. Sometimes, even to the spiritual mind of the Princess Ottilie, the persistent refusal of her niece to think of any marriage seemed almost a crime against mankind.
What did the Crown want with it?
The Princess was a woman of absolutely; loyal sentiment towards all ancient sovereignties. She believed in Divine right, and was as strong a royalist as it is possible for anyone to be whose fathers have been devoured like an anchovy by M. de Bismarck, and who has the sympathy of fellow feeling with Frohsdorf and Gmünden. But even her devotion to the rights of monarchs failed to induce her to see why the Habsburg should inherit Hohenszalras. The Crown is a noble heir, but it is one which leaves the heart cold. Who would ever care for her people, and her forests, and her animals as she had done? Even from her beloved Kaiserin she could not hope for that. 'If I had married?' she thought, the words of the Princess Ottilie coming back upon her memory.
Perhaps, for the sake of her people and her lands, it might have been better.
But there are women to whom the thought of physical surrender of themselves is fraught with repugnance and disgust; a sentiment so strong that only a great passion vanquishes it. She was one of these women, and passion she had never felt.
'Even for Hohenszalras I could not,' she thought, as she leaned on the embrasure cushions, and watched the moon, gradually covered with the heavy blue-black clouds. The Crown should be her heir and reign here after her, when she should be laid by the side of Bela in that beautiful dusky chapel beneath the shrines of ivory and silver, where all the dead of the House of Szalras slept. But it was an heir which left her heart cold.
She rose abruptly, left the embrasure, and began to examine the letters of the day and put down heads of replies to them, which her secretary could amplify on the morrow.
One letter her secretary could not answer for her; it was a letter which gave her pain, and which she read with an impatient sigh. It urged her return to the world as the letter of her Empress had done, and it urged with timidity, yet with passion, a love that had been loyal to her from her childhood. It was signed 'Egon Vàsàrhely.'
'It is the old story,' she thought. 'Poor Egon! If only one could have loved him, how it would have simplified everything; and I do love him, as I once loved Gela and Victor.'
But that was not the love which Egon Vàsàrhely pleaded for with the tenderness of one who had been to her as a brother from her babyhood, and the frankness of a man who knew his own rank so high and his own fortunes so great, that no mercenary motive could be attributed to him even when he sought the mistress of Hohenszalras. It was the old story: she had heard it many times from him and from others in those brilliant winters in Vienna which had preceded Bela's death. And it had always failed to touch her. Women who have never loved are harsh to love from ignorance.
At that moment a louder crash of thunder reverberated from hill to hill, and the Glöckner domes seemed to shout to the crests of the Venediger.
'I hope that stranger is housed and safe,' she thought, her mind reverting to the poacher of whom she had spoken on the terrace at sunset. His face came before her memory: a beautiful face, oriental in feature, northern in complexion, fair and cold, with blue eyes of singular brilliancy.
The forests of Hohenszalras are in themselves a principality. Under enormous trees, innumerable brooks and little torrents dash downwards to lose themselves in the green twilight of deep gorges; broad, dark, still lakes lie like cups of jade in the bosom of the woods; up above, where the Alpine firs and the pinus cembra shelter him, the bear lives and the wolf too; and higher yet, where the glacier lies upon the mountain side, the merry steinbock leaps from peak to peak, and the white-throat vulture and the golden eagle nest. The oak, the larch, the beech, the lime, cover the lower hills, higher grow the pines and firs, the lovely drooping Siberian pine foremost amidst them. In the lower wood grassy roads cross and thread the leafy twilight. A stranger had been traversing these woods that morning, where he had no right or reason to be. Forest-law was sincerely observed and meted out at Hohenszalras, but of that he was ignorant or careless.
Before him, in the clear air, a large, dark object rose and spread huge pinions to the wind and soared aloft. The trespasser lifted his rifle to his shoulder, and in another moment would have fired. But an alpenstock struck the barrel up into the air, and the shot went off harmless towards the clouds. The great bird, startled by the report, flew rapidly to the westward; the Countess Wanda said quietly to the poacher in her forest, 'You cannot carry arms here,'
He looked at her angrily, and in surprise.
'You have lost me the only eagle I have seen for years,' he said bitterly, with a flush of discomfiture and powerless rage on his fair face.
She smiled a little.
'That bird was not an eagle, sir; it was a white-throated vulture, akuttengeier.But had it been an eagle—or a sparrow—you could not have killed it on my lands.'
Pale still with anger, he uncovered his head.
'I have not the honour to know in whose presence I stand,' he muttered sullenly. 'But I have Imperial permission to shoot wherever I choose.'
'His Majesty has no more loyal subject than myself,' she answered him. 'But his dominion does not extend over my forests. You are on the ground of Hohenszalras, and your offence——'
'I know nothing of Hohenszalras!' he interrupted, with impatience.
She blew a whistle, and her head forester with three jägers sprang up as if out of the earth, some great wolf-hounds, grinning with their fangs, waiting but a word to spring. In one second the rangers had thrown themselves on the too audacious trespasser, had pinioned him, and had taken his rifle.
Confounded, disarmed, humiliated, and stunned by the suddenness of the attack, he stood mute and very pale.
'You know Hohenszalras now!' said the mistress of it, with a smile, as she watched his seizure seated on a moss-grown boulder of granite, black Donau and white Neva by her side. He was pale with impotent fury, conscious of an indefensible and absurd position. The jäger looked at their mistress; they had slipped a cord over his wrists, and tied them behind his back; they looked to her for a sign of assent to break his rifle. She stood silent, amused with her victory and his chastisement; a little derision shining in her lustrous eyes.
'You know Hohenszalras now!' she said once more. 'Men have been shot dead for what you were doing. If you be, indeed, a friend of my Emperor's, of course you are welcome here; but——'
'What right have you to offer me this indignity,' muttered the offender, his fair features changing from white to red, and red to white, in his humiliation and discomfiture.
'Right!' echoed the mistress of the forests. 'I have the right to do anything I please with you! You seem to me to understand but little of forest laws.'
'Madame, were you not a woman, you would have had bloodshed.'
'Oh, very likely. That sometimes happens, although seldom, as all the Hohe Tauern knows how strictly these forests are preserved. My men are looking to me for permission to break your rifle. That is the law, sir.'
'Since 'Forty-eight,' said the trespasser, with what seemed to her marvellous insolence, 'all the old forest laws are null and void. It is scarcely allowable to talk of trespass.'
A look of deep anger passed over her face. 'The follies of 'Forty-eight have nothing to do with Hohenszalras,' she said, very coldly. 'We hold under charters of our own, by grants and rights which even Rudolf of Habsburg never dared meddle with. I am not called on to explain this to you, but you appear to labour under such strange delusions that it is as well to dispel them.'
He stood silent, his eyes cast downward. His humiliation seemed to him enormously disproportioned to his offending. The hounds menaced him with deep growls and grinning fangs; the jägers held his gun; his wrists were tied behind him. 'Are you indeed a friend of the Kaiser?' she repeated to him.
'I am no friend of his,' he answered bitterly and sullenly. 'I met him a while ago zad-hunting on the Thorstein. His signature is in my pocket; bid your jäger take it out.'
'I will not doubt your word,' she said to him. 'You look a gentleman. If you will give me your promise to shoot no more on these lands I will let them set you free and render you up your rifle.'
'You have the law with you,' said the trespasser moodily. 'Since I can do no less—I promise.'
'You are ungracious, sir,' said Wanda, with a touch of severity and irritation. 'That is neither wise nor grateful, since you are nothing more or better than a poacher on my lands. Nevertheless, I will trust you.'
Then she gave a sign to the jägers and a touch to the hounds: the latter rose and ceased their growling; the former instantly, though very sorrowfully, untied the cord off the wrists of their prisoner, and gave him back his unloaded rifle.
'Follow that path into the ravine; cross that; ascend the opposite hills, and you will find the high road. I advise you to take it, sir. Good-day to you.'
She pointed out the forest path which wound downward under the arolla pines. He hesitated a moment, then bowed very low with much grace, turned his back on her and her foresters and her dogs, and began slowly to descend the moss-grown slope.
He hated her for the indignity she had brought upon him, and the ridicule to which she forced him to submit; yet the beauty of her had startled and dazzled him. He had thought of the great Queen of the Nibelungen-Lied, whose armour lies in the museum of Vienna.
'Alas! why have you let him go, my Countess!' murmured Otto, the head forester.
'The Kaiser had made him sacred,' she answered, with a smile; and then she called Donau and Neva, who were roaming, and went on her way through her forest.
'What strange and cruel creatures we are!' she thought. 'The vulture would have dropped into the ravine. He would never have found it. The audacity, too, to fire on akuttengeier; if it had been any lesser bird one might have pardoned it.'
For the eagle, the gypæte, the white-throated pygargue, the buzzard, and all the family of falcons were held sacred at Hohenszalras, and lived in their mountain haunts rarely troubled. It was an old law there that the great winged monarchs should never be chased, except by the Kaiser himself when he came there. So that the crime of the stranger had been more than trespass and almost treason! Her heart was hard to him, and she felt that she had been too lenient. Who could tell but that that rifle would bring down some free lord of the air?
She listened with the keen ear of one used to the solitude of the hills and woods; she thought he would shoot something out of bravado. But all was silent in that green defile beneath whose boughs the stranger was wending on his way. She listened long, but she heard no shots, although in those still heights the slightest noise echoed from a hundred walls of rock and ice. She walked onward through the deep shadow of the thick growing beeches; she had her alpenstock in her right hand, her little silver horn hung at her belt, and beside it was a pair of small ivory pistols, pretty as toys, but deadly as revolvers could be. She stooped here and there to gather some lilies of the valley, which were common enough in these damp grassy glades.
'Where could that stranger have come from, Otto?' she asked of her jäger.
'He must have come over the Hündspitz, my Countess,' said Otto. 'Any other way he would have been stopped by our men and lightened of his rifle.'
'The Hündspitz!' she echoed, in wonder, for the mountain so called was a wild inaccessible place, divided by a parapet of ice all the year round from the range of the Gross Glöckner.
'That must he,' said the huntsman,'and for sure if an honest man had tried to come that way he would have been hurled headlong down the ice-wall——'
'He is the Kaiser'sprotégé, Otto,' said his mistress, with a smile, but the old jäger muttered that they had only his own word for that. It had pierced Otto's soul to let the poacher's rifle go.
She thought of all this with some compunction now, as she sat in her own warm safe chamber and heard the thunder, the wind, the raising of the storm which had now fairly broken in full fury. She felt uneasy for the erring stranger. The roads over the passes were still perilous from avalanches and half melted snow in the crevasses; the time of year was more dangerous than midwinter.
'I ought to have given him a guide,' she thought, and went out and joined the Princess Ottilie, who had awakened from her after-dinner repose under the loud roll of the thunder and the constantly recurring flashes of lightning.
'I am troubled for that traveller whom I saw in the woods to-day,' she said to her aunt. 'I trust he is safe housed.'
'If he had been a pastry-cook from the Engadine, or a seditious hereticalcolporteurfrom Geneva, you would have sent him into the kitchens to feast,' said the Princess, contentiously.
'I hope he is safe housed,' repeated Wanda. 'It is several hours ago; he may very well have reached the posthouse.'
'You have the satisfaction of thinking thekuttengeieris safe, sitting on some rock tearing a fish to pieces,' said the Princess, who was irritable because she was awakened before her time. 'Will you have some coffee or some tea? You look disturbed, my dear; after all, you say the man was a poacher.'
'Yes. But I ought to have seen him safe off my ground. There are a hundred kinds of death on the hills for anyone who does not know them well. Let us look at the weather from the hall; one can see better from there.'
From the Rittersäal, whose windows looked straight down the seven miles of the lake water, she watched the tempest. All the mountains were sending back echoes of thunder, which sounded like salvoes of artillery. There was little to be seen for the dense rain mist; the beacon of the Holy Isle glimmered redly through the darkness. In the upper air snow was falling; the great white peaks and pinnacles ever and again flashed strangely into view as the lightning illumined them; the Glöckner-wanda towered above all others a moment in the glare, and seemed like ice and fire mingled.
'They are like the great white thrones of the Apocalypse,' she thought.
Beneath, the lake boiled and seethed in blackness like a witches' cauldron.
A storm was always terrible to her, from the memory of Bela.
In the lull of a second in the tempest of sound it seemed to her as if she heard some other cry than that of the wind.
'Open one of these windows and listen,' she said to Hubert, her major-domo. 'I fancy I hear a shout—a scream. I am not certain, but listen well.'
'There is some sound,' said Hubert, after a moment of attention. 'It comes from the lake. But no boat could live long in that water, my Countess.'
'No!' she said, with a quick sigh, remembering how her brother had died. 'But we must do what we can. It may be one of the lake fishermen caught in the storm before he could make for home. Ring the alarm-bell, and go out, all of you, to the water stairs. I will come, too.'
In a few moments the deep bell that hung in the chime tower, and which was never sounded except for death or danger, added its sonorous brazen voice to the clang and clamour of the storm. All the household paused, and at the summons, coming from north, south, east, and west of the great pile of buildings, grooms, gardeners, huntsmen, pages, scullions, underlings, all answered to the metal tongue, which told them of some peril at Hohenszalras.
With a hooded cloak thrown over her, she went out into the driving rain, down the terrace to the head of what were called the water stairs; a flight of granite steps leading to the little quay upon the eastward shore of the Szalrassee, where were moored in fair weather the pleasure boats, the fishing punts, and the canoes which belonged to the castle: craft all now safe in the boat-house.
'Make no confusion,' she said to them. 'There is no danger in the castle. There is some boat, or some swimmer, on the lake. Light the terrace beacon and we shall see.'
She was very pale. There was no storm on those waters that did not bring back to her, as poignant as the first fresh hours of its grief, the death of Bela.
The huge beacon of iron, a cage set on high and filled with tow and tar and all inflammable things, was set on fire, and soon threw a scarlet glare over the scene.
The shouts had ceased.
'They may be drowned,' she said, with her lips pressed tightly together. 'I hear nothing now. Have you the rope and the lifeboat ready? We must wait for more light.'
At that moment the whole of the tar caught, and the beacon blazed at its fiercest in its iron cage, as it had used to blaze in the ages gone by as a war signal, when the Prelates of Salzburg and Birchtesgaden were marching across the marshes of Pinzgau in quarrel or feud with the lords of the strongest fortress in the Hohe Tauern.
In the struggling light which met the blue glance of the lightning they could see the angry waters of the lake as far as the Holy Isle, and near to land, only his head above the water, was a man drowning, as the pilgrims had drowned.
'For the love of God—the rope!' she cried, and almost before the words had escaped from her her men had thrown a lifebuoy to the exhausted swimmer, and pushed one of the boats into the seething darkness of the lake. But the swimmer had strength enough to catch hold of the buoy as it was hurled to him by thefischermeister'sunerring hand, and he clung to it and kept his grasp on it, despite the raging of the wind and waters, until the boat reached him. He was fifty yards off the shore, and he was pulled into the little vessel, which was tossed to and fro upon the black waters like a shell; thefohnwas blowing fiercely all the time, and flung the men headlong on the boat's bottom twice ere they could seize the swimmer, who helped himself, for, though mute; and almost breathless, he was not insensible, and had not lost all his strength. If he had not been so near the land he and the boat's crew would all have sunk, and dead bodies would once more have been washed on the shore of the Szalrassee with the dawn of another day.
Drenched, choked with water, and thrown from side to side as the wind played with them as a child with its ball, the men ran their boat at last against the stairs, and landed with their prize.
Dripping from head to foot, and drawing deep breaths of exhaustion, the rescued man stood on the terrace steps bareheaded and in his shirt-sleeves, his brown velvet breeches pulled up to his knees, his fair hair lifted by the wind, and soaked with wet.
She recognised the trespasser of the forest.
'Madame, behold me in your power again!' he said, with a little smile, though he breathed with labour, and his voice was breathless and low.
'You are welcome, sir. Any stranger or friend would be welcome in such a night,' she said, with the red glow of the beacon light shed upon her. 'Pray do not waste breath or time in courtesies. Come up the steps and hurry to the house. You must be faint and bruised.'
'No, no,' said the swimmer; but as he spoke his eyes closed, he staggered a little; a deadly faintness and cold had seized him, and cramp came on all his limbs.
The men caught him, and carried him up the stairs; he strove to struggle and protest, but Otto the forester stooped over him.
'Keep you still,' he muttered. 'You have the Countess's orders. Trespass has cost you dear, my master.'
'I do not think he is greatly hurt,' said the mistress of Szaravola to her house physician. 'But go you to him, doctor, and see that he is warmly housed and has hot drinks. Put him in the Strangers' Gallery, and pray take care my aunt is not alarmed.'
The Princess Ottilie at that moment was alternately eating anougatout of her sweetmeat box and telling the beads of her rosary. The sound of the wind and the noise of the storm could not reach her in her favourite blue-room, allcapitonnéewith turquoise silks as it was; the only chamber in all Szaravola that was entirely modern and French.
'I do hope Wanda is running no risk,' she thought, from time to time. 'It would be quite like her to row down the lake.'
But she sat still in her lamp light, and told her beads.
A few moments later her niece entered. Her waterproof mantle had kept her white gown from the rain and spray.
There was a little moisture on her hair, that was all. She did not look as if she had stirred further from her drawing-room than the Princess had done.
Now that the stranger was safe and sound he had ceased to have any interest for her; he was nothing more than any flotsam of the lake; only one other to sleep beneath the roofs of Hohenszalras, where half a hundred slept already.
The castle, in the wild winters that shut out the Hohe Tauern from the world, was oftentimes a hospice for travellers, though usually those travellers were only pedlars, colporteurs, mule-drivers, clock-makers of the Zillerthal or carpet weavers of the Defreggerthal, too late in the year to pursue their customary passage over the passes in safety. To such the great beacon of the Holy Isle and the huge servants' hall of Szaravola were well known.
She sat down to her embroidery frame without speaking; she was working some mountain flowers in silks on velvet, for a friend in Paris' The flowers stood in a glass on a table.
'It is unkind of you to go out in that mad way on such a night as this, and return looking so unlike having had an adventure!' said the Princess, a little pettishly.
'There has been no adventure,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. 'But there is what may do as well—a handsome stranger who' has been saved from drowning.'
Even as she spoke her face changed, her mouth quivered; she crossed herself, and murmured, too low for the other to hear:
'Bela, my beloved, think not that I forget!'
The Princess Ottilie sat up erect in her chair, and her blue eyes brightened like a girl of sixteen.
'Then thereisan adventure! Tell it me quick! My dear, silence is very stately and very becoming to you; but sometimes—excuse me—you do push it to annoying extremes.'
'I was afraid of agitation for you,' said the Countess Wanda; and then she told the Princess what had occurred that night.
'And I never knew that a poor soul was in peril!' cried the Princess, conscious-stricken. 'And is that the last you have seen of him? Have you never asked——?'
'Hubert says he is only bruised; they have taken him to the Strangers' Gallery. Here is Herr Greswold—he will tell us more.'
The person who entered was the physician of Hohenszalras. He was a little old man of great talent, with a clever, humorous, mild countenance; he had, coupled with a love for rural life, a passion for botany and natural history, which made his immurement in the Iselthal welcome to him, and the many fancied ailments of the Princess endurable. He bowed very low alternately to both ladies, and refused with a protest the chair to which the Countess Wanda motioned him. He said that the stranger was not in the least seriously injured; he had been seized with cramp and chills, but he had administered a cordial, and these were passing. The gentleman seemed indisposed to speak, shivered a good deal, and was inclined to sleep.
'He is a gentleman, think you? asked the Princess.
The Herr Professor said that to him it appeared so.
'And of what rank?'
The physician thought it was impossible to say.
'It is always possible,' said the Princess, a little impatiently. 'Is his linen fine? Is his skin smooth? Are his hands white and slender? Are his wrists and ankles small?'
Herr Greswold said that he was sorely grieved, but he had not taken any notice as to any of these things; he had been occupied with his diagnosis of the patient's state; for, he added, he thought the swimmer had been long in the water, and the Szalrassee was of very dangerously low temperature at night, being fed as it Was from the glaciers and snows of the mountains.
'It is very interesting,' said the Princess; 'but pray observe what I have named, now that you return to his chamber.'
Greswold took the hint, and bowed himself out of the drawing-room. Frau Ottilie returned to her nougats.
'I wish that one could know who he was,' she said regretfully. To harbour an unknown person was not agreeable to her in these days of democracies and dynamite.
'What does it matter?' said her niece. 'Though he were a Nihilist or a convict from the mines, he would have to be sheltered to-night.'
'The Herr Professor is very inattentive,' said the Princess, with an accent that from one of her sweetness was almost severe.
'The Herr Professor is compiling the Flora of the Hohe Tauern,' said her niece, 'and he will publish it in Leipzig some time in the next twenty years. How can a botanist care for so unlovely a creature as a man? If it were a flower indeed!'
'I never approved of that herbarium,' said the Princess, still severely. 'It is too insignificant an occupation beside those great questions of human ills which his services are retained to study. He is inattentive, and he grows even impertinent: he almost told me yesterday that my neuralgia was all imagination!'
'He took you for a flower, mother mine, because you are so lovely; and so he thought you could have no mortal pain!' said Wanda, tenderly.
Then after a pause she added:
'Dear aunt, come with me. I have asked Father Ferdinand to have a mass to-night for Bela. I fancy Bela is glad that no other life has been taken by the lake.'
The Princess rose quickly and kissed her.
In the Strangers' Gallery, in a great chamber of panelled oak and Flemish tapestries, the poacher, as he lay almost asleep on a grand old bed, with yellow taffeta hangings, and the crown of the Szalras Counts in gilded bronze above its head, he heard as if in his dream the sound of chanting voices and the deep slow melodies of an organ.
He stirred and opened his drowsy eyes.
'Am I in heaven?' he asked feebly. Yet he was a man who, when he was awake and well, believed not in heaven.
The physician, sitting by his bedside, laid his hand upon his wrist. The pulse was beating strongly but quickly.
'You are in the Burg of Hohenszalras,' he answered him. 'The music you hear comes from the chapel; there is a midnight mass. A mass of thanksgiving for you.'
The heavy lids fell over the eyes of the weary man, and the dreamy sense of warmth and peace that was upon him lulled him into the indifference of slumber.
With the morning, though the storm had ceased and passed away, the clouds were dark, the mountains were obscured, and the rain was pouring down upon lake and land.
It was still early in the day when the stranger was aroused to the full sense of awaking in a room unknown to him; he had slept all through the night; he was refreshed and without fever. His left arm was strained, and he had many bruises; otherwise he was conscious of no hurt.
'Twice in that woman's power,' he thought, with anger, as he looked round the great tapestried chamber that sheltered him, and tried to disentangle his actual memories of the past night from the dreams that had haunted him of the Nibelungen Queen, who all night long he had seen in her golden armour, with her eyes which, like those of the Greek nymph, dazzled those on whom they gazed to madness. Dream and fact had so interwoven themselves that it was with an effort he could sever the two, awaking as he did now in an unfamiliar chamber, and surrounded with those tapestries whose colossal figures seemed the phantoms of a spirit world.
He was a man in whom some vein of superstition had outlived the cold reason and the cynical mockeries of the worldly experiences and opinions in which he was steeped. A shudder of cold ran through his blood as he opened his eyes upon that dim, tranquil, and vast apartment, with the stories of the Tannhäuser legend embroidered on the walls.
'I am he! I am he!' he thought incoherently, watching the form of the doomed knight speeding through the gloom and snow.
'How does the most high and honourable gentleman feel himself this morning?' asked of him, in German, a tall white-haired woman, who might have stepped down from an old panel of Metzu.
The simple commonplace question roused him from the mists of his fancies and fears, and realised to him the bare fact that he was a guest, unbidden, in the walls of Szaravola.
The physician also drew near his bed to question him; and a boy brought on a tray Rhine wine and Tokayer Ausbruck, coffee and chocolate, bread and eggs.
He broke his fast with a will, for he had eaten nothing since the day before at noon; and the Professor Greswold congratulated him on his good night's rest, and on his happy escape from the Szalrassee.
Then he himself said, with a little confusion:
'I saw a lady last night?'
'Certainly, you saw our lady,' said Greswold, with a smile.
'What do you call her?' he asked, eagerly.
The physician answered:
'She is the Countess Wanda von Szalras. She is sole mistress here. But for her, my dear sir, I fear me you would be now lying in those unfathomed depths that the bravest of us fear.'
The stranger shuddered a little.
'I was a madman to try the lake with such an overcast sky; but I had missed my road, and I was told that it lay on the other side of the water. Some peasants tried to dissuade me from crossing, but I am a good rower and swimmer too; so I set forth to pull myself over your lake.'
'With a sky black as ink! I suppose you are used to more serene summers. Midsummer is not so different to midwinter here that you can trust to its tender mercies.'
The stranger was silent.
'She took my gun from me in the morning,' he said abruptly. The memory of the indignity rankled in him, and made bitter the bread and wine.
The physician laughed.
'Were you poaching? Oh, that is almost a hanging matter in the Hohenszalras woods. Had you met Otto without our lady he would most likely have shot you without warning.'
'Are you savages in the Tauern?'
'Oh no; but we are very feudal still, and our forest laws have escaped alteration in this especial part of the province.'
'She has been very hospitable to me, since my crime was so great.'
'She is the soul of hospitality, and the Schloss is a hospice,' said the physician. 'When there is no town nearer than ten Austrian miles, and the nearest posting-house is at Windisch-Matrey, it is very necessary to exercise the primitive virtues; it is our compensation for our feudalism. But take some tokayer, my dear sir; you are weaker than you know. You have had a bath of ice; you had best lie still, and I will send you some journals and books.'
'I would rather get up and go away,' said the stranger. 'These bruises are nothing. I will thank your lady, as you call her, and then go on my way as quickly as I may.'
'I see you do not understand feudal ways, though you have suffered from them,' said the doctor. 'You shall get up if you wish; but I am certain my lady will not let you leave here to-day. The rains are falling in torrents; the roads are dangerous; a bridge has broken down over the Bürgenbach, which you must cross to get away. In a word, if you insist on departure, they will harness their best horses for you, for all the antique virtues have refuge here, and amongst them is a grand hospitality; but you will possibly kill the horses, and perhaps the postillions, and you will not even then get very far upon your way. Be persuaded by me. Wait at least until the morning dawns.'
'I had better burden your lady with an unbidden guest than kill her horses, certainly,' said the stranger. 'How is she sole mistress here? Is there a Count von Szalras? Is she a widow?'
'She has never married,' answered Greswold; and gave his patient a brief sketch of the tragic fates of the lords of Hohenszalras, amongst whom death had been so busy.'
'A very happy woman to be so rich, and so free!' said the traveller, with a little impatient envy; and he added, 'She is very handsome also; indeed, beautiful. I now remember to have heard of her in Paris. Her hand has been esteemed one of the great prizes of Europe.'
'I think she will never marry,' said the old man.
'Oh, my dear doctor, who can make such at least she looks young. What age may she be?'
'She was twenty-four years of age on Easter Day. As for happiness, when you know the Countess Wanda, you will know that she would go out as poor as S. Elizabeth, and self-dethroned like her, most willingly, could she by such a sacrifice see her brothers living around her.'
The stranger gave a little cynical laugh of utter incredulity, which dismayed and annoyed the old professor.
'You do not know her,' he said angrily.
'I know humanity,' said the other. 'Will you kindly take all my apologies and regrets to the Countess, and give her my name; the Marquis de Sabran. She can satisfy herself as to my identity at any embassy she may care to consult.'
When he said his name, the professor gave a great cry and started from his seat.
'Sabran!' he echoed. 'You edited the "Mexico"!' he exclaimed, and gazed over his spectacles in awe and sympathy commingled at the stranger, who smiled and answered——
'Long ago, yes. Have you heard of it?'
'Heard of it!' echoed Greswold. 'Do you take us for barbarians, sir?' It is here, both in my small library, which is the collection of a specialist, and in the great library of the castle, which contains a million of volumes.'
'I am twice honoured,' said the stranger, with a smile of some irony. The good professor was a little disconcerted, and his enthusiasm was damped and cooled. He felt as much embarrassment as though he had been the owner of a discredited work.
'May I not be permitted to congratulate you, sir?' he said timidly. 'To have produced that great work is to possess a title to the gratitude and esteem of all educated men.'
'You are very good,' said Sabran, somewhat indifferently; 'but all that is great in that book is the Marquis Xavier's. I am but the mere compiler.'
'The compilation, the editing of it, required no less learning than the original writer displayed, and that was immense,' said the physician, and with all the enthusiasm of a specialist he plunged into discussion of the many notable points of a mighty intellectual labour, which had received the praise of all the cultured world.
Sabran listened courteously, but with visible weariness. 'You are very good,' he said at last. 'But you will forgive me if I say that I have heard so much of the "Mexico" that I am tempted to wish I had never produced it. I did so as a duty; it was all I could do in honour of one to whom I owed far more than mere life itself.'
Greswold bowed and said no more.
'Give me my belt,' said the stranger to the man who waited on him; it was a leathern belt, which had been about his loins; it was made to hold gold and notes, a small six-chambered revolver, and a watch; these were all in it, and with his money was the imperial permission to shoot, which had been given, him by Franz Josef the previous autumn on the Thorstein.
'Your Countess' will doubtless recognise her Emperor's signature,' he said, as he gave the paper to the physician. 'It will serve at least as a passport, if not as a letter of presentation.'
Réné, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, was one of those persons who illustrate the old fairy tale, of all the good gifts at birth being marred by the malison of one godmother. He had great physical beauty, personal charm, and facile talent; but his very facility was his bane. He did all things so easily and well, that he had never acquired the sterner quality of application. He was a brilliant and even profound scholar, an accomplished musician, a consummate critic of art; and was endowed, moreover, with great natural tact, taste, and correct intuition.
Being, as he was, a poor man, these gifts should have made him an eminent one or a wealthy one, but the perverse fairy who had cursed when the other had blessed him, had contrived to make all these graces and talents barren. Whether it be true or not that the world knows nothing of its greatest men, it is quite true that its cleverest men very often do nothing of importance all their lives long. He did nothing except acquire a distinct repute as adilettantein Paris, and a renown in the clubs of being always serene and fortunate at play.
He had sworn to himself when he had been a youth to make his career worthy of his name; but the years had slipped away, and he had done nothing. He was a very clever man, and he had once set a high if a cold and selfish aim before him as his goal. But he had done worse even than fail; he had never even tried to reach it.
He was only aboulevardier; popular and admired amongst men for his ready wit and his cool courage, and by women often adored and often hated, and sometimes, by himself, thoroughly despised: never so much despised as when by simple luck at play or on the Bourse he made the money which slid through his fingers with rapidity.
All he had in the world were the wind-torn oaks and the sea-washed rocks of a bleak and lonely Breton village, and a few hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures, porcelains, arms, andbibelots, which had accumulated in his rooms on the Boulevard Haussmann, bought at the Drouot in the forenoons after successful play at night. Only two things in him were unlike the men whose associate he was: he was as temperate as an Arab, seldom even touching wine; and he was a keen mountaineer and athlete, once off the asphalte of the Boulevards. For the rest, popular though he was in the society he frequented, no living man could boast of any real intimacy with him. He had a thousand acquaintances, but he accepted no friend. Under the grace and suavity of a very courtly manner he wore the armour of a great reserve.
'At heart you have the taciturnity and thesauvagerieof the Armorican beneath all your polished suavity,' said a woman of his world to him once; and he did not contradict her.
Men did not quarrel with him for it: he was a fine swordsman and a dead shot: and women were allured all the more surely to him because they felt that they never really entered his life or took any strong hold on it.
Such as he was he lay now half-awake on the great bed under its amber canopy, and gazed dreamily at the colossal figures of the storied tapestry, where the Tuscan idlers of the Decamerone wore the sombre hues and the stiff and stately garb of Flemish fashion of the sixteenth century.
'I wonder why I tried so hard to live last night! I am not in love with life,' he thought to himself, as he slowly remembered all that had happened, and recalled the face of the lady who had leaned down to him from over the stone parapet in the play of the torchlight and lightnings. And yet life seemed good and worth having as he recalled that boiling dusky swirl of water which had so nearly swallowed him up in its anger.
He was young enough to enjoy; he was blessed with a fine constitution and admirable health, which even his own excesses had not impaired; he had no close ties to the world, but he had a frequent enjoyment of it, which made it welcome to him. The recovery of existence always enhances its savour; and as he lay dreamily recalling the sharp peril he had run, he was simply and honestly glad to be amongst living men.
He remained still when the physician had left and looked around him; in the wide hearth a fire of oak logs was burning; rain was beating against the painted panes of the oriel casements; there was old oak, old silver, old ivory in the furniture of the chamber, and the tapestries were sombre and gorgeous. It was a room of the sixteenth century; but the wine was in jugs of Bacarat glass, and a box of Turkish cigarettes stood beside them, with the Paris and Vienna newspapers. Everything had been thought of that could contribute to his comfort: he wondered if the doctor had thought of all this, or if it was due to the lady. 'It is a magnificent hospice,' he said to himself with a smile, and then he angrily remembered his rifle, his good English rifle, that was now sunk for ever with his little boat in the waters of the Szalrassee. 'Why did she offer me that outrage?' he said to himself: it went hard with him to lie under her roof, to touch her wine and bread. Yet he was aching in every limb, the bed was easy and spacious, the warmth and the silence and the aromatic scent of the burning pine-cones were alluring him to rest; he dropped off to sleep again, the same calm sleep of fatigue that had changed into repose, and nothing woke him till the forenoon was passed.
'Good heavens! how I am trespassing on this woman's hospitality!' he thought as he did awake, angry with himself for having been lulled into this oblivion; and he began to rise at once, though he felt his limbs stiff and his head for the moment light.
'Cannot I get a carriage for S. Johann? My servant is waiting for me there,' he said to the youth attending on him, when his bath was over.
The lad smiled with amusement.
'There are no carriages here but our lady's, and she will not let you stir this afternoon, my lord,' he answered in German, as he aided the stranger to put on his own linen and shooting breeches, now dry and smoothed out by careful hands.
'But I have no coat! said the traveller in discomfiture, remembering that his coat was gone with his rifle and his powder-flask.
'The Herr Professor thought you could perhaps manage with one of these. They were all of Count Gela's, who was a tall man and about your make,' said an older man-servant who had entered, and now showed him several unworn or scarcely worn suits.
'If you could wear one of these, my lord, for this evening, we will send as soon as it is possible for your servant and your clothes to S. Johann; but it is impossible to-day, because a bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.'
'You are all of you too good,' said Sabran, as he essayed a coat of black velvet.
Pull of his new acquaintance and all his talents, the good man Greswold had hurried away to obey the summons of his ladies, who had desired to see him. He found them in the white room, a grand salon hung with white satin silver-fringed, and stately with white marble friezes and columns, whence it took its name. It was a favourite room with the mistress of the Schloss; at either end of it immense windows, emblazoned and deeply embayed, looked out over the sublime landscape without, of which at this moment every outline was shrouded in the grey veil of an incessantly falling rain.
With humble obeisances Greswold presented the message and the credentials of her guest to Wanda von Szalras; it was the first occasion that he had had of doing so. She read the document signed by the Kaiser with a smile.
'This is the paper which this unhappy gentleman spoke of when I arrested him as a poacher,' she said to her aunt. 'The Marquis de Sabran. The name is familiar to me: I have heard it before.'
'Surely you do not forget the Pontêves-Bargême, the Ducs de Sabran?' said the Princess, with some severity. S. Eleazar was a Comte de Sabran!'
'I know! But it is of something nearer to us than S. Eleazar that I am thinking; there was surely some work or another which bore that name, and was much read and quoted.'
'He edited and annotated the great "Mexico",' said Herr Greswold, as though all were told in that.
'Asavant?' murmured the Princess, in some contemptuous chagrin. 'Pray what is the "Mexico"?'
'The grandest archæological and botanical work, the work of the finest research and most varied learning that has been produced out of Germany,' commenced the Professor, with eagerness, but the Princess arrested him midway in his eloquence.
'The French are all infidels, we know that; but one might have hoped that in one of the old nobility, as his name would imply, some lingering reverence for tradition remained.'
'It is not a subversive, not a philosophic work,' said the Professor, eagerly; but she silenced him.
'It is a book! Why should a Marquis de Sabran write a book?' said the Princess, with ineffable disdain.
There were all the Fathers for anyone who wanted to read: what need for any other use of printer's type? So she was accustomed to think and to say when, scandalised, she saw the German, French, and English volumes, of which whole cases were wont to arrive at Hohenszalras for the use of Wanda von Szalras alone: works of philosophy and of science amongst them which had been denounced in the 'Index.'
'Dear mother,' said the Countess Wanda, 'I have read the "Mexico": it is a grand monument raised to a dead man's memory out of his own labours by one of his own descendants—his only descendant, if I remember aright.'
'Indeed,' said the Princess, unconvinced. 'I know those scientific works by repute; they always consider the voyage of a germ of moss, carried on an aerolite through an indefinite space for a billion of ages, a matter much easier of credence than the "Life of St. Jerome." I believe they call it sporadic transmission; they call typhus fever the same.'
'There is nothing of that in the "Mexico": it is a very fine work on the archæology and history of the country, and on its flora.'
'I should have supposed a Marquis de Sabran a gentleman,' said the Princess, whom no precedent from the many monarchs who have been guilty of inferior literature could convince that literature was other than a trade much like shoemaking: at its best a sort of clerk's quill-driving, to be equally pitied and censured.
Here Greswold, who valued his post and knew his place too well to defend either literature or sporadic germs, timidly ventured to suggest that the Marquis might be well known amongst the nobility of western France, although not of that immense distinction which finds its chronicle in the Hof-Kalender. The Princess smiled.
'Petite noblesse.You mean petite noblesse, my good Greswold? But even the petite noblesse need not write books?'
When, however, the further question arose of inviting the stranger to come to their dinner-table, it was the haughtier Princess who advocated the invitation; the mistress of the house demurred. She thought that all requirements of courtesy and hospitality would be fulfilled by allowing him to dine in his own apartments.
'We do not know him,' she urged. 'No doubt he may very well be what he says, but it is not easy to refer to an embassy while the rains are making an island of the Tauern! Nay, dear mother, I am not suspicious; but I think, as we are two women alone, we can fulfil all obligations of hospitality towards this gentleman without making him personally acquainted with ourselves.'
'That is really very absurd. It is acting as if Hohenszalras were agasthof,' said the Princess, with petulance. 'It is not so often that we have any relief to the tedium with which you are pleased to surround yourself that we should be required to shut ourselves from any chance break in it. Of course, if you send this person his dinner to his own rooms, he will feel hurt, mortified; he will go away, probably on foot, rather than remain where he is insulted. Breton nobility is not very eminent, but it is very proud; it is provincial, territorial; but every one knows it is ancient, and usually of the most loyal traditions alike to Church and State. I should be the last person to advocate making a friendship, or even an acquaintance, without the fullest inquiry; but when it is a mere question of a politeness for twenty-four hours, which can entail no consequences, then I must confess that I think prejudices should yield before the obligations of courtesy. But of course, my love, decide as you will: you are mistress.'
The Countess Wanda smiled, and did not press her own opposition. She perceived that the mind of her aunt was full of vivid and harmless curiosity.
In the end she suggested that the Princess should represent her, and receive the foreign visitor with all due form and ceremony; but she herself was still indisposed to admit a person of whose antecedents she had no positive guarantee so suddenly and entirely into her intimacy.
'You are extraordinarily suspicious,' said the elder lady, pettishly. 'If he were a pedlar or a colporteur, you would be willing to talk with him.'
'Pedlars and colporteurs cannot take any social advantage of one's conversation afterwards,' replied her niece. 'We are not usually invaded by men of rank here; so the precedent may not be perilous. Have your own way, mother mine.'
The Princess demurred, but finally accepted the compromise; reflecting that if this stranger were to dine alone with her, she would be able to ascertain much more about him than if Wanda, who had been created void of all natural curiosity, and who would have been capable of living with people twelve months without asking them a single question, would render it possible to do were she present.
Meanwhile, the physician hurried back to his new friend, who had a great and peculiar interest for him as the editor of the "Mexico", and offered him, with the permission of the Countess von Szalras, to wile away the chill and gloomy day by an inspection of the Schloss.
Joachim Greswold was a very learned and shrewd man, whom poverty and love of tranquil opportunities of study had induced to bury himself in the heart of the Glöckner mountains. He had already led a long, severe, and blameless life of deep devotion and hard privation, when the post of private physician at Hohenszalras in general, and to the Princess Ottilie in especial, had been procured for him by the interest of Prince Lilienhöhe. He had had many sorrows, trials, and disappointments, which made the simple routine and the entire solitude of his existence here welcome to him. But he was none the less delighted to meet any companion of culture and intelligence to converse with, and in his monotonous and lonely life it was a rare treat to be able to exchange ideas with one fresh from the intellectual movements of the outer world.
The Professor found, not to his surprise since he had read the "Mexico", that his elegantgrand seigneurknew very nearly as much as he did of botany and of comparative anatomy; that he had travelled nearly all over the world, and travelled to much purpose, and knew many curious things of the flora of the Rio Grande, whilst it appeared that he possessed in his cabinets in Paris a certain variety of orchid that the doctor had always longed to obtain. He was entirely won over when Sabran, to whom the dried flower was very indifferent, promised to send it to him. The French Marquis had not Greswold's absolute love of science; he had studied every thing that had come to his hand, because he had a high intelligence, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge; and he had no other kind of devotion to it; when he had penetrated its mysteries, it lost all interest for him.
At any rate he knew enough to make him an enchanting companion to a learned man who was all alone in his learning, and received little sympathy in it from anyone near him.
'What a grand house to be shut up in the heart of the mountains!' said Sabran, with a sigh. 'I do believe what romance there still is in the world does lie in these forests of Austria, which have all the twilight and the solitude that would suit Merlin or the Sleeping Beauty better than anything we have in France, except, indeed, here and there an old château like Chenonceaux, or Maintenon.'
'The world has not spoilt us as yet,' said the doctor. 'We see few strangers. Our people are full of old faiths, old loyalties, old traditions. They are a sturdy and yet tender people. They are as fearless as their own steinbock, and they are as reverent as saints were in monastic days. Our mountains are as grand as the Swiss ones, but, thank Heaven, they are unspoilt and little known. I tremble when I think they have begun to climb the Gross Glöckner; all the mystery and glory of our glaciers will vanish when they become mere points of ascension. The alpenstock of the tourist is to the everlasting hills what railway metals are to the plains. Thank God! the few railroads we have are hundreds of miles asunder.'
'You are a reactionist, Doctor?'
'I am an old man, and I have learned the value of repose,' said Greswold. 'You know we are called a slow race. It is only the unwise amongst us who have quicksilver in their brains and toes.'
'You have gold in the former, at least,' said Sabran, kindly, 'and I dare say quicksilver is in your feet, too, when there is a charity to be done?'
Herr Joachim, who was simple in the knowledge of mankind, though shrewd in mother-wit, coloured a little with pleasure. How well this stranger understood him!
The day went away imperceptibly and agreeably to the physician and to the stranger in this pleasant rambling talk; whilst the rain poured down in fury on the stone terraces and green lawns without, and the Szalrassee was hidden under a veil of fog.
'Am I not to see her at all?' thought Sabran. He did not like to express his disquietude on that subject to the physician, and he was not sure himself whether he most desired to ride away without meeting the serene eyes of his châtelaine, or to be face to face with her once more.
He stood long before her portrait, done by Carolus Duran; she wore in it a close-fitting gown of white velvet, and held in her hand a great Spanish hat with white plumes; the two hounds were beside her; the attitude had a certain grandeur and gravity in it which were very impressive.
'This was painted last year,' said Greswold, 'at the Princess's request. It is admirably like——'
'It is a noble picture,' said Sabran. 'But what a very proud woman she looks!'
'Blood tells,' said Greswold, 'far more than most people know or admit. It is natural that my Lady, with the blood in her of so many mighty nobles, who had the power of judgment and chastisement over whole provinces, should be sometimes disposed to exercise too despotic a will, to be sometimes contemptuous of the dictates of modern society, which sends the princess and the peasant alike to a law court for sole redress of their wrongs. She is at times irreconcilable with the world as it stands; she is the representative and descendant in a direct line of arrogant and omnipotent princes. That she combines with that natural arrogance and instinct of dominion a very beautiful pitifulness and even humility is a proof of the chastening influence of religious faith on the nature of women; we are too apt to forget that, in our haste to destroy the Church. Men might get on perhaps very well without a religion of any kind; but I tremble to think what their mothers and their mistresses would become.'
They passed the morning in animated discussion, and as it drew to a close, the good doctor did not perceive how adroitly his new acquaintance drew out from him all details of the past and present of Hohenszalras, and of the tastes and habits of its châtelaine, until he knew all that there was to be known of that pure and austere life.
'You may think her grief for her brother Bela's death—for all her brothers' deaths—a morbid sentiment,' said the doctor as he spoke of her. 'But it is not so—no. It is, perhaps, overwrought; but no life can be morbid that is so active in duty, so untiring in charity, so unsparing of itself. Her lands and riches, and all the people dependent on her, are to the Countess Wanda only as so much trust, for which hereafter she will be responsible to Bela and to God. You and I may smile, you and I, who are philosophers, and have settled past dispute that the human life has no more future than the snail-gnawed cabbage, but yet—yet, my dear sir, one cannot deny that there is something exalted in such a conception of duty; and—of this I am convinced—that on the character of a woman it has a very ennobling influence.'
'No doubt. But has she renounced all her youth? Does she mean never to go into the world or to marry?'
'I am quite sure she has made no resolve of the sort,' But I do not think she will ever alter. She has refused many great alliances. Her temperament is serene, almost cold; and her ideal it would be difficult, I imagine, for any mortal man to realise.'
'But when a woman loves——'
'Oh, of course,' said Herr Joachim, rather drily. 'If the aloe flower!—--Love does not I think possess any part of the Countess Wanda's thoughts or desires. She fancies it a mere weakness.'
'A woman can scarcely be amiable without that weakness.'
'No. Perhaps she is not precisely what we term amiable. She is rather too far also from human emotions and human needs. The women of the house of Szalras have been mostly very proud, silent, brave, and resolute; great ladies rather than lovable wives. Luitgarde von Szalras held this place with only a few archers and spearmen against Heinrich Jasomergott in the twelfth century, and he raised the siege after five months. "She is not a woman, nor human, she is akuttengeier," he said, as he retreated into his Wiener Wald. All the great monk-vultures and the gyps and the pygargues have been sacred all through the Hohe Tauern since that year.'
'And I was about to shoot akuttengeier—now I see that my offence was beyond poaching, it was high treason almost!'
'I heard the story from Otto. He would have hanged you cheerfully. But I hope,' said the doctor, with a pang of misgiving, 'that I have not given you any false impression of my Lady, as cold and hard and unwomanly. She is full of tenderness of a high order; she is the noblest, most truthful, and most generous nature that I have ever known clothed in human form, and if she be too proud—well, it is a stately sin, pardonable in one who has behind her eleven hundred years of fearless and unblemished honour.'
'I am a socialist,' said Sabran, a little curtly; then added, with a little laugh, 'Though I believe not in rank, I do believe in race.'
'Bon sang ne peut mentir,' murmured the old physician; the fair face of Sabran changed slightly.
'Will you come and look over the house?' said the Professor, who noticed nothing, and only thought of propitiating the owner of the rare orchid. 'There is almost as much to see as in the Burg at Vienna. Everything has accumulated here undisturbed for a thousand years. Hohenszalras has been besieged, but never deserted or dismantled.
'It is a grand place!' said Sabran, with a look of impatience. 'It seems intolerable that a woman should possess it all, while I only own a few wind-blown oaks in the wilds of Finisterre.'
'Ah, ah, that is pure socialism!' said the doctor, with a little chuckle. 'Ote-toi, que je m'y mette.That is genuine Liberalism all the world over.'
'You are no communist yourself, doctor?'
'No,' said Herr Joachim, simply. 'All my studies lead me to the conviction that equality is impossible, and were it possible, it would be hideous. Variety, infinite variety, is the beneficent law of the world's life. Why, in that most perfect of all societies, the beehive, flawless mathematics are found co-existent with impassable social barriers and unalterable social grades.'
Sabran laughed good-humouredly.
'I thought at least the bees enjoyed an undeniable Republic.'
'A Republic with helots, sir, like Sparta. A Republic will always have its helots. But come and wander over the castle. Come first and see the parchments.'
'Where are the ladies?' asked Sabran, wistfully.
'The Princess is at her devotions and taking tisane. I visited her this morning; she thinks she has a sore throat. As for our Lady, no one ever disturbs her or knows what she is doing. When she wants any of us ordinary folks, we are summoned. Sometimes we tremble. You know this alone is an immense estate, and then there is a palace at the capital, and one at Salzburg, not to speak of the large estates in Hungary and the mines in Galicia. All these our Lady sees after and manages herself. You can imagine that her secretary has no easy task, and that secretary is herself; for she does not believe in doing anything well by others.'
'A second Maria Theresa!' said Sabran.
'Not dissimilar, perhaps,' said the doctor, nettled at the irony of the tone. 'Only where our great Queen sent thousands out to their deaths the Countess von Szalras saves many lives. There are no mines in the world—I will make bold to say—where there is so much comfort and so little peril as those mines of hers in Stanislaw. She visited them three years hence. But I forget, you are a stranger, and as you do not share our cultus for the Grafin, cannot care to hear its Canticles. Come to the muniment-room; you shall see some strange parchments.'
'Heavens, how it rains!' said Sabran, as they left his chambers. 'Is that common here?'
'Very common, indeed!' said the doctor, with a laugh. 'We pass two-thirds of the year between snow and water. But then we have compensation. Where will you see such grass, such forests, such gardens, when the summer sun does shine?'
The Marquis de Sabran charmed him, and as they wandered over the huge castle the physician delightedly displayed his own erudition, and recognised that of his companion. The Hohenszalrasburg was itself like some black-letter record of old South-German history; it was a chronicle written in stone and wood and iron. The brave old house, like a noble person, contained in itself a liberal education, and the stranger whom through an accident it sheltered was educated enough to comprehend and estimate it at its due value. In his passage through it he won the suffrages of the household by his varied knowledge and correct appreciation. In the stables his praises of the various breeds of horses there commended itself by its accuracy to Ulrich, thestallmeister, not less than a few difficult shots in the shooting gallery proved his skill to his enemy of the previous day, Otto, thejägermeister.Not less did he please Hubert, who was learned in such things, with his cultured admiration of the wonderful old gold and silver plate, the Limoges dishes and bowls, the Vienna and Kronenthal china; nor less the custodian of the pictures, a collection of Flemish and German masters, with here and there a moderncapolavoro, hung all by themselves in a little vaulted gallery which led into a much larger one consecrated to tapestries, Flemish, French, and Florentine.
When twilight came, and the greyness of the rain-charged atmosphere deepened into the dark of night, Sabran had made all living things at the castle his firm friends, down to the dogs of the house, save and except the ladies who dwelt in it. Of them he had had no glimpse. They kept their own apartments. He began to feel some fresh embarrassment at remaining another night beneath a roof the mistress of which did not deign personally to recognise his presence. A salon hung with tapestries opened out of the bedchamber allotted to him; he wondered if he were to dine there like a prisoner of state.
He felt an extreme reluctance united to a strong curiosity to meet again the woman who had treated him with such cool authority and indifference as a common poacher in her woods. His cheek tingled still, whenever he thought of the manner in which, at her signal, his hands had been tied, and his rifle taken from him. She was the representative of all that feudal, aristocratic, despotic, dominant spirit of a dead time which he, with his modern, cynical, reckless Parisian Liberalism, most hated, or believed that he hated. She was Austria Felix personified, and he was a man who had always persuaded himself and others that he was a socialist, a Philippe Egalité. And this haughty patrician had mortified him and then had benefited and sheltered him!