He would willingly have gone from under her roof without seeing her, and yet a warm and inquisitive desire impelled him to feel an unreasonable annoyance that the day was going by without his receiving any intimation that he would be allowed to enter her presence, or be expected to make his obeisances to her. When, however, the servants entered to light the many candles in his room, Hubert entered behind them, and expressed the desire of his lady that the Marquis would favour them with his presence: they were about to dine.
Sabran, standing before the mirror, saw himself colour like a boy: he knew not whether he were most annoyed or pleased. He would willingly have ridden away leaving his napoleons for the household, and seeing no more the woman who had made him ridiculous in his own eyes; yet the remembrance of her haunted him as something strange, imperious, magnetic, grave, serene, stately; vague memories of a thousand things he had heard said of her in embassies and at courts came to his mind; she had been a mere unknown name to him then; he had not listened, he had not cared, but now he remembered all he had heard; curiosity and an embarrassment wholly foreign to him struggled together in him. What could he say to a woman who had first insulted and then protected him? It would tax all the ingenuity and the tact for which he was famed. However, he only said to the major-domo, 'I am much flattered. Express my profound gratitude to your ladies for the honour they are so good as to do me.' Then he made his attire look as well as it could, and considering that punctuality is due from guests as well as from monarchs, he said that he was ready to follow the servant waiting for him, and did so through the many tapestried and panelled corridors by which the enormous house was traversed.
Though light was not spared at the burg it was only such light as oil and wax could give the galleries and passages; dim mysterious figures loomed from the rooms and shadows seemed to stretch away on every side to vast unknown chambers that might hold the secrets of a thousand centuries. When he was ushered into the radiance of the great white room he felt dazzled and blinded.
He felt his bruise still, and he walked with a slight lameness from a strain of his left foot, but this did not detract from the grace and distinction of his bearing, and the pallor of his handsome features became them; and when he advanced through the opened doors and bent before the chair and kissed the hands of the Princess Ottilie she thought to herself, 'What a perfectly beautiful person. Even Wanda will have to admit that!' Whilst Hubert, going backward, said to his regiment of under-servants: 'Look you! since Count Gela rode out to his death at the head of the White Hussars, so grand a man as this stranger has not set foot in this house.'
He expected to see the Countess Wanda von Szalras. Instead, he saw the loveliest little old lady he had ever seen in his life, clad in a semi-conventual costume, leaning on a gold-headed cane, with clouds of fragrant old lace about her, and a cross of emeralds hung at her girdle of onyx beads, who saluted him with the ceremonious grace of that etiquette which is still the common rule of life amongst the great nobilities of the north. He hastened to respond in the same spirit with an exquisite deference of manner.
She greeted him with affable and smiling words, and he devoted himself to her with deference and gallantry, expressing all his sense of gratitude for the succour and shelter he received, with a few eloquent and elegant phrases which said enough and not too much, with a grace that it is difficult to lend to gratitude which is generally somewhat halting and uncouth.
'His name must be in the Hof-Kalendar!' she thought, as she replied to his protestations with her prettiest smile which, despite her sacred calling and her seventy years, was the smile of a coquette.
'M. le Marquis,' she said, in her tender and flute-like voice, 'I deserve none of your eloquent thanks. Age is sadly selfish. I did nothing to rescue you, unless, indeed, Heaven heard my unworthy prayer!—and this house is not mine, nor anything in it; the owner of it, and, therefore, your châtelaine of the moment, is my grand-niece, the Countess Wanda von Szalras.'
'That I had your intercession with Heaven, however indirectly, was far more than I deserved,' said Sabran, still standing before her. 'For the Countess Wanda, I have been twice in her power, and she has been very generous.'
'She has done her duty, nothing more,' said the Princess a little primly and petulantly, if princesses and petulance can mingle. 'We should have scarce been Christians if we had not striven for your life. As to leaving us this day it was out of the question. The storm continues, the passes are torrents; I fear much that it will even be impossible for your servant to come from S. Johann; we could not send to Matrey even this morning for the post-bag, and they tell me the bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.'
'I have wanted for nothing, and my Parisian rogue is quite as well yawning and smoking his days away at S. Johann,' said Sabran. 'Oh, Madame! how can I ever express to you all my sense of the profound obligations you have laid me under, stranger that I am!'
'At least we were bound to atone for the incivility of the Szalrassee,' said the Princess, with her pretty smile. 'It is a very horrible country to live in. My niece, indeed, thinks it Arcadia, but an Arcadia subject to the most violent floods, and imprisoned in snow and frost for so many months, does not commend itself to me; no doubt it is very grand and romantic.'
The ideal of the Princess was neither grand nor romantic: it was life in the little prim, yet gay north German town in the palace of which she and all her people had been born; a little town, with red roofs, green alleys, straight toylike streets, clipped trees, stiff soldiers, set in the midst of a verdant plain; flat and green, and smooth as a card table.
The new comer interested her; she was quickly won by personal beauty, and he possessed this in a great degree. It was a face unlike any she had ever seen; it seemed to her to bear mystery with it and melancholy, and she loved both those things; perhaps because she had never met with either out of the pages of German poets and novelists of France. Those who are united to them in real life find them uneasy bedfellows.
'Perhaps he is some Kronprinz in disguise,' she thought with pleasure; but then she sadly recollected that she knew every crown prince that there was in Europe. She would have liked to have asked him many questions, but her high-breeding was still stronger than her curiosity; and a guest could never be interrogated.
Dinner was announced as served.
'My niece, the Countess Wanda,' said the Princess, with a little reluctance visible in her hesitation, 'will dine in her own rooms. She begs you to excuse her; she is tired from the storm last night.'
'She will not dine with me,' thought Sabran, with the quick intuition natural to him.
'You leave me nothing to regret, Princess,' he said readily, with a sweet smile, as he offered his arm to this lovely little lady, wrapped in laces fine as cobweb, with her great cross of emeralds pendent from her rosary.
A woman is never too old to be averse to the thought that she can charm; very innocent charming was that of the Princess Ottilie, and she thought with a sigh if she had married—if she had had such a son; yet she was not insensible to the delicate compliment which he paid her in appearing indifferent to the absence of his châtelaine and quite content with her own presence.
Throughout dinner in that great hall, he, sitting on her right hand, amused her, flattered her with that subtlest of all flattery, interest and attention; diverted her with gay stories of worlds unknown to her, and charmed her with his willingness to listen to her lament over the degeneracy of mankind and of manners. After a few words of courtesy as to his hostess's absence he seemed not even to remember that Wanda von Salzras was absent from the head of her table.
'And I have said that she was tired! She who is never more tired than the eagles are! May heaven forgive me the untruth!' thought the Princess more than once during the meal, which was long and magnificent, and at which her guest ate sparingly and drank but little.
'You have no appetite?' she said regretfully.
'Pardon me, I have a good one,' he answered her; 'but I have always been content to eat little and drink less. It is the secret of health; and my health is all my riches.'
She looked at him with interest.
'I should think your riches in that respect are inexhaustible?'
He smiled.
'Oh yes! I have never had a day's illness, except once, long ago in the Mexican swamps, a marsh fever and a snake-bite.'
'You have travelled much?'
'I have seen most of the known world, and a little of the unknown,' he answered. 'I am like Ulysses; only there will be not even a dog to welcome me when my wanderings are done.'
'Have you no relatives?'
'None!' he added, with an effort. Everyone is dead; dead long ago. I have been long alone, and I am very well used to it.'
'But you must have troops of friends?'
'Oh!—friends who will win my last napoleon at play, or remember me as long as they meet me every day on the boulevards? Yes, I have many of that sort, but they are not worth Ulysses' dog.'
He spoke carelessly, without any regard to the truth as far as it went, but no study would have made him more apt to coin words to attract the sympathy of his listeners.
'He is unfortunate,' she thought. 'How often beauty brings misfortune. My niece must certainly see him. I wish he belonged to the Pontêves-Bargêmes!'
Not to have a name that she knew, one of those names that fill all Europe as with the trump of an archangel, was to be as one maimed or deformed in the eyes of the Princess, an object for charity, not for intercourse.
'Your title is of Brittany, I think?' she said a little wistfully, and as he answered something abruptly in the affirmative, she solaced herself once more with the remembrance that there was a good deal ofpetite noblesse, honourable enough, though not in the 'Almanac de Gotha,' which was a great concession from her prejudices, invented on the spur of the interest that he excited in her imagination.
'I never saw any person so handsome,' she thought, as she glanced at his face; while he in return thought that this silver-haired, soft-cheeked, lace-enwrapped Holy Mother wasjolie à croquerin the language of those boulevards, which had been his nursery and his palestrum. She was so kind to him, she was so gracious and graceful, she chatted with him so frankly and pleasantly, and she took so active an interest in his welfare that he was touched and grateful. He had known many women, many young ones and gay ones; he had never known what the charm of a kindly and serene old age can be like in a woman who has lived with pure thoughts, and will die in hope and in faith; and this lovely old abbess, with her pretty touch of worldliness, was a study to him, new with the novelty of innocence, and of a kind of veneration. And he was careful not to let her perceive his mortification that the Countess von Szalras would not deign to dine in his presence. In truth, he thought of little else, but no trace of irritation or of absence of mind was to be seen in him as he amused the Princess, and discovered with her that they had in common some friends amongst the nobilities of Saxony, of Wurtemberg, and of Bohemia.
'Come and take your coffee in my own room, the blue-room,' she said to him, and she rose and took his arm. 'We will go through the library; you saw it this morning, I imagine? It is supposed to contain the finest collection of Black Letter in the empire, or so we think.'
And she led him through the great halls and up a few low stairs into a large oval room lined with oaken bookcases, which held the manuscripts, missals, and volumes of all dates which had been originally gathered together by one of the race who had been also a bishop and a cardinal.
The library was oak-panelled, and had an embossed and emblazoned ceiling; silver lamps of old Italiantrasvoratowork, hung by silver chains, and shed a subdued clear light; beneath the porphyry sculptures of the hearth a fire of logs was burning, for the early summer evening here is chill and damp; there were many open fireplaces in Hohenszalras, introduced there by a chilly Provençal princess, who had wedded a Szalras in the seventeenth century, and who had abolished the huge porcelain stoves in many apartments in favour of grand carved mantel-pieces, and gilded andirons, and sweet smelling simple fires of aromatic woods, such as made glad the sombre hotels and lonely châteaux of the Prance of the Bourbons.
Before this hearth, with the dogs stretched on the black bearskin rugs, his hostess was seated; she had dined in a small dining-hall opening out of the library, and was sitting reading with a shaded light behind her. She rose with astonishment, and, as he fancied, anger upon her face as she saw him enter, and stood in her full height beneath the light of one of the silver hanging lamps. She wore a gown of olive-coloured velvet, with some pale roses fastened amongst the old lace at her breast; she had about her throat several rows of large pearls, which she always wore night and day that they should not change their pure whiteness by disuse; she looked very stately, cold, annoyed, disdainful, as she stood there without speaking.
'It is my niece, the Countess von Szalras,' said the Princess to her companion in some trepidation. 'Wanda, my love, I was not aware you were here; I thought you were in your own octagon room; allow me to make you acquainted with your guest, whom you have already received twice with little ceremony I believe.'
The trifling falsehoods were trippingly but timidly said; the Princess's blue eyes sought consciously her niece's forgiveness with a pathetic appeal, to which Wanda, who loved her tenderly, could not be long obdurate. Had it been any other than Mme. Ottilie who had thus brought by force into her presence a stranger whom she had marked her desire to avoid, the serene temper of the mistress of the Hohenszalrasburg would not have preserved its equanimity, and she would have quitted her library on the instant, sweeping a grand courtesy which should have been greeting and farewell at once to one too audacious. But the shy entreating appeal of the Princess's regard touched her heart, and the veneration she had borne from childhood to one so holy, and so sacred by years of grace, checked in her any utterance or sign of annoyance.
Sabran, meanwhile, standing by in some hesitation and embarrassment, bowed low with consummate grace, and a timidity not less graceful.
She advanced a step and held her hand out to him.
'I fear I have been inhospitable, sir,' she said to him in his own tongue. 'Are you wholly unhurt? You had a rough greeting from Hohenszalras.'
He took the tip of her fingers on his own and bent over them as humbly as over an empress's.
Well used to the world as he was, to its ceremonies, courts, and etiquettes, he was awed by her as if he were a youth; he lost his ready aptness of language, and his easy manner of adaptability.
'I am but a vagrant, Madame!' he murmured, as he bowed over her hand. 'I have no right even to your charity!'
For the moment it seemed to her as if he spoke in bitter and melancholy earnest, and she looked at him in a passing surprise that changed into a smile.
'You were a poacher certainly, but that is forgiven. My aunt has taken you under her protection; and you had the Kaiser's already: with such a dual shelter you are safe. Are you quite recovered?' she said, bending her grave glance upon him. 'I have to ask your pardon for my great negligence in not sending one of my men to guide you over the pass to Matrey.'
'Nay, if you had done so I should not have enjoyed the happiness of being your debtor,' he replied, meeting her close gaze with a certain sense of confusion most rare with him; and added a few words of eloquent gratitude, which she interrupted almost abruptly:
'Pray carry no such burden of imaginary debt, and have no scruples in staying as long as you like; we are a mountain refuge, use it as you would a monastery. In the winter we have many travellers. We are so entirely in the heart of the hills that we are bound by all Christian laws to give a refuge to all who need it. But how came you on the lake last evening? Could you not read the skies?'
He explained his own folly and hardihood, and added, with a glance at her, 'The offending rifle is in the Szalrassee. It was my haste to quit your dominions that made me venture on to the lake. I had searched in vain for the high road that you had told me of, and I thought if I crossed the lake I should be off your soil.'
'No; for many leagues you would not have been off it,' she answered him. 'Our lands are very large, and, like the Archbishopric of Berchtesgarten, are as high as they are broad. Our hills are very dangerous for strangers, especially until the snows of the passes have all melted. I repented me too late that I did not send a jäger with you as a guide.'
'All is well that ends well,' said the Princess. 'Monsieur is not the worse for his bath in the lake, and we have the novelty of an incident and of a guest, who we will hope in the future will become a friend.'
'Madame, if I dared hope that I should have much to live for!' said the stranger, and the Princess smiled sweetly upon him.
'You must have very much to live for, as it is. Were I a man, and as young as you, and as favoured by nature, I am afraid I should be tempted to live for—myself.'
'And I am most glad when I can escape from so poor a companion,' said he, with a melancholy in the accent and a passing pain that was not assumed.
Before this gentle and gracious old woman in this warm and elegant chamber he felt suddenly that he was a wanderer—perhaps an outcast.
'You need not use the French language with him, Wanda,' interrupted the Princess. 'The Marquis speaks admirable German: it is impossible to speak better.'
'We will speak our own tongue then,' said Wanda, who always regarded her aunt as though she were a petted and rather wayward child. 'Are you quite rested, M. de Sabran? and quite unhurt?' I did not dine with you. It must have seemed churlish. But I am very solitary in my habits, and my aunt entertains strangers so much better than I do that I grow more hermit-like every year.'
He smiled; he thought there was but little of the hermit in this woman's supreme elegance and dignity as she stood beside her hearth with its ruddy, fitful light playing on the great pearls at her throat and burnishing into gold the bronze shadows of her velvet gown.
'The Princess has told me that you are cruel to the world,' he answered her. 'But it is natural with such a kingdom that you seldom care to leave it.'
'It is a kingdom of snow for seven months out of the year,' said the Princess peevishly, 'and a water kingdom the other five. You see what it is to-day, and this is the middle of May!'
'I think one might well forget the rain and every other ill between these four walls,' said the French Marquis, as he glanced around him, and then slowly let his eyes rest on his châtelaine.
'It is a grand library,' she answered him; 'but I must warn you that there is nothing more recent in it than Diderot and Descartes. The cardinal—Hugo von Szalras—who collected it lived in the latter half of last century, and since his day no Szalras has been bookish save myself. The cardinal, however, had all the MSS. and the black letters, or nearly all, ready to his hand; what he added is a vast library of science and history, and he also got together some of the most beautiful missals in the world. Are you curious in such things?'
She rose as she spoke, and unlocked one of the doors of the oak bookcase and brought out an ivory missal carved by the marvellous Prönner of Klagenfurt, with the arms of the Szalras on one side of it and those of a princely German house on the other.
'That was the nuptial missal of Georg von Szalras and Ida Windisgratz in 1501,' she said; 'and these are all the other marriage-hours of our people, if you care to study them'; and in that case next to this there is a wonderful Evangelistarium, with miniatures of Angelico's. But I see they tell all their stories to you; I see by the way you touch them that you are a connoisseur.'
'I fear I have studied them chiefly at the sales of the Rue Drouot,' said Sabran, with a smile; but he had a great deal of sound knowledge on all arts and sciences, and a true taste which never led him wrong. With an illuminated chronicle in his hand, or a book of hours on his knee, he conversed easily, discursively, charmingly, of the early scribes and the early masters; of monkish painters and of church libraries; of all the world has lost, and of all aid that art had brought to faith.
He talked well, with graceful and well-chosen language, with picturesque illustration, with a memory that never was at fault for name or date, or apt quotation; he spoke fluent and eloquent German, in which there was scarcely any trace of foreign accent; and he disclosed without effort the resources of a cultured and even learned mind.
The antagonism she had felt against the poacher of her woods melted away as she listened and replied to him; there was a melody in his voice and a charm in his manner that it was not easy to resist; and with the pale lights from the Italian lamp which swung near upon the fairness of his face she reluctantly owned that her aunt had been right: he was singularly handsome, with that uncommon and grand cast of beauty which in these days is rarer than it was in the times of Vandyck and of Velasquez—for manners and moods leave their trace on the features, and this age is not great.
The Princess in, her easy-chair, for once not sleeping after dinner, listened to her and thought to herself, 'She is angry with me; but how much better it is to talk with a living being than to pass the evening over a philosophical treatise, or the accounts of her schools, or her stables!'
Sabran having conquered the momentary reluctance and embarrassment which had overcome him in the presence of the woman to whom he owed both an outrage and a rescue, endeavoured, with all the skill he possessed, to interest and beguile her attention. He knew that she was a great lady, a proud woman, a recluse, and a student, and a person averse to homage and flattery of every kind; he met her on the common ground of art and learning, and could prove himself her equal at all times, even occasionally her master. When he fancied she had enough of such serious themes he spoke of music. There was a new opera then out at Paris, of which the theme was as yet scarcely known. He looked round the library and said to her:
'Were there an organ here or a piano I could give you some idea of the motive; I can recall most of it.'
'There are both in my own room. It is near here,' she said to him. 'Will you come?'
Then she led the way across the gallery, which alone separated the library from that octagon room which was so essentially her own where all were hers. The Princess accompanied her: content as a child is who has put a light to a slow match that leads it knows not whither. 'She must approve of him, or she would not take him there,' thought the wise Princess.
'Go and play to us,' said Wanda von Szalras, as her guest entered the sacred room. 'I am sure you are a great musician; you speak of music as we only speak of what we love.'
'What do you love?' he wondered mutely, as he sat down before the grand piano and struck a few chords. He sat down and played without prelude one of the most tender and most grave of Schubert's sonatas. It was subtle, delicate, difficult to interpret, but he gave it with consummate truth of touch and feeling. He had always loved German music best. He played on and on, dreamily, with a perfection of skill that was matched by his tenderness of interpretation.
'You are a great artist,' said his hostess, as he paused.
He rose and approached her.
'Alas! no, I am only an amateur,' he answered her. 'To be an artist one must needs have immense faith in one's art and in oneself: I have no faith in anything. An artist steers straight to one goal; I drift.'
'You have drifted to wise purpose——'You must have studied much?'
'In my youth. Not since. An artist! Ah! how I envy artists! They believe; they aspire; even if they never attain, they are happy, happy in their very torment, and through it, like lovers.'
'But your talent——'
'Ah, Madame, it is only talent; it is nothing else. Thefeu sacréis wanting.'
She looked at him with some curiosity.
'Perhaps the habit of the world has put out that fire: it often does. But if even it be only talent, what a beautiful talent it is! To carry all that store of melody safe in your memory—it is like having sunlight and moonlight ever at command.'
Lizst had more than once summoned the spirits of Heaven to his call there in that same room in Hohenszalras; and since his touch no one had ever made the dumb notes speak as this stranger could do, and the subdued power of his voice added to the melody he evoked. The light of the lamps filled with silvery shadows the twilight of the chamber; the hues of the tapestries, of the ivories, of the gold and silver work, of the paintings, of the embroideries, made a rich chiaro-oscuro of colour; the pine cones and the dried thyme burning on the hearth shed an aromatic smell on the air; there were large baskets and vases full of hothouse roses and white lilies from the gardens; she sat by the hearth, left in shadow except where the twilight caught the gleam of her pearls and the shine of her eyes; she listened, the jewels on her hand glancing like little stars as she slowly waved to and fro a feather screen in rhythm with what he sang or played: so might Mary Stuart have looked, listening to Rizzio or Ronsard. 'She is a queen!' he thought, and he sang—
'Si j'étais Roi!'
'Go on!' she said, as he paused; he had thrown eloquence and passion into the song.
'Shall I not tire you?'
'That is only a phrase! Save when Liszt passes by here I never hear such music as yours.'
'He obeyed her, and played and sang many and very different things.
At last he rose a little abruptly.
Two hours had gone by since they had entered the octagon chamber.
'It would be commonplace to thank you,' she murmured with a little hesitation. 'You have a great gift; one of all gifts the most generous to others.'
He made a gesture of repudiation, and walked across to a spinet of the fifteenth century, inlaid with curious devices by Martin Pacher of Brauneck, and having a painting of his in its lid.
'What a beautiful old box,' he said, as he touched it. 'Has it any sound, I wonder? If one be disposed to be sad, surely of all sad things an old spinet is the saddest! To think of the hands that have touched, of the children that have danced to it, of the tender old ballads that have been sung to the notes that to us seem so hoarse and so faulty! All the musicians dead, dead so long ago, and the old spinet still answering when anyone calls! Shall I sing you a madrigal to it?'
Very tenderly, very lightly, he touched the ivory keys of the painted toy of the ladies so long dead and gone, and he sang in a minor key the sweet, sad, quaint poem:—
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
That ballad of fair women echoed softly through the stillness of the chamber, touched with the sobbing notes of the spinet, even as it might have been in the days of its writer:
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The chords of the old music-box seemed to sigh and tremble with remembrance. Where were they, all the beautiful dead women, all the fair imperious queens, all the loved, and all the lovers? Where were they? The snow had fallen through so many white winters since that song was sung—so many! so many!
The last words thrilled sadly and sweetly through the silence.
He rose and bowed very low.
'I have trespassed too long on your patience, madame; I have the honour to wish you goodnight.'
Wanda von Szalras was not a woman quickly touched to any emotion, but her eyelids were heavy with a mist of unshed tears, as she raised them and looked up from the fire, letting drop on her lap the screen of plumes.
'If there be a Lorelei in our lake, no wonder from envy she tried to drown you,' she said, with a smile that cost her a little effort. Good-night, sir; should you wish to leave us in the morning, Hubert will see you reach S. Johann safely and as quickly as can be.'
'Your goodness overwhelms me,' he murmured. 'I can never hope to show my gratitude——'
'There is nothing to be grateful for,' she said quickly. 'And if there were, you would have repaid it: you have made a spinet, silent for centuries, speak, and speak to our hearts. Good-night, sir; may you have good rest and a fair journey!'
When he had bowed himself out, and the tapestry of the door had closed behind him, she rose and looked at a clock.
'It is actually twelve!'
'Acknowledge at least that he has made the evening pass well!' said the Princess, with a little petulance and much triumph.
'He has made it pass admirably,' said her niece. 'At the same time, dear aunt, I think it would have been perhaps better if you had not made a friend of a stranger.'
'Why?' said the Princess with some asperity.
'Because I think we can fulfil all the duties of hospitality without doing so, and we know nothing of this gentleman.'
'He is certainly a gentleman,' said the Princess, with not less asperity. 'It seems to me, my dear Wanda, that you are for once in your life—if you will pardon me the expression—ill-natured.'
The Countess Wanda smiled a little.
'I cannot imagine myself ill-natured; but I may be so. One never knows oneself.'
'And ungrateful,' added the Princess. 'When, I should like to know, have you for years reached twelve o'clock at night without being conscious of it?'
'Oh, he sang beautifully, and he played superbly,' said her niece, still with the same smile, balancing her ostrich-feathers. 'But let him go on his way to-morrow; you and I cannot entertain strange men, even though they give us music like Rubenstein's.'
'If Egon were here——'
'Oh, poor Egon! I think he would not like your friend at all. They both want to shoot eagles——'
'Perhaps he would not like him for another reason,' said the Princess, with a look of mystery. 'Egon could never make the spinet speak.'
'No; but who knows? Perhaps he can take better care of his own soul because he cannot lend one to a spinet!'
'You are perverse, Wanda!'
'Perverse, inhospitable, and ill-natured? I fear I shall carry a heavy burden of sins to Father Ferdinand in the morning!'
'I wish you would not send horses to S. Johann in the morning. We never have anything to amuse us in this solemn solitary place.'
'Dear aunt, one would think you were very indiscreet.'
'I wish you were more so!' said the pretty old lady with impatience, and then her hand made a sign over the cross of emeralds, for she knew that she had uttered an unholy wish. She kissed her niece with repentant tenderness, and went to her own apartments.
Wanda von Szalras, left alone in her chamber, stood awhile thoughtfully beside the fire; then she moved away and touched the yellow ivory of the spinet keys.
'Why could he make them speak,' she said to herself, 'when everyone else always failed?'
Sabran, as he undressed himself and laid himself down under the great gold-fringed canopy of the stately bed, thought: 'Was I only a clever comedian to-night, or did my eyes really grow wet as I sang that old song and see her face through a mist as if she and I had met in the old centuries long ago?'
He stood and looked a moment at his own reflection in the great mirror with the wax candles burning in its sconces. He was very pale.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The burden of it ran through his mind.
Almost it seemed to him long ago—long ago—she had been his lady and he her knight, and she had stooped to him, and he had died for her. Then he laughed a little harshly.
'I grow that best of all actors,' he thought, 'an actor who believes in himself!'
Then he turned from the mirror and stretched himself on the great bed, with its carved warriors at its foot and its golden crown at its head, and its heavy amber tissues shining in the shadows. He was a sound sleeper at all times. He had slept peacefully on a wreck, in a hurricane, in a lonely hut on the Andes, as after a night of play in Paris, in Vienna, in Monaco. He had a nerve of steel, and that perfect natural constitution which even excess and dissipation cannot easily impair. But this night, under the roof of Hohenszalras, in the guest-chamber of Hohenszalras, he could not summon sleep at his will, and he lay long wide awake and restless, watching the firelight play on the figures upon the tapestried walls, where the lords and ladies of Tuscan Boccaccio and their sinful loves were portrayed in stately and sombre guise, and German costumes of the days of Maximilian.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The line of the old romaunt ran through his brain, and when towards dawn he did at length fall asleep it was not of Hohenszalras that he dreamed, but of wide white steppes, of a great ice-fed rolling river, of monotonous pine woods, with the gilded domes of a half eastern city rising beyond them in the pale blue air of a northern twilight.
With the early morning he awoke, resolute to get away be the weather what it would. As it chanced, the skies were heavy still, but no rain fell; the sun was faintly struggling through the great black masses of cloud; the roads might be dangerous, but they were not impassable; the bridge over the Bürgenbach might be broken, but at least Matrey could be reached, if it were not possible to go on farther to Taxenbach or S. Johann im Wald. High north, where far away stretched the wild marshes and stony swamps of the Pinzgau (the Pinzgau so beautiful, where in its hilly district the grand Salzach rolls on its impetuous way beneath deep shade of fir-clad hills, tracks desolate as a desert of sand or stone), the sky was overcast, and of an angry tawny colour that brooded ill for the fall of night. But the skies were momentarily clear, and he desired to rid of his presence the hospitable roof beneath which he was but an alien and unbidden.
He proposed to leave on foot, but of this neither Greswold nor the major-domo would hear: they declared that such an indignity would dishonour the Hohenszalrasburg for evermore. Guests there were masters. 'Bidden guests, perhaps,' said Sabran, reluctantly yielding to be sped on his way by a pair of the strong Hungarian horses that he had seen and admired in their stalls. He did not venture to disturb the ladies of the castle by a request for a farewell audience at the early hour at which it was necessary he should depart if he wished to try to reach a railway the same evening, but he left two notes for them, couched in that graceful compliment of which his Parisian culture made him an admirable master, and took a warm adieu of the good physician, with a promise not to forget the orchid of the Spiritù Santo. Then he breakfasted hastily, and left the tapestried chamber in which he had dreamed of the Nibelungen Queen.
At the door he drew a ring of great value from his finger and passed it to Hubert, but the old man, thanking him, protested he dared not take it.
'Old as I am in her service,' he said, 'the Countess would dismiss me in an hour if I accepted any gifts from a guest.'
'Your lady is very severe,' said Sabran. 'It is happy for her she has servitors who subscribe to feudalism. If she were in Paris——'
'We are bound to obey,' said the old man, simply. 'The Countess deals with us most generously and justly. We are bound, in return, to render her obedience.'
'All the antique virtues have indeed found refuge here!' said Sabran; but he left the ring behind him lying on a table in the Rittersäal.
Four instead of two vigorous and half-broke horses from the Magyar plains bore him away in a light travelling carriage towards the Virgenthal; the household, with Herr Joachim at their head, watching with regret the travelling carriage wind up amongst the woods and disappear on the farther side of the lake. He himself looked back with a pang of envy and regret at the stately pile towering towards the clouds, with its deep red banner streaming out on the wind that blew from the northern plains.
'Happy woman!' he thought; 'happy—thrice happy—to possess such dominion, such riches, and such ancestry! If I had had them I would have had the world under my foot as well!'
It was with a sense of pain that he saw the great house disappear behind its screen of mantling woods, as his horses climbed the hilly path beyond, higher and higher at every step, until all that he saw of Hohenszalras was a strip of the green lake—green as an arum leaf—lying far down below, bearing on its waters the grey willows of the Holy Isle.
'When I am very old and weary I will come and die there,' he thought, with a touch of that melancholy which all his irony and cynicism could not dispel from his natural temper. There were moments when he felt that he was but a lonely and homeless wanderer on the face of the earth, and this was one of those moments, as, alone, he went upon his way along the perilous path, cut along the face of precipitous rocks, passing over rough bridges that spanned deep defiles and darkening ravines, clinging to the side of a mountain as a swallow's nest clings to the wall of a house, and running high on swaying galleries above dizzy depths, where nameless torrents plunged with noise and foam into impenetrable chasms. The road had been made in the fifteenth century by the Szalras lords themselves, and the engineering of it was bold and vigorous though rude, and kept in sound repair, though not much changed.
He had left a small roll of paper lying beside the ring in the knight's hall. Hubert took them both to his mistress when, a few hours later, he was admitted to her presence. Opening the paper she saw a roll of a hundred napoleons, and on the paper was written, 'There can be no poor where the Countess von Szalras rules. Let these be spent in masses for the dead.'
'What a delicate and graceful sentiment,' said the Princess Ottilie, with vivacity and emotion.
'It is prettily expressed and gracefully thought of,' her niece admitted.
'Charmingly—admirably!' said the Princess, with a much warmer accent. 'There is delicate gratitude there, as well as a proper feeling towards a merciful God.'
'Perhaps,' said her niece, with a little smile, 'the money was won at play, in giving someone else what they call aculotte; what would you say then, dear aunt? Would it be purified by entering the service of the Church?'
'I do not know why you are satirical,' said the Princess; 'and I cannot tell either how you can bring yourself to use Parisian bad words.'
'I will send these to the Bishop,' said Wanda, rolling up the gold. 'Alas! alas! there are always poor. As for the ring, Hubert, give it to Herr Greswold, and he will transmit it to this gentleman's address in Paris, as though it had been left behind by accident. You were so right not to take it; but my dear people are always faithful.'
These few words were dearer and more precious to the honest old man than all the jewels in the world could ever have become. But the offer of it and the gift of the gold for the Church's use had confirmed the high opinion in which he and the whole household of Hohenszalras held the departed guest.
'Allow at least that this evening will be much duller than last!' said the Princess, with much irritation.
'Your friend played admirably,' said Wanda von Szalras, as she sat at her embroidery frame.
'You speak as if he were an itinerant pianist! What is your dislike to your fellow creatures, when they are of your own rank, based upon? If he had been a carpet-dealer from the Defreggerthal, as I said before, you would have bidden him stay a month.'
'Dearest aunt, be reasonable. How was it possible to keep here on a visit a French Marquis of whom we know absolutely nothing, except from himself?'
'I never knew you were prudish!'
'I never knew either that I was,' said the Countess Wanda, with her serene temper unruffled. 'I quite admit your new friend has many attractive qualities—on the surface at any rate; but if it were possible for me to be angry with you, I should be so for bringing him as you did into the library last night.'
'You would never have known your spinet could speak if I had not. You are very ungrateful, and I should not be in the least surprised to find that he was a Crown Prince or a Grand Duke travelling incognito.'
'We know them all, I fear.'
'It is strange he should not have his name in the Hof-Kalender, beside the Sabran-Pontêves!' insisted the Princess. 'He looksprince du sang, if ever anyone did; so——'
'There is good blood outside your Hof Kalender, dear mother mine.'
'Certainly,' said the Princess, 'he must surely be a branch of that family, though it would be more satisfactory if one found his record there. One can never know too much or too certainly of a person whom one admits to friendship.'
'Friendship is a very strong word,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. 'This gentleman has only made a hostelry of Hohenszalras for a day or two, and even that was made against his will. But as you are so interested in him,meine Liebe, read this little record I have found.'
She gave the Princess an old leather-bound volume of memoirs, written and published at Lausanne, by an obscure noble in his exile, in the year 1798. She had opened the book at one of the pages that narrated the fates of many nobles of Brittany, relatives or comrades of the writer.
'And foremost amongst these,' said this little book, 'do I ever and unceasingly regret the loss of my beloved cousin and friend, Yvon Marquis de Sabran-Romaris. So beloved was he in his own province that even the Convention was afraid to touch him, and being poor, despite his high descent, as his father had ruined his fortunes in play and splendour at the court of Louis XV., he thought to escape the general proscription, and dwell peaceably on his rock-bound shores with his young children. But the blood madness of the time so grew upon the nation that even the love of his peasantry and his own poverty could not defend him, and one black, bitter day an armed mob from Vannes came over the heath, burning all they saw of ricks, or homesteads, or châteaux, or cots, that they might warm themselves by those leaping fires; and so they came on at last, yelling, and drunk, and furious, with torches flaming and pikes blood-stained, up through the gates of Romaris. Sabran went out to meet them, leading his eldest son by the hand, a child of eight years old. "What seek ye?" he said to them: "I am as poor as the poorest of you, and consciously have done no living creature wrong. What do you come for here?" The calm courage of him, and the glance of his eyes, which were very beautiful and proud, quelled the disordered, mouthing, blood-drunk multitude in a manner, and moved them to a sort of reverence, so that the leader of them, stepping forth, said roughly, 'Citizen, we come to slit your throat and burn your house; but if you will curse God and the King, and cry 'Long live the sovereign people!' we will leave you alone, for you have been the friend of the poor. Come, say it!—come, shout it with both lungs!—it is not much to ask? Sabran put his little boy behind him with a tender gesture, then kissed the hilt of his sword, which he held unsheathed in his hand: "I sorrow for the people," he said, "since they are misguided and mad. But I believe in my God and I love my King, and even so shall my children do after me;" and the words were scarce out of his mouth before a score of pikes ran him through the body, and the torches were tossed into his house, and he and his perished like so many gallant gentlemen of the time, a prey to the blind fury of an ingrate mob.'
The Princess Ottilie's tender eyes moistened as she read, and she closed the volume reverently, as though it were a sacred thing.
'I thank you for sending me such a history,' she said. 'It does one's soul good in these sad, bitter days of spiritless selfishness and utter lack of all impersonal devotion. This gentleman must, then, be a descendant of the child named in this narrative?'
'The story says that he and his perished,' replied her niece. 'But I suppose that child, or some other younger one, escaped the fire and the massacre. If ever we see him again, we will ask him. Such a tradition is as good as a page in the Almanac de Gotha.'
'It is,' accented the Princess. 'Where did you find it?'
'I read those memoirs when I was a child, with so many others of that time,' answered the Countess Wanda. 'When I heard the name of your new friend it seemed familiar to me, and thinking over it, I remembered these Breton narratives.'
'At least you need not have been afraid to dine with him!' said the Princess Ottilie, who could never resist having the last word, though she felt that the retort was a little ungenerous, and perhaps undeserved.
Meantime Sabran went on his way through the green valley under the shadow of the Klein and the Kristallwand, with the ice of the great Schaltten Gletscher descending like a huge frozen torrent. When he reached the last stage before Matrey he dismissed his postillions with a gratuity as large as the money remaining in his belt would permit, and insisted on taking his way on foot over the remaining miles. Baggage he had none, and he had not even the weight of his knapsack and rifle. The men remonstrated with him, for they were afraid of their lady's anger if they returned when they were still half a German mile off their destination. But he was determined, and sent them backwards, whilst they could yet reach home by daylight. The path to Matrey passed across pastures and tracts of stony ground; he took a little goatherd with him as a guide, being unwilling to run the risk of a second misadventure, and pressed on his way without delay.
The sun had come forth from out a watery world of cloud and mist, which shrouded from sight all the domes and peaks and walls of ice of the mountain region in which he was once more a wanderer. But when the mists had lifted, and the sun was shining, it was beautiful exceedingly: all the grasses were full of the countless wild flowers of the late Austrian spring; the swollen brooks were blue with mouse-ear, and the pastures with gentian; clumps of daffodils blossomed in all the mossy nooks, and hyacinths purpled the pine-woods. On the upper slopes the rain-fog still hung heavily, but the sun-rays pierced it here and there, and the white vaporous atmosphere was full of fantastic suggestions and weird half-seen shapes, as pine-trees loomed out of the mist or a vast black mass of rock towered above the clouds. A love of nature, of out-of-door movement, of healthful exercise and sports, resisted in him the enervating influences of the Paris life which he had led. He had always left the gay world at intervals for the simple and rude pleasures of the mountaineer and the hunter. There was an impulse towards that forest freedom which at times mastered him, and made the routine of worldly dissipation and diversion wholly intolerable to him. It was what his fair critic of Paris had called his barbarism, which broke up out of the artificial restraints and habits imposed by the world.
His wakeful night had made him fanciful, and his departure from Hohenszalras had made him regretful; for he, on his way back to Paris and all his habits and associates and pleasures, looking around him on the calm white mountain-sides, and penetrated by the pure, austere mountain silence, suddenly felt an intense desire to stay amidst that stillness and that solitude, and rest here in the green heart of the Tauern.
'Who knows but one might see her again?' he thought, as the sound of the fall of the Gschlossbach came on his ear from the distance. That stately figure seated by the great wood fire, with the light on her velvet skirts, and the pearls at her throat, and the hounds lying couched beside her, was always before his memory and his vision.
And he paid and dismissed his goatherd at the humble door of the Zum Rautter in Windisch-Matrey, and that evening began discussing with Christ Rangediner and Egger, the guides there, the ascent of the Kahralpe and the Lasörling, and the pass to Krimml, over the ice crests of the Venediger group.
A mountaineer who had dwelt beneath the shadow of Orizaba was not common in the heart of the Tauern, and the men made much of their new comrade, not the less because the gold pieces rattled in his pouch, and the hunting-watch he earned had jewels at its back.
'If anyone had told me that in the Mois de Marie I should bury myself under an Austrian glacier!' he thought, with some wonder at his own decision, for he was one of those foster-sons of Paris to whomparisineis an habitual and necessary intoxication.
But there comes a time when even parisine, like chloral, ceases to have power to charm; in a vague way he had often felt the folly and the hollowness of the life that turned night into day, made the green cloth of the gaming-table the sole field of battle, and offered as all form of love the purchased smile of thebelle petite.A sense of repose and of freshness, like the breath of a cool morning blowing on tired eyes, came to him as he sat in the grey twilight amidst the green landscape, with the night coming down upon the eternal snows above, whilst the honest, simple souls around him talked of hill perils and mountaineers' adventures, and all the exploits of a hardy life; and in the stillness, when their voices ceased, there was no sound but the sound of water up above amidst the woods, tumbling and rippling in a hundred unseen brooks and falls.
'If they had let me alone,' he thought, 'I should have been a hunter all my days; a guide, perhaps, like this Christ and this Egger here. An honest man, at least——'
His heart was heavy and his conscience ill at ease. The grand, serene glance of Wanda von Szalras seemed to have reached his soul and called up in him unavailing regrets, pangs of doubt long dormant, vague remorse long put to sleep with the opiate of the world-taught cynicism, which had become his second nature. The most impenetrable cynicism will yield and melt, and seem but a poor armour, when it is brought amidst the solemnity and solitude of the high hills.
A few days later there arrived by post the 'Spiritù Santo' of Mexico, addressed to the Professor Joachim Greswold.
If he had received the order of the Saint Esprit he would not have been more honoured, more enchanted; and he was deeply touched by the remembrance of him testified by the gift whose donor he supposed was back in the gay world of men, not knowing the spell which the snow mountains of the Tauern had cast on a worldly soul. When he was admitted to the presence of the Princess Ottilie to consult with her on her various ailments, she conversed with him of this passer-by who had so fascinated her fancy, and she even went so far as to permit him to bring her the great volumes of the "Mexico" out of the library, and point her out those chapters which he considered most likely to interest her.
'It is the work of a true Catholic and gentleman,' she said with satisfaction, and perused with special commendation the passages which treated of the noble conduct of the Catholic priesthood in those regions, their frequent martyrdom and their devoted self-negation. When she had thoroughly identified their late guest with the editor of these goodly and blameless volumes, she was content to declare that better credentials no man could bear. Indeed she talked so continually of this single point of interest in her monotonous routine of life, that her niece said to her, with a jest that was more than half earnest, 'Dearest mother, almost you make me regret that this gentleman did not break his neck over the Engelhorn, or sink with his rifle in the Szalrassee.'
'The spinet would never have spoken,' said the Princess; 'and I am surprised that a Christian woman can say such things, even in joke!'
The weather cleared, the sun shone, the gardens began to grow gorgeous, and great parterres of roses glowed between the emerald of the velvet lawns: an Austrian garden has not a long life, but it has a very brilliant one. All on a sudden, as the rains ceased, every alley, group, and terrace were filled with every variety of blossom, and the flora of Africa and India was planted out side by side with the gentians and the alpine roses natural to the soil. All the northern coniferæ spread the deep green of their branches above the turf, and the larch, the birch, the beech, and the oak were massed in clusters, or spread away in long avenues—deep defiles of foliage through which the water of the lake far down below glistened like a jewel.
'If your friend had been a fortnight later he would have seen Hohenszalras in all its beauty,' said its mistress once to the Princess Ottilie. 'It has two seasons of perfection: one its midsummer flowering, and the other when all the world is frozen round it.'
The Princess shivered in retrospect and in anticipation. She hated winter. 'I should never live through another winter,' she said with a sigh.
'Then you shall not be tried by one; we will go elsewhere,' said Wanda, to whom the ice-bound world, the absolute silence, the sense of the sleigh flying over the hard snow, the perfect purity of the rarefied air of night and day, made up the most welcome season of the year.
'I suppose it is dull for you,' she added, indulgently. 'I have so many occupations in the winter; a pair of skates and a sleigh are to me of all forms of motion the most delightful. But you, shut up in your blue-room, do no doubt find our winter hard and long.'
'I hybernate, I do not live,' said the Princess, pettishly. 'It is not even as if the house were full.'
'With ill-assorted guests whose cumbersome weariness one would have to try all day long to dissipate! Oh, my dear aunt, of all wearisomecorvéesthe world holds there is nothing so bad as a house party—even when Egon is here to lead the cotillion and the hunting.'
'You are very inhospitable!'
'That is the third time lately you have made that charge against me. I begin to fear that I must deserve it.'
'You deserve it, certainly. Oh, you are hospitable to the poor. You set pedlars, or mule-drivers, or travelling clockmakers, by the dozen round your hall fires, and you would feed a pilgrimage all the winter long. But to your own order, to your own society, you are inhospitable. In your mother's time the Schloss had two hundred guests for the autumn parties, and then the winter season, from Carnival to Easter, was always spent in the capital.'
'She liked that, I suppose.'
'Of course she liked it; everyone ought to like it at what was her age then, and what is yours now.'
'I like this,' said the Countess Wanda, to change the subject, as the servants set a little Japanese tea-table and two arm-chairs of gilt osier-work under one of the Siberian pines, whose boughs spread tent-like over the grass, on which the dogs were already stretched in anticipation of sugar and cakes.
From this lawn there were seen only the old keep of the burg and the turrets and towers of the rest of the building; ivy clambered over one-half of the great stone pile, that had been raised with hewn rock in the ninth century; and some arolla pines grew about it. A low terrace, with low broad steps, separated it from the gardens. A balustrade of stone, ivy-mantled, protected the gardens from the rocks; while these plunged in a perpendicular descent of a hundred feet into the lake. Some black yews and oaks, very large and old, grew against the low stone pillars. It was a favourite spot with the mistress of Hohenszalras; it looked westward, and beyond the masses of the vast forests there shone the snow summit of the Venediger and the fantastic peaks of the Klein and Kristallwand, whilst on a still day there could be heard a low sound which she, familiar with it, knew came from the thunder of the subterranean torrents filling the Szalrassee.
'Oh, it is very nice,' said the Princess, a little deprecatingly. 'And of course I at my years want nothing better than a gilt chair in the sunshine. But then there is so very little sunshine! The chair must generally stand by the stove! And I confess that I think it would be fitter for your years and your rank if these chairs were multiplied by ten or twenty, and if there were some pretty people laughing and talking and playing games in those great gardens.'
'It is glorious weather now,' said her niece, who would not assent and did not desire to dispute.
'Yes,' interrupted the Princess. 'But it will rain to-morrow. You know we never have two fine days together.'
'We will take it while we have it, and be thankful,' said Wanda, with a good-humour that refused to be ruffled. 'Here is Hubert coming out to us. What can he want? He looks very startled and alarmed.'
The old major-domo's face was indeed gravely troubled, as he bowed before his lady.
'Pardon me the intrusion, my Countess,' he said hurriedly. 'But I thought it right to inform you myself that a lad has come over from Steiner's Inn to say that the foreign gentleman who was here fifteen days ago has had an accident on the Umbal glacier. It seems he stayed on in Matrey for sake of the climbing and the shooting. I do not make out from the boy what the accident was, but the Umbal is very dangerous at this season. The gentleman lies now at Pregratten. You know, my ladies, what a very wretched place that is.'
'I suppose they have come for the Herr Professor?' said Wanda, vaguely disturbed, while the Princess very sorrowfully was putting a score of irrelevant questions which Hubert could not answer.
'No doubt he has no doctor there, and these people send for that reason,' said Wanda, interrupting with an apology for the useless interrogations. 'Get horses ready directly, and send for Greswold at once wherever he may be. But it is a long bad way to Pregratten; I do not see how he can return under twenty-four hours.'
'Let him stay two nights, if he be wanted,' said the Princess, to whom she spoke. She had always insisted that the physician should never be an hour out of Hohenszalras whilst she was in it.
'Your friend has been trying to shoot akuttengeieragain, I suppose,' said her niece, with a smile. 'He is very adventurous.'
'And you are very heartless.'
Wanda did not deny the charge; but she went into the house, saw the doctor, and requested him to take everything with him of linen, wines, food, or cordials that might possibly be wanted.
'And stay as long as you are required,' she added, 'and send mules over to us for anything you wish for. Do not think of us. If my dear aunt should ail anything I can dispatch a messenger to you, or call a physician from Salzburg.'
Herr Joachim said a very few words, thanked her gratefully, and took his departure behind two sure-footed mountain cobs that could climb almost like chamois.
'I think one of the Fathers should have gone too,' said Mme. Ottilie, regretfully.
'I hope he is notin extremis,' said her niece. 'And I fear if he were he would hardly care for spiritual assistance.'
'You are so prejudiced against him, Wanda!'
'I do not think I am ever prejudiced,' said the Countess von Szalras.
'That is so like a prejudiced person!' said the Princess, triumphantly.
For twenty-four hours they heard nothing from Pregratten, which is in itself a miserable little hamlet lying amidst some of the grandest scenes that the earth holds: towards evening the next day a lad of the village came on a mule and brought a letter to his ladies from the Herr Professor, who wrote that the accident had been due, as usual, to the gentleman's own carelessness, and to the fact of the snow being melted by the midsummer sun until it was a thin crust over a deep crevasse. He had found his patient suffering from severe contusions, high fever, lethargy, and neuralgic pains, but he did not as yet consider there were seriously dangerous symptoms. He begged permission to remain, and requested certain things to be sent to him from his medicine-chests and the kitchens.
The boy slept at Hohenszalras that night, and in the morning returned over the hills to Pregratten with all the doctor had asked for. Wanda selected the medicines herself, and sent also some fruit and wine for which he did not ask: the Princess sent a bone of S. Ottilie in an ivory case and the assurance of her constant prayers. She was sincerely anxious and troubled. 'Such a charming person, and so handsome,' she said again and again. 'I suppose the priest of Pregratten is with him.' Her niece did not remind her that her physician did not greatly love any priests whatever, though on that subject he was always discreetly mute at Hohenszalras.
For the next ten days Greswold stayed at Pregratten, and the Princess bore his absence, since it was to serve a person who had had the good fortune to fascinate her, and whom also she chose to uphold because her niece was, as she considered, unjust to him. Moreover, life at the burg was very dull to the Princess, whatever it might be to its châtelaine, who had so much interest in its farms, its schools, its mountains, and its villages: an interest which to her great-aunt seemed quite out of place, as all those questions, she considered, should belong to the priesthood and the stewards, who ought not to be disturbed in their direction, the one of spiritual and the other of agricultural matters. This break in the monotony of her time was agreeable to her—of the bulletins from Pregratten, of the dispatch of all that was wanted, of the additional pleasure of complaining that she was deprived of her doctor's counsels, and also of feeling at the same time that in enduring this deprivation she was doing a charitable and self-denying action. She further insisted on sending out to Steiner's Inn, greatly to his own discomfort, her own confessor.
'Nobles of Brittany have always deep religious feeling,' she said to her niece; 'and Father Ferdinand has such skill and persuasion with the dying.'
'But no one is dying,' said Wanda, a little impatiently.
'That is more than any human being can tell,' said the Princess, piously. 'At all events, Father Ferdinand always uses every occasion judiciously and well.'
Father Ferdinand, however, was not very comfortable in Pregratten, and soon returned, much jolted and worn by the transit on a hill pony. He was reserved about his visitation, and told his patroness sadly that he had been unable to effect much spiritual good, but that the stranger was certainly recovering from his hurts, and had the ivory case of S. Ottilie on his pillow; he had seemed averse, however, to confession, and therefore, of course, there had been no possibility for administration of the Sacrament.
The Princess was inclined to set this rebelliousness down to the fault of the physician, and determined to talk seriously to Greswold on spiritual belief as soon as he should return.
'If he be not orthodox we cannot keep him,' she said severely.
'He is orthodox, dear aunt,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. 'He adores the wonders of every tiny blossom that blows, and every little moss that clothes the rocks.'
'What a profane, almost sacrilegious answer!' said the Princess. 'I never should have imagined thatyouwould have jested on sacred themes.'
'I did not intend a jest. I was never more serious. A life like our old Professor's is a perpetual prayer.'
'Your great-aunt Walburga belonged to the Perpetual Adoration,' rejoined the Princess, who only heard the last word but one. 'The order was very severe. I always think it too great a strain on finite human powers. She was betrothed to the Margraf Paul, but he was killed at Austerlitz, and she took refuge in a life of devotion. I always used to think that you would change Hohenszalras into a sacred foundation; but now I am afraid. You are a deeply religious woman, Wanda—at least I have always thought so—but you read too much German and French philosophy, and I fear it takes something from your fervour, from your entirety of devotion. You have a certain liberty of expression that alarms me at times.'
'I think it is a poor faith that dares not examine its adversaries' charges,' said her niece, quietly. 'You would have faith blindfolded. They call me a bigot at the Court, however. So you see it is hard to please all.'
'Bigot is not a word for a Christian and Catholic sovereign to employ,' said the Princess, severely. 'Her Majesty must know that there can never be too great an excess in faith and service.'
On the eleventh day Greswold returned over the hills and was admitted to immediate audience with his ladies.
'Herr von Sabran is well enough for me to leave him,' he said, after his first very humble salutations. 'But if your excellencies permit it would be desirable for me to return there in a day or two. Yes, my ladies, he is lying at Steiner's Inn in Pregratten, a poor place enough, but your goodness supplied much that was lacking in comfort. He can be moved before long. There was never any great danger, but it was a very bad accident. He is a good mountaineer it seems, and he had been climbing a vast deal in the Venediger group; that morning he meant to cross the Umbal glacier to the Ahrenthal, and he refused to take a guide, so Isaiah Steiner tells me.'
'But I thought he left here to go to Paris?'
'He did so, my Countess,' answered the doctor. 'But it seems he loves the mountains, and their spell fell on him. When he sent back your postillions he went on foot to Matrey, and there he remained; he thought the weather advanced enough to make climbing safe; but it is a dangerous pastime so early in summer, though Christ from Matrey, who came over to see him, tells me he is of the first form as a mountaineer. He reached the Clarahutte safely, and broke his fast there; crossing the Umbal the ice gave way, and he fell into a deep crevasse. He would be a dead man if a hunter on the Welitz side had not seen him disappear and given the alarm at the hut. With ropes and men enough they contrived to haul him up, after some hours, from a great depth. These accidents are very common, and he has to thank his own folly in going out on to the glacier unaccompanied. Of course he was insensible, contused, and in high fever when I reached there: the surgeon they had called from Lienz was an ignorant, who would soon have sent him for ever to as great a deep as the crevasse. He is very grateful to you both, my ladies, and would be more so were he not so angry with himself that it makes him sullen with the world. Men of his kind bear isolation and confinement ill. Steiner's is a dull place: there is nothing to hear but the tolling of the church bell and the fret of the Isel waters.'
'That means, my friend, that you want him moved as soon as he can bear it?' said Wanda. 'I think he cannot very well come here. We know nothing of him. But there is no reason why you should not bring him to the Lake Monastery. There is a good guest-chamber (the Archbishop stayed there once), and he could have your constant care there, and from here every comfort.'
'Why should he not be brought to this house?' interrupted Mme. Ottilie; 'there are fifty men in it already——'
'Servants and priests, no strangers. Beside, this gentleman will be much more at his ease on the Holy Isle, where he can recompense the monks at his pleasure; he would feel infinitely annoyed to be further burdened with a hospitality he never asked!'
'Of course it is as you please!' said the Princess, a little irritably.
'Dear aunt! when he is on the island you can send him all the luxuries and all the holy books you may think good for him. Go over to the monks if you will be so kind, Herr Joachim, and prepare them for a sick guest; and as for transport and all the rest of the assistance you may need, use the horses and the household as you see fit. I give you carte blanche. I know your wisdom and your prudence and your charity.'
The physician again returned to Pregratten, where he found his patient fretting with restless impatience at his enforced imprisonment. He had a difficulty in persuading Sabran to go back to that Szalrassee which had cost him so dear; but when he was assured that he could pay the monks what he chose for their hospitality, he at last consented to be taken to the island.
'I shall see her again,' he thought, with a little anger at himself. The mountain spirits had their own way of granting wishes, but they had granted his.
On the Holy Isle of the Szalrassee there was a small Dominican congregation, never more than twelve, of men chiefly peasant-born, and at this time all advanced in years. The monastery was a low, grey pile, almost hidden beneath the great willows and larches of the isle, but rich within from many centuries of gifts in art from the piety of the lords of Szaravola. It had two guest-chambers for male visitors, which were lofty and hung with tapestry, and which looked down the lake towards the north and west, to where beyond the length of water there rose the mighty forest hills washed by the Salzach and the Ache, backed by the distant Rhœtian Alps.
The island was almost in the centre of the lake, and, at a distance of three miles, the rocks, on which the castle stood, faced it across the water that rippled around it and splashed its trees and banks. It was a refuge chosen in wild and rough times when repose was precious, and no spot on earth was ever calmer, quieter, more secluded than this where the fishermen never landed without asking a blessing of those who dwelt there, and nothing divided the hours except the bells that called to prayer or frugal food. The green willows and the green waters met and blended and covered up this house of peace as a warbler's nest is hidden in the reeds. A stranger resting-place had never befallen the world-tossed, restless, imperious, and dissatisfied spirit of the man who was brought there by careful hands lying on a litter, on a raft, one gorgeous evening of a summer's day—one month after he had lifted his rifle to bring down thekuttengeierin the woods of Wanda von Szalras.