Idrac was situated between Pesth and Peterwardein, lying low on marshy ground that was covered with willows and intersected by small streams flowing from the interior to the Danube.
The little town gave its name and its seigneurie to the owner of its burg; an ancient place built on a steep rock that rose sheer out of the fast-running waves, and dominated the passage of the stream. The Counts of Idrac had been exceeding powerful in the old times, when they had stopped at their will the right of way of the river; and their appanages with their title had come by marriage into the House of Szalras some four centuries before, and although the dominion over the river was gone, the fortress and the little town and all that appertained thereto still formed a considerable possession; it had usually been given with its Countship to the second son of the Szalras.
Making the passage to Pesth in fourteen hours, the yacht dropped anchor before the Franz Josef Quai as the first stars came out above the Blocksburg, for by this time the skies had lightened and the rains had ceased. Here she stayed the night perforce, as an accident had occurred to the machinery of the vessel. She did not leave the yacht, but sent into the inner city for stores of provisions and of the local cordial, theslibowitza, to distribute to the half-drowned people amongst whom she was about to go. It was noonday before the yawl got under weigh and left the twin-towns behind her. A little way further down the stream they passed a great castle, standing amidst beech woods on a rock that rose up from fields covered with the Carlowitz vine. She looked at it with a sigh: it was the fortress of Kohacs, one of the many possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely.
The weather had now cleared, but the skies were overcast, and the plains, which began to spread away monotonously from either shore, were covered with white fog. Soon the fog spread also over the river, and the yacht was compelled to advance cautiously and slowly, so that the voyage was several hours longer than usual. When the light of the next day broke they had come in sight of the flooded districts on their right: the immense flat fields that bore the flax and grain which make the commerce of Baja, of Neusatz, and of other riverain towns, were all changed to shallow estuaries. The Theiss, the Drave, and many minor streams, swollen by the long autumnal rains, had burst their boundaries and laid all the country under water for hundreds of square leagues. The granaries, freshly filled with the late abundant harvest, had at many places been flooded or destroyed: thousands of stacks of grain were floating like shapeless, dismasted vessels. Timber and the thatched roofs of the one-storied houses were in many places drifting too, like the flotsam and the hulls of wrecked ships.
There are few scenes more dreary, more sad, more monotonous than those of a flat country swamped by flood: the sky above them was leaden and heavy, the Danube beneath them was turgid and discoloured; the shrill winds whistled through the brakes of willow, the water-birds, frightened, flew from their osier-beds on the islands, the bells of churches and watch-towers tolled dismally.
It was late in the afternoon when she came within sight of her little town on the Sclavonian shore, which Ernst von Szalras had fired on August 29, 1526, to save it from the shame of violation by the Turks. Though he had perished, and most of the soldiers and townsfolk with him, the fortress, thetêtes du pont, and the old water-gates and walls had been too strong for the flames to devour, and the town had been built up again by the Turks and subsequently by the Hungarians.
The slender minarets of the Ottomans' two mosques still raised themselves amidst the old Gothic architecture of the mediæval buildings, and the straw-covered roofs and the white-plastered walls of the modern houses. As they steamed near it the minarets and the castle towers rose above what looked a world of waters, all else seemed swallowed in the flood; the orchards, which had surrounded all save the river-side of the town; were immersed almost to the summits of their trees. The larger vessels could never approach Idrac in ordinary times, the creek being too shallow on which it stood; but now the water was so high that though it would be too imprudent to anchor there, the yacht easily passed in, and hove-to underneath the water-walls, a pilot taking careful soundings as they steered. It was about three in the afternoon. The short, grey day was near its end; a shout of welcome rose from some people on the walls as they recognised the build and the ensign of the yawl. Some crowded boats were pulling away from the town, laden with fugitives and their goods.
'How soon people run away! They are like rats,' she thought. 'I would sooner be like the stork, and not quit my nest if it were in flames.'
She landed at the water-stairs of the castle. Men, women, and children came scrambling along the walls, where they were huddled together out of temporary reach of the flood, and threw themselves down at her feet and kissed her skirts with abject servility. They were half mad with terror, and amongst the population there were many hundreds of Jews, the most cowardly people in all the world. The boats were quite inadequate in number to the work they had to do; the great steamers passing up and down did not pause to help them; the flood was so general below Pesth that on the right shore of the river each separate village and township was busy with its own case and had no help for neighbours: the only aid came from those on the opposite shore, but that was scanty and unwisely ministered. The chief citizens of Idrac had lost their wits, as she had foreseen they would do. To ring the bells madly night and day, and fire off the old culverins from the water-gate, was all they seemed to know how to do. They told her that many lives had been lost, as the inland waters had risen in the night, and most of the houses were of only one storey. In the outlying flax-farms it was supposed that whole households had perished. In the town itself there were six feet of water everywhere, and many of the inhabitants were huddled together in the two mosques, which were now granaries, in the towers, and in the fortress itself; but several families had been enabled to escape, and had climbed upon the roofs, clinging to the chimneys for bare life.
Her mere presence brought reviving hope and energy to the primitive population. Their Lady had a romantic legendary reputation amongst them, and they were ready to cling round the pennon of the yacht as their ancestors had rallied round the standard of Ernst von Szalras.
She ascended to the Rittersaal of the fortress, and assembled a few of the men about her, who had the most influence and energy in the little place. She soon introduced some kind of system and method into the efforts made, promised largesse to those who should be the most active, and had the provisions she had brought distributed amongst those who most needed them. The boats of the yawl took many away to a temporary refuge on the opposite shore. Many others were brought in to the state-room of the castle for shelter. Houses were constantly falling, undermined by the water, and there were dead and wounded to be attended to, as well as the hungry and terrified living creatures. Once before, Idrac had been thus devastated by flood, but it had been far away in the previous century, and the example was too distant to have been a warning to the present generation.
She passed a fatiguing and anxious night. It was impossible to think of sleep with so much misery around. The yacht was obliged to descend, the river for safe anchorage, but the boats remained. She went herself, now in one, now in another, to endeavour to inspire the paralysed people with some courage and animation. A little wine, a little bread, were all she took; food was very scarce. The victuals of the yacht's provisioning did not last long amongst so many famishing souls. She ordered her skipper at dawn to go down as far as Neusatz and purchase largely. There were five thousand people, counting those of the neighbourhood, or more, homeless and bereft of all shelter. The telegraph was broken, the poles had been snapped by the force of the water in many places.
With dawn a furious storm gathered and broke, and renewed rains added their quota to the inundation and their discomfort to the exposed sufferers. The cold was great, and the chill that made them shudder from head to foot was past all cure by cordials. She regretted not to have brought Greswold with her. She was indifferent to danger, indefatigable in exertion, and strong as Libussa, brave as Chriemhilde. Because the place belonged to her in almost a feudal manner, she held herself bound to give her life for it if need be. Bela would have done what she was doing.
Twice or thrice during the two following days she heard the people speak of a stranger who had arrived fifteen hours before her, and had wrought miracles of deliverance. Unless the stories told her were greatly exaggerated, this foreigner had shown a courage and devotion quite unequalled. He had thrown himself into the work at once on his arrival there in a boat from Neusatz, and had toiled night and day, enduring extreme fatigue and running almost every hour some dire peril of his life. He had saved whole families of the poorest and most wretched quarter; he had sprung on to roofs that were splitting and sinking, on to walls that were trembling and tottering, and had borne away in safety men, women, and children, the old, and the sick, and the very animals; he had infused some of his own daring and devotedness into the selfish and paralysed Hebrew population; priests and rabbis were alike unanimous in his praise, and she, as she heard, felt that he who had fought for France had been here for her sake. They told her that he was now out amongst the more distant orchards and fields, amidst the flooded farms where the danger was even greater than in the town itself. Some Czechs said that he was S. John of Nepomuc himself. She bade them bring him to her, that she might thank him, whenever he should enter the town again, and then thought of him no more.
Her whole mind and feeling were engrossed by the spectacle of a misery that even all her wealth could not do very much to alleviate. The waters as yet showed no sign of abatement. The crash of falling houses sounded heavily ever and again through the gloom. The melancholy sight of humble household things, of drowned cattle, of dead dogs, borne down the discoloured flood out to the Danube renewed itself every hour. The lamentations of the ruined people went up in an almost continuous wail like the moaning of a winter wind. There was nothing grand, nothing picturesque, nothing exciting to redeem the dreariness and the desolation. It was all ugly, miserable, dull. It was more trying than war, which even in its hideous senselessness lends a kind of brutal intoxication to all whom it surrounds.
She was incessantly occupied and greatly fatigued, so that the time passed without her counting it. She sent a message each day to the Princess at home, and promised to return as soon as the waters had subsided and the peril passed. For the first time in her life she experienced real discomfort, real privation; she had surrendered nearly all the rooms in the burg to the sick people, and food ran short and there was none of good quality, though she knew that supplies would soon come from the steward at Kohacs and by the yacht.
On the fourth day the waters had sunk an inch. As she heard the good tidings she was looking out inland over the waste of grey and yellow flood; a Jewish rabbi was beside her speaking of the exertions of the stranger, in whom the superstitious of the townsfolk saw a saint from heaven.
'And does no one even know who he is?' she asked.
'No one has asked,' answered the Jew. 'He has been always out where the peril was greatest.'
'How came he here?'
'He came by one of the big steamers that go to Turkey. He pulled himself here in a little boat that he had bought; the boat in which he has done such good service.'
'What is he like in appearance?'
'He is very tall, very fair, and handsome; I should think he is northern.'
Her pulse beat quicker for a moment; then she rejected the idea as absurd, though indeed, she reflected, she had seen him at Salzburg.
'He must at least be a brave man,' she said quietly. 'If you see him bring him to me that I may thank him. Is he in the town now?'
'No; he is yonder, where the Rathwand farms are, or were; where your Excellency sees those dark, long islands which are not islands at all, but only the summits of cherry orchards. He has carried the people away, carried them down to Peterwardein; and he is now about to try and rescue some cattle which were driven up on to the roof of a tower, poor beasts—that tower to the east there, very far away: it is five miles as the crow flies.'
'I suppose he will come into the town again?'
'He was here last night; he had heard of your Excellency, and asked for her health.'
'Ah! I will see and thank him if he come again.'
But no one that day saw the stranger in Idrac.
The rains fell again and the waters again rose. The maladies which come of damp and of bad exhalations spread amongst the people; they could not all be taken to other villages or towns, for there was no room for them. She had quinine, wines, good food ordered by the great steamers, but they were not yet arrived. What could be got at Neusatz or Peterwardein the yacht brought, but it was not enough for so many sick and starving people. The air began to grow fœtid from the many carcases of animals, though as they floated the vultures from the hills fed on them. She had a vessel turned into a floating hospital, and the most delicate of the sick folk carried to it, and had it anchored off the nearest port. Her patience, her calmness, and her courage did more to revive the sinking hearts of the homeless creatures than the cordials and the food. She was all day long out in her boat, being steered from one spot to another. At night she rested little and passed from one sick bed to another. She had never been so near to hopeless human misery before. At Hohenszalras no one was destitute.
One twilight hour on the ninth day, as she was rowed back to the castle stairs, she passed another boat in which were two lads and a man. The man was rowing, a dusky shadow in the gloom of the wet evening and the uncouthness of his waterproof pilot's dress; but she had a lantern beside her, and she flashed its light full on the boat as it passed her. When she reached the burg, she said to her servant Anton: 'Herr von Sabran is in Idrac; go and say that I desire to see him.'
Anton, who remembered him well, returned in an hour, and said he could neither find him nor hear of him.
All the night long, a cheerless tedious night, with the rain falling without and the storm that was raging in the Bosphorus sending its shrill echoes up the Danube, she sat by the beds of the sick women or paced up and down the dimly-lit Rittersaal in an impatience which it humiliated her to feel. It touched her that he should be here, so silently, so sedulously avoiding her, and doing so much for the people of Idrac, because they were her people. The old misgiving that she had been ungenerous in her treatment of him returned to her. He seemed always to have the finer part—thebeau rôle.To her, royal in giving, imperious in conduct, it brought a sense of failure, of inferiority. As she read the psalms in Hungarian to the sick Magyar women, her mind perpetually wandered away to him.
She did not see Sabran again, but she heard often of him. The fair stranger, as the people called him, was always conspicuous wherever the greatest danger was to be encountered. There was always peril in almost every movement where the undermined houses, the tottering walls, the stagnant water, the fever-reeking marshes presented at every turn a perpetual menace to life. 'He is not vainlyun fils des preux,' she thought, with a thrill of personal pride, as if someone near and dear to her were praised, as she listened to the stories of his intrepidity and his endurance. Whole nights spent in soaked clothes, in half swamped boats; whole days lost in impotent conflict with the ignorance or the poltroonery of an obstinate populace, continual risk encountered without counting its cost to rescue some poor man's sick beast, or pull a cripple from beneath falling beams, or a lad from choking mud; hour on hour of steady laborious rowing, of passage to and fro the sullen river with a freight of moaning, screaming peasantry—this was not child's play, nor had it any of the animation and excitation which in war or in adventure make of danger a strong wine that goes merrily and voluptuously to the head. It was all dull, stupid, unlovely, and he had come to it for her sake. For her sake certainly, though he never approached her; though when Anton at last found and took her message to him he excused himself from obedience to it by a plea that he was at that moment wet and weary, and had come from a hut where typhoid raged. She understood the excuse; she knew that he knew well she was no more afraid than he of that contagion. She admired him the more for his isolation; in these grey, rainy, tedious, melancholy days his figure seemed to grow into a luminous heroic shape like one of the heroes of the olden time. If he had once seemed to seek a guerdon for it the spell would have been broken. But he never did. She began to believe that such a knight deserved any recompense which she could give.
'Egon himself could have done no more,' she said in her own thoughts, and it was the highest praise that she could give to any man, for her Magyar cousin was the embodiment of all martial daring, of all chivalrous ardour, and had led his glittering hussars down on to the French bayonets, as on to the Prussian Krupp guns, with a fury that bore all before it, impetuous and irresistible as a stream of fired naphtha.
On the twelfth morning the river had sunk so much lower that the yacht arriving with medicines and stores of food from Neusatz signalled that she could not enter the creek on which Idrac stood, and waited orders. It had ceased to rain, but the winds were still strong and the skies heavy. She descended to her boat at the water-gate, and told the men to take her out to the yacht. It was early, the sun behind the clouds had barely climbed above the distant Wallachian woods, and the scene had lost nothing of its melancholy. A man was standing on the water-stairs as she descended them, and turned rapidly away, but she had seen him and stretched out her long staff and touched him lightly.
'Why do you avoid me?' she said, as he uncovered his head; 'my men sought you in all directions; I wished to thank you.'
He bowed low over the hand she held out to him. 'I ventured to be near at hand to be of use,' he answered. 'I was afraid the exposure, and, the damp, and all this pestilence would make you ill: you are not ill?'
'No; I am quite well. I have heard of all your courage and endurance. Idrac owes you a great debt.'
'I only pay my debt to Hohenszalras.'
They were both silent; a certain constraint was upon them both.
'How did you know of the inundation? It was unkind of you not to come to me,' she said, and her voice was unsteady as she spoke. 'I want so much to tell you, better than letters can do, all that we felt for you throughout that awful war.'
He turned away slightly with a shudder. 'You are too good. Thousands of men much better than I suffered much more.'
The tears rose to her eyes as she glanced at him. He was looking pale and worn. He had lost the gracefulinsoucianceof his earlier manner. He looked grave, weary, melancholy, like a man who had passed through dire disaster, unspeakable pain, and had seen his career snapped in two like a broken wand. But there was about him instead something soldierlike, proven, war-worn, which became him in her eyes, daughter of a race of warriors as she was.
'You have much to tell me, and I have much to hear,' she said, after a pause. 'You should have come to the monastery to be cured of your wounds. Why were you so mistrustful of our friendship?'
He coloured and was silent.
'Indeed,' she said gravely, 'we can honour brave men in the Tauern and in Idrac too. You are very brave. I do not know how to thank you for my people or for myself.'
'Pray do not speak so,' he said, in a very low voice. 'To see you again would be recompense for much worthier things than any I have done.'
'But you might have seen me long ago,' she said, with a certain nervousness new to her, 'had you only chosen to come to the Isle. I asked you twice.'
He looked at her with eyes of longing and pathetic appeal.
'Do not tempt me,' he murmured. 'If I yielded, and if you despised me——'
'How could I despise one who has so nobly saved the lives of my people?'
'You would do so.'
He spoke very low: he was silent a little while, then he said very softly:
'One evening, when we spoke together on the terrace at Hohenszalras, you leant your hand upon the ivy there. I plucked the leaf you touched; you did not see. I had the leaf with me all through the war. It was a talisman. It was like a holy thing. When your cousin's soldiers stripped me in their ambulance, they took it from me.'
His voice faltered. She listened and was moved to a profound emotion.
'I will give you something better,' she said very gravely. He did not ask her what she would give.
She looked away from him awhile, and her face flushed a little. She was thinking of what she would give him; a gift so great that the world would deem her mad to bestow it, and perhaps would deem him dishonoured to take it.
'How did you hear of these floods along the Danube?' she asked him, recovering her wonted composure.
'I read about them in telegrams in Paris,' he made answer. 'I had mustered courage to revisit my poor Paris; all I possess is there. Nothing has been injured; a shell burst quite close by but did not harm my apartments. I went to make arrangements for the sale of my collections, and on the second day that I arrived there I saw the news of the inundations of Idrac and the lower Danubian plains. I remembered the name of the town; I remembered it was yours. I remembered your saying once that where you had feudal rights you had feudal duties, so I came on the chance of being of service.'
'You have been most devoted to the people.'
'The people! What should I care though the whole town perished? Do not attribute to me a humanity that is not in my nature.'
'Be as cynical as you like in words so long as you are heroic in action. I am going out to the yacht; will you come with me?'
He hesitated. 'I merely came to hear from the warder of your health. I am going to catch the express steamer at Neusatz; all danger is over.'
'The yacht can take you to Neusatz. Come with me.'
He did not offer more opposition; he accompanied her to the boat and entered it.
The tears were in her eyes. She said nothing more, but she could not forget that scores of her own people here had owed their lives to his intrepidity and patience, and that he had never hesitated to throw his life into the balance when needed. And it had been done for her sake alone. The love of humanity might have been a nobler and purer motive, but it would not have touched her so nearly as the self-abandonment of a man by nature selfish and cold.
In a few moments they were taken to the yawl. He ascended the deck with her.
The tidings the skipper brought, the examination of the stores, the discussion of ways and means, the arrangements for the general relief, were air dull, practical matters that claimed careful attention and thought. She sat in the little cabin that was brave with marqueterie work and blue satin and Dresden mirrors, and made memoranda and calculations, and consulted him, and asked his advice on this, on that. The government official, sent to make official estimates of the losses in the township, had come on board to salute and take counsel with her. The whole forenoon passed in these details. He wrote, and calculated, and drew up reports for her. No more tender or personal word was spoken between them; but there was a certain charm for them both in this intimate intercourse, even though it took no other shape than the study of how many boatloads of wheat were needed for so many hundred people, of how many florins a day might be passed to the head of each family, of how many of the flooded houses would still be serviceable with restoration, of how many had been entirely destroyed, of how the town would best be rebuilt, and of how the inland rivers could best be restrained in the future.
To rebuild it she estimated that she would have to surrender for five years the revenues from her Galician and Hungarian mines, and she resolved to do it altogether at her own cost. She had no wish to see the town figure in public prints as the object of public subscription.
'I am sure all my woman friends,' she said, 'would kindly make it occasion for a fancy fair or a lottery (with new costumes) in Vienna, but I do not care for that sort of thing, and I can very well do what is needed alone.'
He was silent. He had always known that her riches were great, but he had never realised them as fully as he now did when she spoke of rebuilding an entire town as she might have spoken of building a carriage.
'You would make a good prime minister,' she said, smiling; 'you have the knowledge of a specialist on so many subjects.'
At noon they served her a little plain breakfast of Danubiansalbling, with Carlowitzer wine and fruit sent by the steward of Mohacs. She bade him join her in it.
'Had Egon himself been here he could not have done more for Idrac than you have done,' she said.
'Is this Prince Egon's wine?' he said abruptly, and on hearing that it was so, he set the glass down untasted.
She looked surprised, but she did not ask him his reason, for she divined it. There was an exaggeration in the unspoken hostility more like the days of Arthur and Lancelot than their own, but it did not displease her.
They were both little disposed to converse during their meal; after the dreary and terrible scenes they had been witness of, the atmosphere of life seems grave and dark even to those whom the calamity had not touched. The most careless spirit is oppressed by a sense of the precariousness and the cruelty of existence.
When they ascended to the deck the skies were lighter than they had been for many weeks; the fog had cleared, so that, in the distance, the towers of Neusatz and the fortress of Peterwardein were visible; vapour still hung over the vast Hungarian plain, but the Danube was clear and the affluents of it had sunk to their usual level.
'You really go to-night?' she said, as they looked down the river.
'There is no need for me to stay; the town is safe, and you are well, you say. If there be anything I can still do, command me.'
She smiled a little and let her eye meet his for a moment.
'Well, if I command you to remain then, will you do so as my viceroy? I want to return home; Aunt Ottilie grows daily more anxious, more alarmed, but I cannot leave these poor souls all alone with their priests, and their rabbi, who are all as timid as sheep and as stupid. Will you stay in the castle and govern them, and help them till they recover from their fright? It is much to ask, I know, but you have already done so much for Idrac that I am bold to ask you to do more?'
He coloured with a mingled emotion.
'You could ask me nothing that I would not do,' he said in a low tone. 'I could wish you asked me something harder.'
'Oh, it will be very hard,' she said, with an indifference she did not feel. 'It will be very dull, and you will have no one to speak to that knows anything save how to grow flax and cherries. You will have to talk the Magyar tongue all day, and you will have nothing to eat savekartoffelnandsalbling; and I do not know that I am even right,' she added, more gravely, 'to ask you to incur the risks that come from all that soaked, ground, which will be damp so long.'
'The risks that you have borne yourself! Pray do not wound me by any such scruple as that. I shall be glad, I shall be proud, to be for ever so short or so long a time as you command, your representative, your servant.'
'You are very good.'
'No.'
His eyes looked at hers with a quick flash, in which all the passion he dared not express was spoken. She averted her glance and continued calmly: 'You are very good indeed to Idrac. It will be a great assistance and comfort to me to know that you are here. The poor people already love you, and you will write to me and tell me all that may need to be done. I will leave you the yacht and Anton. I shall return by land with my woman; and when I reach home I will send you Herr Greswold. He is a good companion, and has a great admiration for you, though he wishes that you had not forsaken the science of botany.'
'It is like all other dissection or vivisection; it spoils the artistic appreciation of the whole. I am yet unsophisticated enough to feel the charm of a bank of violets, of a cliff covered with alpen-roses. I may write to you?'
'You must write to me! It is you who will know all the needs of Idrac. But are you sure that to remain here will not interfere with your own projects, your own wishes, your own duties?'
'I have none. If I had any I would throw them away, with pleasure, to be of use to one of your dogs, to one of your birds.'
She moved from his side a little.
'Look how the sun has come out. I can see the sparkle of the brass on the cannon down yonder at Neusatz. We had better go now. I must see my sick people and then leave as soon as I can. The yacht must take me to Mohacs; from there I will send her back to you.'
'Do as you will. I can have no greater happiness than to obey you.'
'I am sure that I thank you in the way that you like best, when I say that I believe you.'
She said the words in a very low tone, but so calmly that the calmness of them checked any other words he might have uttered. It was a royal acceptance of a loyal service; nothing more. The boat took them back to the fortress. Whilst she was occupied in her farewell to the sick people, and her instructions to those who attended on them, he, left to himself in the apartment she had made her own, instinctively went to an old harpsichord that stood there and touched the keys. It had a beautiful case, rich with the varnish of the Martins. He played with it awhile for its external beauty, and then let his fingers stray over its limited keyboard. It had still sweetness in it, like the spinet of Hohenszalras. It suited certain pathetic quaint old German airs he knew, and which he half unconsciously reproduced upon it, singing them as he did so in a low tone. The melody, very soft and subdued, suited to the place where death had been so busy and nature so unsparing, and where a resigned exhaustion had now succeeded to the madness of terror, reached the ears of the sick women in the Rittersaal and of Wanda von Szalras seated beside their beds.
'It is like the saints in Heaven sighing in pity for us here,' said one of the women who was very feeble and old, and she smiled as she heard. The notes, tremulous from age but penetrating in their sweetness, came in slow calm movements of harmony through the stillness of the chamber; his voice, very low also, but clear, ascended with them. Wanda sat quite still, and listened with a strange pleasure. 'He alone,' she thought, 'can make the dumb strings speak.
It was almost dusk when she descended to the room which she had made her own. In the passages of the castle oil wicks were lighted in the iron lamps and wall sconces, but here it was without any light, and in the gloom she saw the dim outline of his form as he sat by the harpsichord. He had ceased playing; his head was bent down and rested on the instrument; he was lost in thought, and his whole attitude was dejected. He did not hear her approach, and she looked at him some moments, herself unseen. A great tenderness came over her: he was unhappy, and he had been very brave, very generous, very loyal: she felt almost ashamed. She went nearer, and he raised himself abruptly.
'I am going,' she said to him. 'Will you come with me to the yacht?'
He rose, and though it was dusk, and in this chamber so dark that his face was indistinct to her, she was sure that tears had been in his eyes.
'Your old harpsichord has the vernis Martin,' he said, with effort. 'You should not leave it buried here. It has a melody in it too, faint and simple and full of the past, like the smell of dead rose-leaves. Yes, I will have the honour to come with you. I wish there were a full moon. It will be a dark night on the Danube.'
'My men know the soundings of the river well. As for the harpsichord, you alone have found its voice. It shall go to your rooms in Paris.'
'You are too good, but I would not take it. Let it go to Hohenszalras.'
'Why would you not take it?
'I would take nothing from you.'
He spoke abruptly, and with some sternness.
'I think there is such a thing as being too proud? she said, with hesitation.
'Your ancestors would not say so,' he answered, with an effort; she understood the meaning that underlay the words. He turned away and closed the lid of the harpsichord, where little painted cupids wantoned in a border of metal scroll-work.
All the men and women well enough to stand crowded on the water-stairs to see her departure; little children were held up in their mother's arms and bidden remember her for evermore; all feeble creatures lifted up their voices to praise her; Jew and Christian blessed her; the water-gate was cumbered with sobbing people, trying to see her face, to kiss her skirt for the last time. She could not be wholly unmoved before that unaffected, irrepressible emotion. Their poor lives were not worth much, but such as they were she, under Heaven, had saved them.
'I will return and see you again,' she said to them, as she made a slow way through the eager crowd. 'Thank Heaven, my people, not me. And I leave my friend with you, who did much more for you than I. Respect him and obey him.'
They raised with their thin trembling voices a loudEljén! of homage and promise, and she passed away from their sight into the evening shadows on the wide river.
Sabran accompanied her to the vessel, which was to take her to the town of Mohacs, thence to make her journey home by railway.
'I shall not leave until you bid me, even though you should forget to call me all in my life!' he said, as the boat slipped through the dark water.
'Such oblivion would be a poor reward.'
'I have had reward enough. You have called me your friend.'
She was silent. The boat ran through the dusk and the rippling rays of light streaming from the sides of the yacht, and they went on board. He stood a moment with uncovered head before her on the deck, and she gave him her hand.
'You will come to the Holy Isle?' she said, as she did so.
'If you bid me,' he said, as he bowed and kissed her hand. His lips trembled as he did so, and by the lamplight she saw that he was very pale.
'I shall bid you,' she said, very softly, by-and-by. Farewell!'
He bowed very low once more, then he dropped over the yacht's side into the boat waiting below; the splash of the oars told her he was gone back to Idrac. The yawl weighed anchor and began to go up the river, a troublesome and tedious passage at all seasons. She sat on deck watching the strong current of the Danube as it rolled on under the bow of the schooner. For more than a league she could see the beacon that burned by the water-gate of the fortress. When the curve of the stream hid it from her eyes she felt a pang of painful separation, of wistful attachment to the old dreary walls where she had seen so much suffering and so much courage, and where she had learned to read her own heart without any possibility of ignoring its secrets. A smile came on her mouth and a moisture in her eyes as she sat alone in the dark autumn night, while the schooner made her slow ascent through the swell that accompanies the influx of the Drave.
In two days' time Hohenszalras received its mistress home.
She was not in any way harmed by the perils she had encountered, and the chills and fever to which she had been exposed. On the contrary, her eyes had a light and her face had a bloom which for many months had not been there.
The Princess heard a brief sketch of what had passed in almost total silence. She had disapproved strongly, and she said that her disapproval could not change, though a merciful heavenly host had spared her the realisation of her worst fears.
The name of Sabran was not spoken. Wanda was of a most truthful temper, but she could not bring herself to speak of his presence at Idrac; the facts would reveal themselves inevitably soon enough.
She sent Greswold to the Danube laden with stores and medicines. She received a letter every morning from her delegate; but he wrote briefly, and with scrupulous care, the statements of facts connected with the town and reports of what had been done. Her engineer had arrived from the mines by Kremnitz, and the builders estimated that the waters would have subsided and settled enough, if no fresh rising took place, for them to begin the reconstruction of the town with the beginning of the new month. Ague and fever were still very common, and fresh cases were brought in every hour to the hospital in the fortress. He wrote on the arrival of Herr Greswold, that, with her permission, he himself would still stay on, for the people had grown used to him, and having some knowledge of hydraulics he would be interested to see the plans proposed by her engineers for preserving the town from similar calamities.
Three weeks passed; all that time she spoke but little either of him or of any other subject. She took endless rides, and she sat many hours doing nothing in the white room, absorbed in thought. The Princess, who had learned what had passed, with admirable exercise of tact and self-restraint made neither suggestion nor innuendo, and accepted the presence of a French Marquis at a little obscure town in Sclavonia as if it were the most natural circumstance in the world.
'All the Szalras have been imperious, arrogant, and of complicated character,' she thought; 'she has the same temper, though it is mitigated in her by great natural nobility of disposition and strong purity of motives. She will do as she chooses, let all the world do what it may to change her. If I say a word either way it may take effect in some wholly unforeseen manner that I should regret. It is better to abstain. In doubt do nothing, is the soundest of axioms.'
And Princess Ottilie, who on occasion had the wisdom of the serpent with the sweetness of the dove, preserved a discreet silence, and devoured her really absorbing curiosity in her own heart.
At the end of the fourth week she heard that all was well at Idrac, so far as it could be so in a place almost wholly destroyed. There was no sign of renewed rising of the inland streams. The illness was diminished, almost conquered; the people had begun to take heart and hope, and, being aided, wished to aid themselves. The works for new embankments, water-gates, and streets were already planned, though they could not be begun until the spring. Meanwhile, strong wooden houses were being erected on dry places, which which could shelterad interimmany hundreds of families; the farmers were gradually venturing to return to their flooded lands. The town had suffered grievously and in much irreparably, but it began to resume its trade and its normal life.
She hesitated a whole day when she heard this. Though Sabran did not hint at any desire of his own to leave the place, she knew it, was impossible to bid him remain longer, and that a moment of irrevocable decision was come. She hesitated all the day, slept little all the night, then sent him a brief telegram: 'Come to the Island.'
Obey the summons as rapidly as he might, he could not travel by Vienna and Salzburg more quickly than in some thirty hours or more. The time passed to her in a curious confusion and anxiety. Outwardly she was calm enough; she visited the schools, wrote some letters, and took her usual long ride in the now leafless woods, but at heart she was unquiet and ill at ease, troubled more than by anything else at the force of the desire she felt to meet him once more. It was but a month since they had parted on the deck, and it seemed ten years. She had known what he had meant when he had said that he would come if she bade him; she had known that she would only do the sheerest cruelty and treachery if she called him thither only to dismiss him. It had not been a visit of the moment, but all his life that she had consented to take when she had written 'Come to the Island.'
She would never have written it unless she had been prepared to fulfil all to which it tacitly pledged her. She was incapable of wantonly playing with any passion that moved another, least of all with his. The very difference of their position would have made indecision or coyness in her seem cruelty, humiliation. The decision hurt her curiously with a sense of abdication, mortification, and almost shame. To a very proud woman in whom the senses have never asserted their empire, there is inevitably an emotion of almost shame, of self-surrender, of loss of self-respect, in the first impulses of love. It made her abashed and humiliated to feel the excitation that the mere touch of his hand, the mere gaze of his eyes, had power to cause her. 'If this be love,' she thought, 'no wonder the world is lost for it.'
Do what she would, the time seemed very long; the two evenings that passed were very tedious and oppressive. The Princess seemed to observe nothing of what she was perfectly conscious of, and her flute-like voice murmured on in an unending stream of commonplaces to which her niece replied much at random.
In the afternoon of the third day she stood on the terrace looking down the lake and towards the Holy Isle, with an impatience of which she was in turn impatient. She was dressed in white woollen stuff with silver threads in it; she had about her throat an old necklace of the Golden Fleece, of golden shells enamelled, which had been a gift from Charles the Fifth to one of her house; over her shoulders, for the approach of evening was cold, she had thrown a cloak of black Russian sables. She made a figure beautiful, stately, patrician, in keeping with the background of the great donjon tower, and the pinnacled roofs, and the bronze warriors in their Gothic niches.
When she had stood there a few minutes looking down the lake towards the willows of the monastery island, a boat came out from the willow thickets, and came over the mile-and-half of green shadowy water. There was only one person in it. She recognised him whilst he was still far off, and a smile came on her mouth that it was a pity he could not see.
He was a bold man, but his heart stood still with awe of her, and his soul trembled within him at this supreme moment of his fate. For he believed that she would not have bidden him there unless her hand were ready to hold out destiny to him—the destiny of his maddest, of his sweetest, dreams.
She came forward a few paces to meet him; her face was grave and pale, but her eyes had a soft suppressed light.
'I have much for which to thank you,' she said, as she held out her hand to him. Her voice was tremulous though calm.
He kissed her hand, then stood silent. It seemed to him that there was nothing to say. She knew what he would have said if he had been king, or hero, or meet mate for her. His pulses were beating feverishly, his self-possession was gone, his eyes did not dare to meet hers. He felt as if the green woods, the shining waters, the rain-burdened skies were wheeling round him. That dumbness, that weakness, in a man so facile of eloquence, so hardy and even cynical in courage, touched her to a wondering pitifulness.
'After all,' she thought once more, 'if we love one another what is it to anyone else? We are both free.'
If the gift she would give would be so great that the world would blame him for accepting it, what would that matter so long as she knew him blameless?
They were both mute: he did not even look at her, and she might have heard the beating of his heart. She looked at him and the colour came back into her face, the smile back upon her mouth.
'My friend,' she said very gently,'did never you think that I also——'
She paused: it was very hard to her to say what she must say, and he could not help her, dared not help her, to utter it.
They stood thus another moment mute, with the sunset glow upon the shining water, and upon the feudal majesty of the great castle.
Then she looked at him with a straight, clear, noble glance, and with the rich blood mounting in her face, stretched out her hand to him with a royal gesture.
'They robbed you of your ivy leaf, my cruel Prussian cousins. Will you—take—this—instead?'
Then Heaven itself opened to his eyes. He did not take her hand. He fell at her feet and kissed them.
Is it wisest after all to be very unwise, dear mother mine?' she said a little later, with a smile that was tender and happy.
The Princess looked up quickly, and so looking understood.
'Oh, my beloved, is it indeed so? Yes, you are wise to listen to your heart; God speaks in it!'
With tears in her eyes she stretched out her pretty hands in solemn benediction.
'Be His Spirit for ever with you,' she said with great emotion. 'I shall be so content to know that I leave you not alone when our Father calls me, for I think your very greatness and dominion, my dear, but make you the more lonely, as sovereigns are, and it is not well to be alone, Wanda; it is well to have human love close about us.'
'It is to lean on a reed, perhaps,'murmured Wanda, in that persistent misgiving which possessed her. 'And when the reed breaks, then though it has been so weak before, it becomes of iron, barbed and poisoned.'
'What gloomy thoughts! And you have made me so happy, and surely you are happy yourself?'
'Yes. My reed is in full flower, but—but—yes, I am happy; I hope that Bela knows.'
The Princess kissed her once again.
'Ah! he loves you so well.'
'That I am sure of; yet I might never have known it but for you.'
'I did for the best.'
'I will send him to you. I want to be alone a little. Dear mother, he cares for you as tenderly as though he were your son.'
'I have been his friend always,' said the Princess, with a smile, whilst the tears still stood in her eyes. 'You cannot say so much, Wanda; you were very harsh.'
'I know it. I will atone to him.'
The eyes of the Princess followed her tenderly.'
'And she will make her atonement generously, grandly,' she thought. 'She is a woman of few protestations, but of fine impulses and of unerring magnanimity. She will be incapable of reminding him that their kingdom is hers. I have done this thing; may Heaven be with it! If she had loved no one, life would have grown so pale, so chill, so monotonous to her; she would have tired of herself, having nothing but herself for contemplation. Solitude has been only grand to her hitherto because she has been young, but as the years rolled on she would have died without ever having lived; now she will live. She may have to bear pains, griefs, infidelities, calamities that she would have escaped; but even so, how much better the summer day, even with the summer storm, than the dull, grey, quiet, windless weather! Of course, if she could have found sanctuary in the Church——But her faith is not absolute and unwavering enough for that; she has read too many philosophies; she requires, too, open-air and vigorous life; the cloister would have been to her a prison. She is one of those whose religion lies in activity; she will worship God through her children.'
Sabran entered as she mused, and knelt down before her.
'You have been my good angel, always,' he murmured. 'How can I thank you? I think she would never have let her eyes rest on me but for you.'
The Princess smiled.
'My friend, you are one of those on whom the eyes of women willingly rest, perhaps too willingly. But you—you will have no eyes for any other now? You must deserve my faith in you. Is it not so?'
'Ah, madame,' he answered with deep emotion, 'all words seem so trite and empty; any fool can make phrases, but when I say that my life shall be consecrated to her, I mean it, in the uttermost royalty, the uttermost gratitude.'
'I believe you,' said the Princess, as she laid her hand lightly on his bent head. 'Perhaps no man can understand entirely all that she surrenders in admitting that she loves you; for a proud woman to confess so much of weakness is very hard: but I think you will comprehend her better than any other would. I think you will not force her to pass the door of disillusion; and remember that though she will leave you free as air—for she is not made of that poor stuff which would enslave what it loves—she would not soon forgive too great abuse of freedom. I mean if you were ever—ever unfaithful——
'For what do you take me?' he cried, with indignant passion. 'Is there another woman in the world who could sit beside her, and not be dwarfed, paled, killed, as a candle by the sun?'
'You are only her betrothed,' said the Princess, with a little sigh. 'Men see their wives with different eyes; so I have been told, at least. Familiarity is no courtier, and time is always cruel.'
'Nay, time shall be our dearest friend,' said Sabran, with a tenderness in his voice that spoke more constancy than a thousand oaths. 'She will be beautiful when she is old, as you are; age will neither alarm nor steal from her; her bodily beauty is like her spiritual, it is cast in lines too pure and clear not to defy the years. Oh, mother mine! (let me call you that) fear nothing; I will love her so well that, all unworthy now, I will grow worthy her, and cause her no moment's pain that human love can spare her.'
'Her people shall be your people, and her God your God,' murmured the Princess, with her hand still lying lightly on his head, obediently bent.
When late that night he went across the lake the monks were at their midnight orisons; their voices murmured as one man's the Latin words of praise and prayer, and made a sound like that of a great sea rolling slowly on a lonely shore.
He believed naught that they believed. Deity was but a phrase to him; faith and a future life were empty syllables to him. Yet, in the fulness of his joy and the humiliation of his spirit, he felt his heart swell, his pride sink subdued. He knelt down in the hush and twilight of that humble place of prayer, and for the first moment in many years he also praised God.
No one heeded him; he knelt behind them in the gloom unnoticed; he rose refreshed as men in barren lands in drought are soothed by hearing the glad fall of welcome rain. He had no place there, and in another hour would have smiled at his own weakness; but now he remembered nothing except that he, utterly beyond his deserts, was blessed. As the monks rose to their feet and their loud chanting began to vibrate in the air, he went out unheard, as he had entered, and stood on the narrow strip of land that parted the chapel from the lake. The green waters were rolling freshly in under a strong wind, the shadows of coming night were stealing on; in the south-west a pale yellow moonlight stretched broadly in a light serene as dawn, and against it there rose squarely and darkly with its many turrets the great keep of Hohenszalras.
He looked, but it was not of that great pile and all which it represented and symbolised that he thought now.
It was of the woman he loved as a woman, not as a great possessor of wealth and lands.
'Almost I wish that she were poor as the saints she resembles!' he thought, with a tender passion that for the hour was true. It seemed to him that had he seen her standing in her shift in the snow, like our Lady of Hungary, discrowned and homeless, he would have been glad. He was honest with the honesty of passion. It was not the mistress of Hohenszalras that he loved, but his own wife.
Such a marriage could not do otherwise than arouse by its announcement the most angry amazement, the most indignant protests from all the mighty houses with which for so many centuries the house of Szalras had allied itself. In a few tranquil sentences she made known her intentions to those of her relations whom she felt bound thus to honour; but she gave them clearly to understand that it was a formula of respect not an act of consultation. When they received her letters they knew that her marriage was already quite as irrevocable as though it had already taken place in the Hof-Kapelle of Vienna.
All her relatives and all her order were opposed to her betrothal; a cold sufferance was the uttermost which any of them extended to Sabran. A foreigner and poor, and, with a troubled and uncertain past behind him, he was bitterly unwelcome to the haughty Prussian, Austrian, and Hungarian nobilities to which she belonged; neither his ancient name nor his recent political brilliancy and military service could place him on an equality with them in their eyes. Her trustees, the Grand Duke of Lilienhöhe and the Cardinal Vàsàrhely, with her cousin Kaulnitz, hurried in person as swiftly as special trains could bring them to the Iselthal, but they were too late to avert the blow.
'It is not a marriage for her,' said Kaulnitz, angrily.
'Why not? It is a very old family,' said the Princess, with no less irritation.
'But quite decayed, long ruined,' he returned. 'This man was himself born in exile.'
'As they exile everybody twice in every ten years in France!
'And there have been stories——'
'Of whom are there not stories? Calumny is the parasite of character; the stronger the character the closer to it clings the strangler.'
'I never heard him accused of any strength, except of the wrist inl'escrime!'
'Do you know anything dishonourable of him? If you do you are bound to say it.'
'Dishonourable is a grave word. No, I cannot say that I do; the society he frequents is a guarantee against that; but his life has been indifferent, complicated, uncertain, not a life to be allied with that of such a woman as Wanda. My dear Princess, it has been a lifedans le milieu parisien; what more would you have me say?'
'Prince Archambaud's has been that. Yet three years since you earnestly pressed his suit on Wanda.'
'Archambaud! He is one of the first alliances in Europe; he is of blood royal, and he has not been more vicious than other men.'
'It would be better he should have been less so, since he lives so near 'the fierce light that beats upon the throne;' an electric light which blackens while it illumines! My good Kaulnitz, you wander very far afield. If you know anything serious against M. de Sabran it is your duty to say it.'
'He is a gambler.'
'He has renounced gambling.'
'He is a duellist.'
'Society was of much better constitution when the duel was its habitual phlebotomy.'
'He has been the lover of many women.'
'I am afraid that is nothing singular.'
'He is hardly more than an adventurer.'
'He counts his ancestry in unbroken succession from the clays of Dagobert.
'He has nothing but apignon sur ruein Paris, and a league or two of rocks and sand in Brittany; yet, though so poor, he made money enough by cards and speculation to be for three years theamant en titreof Cochonette.'
Madame Ottilie rose with a little frown.
'I think we will say no more, my dear Baron; the matter is, after all, not yours or mine to decide. Wanda will assuredly do as she likes.'
'But you have so much influence with her.'
'I have none; no one has any: and I think you do not understand her in the least. It may cost her very much to avow to him that she loves him, but once having done that, it will cost her nothing at all to avow it to the world. She is much too proud a woman to care for the world.'
'He isgentilhomme de race, I grant,' admitted with reluctance the Grand Duke of Lilienhöhe.
'When has a noble of Brittany been otherwise?' asked the Princess Ottilie.
'I know,' said the Prince; 'but you will admit that he occupies a difficult position—an invidious one.'
'And he carries himself well through it. It is a difficult position which is the test of breeding,' said the Princess, triumphantly, 'and I deny entirely that it is what you call an invidious one. It is you who have the idea of the crowd when you lay so much stress on the mere absence of money.'
'It is the idea of the crowd that dominates in this age.'
'The more reason for us to resist it, if it be so.'
'I think you are in love with him yourself, my sister!'
'I should be were I forty years younger.'
The Countess Brancka alone wrote with any sort of sympathy and pleasure to congratulate them both.
'I was sure that Parsifal would win soon or late,' she said. 'Only remember that he is a Parsifaldoubléby a de Morny.'
Wanda read that line with contracted brows. It angered her more than the outspoken remonstrances of the Vàsàrhely, of the Lilienhöhe, of the Kaulnitz, of the many great families to whom she was allied. De Morny!—a bastard, an intriguer, a speculator, a debaucher! The comparison had an evil insinuation, and displeased her!
She was not a woman, however, likely either for insinuation or remonstrance to change her decisions or abandon her wishes. She had so much of the 'éternel féminin' in her that she was only the more resolved in her own course because others, by evil prophecy and exaggerated fears, sought to turn her from it. What they said was natural, she granted, but it was unjust and would be unjustified. All the expostulation, diplomatically hinted or stoutly outspoken, of those who considered that they had the right to make such remonstrances produced not the smallest effect upon the mind of the woman whom, as Baron Kaulnitz angrily expressed it, Sabran had magnetised. Once again Love was a magician, against whom wisdom, prudence, and friendship had no power of persuasion.
The melancholy that she observed in him seemed to her only the more graceful; there was no vulgar triumph in his own victory, such as might have suggested that the material advantages of that triumph were present to him. That he loved her greatly she could not doubt, and that he had striven to conceal it from her she could not doubt either. The sadness which at times overcame him was but natural in a proud man, whose fortunes were unequal to his birth, and who was also sensible of many brilliant gifts, intellectual, that he had wasted, which, had they been fully utilised, would have justified his aspiration to her hand.
'Try and persuade him,' she said to Mdme. Ottilie, 'to think less of this mere accident of difference between us. If it were difference of birth it might be insurmountable or intolerably painful; but a mere difference of riches matters no more than the colour of one's eyes, or the inches of one's stature.'
The Princess shook her head.
'If he did not feel it as he does, he would not be the man that he is. A marriage contract to which the lover brings nothing must always be humiliating to himself. Besides, it seems to him that the world at large must condemn him as a mere fortune-hunter.'
'Since I am convinced of the honesty and purity of his motives, what matters the opinion of others?'
'How can he tell that the world may not some day induce you to doubt those motives?'
Wanda did not reply.
'But he will cease to think of any disparity when all that is mine has been his a year or two,' she thought. 'All the people shall look to him as their lord, since he will be mine; even if I think differently to him on any matter I will not say it, lest I should remind him that the power lies with me; he shall be no prince consort, he shall be king.'
As the generous resolve passed dreamily through her mind she was listening to the Coronation Mass of Liszt, as he played it on the organ within. It sounded to her like the hymn of the future; a chorus of grave and glorious voices shouting welcome to the serene and joyous years to come.
When she was next alone with him she said to him very tenderly:
'I want you to promise me one thing.'
'I promise you all things. What is this one?'
'It is this: you are troubled at the thought that I have one of those great fortunes which form theacte d'accusationof socialists against society, and that you have lost all except the rocks and salt beach of Romans. Now I want you to promise me never to think of this fact. It is beneath you. Fortune is so precarious a thing, so easily destroyed by war or revolution, that it is not worth contemplation as a serious barrier between human beings. A treachery, a sin, even a lie, any one of those may be a wall of adamant, but a mere fortune!—Promise me that you will never think of mine, except inasmuch, my beloved, as it may enhance my happiness by ministering to yours.'
He had grown very pale as she spoke, and his lips had twice parted to speak without words coming from them. When she had ceased he still remained silent.
'I do not like the world to come between us, even in a memory; it is too much flattery to it,' she continued. 'Surely it is treason against me to be troubled by what a few silly persons will or will not say in a few salons? You have too little vanity, I think, where others have too much!'
He stooped and kissed her hand.
'Could any man live and fail to be humble before you?' he said with passionate tenderness. 'Yes, the world will say, and say rightly, that I have done a base thing, and I cannot forget that the world will be right; yet since you honour me with your divine pity, can I turn away from it? Could a dying man refuse a draught of the water of life?'
A great agitation mastered him for the moment. He hid his face upon her hands as he held them clasped in his.
'We will drink that wafer together, and as long as we are together it will never be bitter, I think,' she said very softly.
Her voice seemed to sink into his very soul, so much it said of faith, so much it aroused of remorse.
Then the great joy which had entered his life, like a great dazzling flood of light suddenly let loose into a darkened chamber, so blinded consumed, and intoxicated him, that he forgot all else; all else save this one fact—she would be his, body and soul, night and day, in life and in death for ever; his children borne by her, his life spent with her, her whole existence surrendered to him.
For some days after that she mused upon the possibility of rendering him entirely independent of herself, without insulting him by a direct offer of a share in her possessions. At last a solution occurred to her. The whole of the fiefs of Idrac constituted a considerable appanage apart; its title went with it. When it had come into the Szalras family by marriage, as far back as the fifteenth century, it had been a principality; it was still a seigneurie, and many curious feudal privileges and distinctions went with it.
It was Idrac now that she determined to abandon to her lover.
'He will be seigneur of Idrac,' she thought, 'and I shall be so glad for him to bear an Austrian name.'
'She herself would always retain her own name, and would take no other.
'We will go and revisit it together,' she thought, and though she was all alone' at that moment, a soft warmth came into her face, and a throb of emotion to her heart, as she remembered all that would lie in that one word 'together,' all the tender and intimate union of the years to come.
Her trustees were furious, and sought the aid of the men of law to enable them to step in and arrest her in what they deemed a course of self-destruction, but the law could not give them so much power; she was her own mistress, and as sole inheritrix had received her possessions singularly untrammelled by restrictions. In vain Prince Lilienhöhe spent his severe and chilly anger, Kaulnitz his fine sarcasm and delicate insinuations, and the Cardinal his stately and authoritative wrath. She was not to be altered in her decision.
Austrian law allowed her to give away an estate to her husband if she chose, and there was nothing in the private settlements of her property to prevent her availing herself of the law.
Strenuous opposition was encountered by her to this project, by every one of her relatives, hardly excluding the Princess Ottilie; 'for,' said that sagacious recluse, 'your horses may show you, my dear, the dangers of a rein too loose.'
'I want no rein at all,' said Wanda. 'You forget that, to my thinking, marriage should never be bondage; two people with independent wills, tastes, and habits should mutually concede a perfect independence of action to each other. When one must yield, it must be the woman.'
'Those are very fine theories,' the Princess remarked with caution.
'I hope we shall put them in practice,' said Wanda, with unruffled good humour. 'Dear mother, I am sure you can understand that I want him to feel he is wholly independent of me. To what I love best on earth shall I dole out a niggard largesse from my wealth? If I were capable of doing so he would grow in time to hate me, and his hatred would be justified.'
'I never should have supposed you would become so romantic,' said the Princess.
'It will make him independent of you,' objected Prince Lilienhöhe.
'That is what, beyond all, I desire him to be,' she answered.
'It is an infatuation,' sighed Cardinal Vàsàrhely, out of her hearing, 'when Egon would have brought to her a fortune as large as her own.'
'You think water should always run to the sea,' said Princess Ottilie; 'surely that is great waste sometimes?'
'I think you are as infatuated as she is,' murmured the Cardinal. 'You forget that had she not been inspired with this unhappy sentiment she would have most probably left Hohenszalras to the Church.'
'She would have done nothing of the kind. Your Eminence mistakes,' answered Madame Ottilie, sharply. 'Hohenszalras and everything else, had she died unmarried, would have certainly gone to the Habsburgs.'
That would have been better than to an adventurer.'
'How can you call a Breton noble ah adventurer? It is one of the purest aristocracies of the world, if poor.'
'Ce que femme veut,' sighed his Eminence, who knew how often even the Church had been worsted by women.
The Countess von Szalras had her way, and although when the marriage-deeds were drawn up they all set aside completely any possibility of authority or of interference on the part of her husband, and maintained in the clearest and firmest manner her entire liberty of action and enjoyment of inalienable properties and powers, she had the deed of gift of Idrac locked up in her cabinet, and thought to herself, as the long dreary preamble and provisions of the law were read aloud to her, 'So will he be always his own master. What pleasure that your hawk stays by you if you chain him to your wrist? If he love you he will sail back uncalled from the longest flight. I think mine always will. If not—if not—well, he must go!'
One morning she came to him with a great roll of yellow parchment emblazoned and with huge seals bearing heraldic arms and crowns. She spread it out before him as they stood alone in the Rittersaal. He looked scarcely at it, always at her. She wore a gown of old gold plush that gleamed and glowed as she moved, and she had a knot of yellow tea-roses at her breast, fastened in with a little dagger of sapphires. She had never looked more truly a great lady, more like a châtelaine of the Renaissance, as she spread out the great roll of parchment before him on one of the tables of the knights' hall.
'Look!' she said to him. 'I had the lawyers bring this over for you to see. It is the deed by which Stephen, first Christian King of Hungary, confirmed to the Counts of Idrac in the year 1001 all their feudal rights to that town and district, as a fief. They had been lords there long before. Look at it; here, farther down you see is the reconfirmation of the charter under the Habsburg seal, when Hungary passed to them; but you do not attend, where are your eyes?'
'On you! Carolus Duran must paint you again in that dead gold with those roses.'
'They are only hothouse roses; who cares for them? I love no forced flowers either in nature or humanity. Come, study this old parchment. It must have some interest for you. It is what makes you lord of Idrac.'
'What have I to do with Idrac? It is one of the many jewels of your coronet, to which I can add none!'
But to please her he bent over the crabbed black letter and the antique blazonings of the great roll to which the great dead men had set their sign and seal. She watched him as he read it, then after a little time she put her hand with a caressing movement on his shoulder.
'My love, I can do just as I will with Idrac. The lawyers are agreed on that, and the Kaiser will confirm whatever I do. Now I want to give you Idrac, make you wholly lord of it; indeed, the thing is already done. I have signed all the documents needful, and, as I say, the Emperor will confirm any part of them that needs his assent. My Réné, you are a very proud man, but you will not be too proud to take Idrac and its title from your wife. But for that town who can say that our lives might not have been passed for ever apart? Why do you look so grave? The Kaiser and I both want you to be Austrian. When I transfer to you the fief of Idrac you are its Count for evermore.'