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WANDA

BY

OUIDA

_'Doch!--alles was dazu mich trieb_;
_Gott!--war so gut, ach, war so lieb!_'
Goethe

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1873

TO

'A PERFECT WOMAN, NOBLY PLANN'D'

WALPURGA, LADY PAGET

NÉE

COUNTESS VON HOHENTHAL

This book is inscribed

IN ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION

WANDA.

PROEM.

    Doch--alles was dazu mich trieb,
    Gott! war so gut! ach, war so lieb!--GOETHE.

Towards the close of a summer's day in Russia a travelling carriage was
compelled to pause before a little village whilst a smith rudely mended
its broken wheel. The hamlet was composed of a few very poor dwellings
grouped around a large low horse-shoe shaped building, which was the
manorial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and dropping
to decay; its many windows were barred and shuttered; the grass grew in
its courts, and flowering weeds had time to seed and root themselves
on its whitewashed walls.

Around it the level ground was at this season covered with green
wheat, spreading for leagues on leagues, and billowing and undulating
under the wind that blew from the steppes, like the green sea which it
resembled. Farther on were woods of larch and clumps of willow; and in
the distance, across the great plain to the westward, rolled a vast
shining river, here golden with choking sand, here dun-coloured with
turbid waves, here broken with islets and swamps of reeds, where the
singing swan and the pelican made their nests.

It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the Volga rolls
its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was bleak and mournful,
though for many leagues the green corn spread and caught the timid
sunshine and the shadow of the clouds. There were a few stunted
willows near the house, and a few gashed pines; a dried-up lake was
glittering with crystals of salt; the domes and minarets of a little
city rose above the sky line far away to the south-east; and farther
yet northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains; the wall of
stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All was desolate,
melancholy, isolated, even though the season was early summer; but the
vastness of the view, the majesty of the river, the suggestion of the
faint blue summits where the Urals rose against the sky, gave solemnity
and a melancholy charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous and
tedious.

Prince Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff was in Russia because he was on the
point of marriage with a great heiress of the southern provinces, and
was travelling across from Orenburg to the Krimea, where his betrothed
bride awaited him in the summer palace of her fathers. Russia, with the
exception of Petersburg, was an unknown and detested place to him; his
errand was distasteful, his journey tedious, his temper irritated; and
when a wheel of his _telegue_ came off in this miserable village of
the Northern Volga district, he was in no mood to brook with patience
such an accident. He paced to and fro restlessly as he looked round on
the few and miserable cabins of a district that had been continually
harried and fired through many centuries by Kossack and Tartar.

'Whose house is that?' he said to his servant, pointing to the great
white building.

The servant humbly answered, 'Little father, it is thine.'

'Mine!' echoed Paul Zabaroff. He was astonished; then he laughed, as he
remembered that he had large properties around the city of Kazán.

The whole soil was his own as far as his eyes could reach, till the
great river formed its boundary. He did not even know his steward here;
the villagers did not know him. He had been here once only, a single
night, in the late autumn time, long, long before, He was a man in
whose life incidents followed each other too rapidly for remembrance
to have any abiding-place or regret any home in his mind. He had
immense estates, north, south, east, west; his agents forwarded him
the revenues of each, or as much of the revenues as they chose him to
enjoy, when they themselves were satisfied with their gains.

When he was not in Paris he was in Petersburg, and he was an
impassioned and very daring gamester. These great silent houses, in
the heart of fir woods, in the centre of grass plains, or on the banks
of lonely rivers, were all absolutely unknown to and indifferent to
him. He was too admired and popular at his Court ever to have had the
sentence passed upon him to retire to his estates; but had he been
forced to do so he would have been as utterly an exile in any one of
the houses of his fathers as if he had been consigned to Tobolsk itself.

He looked around him now, an absolute stranger in the place where
he was as absolutely lord. All these square leagues he learned were
his, all these miserable huts, all these poor lives; for it was in
a day before the liberation of the serfs had been accomplished by
that deliverer whom Russia rewarded with death. A vague remembrance
came over him as he gazed around: he had been here once before. The
villagers, learning that it was their master who had arrived thus
unexpectedly in their midst, came timidly around and made their humble
prostrations: the steward who administered the lands was absent that
day in the distant town. He was entreated to go within his own deserted
dwelling, but he refused: the wheel was nearly mended, and he reflected
that a house abandoned for so long was probably damp and in disorder,
cold and comfortless. He was impatient to be gone, and urged the smith
to his best and quickest by the promise of many roubles. The _moujiks_,
excited and frightened, hastened to him with the customary offerings
of bread and salt; he touched the gifts carelessly; spoke to them with
good-humoured, indifferent carelessness; and asked if they had any
grievances to complain of, without listening to the answer. They had
many, but they did not dare to say so, knowing that their lord would be
gone in five minutes, but that the heavy hand of his steward would lie
for ever upon them.

Soon the vehicle was repaired, and Paul Zabaroff ceased his restless
walk to and fro the sandy road, and prepared to depart from this weary
place of detention. But, from an _isba_ that stood apart, beneath one
of the banks of sand that broke the green level of the corn, the dark
spare figure of an old woman came, waving bony hands upon the air, and
crying with loud voice to the _barine_ to wait.

'It is only mad Maritza,' said the people; yet they thought Maritza
had some errand with their lord, for they fell back and permitted her
to approach him as she cried aloud: 'Let me come! Let me come! I would
give him back the jewel he left here ten years ago!'

She held a young boy by the hand, and dragged him with her as she spoke
and moved. She was a dark woman, once very handsome, with white hair
and an olive skin, and a certain rugged grandeur in her carriage; she
was strong and of strong purpose; she made her way to Paul Zabaroff as
he stood by the carriage, and she fell at his feet and touched the dust
with her forehead, and forced the child beside her to make the same
obeisance.

'All hail to my lord, and heaven be with him! The poor Maritza comes
to give him back what he left.'

Prince Zabaroff smiled in a kindly manner, being a man often careless,
but not cruel.

'Nay, good mother, keep it, whatever it be: you have earned the right.
Is it a jewel, you say?'

'It is a jewel.'

'Then keep it. I had forgotten even that I was ever here.'

'Ay! the great lord had forgot.'

She rose up with the dust on her white hair, and thrust forward a young
boy, and put her hands on the boy's shoulders and made him kneel.

'There is the jewel, Paul Ivanovitch. It is time the Gospodar kept it
now.'

Paul Zabaroff did not understand. He looked down at the little serf
kneeling in the dust.

'A handsome child. May the land have many such to serve the Tsar. Is he
your grandson, good mother?'

The boy was beautiful, with long curling fair hair and a rosy mouth,
and eyes like the blue heavens in a night of frost. His limbs were
naked, and his chest. He had a shirt of sheepskin.

Old Maritza kept her hands on the shoulders of the kneeling child.

'He is thy son, O lord!'

'My son!'

'Ay. The lord has forgotten. The lord tarried but one night, but he
bade my Sacha serve drink to him in his chamber, and on the morrow,
when he left, Sacha wept. The lord has forgotten!'

Paul Zabaroff stood silent, slowly remembering. In the boy's face
looking up at him, half-sullenly, half-timidly, he saw the features of
his own race mingled with something much more beautiful, oriental, and
superb.

Yes: he had forgotten; quite forgotten; but he remembered now.

The people stood around, remembering better than he, but thinking it no
wrong in him to have forgotten, because he was their ruler and lord,
and did that which seemed right to him; and when he had gone away, in
Sacha's bosom there had been a thick roll of gold.

'Where is--the mother?' he said at length.

Old Maritza made answer:

'My Sacha died four summers ago. Always Sacha hoped that the lord might
some day return.'

Prince Zabaroff's cheek reddened a little with pain.

'Fool! why did you not marry her?' he said with impatience. 'There
were plenty of men. I would have given more dowry.'

'Sacha would not wed. What the lord had honoured she thought holy.'

'Poor soul!' muttered Paul Zabaroff; and he looked again at the boy,
who bore his own face, and was as like him as an eaglet to an eagle.

'Do you understand what we say?'

The boy answered sullenly, 'I understand.' 'What is your name?'

'I am Vassia.'

'And what do you do?'

'I do nothing.'

'Are you happy?'

'What is that? I do not know.'

Prince Zabaroff was silent.

'Rise up, since you are my son,' he said at length.

The boy rose.

He was sullen, shy, tameless, timid, like a young animal from the pine
woods. The old woman took her hands off his shoulders.

'I have delivered the jewel to the lord that owns it. I have done
Sacha's will.'

Then she turned herself round and covered her face, and went towards
her home.

The child stood, half-fierce, half-fearful, like a dog which an old
master drives away, and which fears the new one.

'These jewels are as many as the sands of the sea, and as worthless,'
said Paul Zabaroff with a slight smile.

Nevertheless, he resolved, since Maritza spoke truth, that the boy
should be cared for and well taught, and have all that gold could get
for him, and be sent away out from Russia; for in Russia he was a serf.

The boy's hair hung over his eyes, which were hungrily watching the
dark lean figure of the woman as it went away through the tall corn to
the white wood hut that stood alone in the fields. He dimly understood
that his life was being changed for him, but how he knew not. He wanted
to go home with Maritza to his nest of moss, where his bear-cubs slept
with him by night and played with him at dawn.

'Farewell,' said Paul Zabaroff, and he touched his son's cheek with his
hand.

'You are magnificently handsome, my poor child; indeed, who knows
what you will be?--a jewel or only a toad's eye?' he said dreamily;
then he sprang up behind his horses, and was borne away through the
fast-falling shades of the evening, leaving behind him the boy Vassia
and a little rough mound of nameless grass, which he had never seen,
and which was Sacha's grave.

The four fiery horses that bore the _telegue_ dashed away with it in
the sunlight, scattering the sand in yellow clouds, and the village
on the Volga plains beheld its lord never more in life. The boy stood
still, and looked after it with a sombre anger on his beautiful fair
Circassian face.

'You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia,' said the men to him
with envy. The child could not have expressed the vague mute wrath and
shame that stirred together in him, but he turned from them without a
word, and ran fleet as a roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He
loved his great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost
passion, though it was silent and almost unconscious of itself. She
never checked him, beat him, or cursed him as the other women often
did their children. She did her best by him, though they dwelt in a
miserable little _isba_, that often in winter time was covered up with
the snow like a bear's hole, and in summer, the fierce brief parching
summer of north-east Russia, was as hot as a scorched eye under a
sun-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to him. He was
loved and he was free: childhood wants nothing more; Maritza was a
Persian woman. Years and years before, when she had been in her youth,
she had come from the Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are
alike alive with the leaping naphtha of the Ghebir worship: she had
been born within the iron gates of Derbent, of Persian parentage, and
she had known war and capture and violence, and had had many troubles,
many privations, many miseries before she had found herself stranded in
her old age, with her grandchild, in this little desolate village on
the sand-bank by the Volga.

She was very poor; she had an evil reputation: nothing evil was ever
really traced to her, but she had Oriental faiths and traditions
and worshipped fire, or so said her enemies the black clergy of the
scattered villages and their ready believers. Never did Maritza light a
lamp at nightfall, but her neighbours saw in the act a devil worship.

She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor; she was hated
accordingly. When her granddaughter Sacha bore a child that was
the offspring of Prince Paul Zabaroff, though she cursed him, the
neighbours envied her and begrudged her such an honour.

Maritza had brought up the young Vassia with little tenderness, yet
with a great yearning over the boy, with his pure Persian face and
his beautiful fair body, like a pearl. The uttermost she wished for
him was that he should grow up a raftsman or a fisherman on the Volga
water; all that she dreaded was that the Kossacks would take him and
put a lance in his hand and have him slain in war, as in the old stern
days of her youth her lovers had been taken by the battle-god, that
devoured them one by one, and her sons after them.

She never gave a thought to the boy's parentage as of possible use to
him, but she always said to herself, 'If Paul Zabaroff ever come back,
then shall he know his son,' and meanwhile the boy was happy, though
he had not known the meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny
Volga in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts go down
it, and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which took the
condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a gang of such captives
would go by on foot and chained; miserable exceedingly, wounded,
exhausted, doomed to twelve months' foot-sore travel ere they reached
the endless darkness of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual
frost. He watched them; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity nor
pity as he lay on the tall rough grass, and they moved by him on the
dusty, flint-strewn, ill-made road towards that chain of blue hills
which marked their future home and their eternal grave. For sport the
boy had the bear, the wolf, the blue fox, the wild hare, in the long
wintertime; in the brief summer he helped chase the pelican and the
swan along the sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves.
He was keen of eye and swift of foot: the men of his native village
were always willing to have his company, child though he was. He was
fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder still of sport; once he
risked his own life to save a stork and her nest on a burning roof.
When asked why he did it, he who choked the cygnet and snared the cub,
he could not say: he was ashamed of his own tenderness.

He wanted no other life than this rude freedom, but one day, a month or
more after Paul Zabaroff had passed through the country, there came to
the door of Maritza's hut a stranger, who displayed to her eyes, which
could not read, a letter with the Prince's seal and signature. He said:
'I am sent to take away the boy who is called Vassia.'

The Persian woman bowed her head as before a headsman's glaive.

'It is the will of God,' she said.

But the time came when Vassia, grown to man's estate, thought that
devils rather than gods had meddled with him then.

'Send him to a great school; send him out of Russia; spare no cost;
make him a gentleman,' Paul Zabaroff had said to his agents when he
had seen the son of Sacha, and he had been obeyed. The little fierce
half-naked boy who in frost was wrapped in wolf-fur and looked like a
little wild beast, had been taken from the free, headstrong, barbaric
life of the Volga plains, where he was under no law and knew no rule,
and passionately loved the river and the chase, and the great silent
snow-wrapt world of his birth, and was sent to a famous and severe
college near Paris, to the drill, and the class, and the uniform, and
the classic learning, and the tape-bound, hard, artificial routine of
mechanical education. The pride, of the Oriental and the subtlety of
the Slav were all he brought with him as arms in the unequal combat
with an unsympathetic crowd.

For a year's time he was insulted, tormented, ridiculed; in another
twelve months he was let alone; in a third year he was admired and
feared. All the while his heart was bursting within him with the agony
of home-sickness and revolt; but he gave no sign of either. Only at
nights, when the others of his chamber were all sleeping, he would slip
out of bed and stare up at the stars, which did not look the same as
he had known, and think of Maritza and of the bear-cubs, and of the
Volga's waters bearing the wild white swans upon their breast; and then
he would sob his very soul out in silence.

He had been entered upon the books of the college under the name
of Vassia Kazán; Kazán having been the place at which he had been
baptised, the golden-domed, many-towered, half Asiatic city which
was seen afar off from the little square window in Maritza's hut.
High influence and much gold had persuaded the principal of a great
college--the Lycée Clovis, situated between Paris and Versailles--not
to inquire too closely into the parentage of this beautiful little
savage from the far north. Russia still remains dim, distant, and
mysterious to the western mind; among his tutors and comrades it was
taken for granted that he was some young barbarian noble, and the
child's own lips were shut as close as if the ice of his own land had
frozen them.

Eight years later, on another day when wheat was ripe and willows
waved in summer sunshine, a youth lay asleep with his head on an open
Lucretius in the deserted playground of a French college. The place
of recreation was a dusty gravelled square; there were high stone
walls all round it, and a few poplars stood in it white with dust.
It was August, and all the other scholars were away; he alone had
been forgotten; he was used to being forgotten. He was not dull or
sorrowful, as other lads are when left in vacation time alone. He had
many arts and pastimes, and he was a scholar by choice, if a capricious
one, and he had a quick and facile tact which taught him how to have
his own way always; and on many a summer night, when his teachers
believed him safe sleeping, he was out of college, and away dancing and
singing and laughing at students' halls, and in the haunts of artists,
and at the little theatre beyond the barrier, and he had never been
found out, and would have cared but little if he had been. And he slept
now with his fair forehead leaning on Lucretius, and a drowsy, heavy
heat around him, filled with the hum of flies and gnats. He did not
dream of the heat and the insects; he did not even dream of the saucy
beauty at the barrier ball the night before, who had kicked cherries
out of his mouth with her blue-shod feet, and kissed him on his curls.
He dreamt of a little, low, dark hut; of an old woman that knelt before
a brazen image; of slumbering bear-cubs in a nest of hay; of a winter
landscape, white and shining, that stretched away in an unbroken level
of snow to the sea that half the year was ice. He dreamed of these,
and, dreaming, sighed and woke. He thought he stood on the frozen sea,
and the ice broke, and the waters swallowed him.

It was nothing; only the voice of his tutor calling him. He was
summoned to the Principal of the Lycée: a rare honour. He rose, a
slender, tall, beautiful youth, in the dark close-fitting costume
of the institute. He shook the dust off his uniform and his curls,
shut his book, and went within the large white prison-like building
which had been his home since he had left the lowly _isba_ among the
sandhills and the blowing corn by Volga.

The Principal was sitting in one of his private chambers, a grim,
dark, book-lined chamber; he held an open letter in his hand, which
he had read and re-read. He was a clever man, and unscrupulous and
purchasable; but he was not without feeling, and he was disquieted, for
he had a painful office to fulfil.

When the youth obeyed his summons he looked up and shaded his eyes
with his hand. He hesitated, looking curiously at the young man's
attitude, which had an easy grace in it, and some hauteur visible under
a semblance of respect.

The Principal took up the open letter: 'I regret, I grieve, to tell
you,' he said slowly, 'your patron and friend, the Prince Zabaroff, has
died suddenly!'

The face of Vassia Kazán grew very pale, but very cold. He said nothing.

'He died quite suddenly,' continued the director of the college; 'a
blood-vessel broke in the brain, after great fatigue in hunting; he was
upon one of his estates in White Russia.'

The son of Paul Zabaroff was still silent. His master wished that he
would show some emotion.

'It was he who placed you here--was at all costs for your education. I
suppose you are aware of that?' he continued, with some embarrassment.

Vassia Kazán bowed and still said nothing. He might have been made of
ice or of marble for any sign that he gave. He might only have heard
that an unknown man had died in the street.

'You were placed here by him--at least, by his agents; you were the son
of a dead friend, they said. I did not inquire closer--payments were
always made in advance.'

He passed his hand a little confusedly over his eyes, for he felt a
little shame; his college was of high repute, and the agents of Prince
Zabaroff had placed sums in his hands, to induce him to deviate from
his rules, larger than he would have cared to confess.

The boy was silent.

'If he would only speak!' thought his master. 'He must know--he must
know.'

But the son of the dead Zabaroff did not speak.

'I am sorry to say,' resumed his master, still with hesitation, 'I am
very sorry to say that the death of the Prince being thus sudden and
thus unforeseen, his agents write me that there are no instructions, no
arrangement, no testament, in short--you will understand what I mean;
you will understand that, in point of fact, there is nothing for you,
there is no one to pay anything any longer.'

He paused abruptly; the fair face of the boy grew a shade paler, that
was all. He bore the shock without giving any sign.

'Is he made of ice and steel?' thought the old man, who had been proud
of him as his most brilliant pupil.

'It pains me to give you such terrible intelligence,' he muttered; 'but
it is my duty not to conceal it an hour. You are quite--penniless. It
is very sad.'

The boy smiled slightly; it was not a smile for so young a face.

'He has given me learning; he need not have done that,' he said
carelessly. The words sounded grateful, but it was not gratitude that
glanced from his eyes.

'I believe I am a serf in Russia?' he added, after a short silence.

'I do not know at all,' muttered the Principal, who felt ill at ease
and ashamed of himself for having taken for eight years the gold of
Prince Paul.

'I cannot tell--lawyers would tell you--I am not sure at all; indeed, I
know nothing of your history; but you are young and friendless. You are
a brilliant scholar, but you are not fit for work. What will you do, my
poor lad?'

The boy did not respond to the kindness that was in the tone, and he
resented the pity there was in it.

'That will be my affair alone,' he said, still carelessly and very
haughtily.

'All is paid up to the New Year,' said his master, feeling restless and
dissatisfied. 'There is no haste--I would not turn you from my roof.
You are a brilliant classic--you might be a teacher here, perhaps?'

The youth smiled; then he said coldly:

'You are very good. I had better go away at once. I should wish to be
away before the others return.'

'But where will you go?' said the old man, staring at him with a dull
and troubled surprise.

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

'The world is large--at least it looks so when one has not been over
it. Can you tell me who inherits from Prince Paul Zabaroff?'

'His eldest son by his marriage with a Princess Kourouassine. If he had
only left some will, some sort of command or direction--perhaps if I
wrote to the Princess, and told her the facts, she--'

'Pray do not do that,' said the boy coldly. 'I thank you for all I have
learned here, and I will leave your house to-night. Farewell to you,
sir.'

The boy's eyes were dry and calm; the old man's were wet and dim. He
rose hurriedly, and laid aside his stern habit of authority for a
moment, as he put his hand on the lad's shoulder.

'Vassia, do not leave us like that. I do not like to see you so cold,
so quiet, so unnaturally indifferent. You are left friendless and
nameless--and after all he was your father.'

The boy drew himself away gently, and shrugged his shoulders once more
with his slight gesture of contempt.

'He never called me his son. I wish he had left me by the Volga with
the bear-cubs: that is all. Adieu, sir.'

'But what do you mean to do?'

'I will do what offers.'

'But few things offer when one is friendless and you have many faults,
Vassia, though you have many talents. I fear for your future.'

'Adieu, sir.'

The boy bowed low, with composure and grace, and left the room. The
old man sat in the shadow by his desk, and blamed himself, and blamed
the dead. The young collegian went out from his presence with a firm
step and a careless carriage, and ascended the staircase of the
college to his dormitory. The large long room, with its whitewashed
walls, its barred casements, its rows of camp bedsteads, looked like a
barrack-room deserted by the soldiers. The aspen and poplar leaves were
quivering outside the grated windows; the rays of the bright August sun
streamed through and shone on the floor. The boy sat down on his bed.
It was at the top of the row of beds, next one of the casements. The
sun-rays touched his head; he was all alone. The clamour, the disputes,
the mirth, the wrong-doing with which he and his comrades had consoled
themselves for the stern discipline of the day, were all things of
the past, and he would know them no more. In a way he had been happy
here, being lord and king of the rebellious band that had filled this
chamber, and knowing so little of his own fate or of his own future
that any greatness or glory might be possible to him.

Three years before he had been summoned to a château on the north coast
of France in the full summer season. It had entered into the capricious
fancy of Prince Zabaroff that he should like to see what the wild
young wolf-cub of the Volga plains had become. He had found in him a
youth so handsome, so graceful, so accomplished, that a certain fibre
of paternal pride had been touched in him; whilst the coldness, the
silence, and the disdainfulness of the boy's temper had commanded his
respect. No word of their relationship had passed between them, but by
the guests assembled there it had been assumed that the young Vassia
Kazán was near of kin to their host, whose lawfully-begotten sons and
daughters were far away in one of his summer palaces of the Krimea.

The boy was beautiful, keen-witted, precocious in knowledge and tact;
the society assembled there, which was dissolute enough, dazzled and
indulged him. The days had gone by like a tale of magic. There had
been always in him the bitter, mortified, rebellious hatred of his
own position; but this he had not shown, and no one had suspected it.
These three summer months of unbridled luxury and indulgence had made
an indelible impression on him. He had felt that life was not worth the
living unless it could be passed in the same manner. He had known that
away there in Russia there were young Zabaroff princes, his brethren,
who would not have owned him; but the remembrance of them had not dwelt
on him. He had not known definitely what to expect of the future.
Though he was still there only Vassia Kazán, yet he had been treated
as though he were a son of the house. When the party had broken up he
had been sent back to his college with many gifts and a thousand francs
in gold. When he reached Paris he had given the presents to a dancing
girl and the money to an old professor of classics who had lost his
sight. Not a word had been said as to his future. Measuring both by the
indulgences and liberalities that were conceded to him, he had always
dreamed of it vaguely but gorgeously, as sure to bring recognition and
reverence, pomp and power, to him from the world. He had vaguely built
up ambitious hopes. He had been sensible of no ordinary intelligence,
of no common powers; and it had seemed legitimate to suppose that so
liberal and princely an education meant that some golden gates would
open to him at manhood: why should they rear him so if they intended
to leave him in obscurity?

This day, as he had sat in the large white courtyard, shadowed by the
Parisian poplar trees, he had remembered that he was within a few weeks
of the completion of his eighteenth year, and he had wondered what
they meant to do with him. He had heard nothing from Prince Zabaroff
since those brilliant, vivid, tumultuous months which had left on him a
confused sense of dazzling though vague expectation. He had hoped every
summer to hear something, but each summer had passed in silence; and
now he was told that Paul Zabaroff was dead.

He had been happy, being dowered with facile talents, quick wit, and
the great art of being able to charm others without effort to himself.
He had been seldom obedient, often guilty, yet always successful. The
place had been no prison to him; he had passed careless days and he had
dreamed grand dreams there; and now--

He sat on the little iron bed, and knew that in a few nights to come he
might have to make his bed with beggars under bridge arches and in the
dens of thieves.

Tears gathered in his eyes, and fell slowly one by one. A sort of
convulsion passed over his face. He gripped his throat with his hand,
to stifle a sob that rose there.

The intense stillness of the chamber was not broken even by the buzzing
of a gnat.

He sat quite motionless, and his thoughts went back to the summer day
in the cornfields by the Volga; he saw the scene in all its little
details: the impatient good-humour of the great lord, the awe of the
listening peasants, the blowing wheat, the wooden cross, the stamping
horses, the cringing servants; he heard the voice of his father saying,
'Will you be a jewel or a toad's eye?'

'Why could he not leave me there?' he thought; 'I should have known
nothing; I should have been a hunter; I should have done no harm on the
ice and the snow there, with old Maritza.'

He thought of his grandmother, of the little hut, of the nest of skins,
of the young bears at play, of the glittering plains in winter, of the
low red sun, of the black lonely woods, of the grey icy river, of the
bright virgin snow--thought, with a great longing like that of thirst.
Why had they not let him be? Why had they not left him ignorant and
harmless in the clear, keen, solitary winter world?

Instead of that they had flung him into hell, and now left him in it,
alone.

There was a far-off murmur on the sultry summer air, and a far-off
gleam of metal beyond the leaves of the poplar trees; it was the murmur
of the streets, and the glisten of the roofs of Paris.

About his neck there hung a little silver image of St. Paul. His mother
had hung it there at birth, and Maritza had prayed him never to disturb
it. Now he took it off, he spat on it, he trod on it, he threw it out
to fall into the dust.

He did this insult to the sacred thing coldly, without passion. His
tears were no more on his cheeks, nor the sobs in his throat.

He changed his clothes quickly, put together a few necessaries, leaving
behind nearly all that he possessed, because he hated everything that
the dead man's money had bought; and then, without noise and without
haste, looking back once down the long empty chamber, he went through
the house by back ways that he knew and had used in hours of forbidden
liberty, and opening the gate of the courtyard, went out into the long
dreary highway, white with dust, that stretched before him and led to
Paris.

He had made friends, for he was a beautiful bold boy, gay of wit,
agile, and strong, and of many talents; but these friends were
artists little known in the world, soldiers who liked pleasure, young
dramatists without theatres, pretty frail women who had taught him to
eat the sweet and bitter apple that is always held out in the hand of
Eve. These and their like were all butterfly friends of a summer noon
or night; he knew that very well, for he had a premature and unerring
knowledge of the value of human words. They would be of no use in such
a strait as his; and the colour flushed back for one instant into his
pale cheeks, as he thought that he would die in a hospital before he
was twenty rather than ask their aid.

As the grey dust, the hot wind, the nauseous smell of streets in summer
smote upon him, leaving the poplar-shadowed court of his old school,
he felt once more the same strange yearning of home-sickness for the
winter world of his birth, for the steel-grey waters, the darkened
skies, the forests of fir, the howl of the wolves on the wind, the joys
of the fresh fierce cold, the feel of the ice in the air, the smell of
the pines and the river. The bonds of birth are strong.

'If Maritza were not dead I would go back,' he thought. But Maritza had
been long dead, laid away under the snow by her daughter's side.

The boy went to Paris.

Would it be any fault of his what he became?

He told himself, No.

It would lie with the dead; and with Paris.

CHAPTER I.

In the heart of the Hohe Tauern, province of lakes and streams, there
lies one lake called the Szalrassee: known to the pilgrim, to the
fisher, to the hunter, but to the traveller little, for it is shut
away from the hum and stir of man by the amphitheatre of its own hills
and forests. To the south-east of it lies the Iselthal, and to the
north-west the Wilde Gerlos; due east is the great Glöckner group, and
due west the Venediger. Farther away are the Alps of Zillerthal, and on
the opposite horizon the mountains of Karinthia.

Here, where the foaming rivers thunder through their rocky channels,
and the ice bastions of a thousand glaciers glow in the sunrise and bar
the sight of sunset; here, where a thousand torrents bathe in silver
the hillsides, and the deep moan of subterranean waters sounds for
ever through the silence of the gorges, dark with the serried pines;
here, in the green and cloudy Austrian land, the merry trout have many
a joyous home, but none is fairer or more beloved by them than this
lovely lake of Hohenszalras; so green that it might have been made of
emeralds dissolved in sunbeams, so deep that at its centre no soundings
can be taken, so lonely that of the few wanderers who pass from S.
Johann im Wald or from Lienz to Matrey, even of those few scarce one in
a summer will know that a lake lies there, though they see from afar
off its great castle standing, many-turreted and pinnacled, with its
frowning keep, backed by the vast black forests, clothing slopes whose
summits hide themselves in cloud, whilst through the cold clear air the
golden vulture and the throated eagle wing their way.

The lake lies like a crystal bedded in rock, lovely and lonely as the
little Gosausee when the skies are fair; perilous and terrible as the
great Königs-See in storm, when the north wind is racing in from the
Bœhmervald and the Polish steppes, and the rain-mists are dark and
dense, and the storks leave their home on the chapel roof because the
winter draws nigh. It is fed by snow and ice descending from a hundred
hills, and by underground streams and headlong-descending avalanches,
and in its turn feeds many a mountain waterfall, many a mountain tarn,
many a woodland brook, and many a village fountain. The great white
summits tower above it, and the dense still woods enshroud it; there
are a pier and harbour at either end, but these are only used by the
village people, and once a year by pilgrims who come to the Sacred
Island in its midst; pilgrims who flock thither from north, south,
east, and west, for the chapel of the Szalrassee is as renowned and
blessed as the silver shrine of holy Mariazell itself.

On the right bank of its green glancing water, looking towards the
ice-peaks of the Glöckner on the east, and on the south towards the
Kitchbull mountains and the limestone Alps, a promontory juts out
into the lake and soars many hundred feet above it. It is of hard
granite rock. Down one of its sides courses a torrent, the other side
is clothed with wood; on the summit is the immense building that is
called the Hohenszalrasburg, a mass of towers and spires and high metal
roofs and frowning battlements, with a huge square fortress at one end
of them: it is the old castle of the Counts of Szalras, and the huge
donjon keep of it has been there twelve centuries, and in all these
centuries no man has ever seen its flag furled or its portcullis drawn
up for a conqueror's entry.

The greater part of the Schloss now existing is the work of Meister
Wenzel of Klosterneuburg, begun in 1350, but the date of the keep
and of the foundations generally are much earlier, and the prisons
and clock tower are Romanesque. Majestic, magnificent, and sombre,
though not gloomy, by reason of its rude decoration and the brilliant
colours of its variegated roofs, it is scarcely changed since its lords
dwelt there in the fourteenth century, when their great banner, black
vultures on a ground of gold and red, floated then high up amongst the
clouds, even as it now shakes its heavy folds out on the strong wind
that blew so keenly from the Prussian and the Polish plains due north.

It is a fortress that has wedded a palace; it is majestic, powerful,
imposing, splendid, like the great race, of which it so long has been
the stronghold and the birthplace. But it is as lonely in the quiet
heart of the everlasting hills as any falcon's or heron's nest hung in
the oak branches.

And this loneliness seemed its sweetest charm in the eyes of its
châtelaine and mistress, the Countess Wanda von Szalras, as she leaned
one evening over the balustrade of her terrace, watching for the
after-glow to warm the snows of the Glöckner. She held in her hand an
open letter from her Kaiserin, and the letter in its conclusion said:
'You have sorrowed and tarried in seclusion long enough--too long;
longer than he would have wished you to do. Come back to us and to the
world.'

And Wanda von Szalras thought to herself: 'What can the world give me?
What I love is Hohenszalras on earth, and Bela in heaven.'

What could the world give her indeed? The world cannot give back the
dead. She wanted nothing of the world. She was rich in all that it can
ever give.

In the time of Ferdinand the Second those who were then Counts of
Szalras had stitched the cloth cross on their sleeves and gone with the
Emperor to the Third Crusade. In gratitude for their escape, father
and son, from the perils of Palestine and the dangers of the high seas
and of the treacherous Danube water, from Moslem steel, and fever of
Jaffa, and chains of swarming Barbary corsairs, they, returning at last
in safety to their eyrie above the Szalrassee, had raised a chapel
on the island in the lake, and made it dedicate to the Holy Cross,
a Szalras of the following generation, belonging to the Dominican
community, and being a man of such saintly fervour and purity that he
was canonised by Innocent, had dwelt on the Holy Isle, and given to
it the benediction and the tradition of his sanctity and good works.
As centuries went on the holy fame of the shrine where the Crusader
had placed a branch from a thorn-tree of Nazareth grew, and gained in
legend and in miracle, and became as adored an object, of pilgrimage as
the Holy Phial of Heiligenblut. All the Hohe Tauern, and throngs even
from Karinthia on the one side and Tirol on the other, came thither on
the day of Ascension.

The old faith still lives, very simple, warm, and earnest, in the
heart of Austria, and with that day-dawn in midsummer thousands of
peasant-folks flock from mountain villages and forest chalets and
little remote secluded towns, to speed over the green lake with flaming
crucifix and floating banner, and haunted anthem echoed from hill
to hill. One of those days of pilgrimage had made her mistress of
Hohenszalras.

It was a martial and mighty race this which in the heart of the green
Tauern had made of fealty to God and the Emperor a religion for itself
and all its dependants. The Counts of Szalras had always been proud,
stern, and noble men: though their records were often stained with
fierce crimes, there was never in them any single soil of baseness,
treachery, or fear. They had been fierce and reckless in the wild days
when they were for ever at war with the Counts of Tirol and the warlike
Archbishops of Salzburg. Then with the Renaissance they had become no
less powerful, but more lettered, more courtly, and more splendid, and
had given alike friendship and service to the Habsburg. Now, of all
these princely and most powerful people there was but one descendant,
but one representative; and that one was a woman.

Solferino had seen Count Gela fall charging at the head of his own
regiment of horse; Magenta had seen Count Victor cut in two by a
cannon-shot as he rode with the dragoons of Swartzenberg; and but a
few years later the youngest, Count Bela, had been drowned by his own
bright lake.

Their father had died of grief for his eldest son; their mother had
been lost to them in infancy; Bela and Wanda had grown up together,
loving each other as only two lonely children can. She had been his
elder by a few years, and he younger than his age by reason of his
innocent simplicity of nature and his delicacy of body. They had always
thought to make a priest of him, and when that peaceful future was
denied him on his becoming the sole heir, it was the cause of bitter
though mute sorrow to the boy who was indeed so like a young saint in
church legends that the people called him tenderly _der Heilige Graf._
He had never quitted Hohenszalras, and he knew every peasant around,
every blossom that blew, every mountain path, every forest beast
and bird, and every tale of human sorrow in his principality. When
he became lord of all after his brother's death he was saddened and
oppressed by the sense of his own overwhelming obligations. 'I am but
the steward of God,' he would say, with a tender smile, to the poor who
blessed him.

One Ascension Day the lake was, as usual, crowded with the boats of
pilgrims; the morning was fair and cloudless, but, after noontide, wind
arose, the skies became overcast, and one of the sudden storms of the
country burst over the green waters. The little lord of Hohenszalras
was the first to see the danger to the clumsy heavy boats crowded with
country people, and with his household rowed out to their aid. The
storm had come so suddenly and with such violence that it smote, in
the very middle of the lake, some score of these boats laden with the
pilgrims of the Pinzgau and the Innthal, women chiefly; their screams
pierced through the noise of the roaring winds, and their terror added
fresh peril to the dangers of the lake, which changed in a few moments
to a seething whirlpool, and flung them to and fro like coots' nests
in a flood. The young Bela with his servants saved many, crossing and
recrossing the furious space of wind-lashed, leaping, foaming water;
but on the fourth voyage back the young Count's boat, over-burdened
with trembling peasants, whose fright made them blind and restive,
dipped heavily on one side, filled, and sank. Bela could swim well,
and did swim, even to the very foot of his own castle rock, where a
hundred hands were outstretched to save him; but, hearing a drowning
woman's moan, he turned and tried to reach her. A fresh surge of the
hissing water, a fresh gust of the bitter north wind, tossed him back
into a yawning gulf of blackness, and drove him headlong, and with no
more resistance in him than if he had been a broken bough, upon the
granite wall of his own rocks. He was caught and rescued almost on the
instant by his own men, but his head had struck upon the stone, and he
was senseless. He breathed a few hours, but he never spoke or opened
his eyes or gave any sign of conscious life, and before the night had
far advanced his innocent body was tenantless and cold, and his sweet
spirit lived only in men's memories. His sister, who was absent at that
time at the court of her Empress, became by his death the mistress of
Hohenszalras and the last of her line.

When the tidings of his heroic end reached her at the imperial
hunting-place of Gödöllö all the world died for her; that splendid
pageant of a world, whose fairest and richest favours had been always
showered on the daughter of the mighty House of Szalras. She withdrew
herself from her friends, from her lovers, from her mistress, and
mourned for him with a grief that time could do little to assuage,
nothing to efface. She was then twenty years of age.

She was thinking of that death now, four years later, as she stood on
the terrace which overhung the cruel rocks that had killed him.

His loss was to her a sorrow that could never wholly pass away.

Her other brothers had been dear to her, but only as brilliant young
soldiers are to a little child who sees them seldom. But Bela had been
her companion, her playmate, her friend, her darling. From Bela she had
been scarce ever parted. Every day and every night, herself, and all
her thoughts and all her time, were given to such administration of her
kingdom as should best be meet in the sight of God and his angels. 'I
am but Bela's almoner, as he was God's steward,' she said.

She leaned against the parapet, and looked across the green and shining
water, the open letter hanging in her hand.

The Countess Wanda von Szalras was a beautiful woman; but she had that
supreme distinction which eclipses beauty, that subtle, indescribable
grace and dignity which are never seen apart from some great lineage
with long traditions of culture, courtesy, and courage. She was very
tall, and her movements had a great repose and harmony in them; her
figure, richness and symmetry. Her eyes were of a deep brown hue, like
the velvety brown of a stag's throat; they were large, calm, proud,
and meditative. Her mouth was very beautiful; her hair was light and
golden; her skin exceedingly fair. She was one of the most beautiful
women of her country, and one of the most courted and the most
flattered; and her imperial mistress said now to her, 'Come back to us
and to the world.'

Standing upon her terrace, in a gown of pale grey velvet that had no
ornament save an old gold girdle with an enamelled missal hung to
it, with two dogs at her side, one the black hunting-hound of St.
Hubert, the other the white sleuth-hound of Russia, she looked like a
châtelaine of the days of Mary of Burgundy or Elizabeth of Thuringia.
It seemed as if the dark cedar boughs behind her should lift and admit
to her presence some lover with her glove against the plume of his hat,
and her ring set in his sword-hilt, who would bow down before her feet
and not dare to touch her hand unbidden.

But no lover was there. The Countess Wanda dismissed all lovers; she
was wedded to the memory of her brother, and to her own liberty and
power.

She leaned on the stone parapet of her castle and gazed on the scene
that her eyes had rested on since they had first seen the light, yet of
which she never wearied. The intense depth of colour, that is the glory
of Austria, was deepening with each moment that the sun went nearer
to its setting in the dark blue of thunderclouds that brooded in the
west, over the Venediger and the Zillerthal Alps. Soon the sun would
pass that barrier of stone and ice, and evening would fall here in the
mountains of the Iselthal, whilst it would be still day for the plains
of the Ober Pinzgau and Salzkammergut. But as yet the radiance was
here; and the dark oak woods and birch woods, the purple pine forests,
the blue lake waters, and the glaciers of the Glöckner range, had
all that grandeur which makes a sunset in these highlands at once so
splendid and so peaceful. There is an infinite sense of peace in those
cool, vast, unworn mountain solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping
like spectral armies over the level lands below, and the sun-rays
slanting heavenward, like the spears of an angelic host. There is such
abundance of rushing water, of deep grass, of endless shade, of forest
trees, of heather and pine, of torrent and tarn; and beyond these are
the great peaks that loom through breaking clouds, and the clear cold
air, in which the vulture wheels and the heron sails; and the shadows
are so deep, and the stillness is so sweet, and the earth seems so
green, and fresh, and silent, and strong. Nowhere else can one rest
so well; nowhere else is there so fit a refuge for all the faiths and
fancies that can find a home no longer in the harsh and hurrying world:
there is room for them all in the Austrian forests, from the Erl-King
to Ariel and Oberon.

The Countess Wanda leaned against the balustrade of the terrace and
watched that banquet of colour on land and cloud and water; watched
till the sun sank out of sight behind the Venediger snows, and the
domes of the Glöckner, and all the lesser peaks opposite were changing
from the warmth, as of a summer rose, to a pure transparent grey, that
seemed here and there to be pierced as with fire.

'How often do we thank God for the mountains?' she thought; 'yet we
ought every night that we pray.'

Then she sighed as her eyes sank from the hill-tops to the lake water,
dark as iron, glittering as steel, now that the radiance of the sun had
passed off it. She remembered Bela.

How could she ever forget him, with that murderous water shining for
ever at her feet?

The world called her undiminished tenderness for her dead brother a
morbid grief, but then to the world at large any fidelity seems so
strange and stupid a waste of years: it does not understand that _tout
casse, tout lasse, tout passe_, was not written for strong natures.

'How could I ever forget him, so long as that water glides there?' she
thought, as her eyes rested on the emerald and sparkling lake.

'Yet her Majesty is so right! So right and so wise!' said a familiar
voice at her side.

And there came up to her the loveliest little lady in all the empire;
an old lady, but so delicate, so charming, so pretty, so fragile, that
she seemed lovelier than all the young ones; a very fairy godmother,
covered up in lace and fur, and leaning on a gold-headed cane, and
wearing red shoes with high gilt heels, and smiling with serene blue
eyes, as though she had just stepped down out of a pictured copy of
Cinderella, and could change common pumpkins into gilded chariots, and
mice into horses, at a wish.

She was the Princess Ottilie of Lilienhöhe, and had once been head of a
religious house.

'Her Majesty is so right!' she said once more, with emphasis.

The Countess Wanda turned and smiled, rather with her eyes than with
her lips.

'It would not become my loyal affection to say she could be wrong. But
still, I know myself, and I know the world very well, and I far prefer
Hohenszalras to it.'

'Hohenszalras is all very well in the summer and autumn,' said Princess
Ottilie, with a glance of anything but love at the great fantastic
solemn pile; 'but for a woman of your age and your possessions to
pass your days talking to farmers and fishermen, poring over books,
perplexing yourself as to whether it is right for you to accept wealth
that comes from such a source of danger to human life as your salt
mines--it is absurd, it is ludicrous. You are made for something more
than a political economist; you should be in the great world.'

'I prefer my solitude and my liberty.'

'Liberty! Who or what could dictate to you in the world? You reigned
there once; you would always reign there.'

'Social life is a bondage, as an empress's is. It denies one the
greatest luxury of life--solitude.'

'Certainly, if you love solitude so much, you have your heart's desire
here. It is an Alvernia! It is a Mount Athos! It is a snow-entombed
paraclete, a hermitage, only tempered by horses!' said the Princess,
with a little angry laugh.

Her grand-niece smiled.

'By many horses, certainly. Dearest aunt, what would you have?
Austrians are all centaurs and amazons. I am only like my Kaiserin in
that passion.'

The Princess sighed.

She had never been able to comprehend the forest life, the daring, the
intrepidity, the open-air pastimes, and the delight in danger which
characterised all the race of Szalras. Daughter of a North German
princeling, and with some French blood in her veins also, reared under
the formal etiquette of her hereditary court, and at an early age
canoness of one of those great semi-religious orders which are only
open to the offspring of royal or of most noble lines, her whole life
had been one moulded to form and conventional habit, and only her own
sweetness and sprightliness of temper had saved her from the narrowness
of judgment and the chilliness of formality which such a life begets.
The order of which until late years she had been superior was one for
magnificence and wealth unsurpassed in Europe; but, semi-secular in its
privileges, it had left her much liberty, and never wholly divorced
her from the world, which in an innocent way she had always loved
and enjoyed. After Count Victor's death she had resigned her office
on plea of age and delicacy of health, and had come to take up her
residence at Hohenszalras with her dead niece's children. She had done
so because she had believed it to be her duty, and her attachment to
Wanda and Bela had always been very great; but she had never learned to
love the solitude of the Hohe Tauern, or ceased to regard Hohenszalras
as a place of martyrdom. After the minute divisions of every hour
and observances of every smallest ceremonial that she had been used
to at her father's own little court of Lilienslüst, and in her own
religious house, where every member of the order was a daughter of
some one of the highest families of Germany or of Austria, the life at
Hohenszalras, with its outdoor pastimes, its feudal habits, its vast
liberties for man and beast, and its long frozen winters, when not a
soul could come near it from over the passes, seemed very terrible to
her. She could never understand her niece's passionate attachment to
it, and she in real truth only breathed entirely at ease in those few
weeks of the year which to please her niece she consented to pass away
from the Hohe Tauern.

'Surely you will go to Ischl or go to Gödöllö this autumn, since Her
Majesty wishes it?' she said now, with an approving glance at the
imperial letter.

'Her Majesty is so kind as always to wish it,' answered the Countess
Wanda. 'Let us leave time to show what it holds for us. This is
scarcely summer. Yesterday was the fifteenth of May.'

'It is horribly cold,' said the Princess, drawing her silver-grey fur
about her. 'It is always horribly cold here, even in midsummer. And
when it does not snow it rains; you cannot deny _that._'

'Come, come! we have seen the sun all day to-day. I hope we shall see
it many days, for they have begun planting-out, you see--the garden
will soon be gorgeous.'

'When the mist allows it to be seen, it will be, I dare say,' said
Princess Ottilie, somewhat pettishly. 'It is tolerable here in the
summer, though never agreeable; but the Empress is so right, it is
absurd to shut yourself longer up in this gloomy place; you are bound
to return to the world. You owe it to your position to be seen in it
once more.'

'The world does not want me, my dear aunt; nor do I want the world.'

'That is sheer perversity----'

'How am I perverse? I know the world very well, and I know that no one
is necessary to it, unless it be Herr von Bismarck.'

'I do not see what Herr von Bismarck has to do with your going back to
your natural manner of life,' said the Princess, severely, who abhorred
any sort of levity in regard to the mighty minister who had destroyed
the Lilienhöhe princes one fine morning, as indifferently as a boy
plucks down a cranberry bough. 'In summer, or even autumn, Hohenszalras
is endurable, but in winter it is--hyperborean--even you must grant
that. One might as well be jammed in a ship, amidst icebergs, in the
midst of a frozen sea.'

'And you were born on the Elbe, oh fie! But indeed, my dearest aunt, I
like the frozen sea. The white months have no terrors for me. What you
call, and what calls itself, the great world is far more narrow than
the Iselthal. Here one's fancies, at least, can fly high as the eagles
do; in the world who can rise out of the hot-house air of the salons,
and see beyond the doings of one's friends and foes?'

'Surely one's own friends and foes--people like oneself, in a
word--must be as interesting as Hans, and Peter, and Katte, and
Grethel, with their crampons or their milkpails,' said the Princess,
with impatience. 'Besides, surely in the world there are political
movement, influence, interests.'

'Oh, intrigue?--as useful as Mme. de Laballe's or Mme. de
Longueville's? No! I do not believe there is even that in our time,
when even diplomacy itself is fast becoming a mere automatic factor
in a world that is governed by newspapers, and which has changed the
tyranny of wits for the tyranny of crowds. The time is gone by when a
"Coterie of Countesses" could change ministries, if they ever did do so
outside the novels of Disraeli. Drawing-room cabals may still do some
mischief perhaps, but they can do no good. Sometimes, indeed, I think
that what is called Government everywhere is nothing but a gigantic
mischief-making and place-seeking. The State is everywhere too like a
mother who sweeps her doorstep diligently, and scolds the neighbours,
while her child scalds itself to death unseen within.'

'In the world,' interrupted the Princess oppositely, 'you might
persuade them that the sweeping of doorsteps is not sufficient----'

'I prefer to keep my own house in order. It is quite enough
occupation,' said the Countess Wanda, with a smile. 'Dear aunt, here
amongst my own folks I can do some real good, I have some tangible
influence, I can feel that my life is not altogether spent in vain.
Why should I exchange these simple and solid satisfactions, for the
frivolities and the inanities of a life of pleasure which would not
even please me?'

'You are very hard to please, I know,' retorted the Princess. 'But say
what you will, it becomes ridiculous for a person of your age, your
great position, and your personal beauty, to immure yourself eternally
in what is virtually no better than confinement to a fortress!'

'A court is more of a prison to me,' said Wanda von Szalras. 'I know
both lives, and I prefer this life. As for my being very hard to
please, I think I was very gay and mirthful before Bela's death. Since
then all the earth has grown grey for me.'

'Forgive me, my beloved!' said Princess Ottilie, with quick contrition,
whilst moisture sprang into her limpid and still luminous blue eyes.

Wanda von Szalras took the old abbess's hand in her own, and kissed it.

'I understand all you wish for me, dear aunt. Believe me, I envy people
when I hear them laughing light-heartedly amongst each other. I think
I shall never laugh _so_ again.'

'If you would only marry----' said the Princess, with some hesitation.

'You think marriage amusing?' she said, with a certain contempt. 'If
you do, it is only because you escaped it.'

'Amusing!' said the Princess, a little scandalised. 'I could speak of
no Sacrament of our Holy Church as "amusing." You rarely display such
levity of language. I confess I do not comprehend you. Marriage would
give you interests in life which you seem to lack sadly now. It would
restore you to the world. It would be a natural step to take with such
vast possessions as yours.'

'It is not likely I shall ever take it,' said Wanda von Szalras,
drawing the soft fine ear of Donau through her fingers.

'I know it is not likely. I am very sorry that it is not likely. Yet
what nobler creature does God's earth contain than your cousin Egon?

'Egon? No: he is a good and brave and loyal gentleman, none better; but
I shall no more marry him than Donau here will wed a forest doe.'

'Yet he has loved you for ten years. But if not he there are so
many others, men of high enough place to be above all suspicion of
mercenary motive. No woman has been more adored than you, Wanda. Look
at Hugo Landrassy.'

'Oh, pray spare me their enumeration. It is like the Catalogue of
Ships!' said the Countess Wanda, with some coldness and some impatience
on her face.

At that moment an old man, who was major-domo of Hohenszalras,
approached and begged with deference to know whether his ladies would
be pleased to dine.

The Princess signified her readiness with alacrity; Wanda von Szalras
signed assent with less willingness.

'What a disagreeable obligation dining is,' she said, as she turned
reluctantly from the evening scene, with the lake sleeping in dusk and
shadow, while the snow summits still shone like silver and glowed with
rose.

'It is very wicked to think so,' said her great-aunt. 'When a merciful
Creator has appointed our appetites for our consolation and support it
is only an ingrate who is not thankful lawfully to indulge them.'

'That view of them never occurred to me,' said the châtelaine of
Hohenszalras. 'I think you must have stolen it, aunt, from some abbé
galant or some chanoinesse as lovely as yourself in the last century.
Alas! if not to care to eat be ungrateful I am a sad ingrate. Donau
and Neva are more ready subscribers to your creed.'

Donau and Neva were already racing towards the castle, and Wanda von
Szalras, with one backward lingering glance to the sunset, which
already was fading, followed them with slow steps to the grand house of
which she was mistress.

In the north alone the sky was overcast and of a tawny colour, where
the Pinzgau lay, with the green Salzach water rushing through its
wooded gorges, and its tracks of sand and stone desolate as any desert.

That slender space of angry yellow to the north boded ill for the
night. Bitter storms rolled in west from the Bœhmerwald, or north
from the Salzkammergut, many a time in the summer weather, changing it
to winter as they passed, tugging at the roof-ropes of the châlets,
driving the sheep into their sennerin's huts, covering with mist and
rain the mountain sides, and echoing in thunder from the peaks of the
Untersburg to the snows of the Ortler Spitze. It was such a sudden
storm which had taken Bela's life.

'I think we shall have wild weather,' said the Princess, drawing her
furs around her, as she walked down the broad length of the stone
terrace.

'I think so too,' said Wanda. 'It is coming very soon; and I fear I did
a cruel thing this morning.'

'What was that?'

'I sent a stranger to find his way over our hills to Matrey, as best
he might. He will hardly have reached it by now, and if a storm should
come----'

'A stranger?' said Princess Ottilie, whose curiosity was always alive,
and had also lately no food for its hunger.

'Only a poacher; but he was a gentleman, which made his crime the
worse.'

'A gentleman, and you sent him over the hills without a guide? It seems
unlike the hospitality of Hohenszalras.'

'Why he would have shot a _kuttengeier!_'

'A _kuttengeier_ is a horrible beast,' said the Princess, with a
shudder; 'and a stranger, just for an hour or so, would be welcome.'

'Even if his name were not in the Hof-Kalender?' asked her niece,
smiling.

'If he had been a pedlar, or a clockmaker, you would have sent him in
to rest. For a gentlewoman, Wanda, and so proud a one as you are, you
become curiously cruel to your own class.'

'I am always cruel to poachers. And to shoot a vulture in the month of
May!'

CHAPTER II.

The dining-hall was a vast chamber, panelled and ceiled with oak. In
the centre of the panels were emblazoned shields bearing the arms of
the Szalras, and of the families with which they had intermarried; the
long lancet windows had been painted by no less a hand than that of
Jacob of Ulm; the knights' stalls which ran round the hall were the
elaborate carving of Georges Syrlin; and old gorgeous banners dropped
down above them, heavy with broideries and bullion.

There were upper servants in black clothes with knee breeches, and a
dozen lacqueys in crimson and gold liveries, ranged about the table.
In many ways there were a carelessness and ease in the household which
always seemed lamentable to the Princess Ottilie, but in matters of
etiquette the great household was ruled like a small court; and when
sovereigns became guests there little in the order of the day needed
change at Hohenszalras.

The castle was half fortress, half palace; a noble and solemn place,
which had seen many centuries of warfare, of splendour, and of
alternate war and joy. Strangers used to Paris gilding, to Italian
sunlight, to English country-houses, found it too severe, too august,
too dark, and too stern in its majesty, and were awed by it. But she
who had loved it and played in it in infancy changed nothing there,
but cherished it as it had come to her; and it was in all much the
same as it had been in the days of Henry the Lion, from its Gothic
Silber-kapelle, that was like an ivory and jewelled casket set in dusky
silver, to its immense Rittersäal, with a hundred knights in full
armour standing down it, as the bronze figures stand round Maximilian's
empty tomb in Tirol. There are many such noble places hidden away in
the deep forests and the mountain glens of Maximilian's empire.

In this hall there were some fifteen persons standing. They were the
priest, the doctor, the high steward, the almoner, some dames de
compagnie, and some poor ladies, widows or spinsters, who subsisted
on the charities of Hohenszalras. The two noble ladies bowed to them
all and said a few kind words; then passed on and seated themselves
at their own table, whilst these other persons took their seats
noiselessly at a longer table, behind a low screen of carved oak.

The lords of Hohenszalras had always thus adhered to the old feudal
habit of dining in public, and in royal fashion, thus.

The Countess Wanda and her aunt spoke little; the one was thinking
of many other things than of the food brought to her, the other was
enjoying to the uttermost each _bouchée_, each _relevée_, each morsel
of quail, each mouthful of wine-stewed trout, each succulent truffle,
and each rich drop of crown Tokaï.

The repast was long, and to one of them extremely tedious; but these
formal and prolonged ceremonials had been the habit of her house, and
Wanda von Szalras carefully observed all hereditary usage and custom.
When her aunt had eaten her last fruit, and she herself had broken
her last biscuit between the dogs, they rose, one glad that the most
tiresome, and the other regretful that the most pleasant, hour of the
uneventful day was over.

With a bow of farewell to the standing household, they went by mutual
consent their divers ways; the Princess to her favourite blue room
and her after-dinner doze, Wanda to her own study, the chamber most
essentially her own, where all were hers.

The softness and radiance of the after-glow had given place to night
and rain; the mists and the clouds had rolled up from the Zillerthal
Alps, and the water was pouring from the skies.

Lamps, wax candles, flambeaux, burning in sconces or upheld by statues
or swinging from chains, were illumining the darkness of the great
castle, but in her own study only one little light was shining, for
she, a daughter of the mystical mountains and forests, loved the
shadows of the night.

She seated herself here by the unshuttered casement. The full moon was
rising above the Glöckner range, and the rain-clouds as yet did not
obscure it, though a film of falling water veiled all the westward
shore of the lake, and all the snows on the peaks and crests of the
Venediger. She leaned her elbows on the cushioned seat, and looked out
into the night.

'Bela, my Bela! are you content with me?' she murmured. To her Bela
was as living as though he were present by her side; she lived in
the constant belief of his companionship and his sight. Death was a
cruel--ah, how cruel!--wall built up between him and her, forbidding
them the touch of each other's hands, denying them the smile of each
other's eyes; but none the less to her was he there, unseen, but ever
near, hidden behind that inexorable, invisible barrier which one day
would fall and let her pass and join him.

She sat idle in the embrasure of the oriel window, whilst the one lamp
burned behind her. This, her favourite room, had scarcely been changed
since Maria Theresa, on a visit there, had made it her bower-room.
The window-panes had been painted by Selier of Landshut in 1440;
the stove was one of Hirschvögel's; the wood-carvings had been done
by Schuferstein; there was silver _repoussé_ work of Kellerthaler,
tapestries of Marc de Comans, enamels of Elbertus of Köln, of Jean of
Limoges, of Leonard Limousin, of Penicaudius; embroidered stuffs of
Isabeau Maire, damascened armour once worn by Henry the Lion, a painted
spinet that had belonged to Isabella of Bavaria, and an ivory Book of
Hours, once used by Carolus Magnus; and all these things, like the many
other treasures of the castle, had been there for centuries; gifts
from royal guests, spoils of foreign conquest, memorials of splendid
embassies or offices of state held by the lords of Szalras, or
marriage presents at magnificent nuptials in the old magnificent ages.

In this room she, their sole living representative, was never disturbed
on any pretext. In the adjacent library (a great cedar-lined room,
holding half a million volumes, with many missals and early classics,
and many an _editio princeps_ of the Renaissance), she held all her
audiences, heard all petitions or complaints, audited her accounts,
conversed with her tenants or her stewards, her lawyers or her
peasants, and laboured earnestly to use to the best of her intelligence
the power bequeathed to her.

'I am but God's and Bela's steward, as my steward is mine,' she said
always to herself, and never avoided any duty or labour entailed on
her, never allowed weariness or self-indulgence to enervate her. _Qui
facit per alium, facit per se_ had been early taught to her, and she
never forgot it. She never did anything vicariously which concerned
those dependent upon her. And she was an absolute sovereign in this her
kingdom of glaciers and forests; her frozen sea as she had called it.
She never avoided a duty merely because it was troublesome, and she
never gave her signature without knowing why and wherefore. It is easy
to be generous; to be just is more difficult and burdensome. Generous
by temper, she strove earnestly to be always just as well, and her life
was not without those fatigues which a very great fortune brings with
it to anyone who regards it as a sacred trust.

She had wide possessions and almost incalculable wealth. She had salt
mines in Galicia, she had Vosläuer vineyards in the Salzkammergut, she
had vast plains of wheat, and leagues on leagues of green lands, where
broods of horses bred and reared away in the steppes of Hungary. She
had a palace in the Herrengasse at Vienna, another in the Residenzplatz
of Salzburg; she had forests and farms in the Innthal and the
Zillerthal; she had a beautiful little schloss on the green Ebensee,
which had been the dower-house of the Countesses of Szalras, and she
had pine-woods, quarries, vineyards, and even a whole riverain town
on the Danube, with a right to take toll on the ferry there, which
had been given to her forefathers as far back as the days of Mathias
Carvin, a right that she herself had let drop into desuetude. 'I do
not want the poor folks' copper kreutzer,' she said to her lawyers
when they remonstrated. What did please her was the fact coupled with
this right that even the Kaiser could not have entered her little town
without his marshal thrice knocking at the gates, and receiving from
the warder the permission to pass, in the words, 'The Counts of Idrac
bid you come in peace.'

All these things and places made a vast source of revenue, and the
property, whose title-deeds and archives lay in many a chest and coffer
in the old city of Salzburg, was one of the largest in Europe. It would
have given large portions and dowries to a score of sons and daughters
and been none the worse. And it was all accumulating on the single head
of one young and lonely woman! She was the last of her race; there were
distant collateral branches, but none of them near enough to have any
title to Hohenszalras. She could bequeath it where she would, and she
had already willed it to her Kaiserin, in a document shut up in an iron
chest in the city of Salzburg. She thought the Crown would be a surer
and juster guardian of her place and people than any one person, whose
caprices she could not foretell, whose extravagance or whose injustice
she could not foresee. Sometimes, even to the spiritual mind of the
Princess Ottilie, the persistent refusal of her niece to think of any
marriage seemed almost a crime against mankind.

What did the Crown want with it?

The Princess was a woman of absolutely; loyal sentiment towards all
ancient sovereignties. She believed in Divine right, and was as strong
a royalist as it is possible for anyone to be whose fathers have been
devoured like an anchovy by M. de Bismarck, and who has the sympathy
of fellow feeling with Frohsdorf and Gmünden. But even her devotion to
the rights of monarchs failed to induce her to see why the Habsburg
should inherit Hohenszalras. The Crown is a noble heir, but it is one
which leaves the heart cold. Who would ever care for her people, and
her forests, and her animals as she had done? Even from her beloved
Kaiserin she could not hope for that. 'If I had married?' she thought,
the words of the Princess Ottilie coming back upon her memory.

Perhaps, for the sake of her people and her lands, it might have been
better.

But there are women to whom the thought of physical surrender of
themselves is fraught with repugnance and disgust; a sentiment so
strong that only a great passion vanquishes it. She was one of these
women, and passion she had never felt.

'Even for Hohenszalras I could not,' she thought, as she leaned on
the embrasure cushions, and watched the moon, gradually covered with
the heavy blue-black clouds. The Crown should be her heir and reign
here after her, when she should be laid by the side of Bela in that
beautiful dusky chapel beneath the shrines of ivory and silver, where
all the dead of the House of Szalras slept. But it was an heir which
left her heart cold.

She rose abruptly, left the embrasure, and began to examine the letters
of the day and put down heads of replies to them, which her secretary
could amplify on the morrow.

One letter her secretary could not answer for her; it was a letter
which gave her pain, and which she read with an impatient sigh. It
urged her return to the world as the letter of her Empress had done,
and it urged with timidity, yet with passion, a love that had been
loyal to her from her childhood. It was signed 'Egon Vàsàrhely.'

'It is the old story,' she thought. 'Poor Egon! If only one could have
loved him, how it would have simplified everything; and I do love him,
as I once loved Gela and Victor.'

But that was not the love which Egon Vàsàrhely pleaded for with the
tenderness of one who had been to her as a brother from her babyhood,
and the frankness of a man who knew his own rank so high and his own
fortunes so great, that no mercenary motive could be attributed to
him even when he sought the mistress of Hohenszalras. It was the old
story: she had heard it many times from him and from others in those
brilliant winters in Vienna which had preceded Bela's death. And it had
always failed to touch her. Women who have never loved are harsh to
love from ignorance.

At that moment a louder crash of thunder reverberated from hill to
hill, and the Glöckner domes seemed to shout to the crests of the
Venediger.

'I hope that stranger is housed and safe,' she thought, her mind
reverting to the poacher of whom she had spoken on the terrace at
sunset. His face came before her memory: a beautiful face, oriental
in feature, northern in complexion, fair and cold, with blue eyes of
singular brilliancy.

The forests of Hohenszalras are in themselves a principality. Under
enormous trees, innumerable brooks and little torrents dash downwards
to lose themselves in the green twilight of deep gorges; broad, dark,
still lakes lie like cups of jade in the bosom of the woods; up above,
where the Alpine firs and the pinus cembra shelter him, the bear lives
and the wolf too; and higher yet, where the glacier lies upon the
mountain side, the merry steinbock leaps from peak to peak, and the
white-throat vulture and the golden eagle nest. The oak, the larch,
the beech, the lime, cover the lower hills, higher grow the pines and
firs, the lovely drooping Siberian pine foremost amidst them. In the
lower wood grassy roads cross and thread the leafy twilight. A stranger
had been traversing these woods that morning, where he had no right
or reason to be. Forest-law was sincerely observed and meted out at
Hohenszalras, but of that he was ignorant or careless.

Before him, in the clear air, a large, dark object rose and spread
huge pinions to the wind and soared aloft. The trespasser lifted his
rifle to his shoulder, and in another moment would have fired. But an
alpenstock struck the barrel up into the air, and the shot went off
harmless towards the clouds. The great bird, startled by the report,
flew rapidly to the westward; the Countess Wanda said quietly to the
poacher in her forest, 'You cannot carry arms here,'

He looked at her angrily, and in surprise.

'You have lost me the only eagle I have seen for years,' he said
bitterly, with a flush of discomfiture and powerless rage on his fair
face.

She smiled a little.

'That bird was not an eagle, sir; it was a white-throated vulture, a
_kuttengeier._ But had it been an eagle--or a sparrow--you could not
have killed it on my lands.'

Pale still with anger, he uncovered his head.

'I have not the honour to know in whose presence I stand,' he muttered
sullenly. 'But I have Imperial permission to shoot wherever I choose.'

'His Majesty has no more loyal subject than myself,' she answered him.
'But his dominion does not extend over my forests. You are on the
ground of Hohenszalras, and your offence----'

'I know nothing of Hohenszalras!' he interrupted, with impatience.

She blew a whistle, and her head forester with three jägers sprang up
as if out of the earth, some great wolf-hounds, grinning with their
fangs, waiting but a word to spring. In one second the rangers had
thrown themselves on the too audacious trespasser, had pinioned him,
and had taken his rifle.

Confounded, disarmed, humiliated, and stunned by the suddenness of the
attack, he stood mute and very pale.

'You know Hohenszalras now!' said the mistress of it, with a smile,
as she watched his seizure seated on a moss-grown boulder of granite,
black Donau and white Neva by her side. He was pale with impotent fury,
conscious of an indefensible and absurd position. The jäger looked at
their mistress; they had slipped a cord over his wrists, and tied them
behind his back; they looked to her for a sign of assent to break his
rifle. She stood silent, amused with her victory and his chastisement;
a little derision shining in her lustrous eyes.

'You know Hohenszalras now!' she said once more. 'Men have been shot
dead for what you were doing. If you be, indeed, a friend of my
Emperor's, of course you are welcome here; but----'

'What right have you to offer me this indignity,' muttered the
offender, his fair features changing from white to red, and red to
white, in his humiliation and discomfiture.

'Right!' echoed the mistress of the forests. 'I have the right to do
anything I please with you! You seem to me to understand but little of
forest laws.'

'Madame, were you not a woman, you would have had bloodshed.'

'Oh, very likely. That sometimes happens, although seldom, as all the
Hohe Tauern knows how strictly these forests are preserved. My men are
looking to me for permission to break your rifle. That is the law, sir.'

'Since 'Forty-eight,' said the trespasser, with what seemed to her
marvellous insolence, 'all the old forest laws are null and void. It
is scarcely allowable to talk of trespass.'

A look of deep anger passed over her face. 'The follies of 'Forty-eight
have nothing to do with Hohenszalras,' she said, very coldly. 'We hold
under charters of our own, by grants and rights which even Rudolf of
Habsburg never dared meddle with. I am not called on to explain this to
you, but you appear to labour under such strange delusions that it is
as well to dispel them.'

He stood silent, his eyes cast downward. His humiliation seemed to
him enormously disproportioned to his offending. The hounds menaced
him with deep growls and grinning fangs; the jägers held his gun; his
wrists were tied behind him. 'Are you indeed a friend of the Kaiser?'
she repeated to him.

'I am no friend of his,' he answered bitterly and sullenly. 'I met
him a while ago zad-hunting on the Thorstein. His signature is in my
pocket; bid your jäger take it out.'

'I will not doubt your word,' she said to him. 'You look a gentleman.
If you will give me your promise to shoot no more on these lands I will
let them set you free and render you up your rifle.'

'You have the law with you,' said the trespasser moodily. 'Since I can
do no less--I promise.'

'You are ungracious, sir,' said Wanda, with a touch of severity and
irritation. 'That is neither wise nor grateful, since you are nothing
more or better than a poacher on my lands. Nevertheless, I will trust
you.'

Then she gave a sign to the jägers and a touch to the hounds: the
latter rose and ceased their growling; the former instantly, though
very sorrowfully, untied the cord off the wrists of their prisoner, and
gave him back his unloaded rifle.

'Follow that path into the ravine; cross that; ascend the opposite
hills, and you will find the high road. I advise you to take it, sir.
Good-day to you.'

She pointed out the forest path which wound downward under the arolla
pines. He hesitated a moment, then bowed very low with much grace,
turned his back on her and her foresters and her dogs, and began slowly
to descend the moss-grown slope.

He hated her for the indignity she had brought upon him, and the
ridicule to which she forced him to submit; yet the beauty of her had
startled and dazzled him. He had thought of the great Queen of the
Nibelungen-Lied, whose armour lies in the museum of Vienna.

'Alas! why have you let him go, my Countess!' murmured Otto, the head
forester.

'The Kaiser had made him sacred,' she answered, with a smile; and
then she called Donau and Neva, who were roaming, and went on her way
through her forest.

'What strange and cruel creatures we are!' she thought. 'The vulture
would have dropped into the ravine. He would never have found it. The
audacity, too, to fire on a _kuttengeier_; if it had been any lesser
bird one might have pardoned it.'

For the eagle, the gypæte, the white-throated pygargue, the buzzard,
and all the family of falcons were held sacred at Hohenszalras, and
lived in their mountain haunts rarely troubled. It was an old law there
that the great winged monarchs should never be chased, except by the
Kaiser himself when he came there. So that the crime of the stranger
had been more than trespass and almost treason! Her heart was hard to
him, and she felt that she had been too lenient. Who could tell but
that that rifle would bring down some free lord of the air?

She listened with the keen ear of one used to the solitude of the hills
and woods; she thought he would shoot something out of bravado. But all
was silent in that green defile beneath whose boughs the stranger was
wending on his way. She listened long, but she heard no shots, although
in those still heights the slightest noise echoed from a hundred walls
of rock and ice. She walked onward through the deep shadow of the thick
growing beeches; she had her alpenstock in her right hand, her little
silver horn hung at her belt, and beside it was a pair of small ivory
pistols, pretty as toys, but deadly as revolvers could be. She stooped
here and there to gather some lilies of the valley, which were common
enough in these damp grassy glades.

'Where could that stranger have come from, Otto?' she asked of her
jäger.

'He must have come over the Hündspitz, my Countess,' said Otto. 'Any
other way he would have been stopped by our men and lightened of his
rifle.'

'The Hündspitz!' she echoed, in wonder, for the mountain so called was
a wild inaccessible place, divided by a parapet of ice all the year
round from the range of the Gross Glöckner.

'That must he,' said the huntsman,'and for sure if an honest man had
tried to come that way he would have been hurled headlong down the
ice-wall----'

'He is the Kaiser's _protégé_, Otto,' said his mistress, with a smile,
but the old jäger muttered that they had only his own word for that.
It had pierced Otto's soul to let the poacher's rifle go.

She thought of all this with some compunction now, as she sat in her
own warm safe chamber and heard the thunder, the wind, the raising of
the storm which had now fairly broken in full fury. She felt uneasy for
the erring stranger. The roads over the passes were still perilous from
avalanches and half melted snow in the crevasses; the time of year was
more dangerous than midwinter.

'I ought to have given him a guide,' she thought, and went out and
joined the Princess Ottilie, who had awakened from her after-dinner
repose under the loud roll of the thunder and the constantly recurring
flashes of lightning.

'I am troubled for that traveller whom I saw in the woods to-day,' she
said to her aunt. 'I trust he is safe housed.'

'If he had been a pastry-cook from the Engadine, or a seditious
heretical _colporteur_ from Geneva, you would have sent him into the
kitchens to feast,' said the Princess, contentiously.

'I hope he is safe housed,' repeated Wanda. 'It is several hours ago;
he may very well have reached the posthouse.'

'You have the satisfaction of thinking the _kuttengeier_ is safe,
sitting on some rock tearing a fish to pieces,' said the Princess, who
was irritable because she was awakened before her time. 'Will you have
some coffee or some tea? You look disturbed, my dear; after all, you
say the man was a poacher.'

'Yes. But I ought to have seen him safe off my ground. There are a
hundred kinds of death on the hills for anyone who does not know them
well. Let us look at the weather from the hall; one can see better from
there.'

From the Rittersäal, whose windows looked straight down the seven
miles of the lake water, she watched the tempest. All the mountains
were sending back echoes of thunder, which sounded like salvoes of
artillery. There was little to be seen for the dense rain mist; the
beacon of the Holy Isle glimmered redly through the darkness. In the
upper air snow was falling; the great white peaks and pinnacles ever
and again flashed strangely into view as the lightning illumined them;
the Glöckner-wanda towered above all others a moment in the glare, and
seemed like ice and fire mingled.

'They are like the great white thrones of the Apocalypse,' she thought.

Beneath, the lake boiled and seethed in blackness like a witches'
cauldron.

A storm was always terrible to her, from the memory of Bela.

In the lull of a second in the tempest of sound it seemed to her as if
she heard some other cry than that of the wind.

'Open one of these windows and listen,' she said to Hubert, her
major-domo. 'I fancy I hear a shout--a scream. I am not certain, but
listen well.'

'There is some sound,' said Hubert, after a moment of attention. 'It
comes from the lake. But no boat could live long in that water, my
Countess.'

'No!' she said, with a quick sigh, remembering how her brother had
died. 'But we must do what we can. It may be one of the lake fishermen
caught in the storm before he could make for home. Ring the alarm-bell,
and go out, all of you, to the water stairs. I will come, too.'

In a few moments the deep bell that hung in the chime tower, and which
was never sounded except for death or danger, added its sonorous brazen
voice to the clang and clamour of the storm. All the household paused,
and at the summons, coming from north, south, east, and west of the
great pile of buildings, grooms, gardeners, huntsmen, pages, scullions,
underlings, all answered to the metal tongue, which told them of some
peril at Hohenszalras.

With a hooded cloak thrown over her, she went out into the driving
rain, down the terrace to the head of what were called the water
stairs; a flight of granite steps leading to the little quay upon the
eastward shore of the Szalrassee, where were moored in fair weather the
pleasure boats, the fishing punts, and the canoes which belonged to the
castle: craft all now safe in the boat-house.

'Make no confusion,' she said to them. 'There is no danger in the
castle. There is some boat, or some swimmer, on the lake. Light the
terrace beacon and we shall see.'

She was very pale. There was no storm on those waters that did not
bring back to her, as poignant as the first fresh hours of its grief,
the death of Bela.

The huge beacon of iron, a cage set on high and filled with tow and tar
and all inflammable things, was set on fire, and soon threw a scarlet
glare over the scene.

The shouts had ceased.

'They may be drowned,' she said, with her lips pressed tightly
together. 'I hear nothing now. Have you the rope and the lifeboat
ready? We must wait for more light.'

At that moment the whole of the tar caught, and the beacon blazed at
its fiercest in its iron cage, as it had used to blaze in the ages gone
by as a war signal, when the Prelates of Salzburg and Birchtesgaden
were marching across the marshes of Pinzgau in quarrel or feud with the
lords of the strongest fortress in the Hohe Tauern.

In the struggling light which met the blue glance of the lightning they
could see the angry waters of the lake as far as the Holy Isle, and
near to land, only his head above the water, was a man drowning, as the
pilgrims had drowned.

'For the love of God--the rope!' she cried, and almost before the words
had escaped from her her men had thrown a lifebuoy to the exhausted
swimmer, and pushed one of the boats into the seething darkness of the
lake. But the swimmer had strength enough to catch hold of the buoy
as it was hurled to him by the _fischermeister's_ unerring hand, and
he clung to it and kept his grasp on it, despite the raging of the
wind and waters, until the boat reached him. He was fifty yards off
the shore, and he was pulled into the little vessel, which was tossed
to and fro upon the black waters like a shell; the _fohn_ was blowing
fiercely all the time, and flung the men headlong on the boat's bottom
twice ere they could seize the swimmer, who helped himself, for, though
mute; and almost breathless, he was not insensible, and had not lost
all his strength. If he had not been so near the land he and the boat's
crew would all have sunk, and dead bodies would once more have been
washed on the shore of the Szalrassee with the dawn of another day.

Drenched, choked with water, and thrown from side to side as the wind
played with them as a child with its ball, the men ran their boat at
last against the stairs, and landed with their prize.

Dripping from head to foot, and drawing deep breaths of exhaustion,
the rescued man stood on the terrace steps bareheaded and in his
shirt-sleeves, his brown velvet breeches pulled up to his knees, his
fair hair lifted by the wind, and soaked with wet.

She recognised the trespasser of the forest.

'Madame, behold me in your power again!' he said, with a little smile,
though he breathed with labour, and his voice was breathless and low.

'You are welcome, sir. Any stranger or friend would be welcome in such
a night,' she said, with the red glow of the beacon light shed upon
her. 'Pray do not waste breath or time in courtesies. Come up the steps
and hurry to the house. You must be faint and bruised.'

'No, no,' said the swimmer; but as he spoke his eyes closed, he
staggered a little; a deadly faintness and cold had seized him, and
cramp came on all his limbs.

The men caught him, and carried him up the stairs; he strove to
struggle and protest, but Otto the forester stooped over him.

'Keep you still,' he muttered. 'You have the Countess's orders.
Trespass has cost you dear, my master.'

'I do not think he is greatly hurt,' said the mistress of Szaravola to
her house physician. 'But go you to him, doctor, and see that he is
warmly housed and has hot drinks. Put him in the Strangers' Gallery,
and pray take care my aunt is not alarmed.'

The Princess Ottilie at that moment was alternately eating a _nougat_
out of her sweetmeat box and telling the beads of her rosary. The sound
of the wind and the noise of the storm could not reach her in her
favourite blue-room, all _capitonnée_ with turquoise silks as it was;
the only chamber in all Szaravola that was entirely modern and French.

'I do hope Wanda is running no risk,' she thought, from time to time.
'It would be quite like her to row down the lake.'

But she sat still in her lamp light, and told her beads.

A few moments later her niece entered. Her waterproof mantle had kept
her white gown from the rain and spray.

There was a little moisture on her hair, that was all. She did not
look as if she had stirred further from her drawing-room than the
Princess had done.

Now that the stranger was safe and sound he had ceased to have any
interest for her; he was nothing more than any flotsam of the lake;
only one other to sleep beneath the roofs of Hohenszalras, where half a
hundred slept already.

The castle, in the wild winters that shut out the Hohe Tauern from the
world, was oftentimes a hospice for travellers, though usually those
travellers were only pedlars, colporteurs, mule-drivers, clock-makers
of the Zillerthal or carpet weavers of the Defreggerthal, too late in
the year to pursue their customary passage over the passes in safety.
To such the great beacon of the Holy Isle and the huge servants' hall
of Szaravola were well known.

She sat down to her embroidery frame without speaking; she was working
some mountain flowers in silks on velvet, for a friend in Paris' The
flowers stood in a glass on a table.

'It is unkind of you to go out in that mad way on such a night as
this, and return looking so unlike having had an adventure!' said the
Princess, a little pettishly.

'There has been no adventure,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile.
'But there is what may do as well--a handsome stranger who' has been
saved from drowning.'

Even as she spoke her face changed, her mouth quivered; she crossed
herself, and murmured, too low for the other to hear:

'Bela, my beloved, think not that I forget!'

The Princess Ottilie sat up erect in her chair, and her blue eyes
brightened like a girl of sixteen.

'Then there _is_ an adventure! Tell it me quick! My dear, silence is
very stately and very becoming to you; but sometimes--excuse me--you do
push it to annoying extremes.'

'I was afraid of agitation for you,' said the Countess Wanda; and then
she told the Princess what had occurred that night.

'And I never knew that a poor soul was in peril!' cried the Princess,
conscious-stricken. 'And is that the last you have seen of him? Have
you never asked----?'

'Hubert says he is only bruised; they have taken him to the Strangers'
Gallery. Here is Herr Greswold--he will tell us more.'

The person who entered was the physician of Hohenszalras. He was
a little old man of great talent, with a clever, humorous, mild
countenance; he had, coupled with a love for rural life, a passion
for botany and natural history, which made his immurement in the
Iselthal welcome to him, and the many fancied ailments of the Princess
endurable. He bowed very low alternately to both ladies, and refused
with a protest the chair to which the Countess Wanda motioned him. He
said that the stranger was not in the least seriously injured; he had
been seized with cramp and chills, but he had administered a cordial,
and these were passing. The gentleman seemed indisposed to speak,
shivered a good deal, and was inclined to sleep.

'He is a gentleman, think you? asked the Princess.

The Herr Professor said that to him it appeared so.

'And of what rank?'

The physician thought it was impossible to say.

'It is always possible,' said the Princess, a little impatiently. 'Is
his linen fine? Is his skin smooth? Are his hands white and slender?
Are his wrists and ankles small?'

Herr Greswold said that he was sorely grieved, but he had not taken
any notice as to any of these things; he had been occupied with his
diagnosis of the patient's state; for, he added, he thought the swimmer
had been long in the water, and the Szalrassee was of very dangerously
low temperature at night, being fed as it Was from the glaciers and
snows of the mountains.

'It is very interesting,' said the Princess; 'but pray observe what I
have named, now that you return to his chamber.'

Greswold took the hint, and bowed himself out of the drawing-room. Frau
Ottilie returned to her nougats.

'I wish that one could know who he was,' she said regretfully. To
harbour an unknown person was not agreeable to her in these days of
democracies and dynamite.

'What does it matter?' said her niece. 'Though he were a Nihilist or a
convict from the mines, he would have to be sheltered to-night.'

'The Herr Professor is very inattentive,' said the Princess, with an
accent that from one of her sweetness was almost severe.

'The Herr Professor is compiling the Flora of the Hohe Tauern,' said
her niece, 'and he will publish it in Leipzig some time in the next
twenty years. How can a botanist care for so unlovely a creature as a
man? If it were a flower indeed!'

'I never approved of that herbarium,' said the Princess, still
severely. 'It is too insignificant an occupation beside those great
questions of human ills which his services are retained to study.
He is inattentive, and he grows even impertinent: he almost told me
yesterday that my neuralgia was all imagination!'

'He took you for a flower, mother mine, because you are so lovely; and
so he thought you could have no mortal pain!' said Wanda, tenderly.

Then after a pause she added:

'Dear aunt, come with me. I have asked Father Ferdinand to have a mass
to-night for Bela. I fancy Bela is glad that no other life has been
taken by the lake.'

The Princess rose quickly and kissed her.

In the Strangers' Gallery, in a great chamber of panelled oak and
Flemish tapestries, the poacher, as he lay almost asleep on a grand old
bed, with yellow taffeta hangings, and the crown of the Szalras Counts
in gilded bronze above its head, he heard as if in his dream the sound
of chanting voices and the deep slow melodies of an organ.

He stirred and opened his drowsy eyes.

'Am I in heaven?' he asked feebly. Yet he was a man who, when he was
awake and well, believed not in heaven.

The physician, sitting by his bedside, laid his hand upon his wrist.
The pulse was beating strongly but quickly.

'You are in the Burg of Hohenszalras,' he answered him. 'The music
you hear comes from the chapel; there is a midnight mass. A mass of
thanksgiving for you.'

The heavy lids fell over the eyes of the weary man, and the dreamy
sense of warmth and peace that was upon him lulled him into the
indifference of slumber.

Chapter III

With the morning, though the storm had ceased and passed away, the
clouds were dark, the mountains were obscured, and the rain was pouring
down upon lake and land.

It was still early in the day when the stranger was aroused to the full
sense of awaking in a room unknown to him; he had slept all through the
night; he was refreshed and without fever. His left arm was strained,
and he had many bruises; otherwise he was conscious of no hurt.

'Twice in that woman's power,' he thought, with anger, as he looked
round the great tapestried chamber that sheltered him, and tried to
disentangle his actual memories of the past night from the dreams that
had haunted him of the Nibelungen Queen, who all night long he had
seen in her golden armour, with her eyes which, like those of the Greek
nymph, dazzled those on whom they gazed to madness. Dream and fact had
so interwoven themselves that it was with an effort he could sever the
two, awaking as he did now in an unfamiliar chamber, and surrounded
with those tapestries whose colossal figures seemed the phantoms of a
spirit world.

He was a man in whom some vein of superstition had outlived the
cold reason and the cynical mockeries of the worldly experiences
and opinions in which he was steeped. A shudder of cold ran through
his blood as he opened his eyes upon that dim, tranquil, and vast
apartment, with the stories of the Tannhäuser legend embroidered on the
walls.

'I am he! I am he!' he thought incoherently, watching the form of the
doomed knight speeding through the gloom and snow.

'How does the most high and honourable gentleman feel himself this
morning?' asked of him, in German, a tall white-haired woman, who might
have stepped down from an old panel of Metzu.

The simple commonplace question roused him from the mists of his
fancies and fears, and realised to him the bare fact that he was a
guest, unbidden, in the walls of Szaravola.

The physician also drew near his bed to question him; and a boy brought
on a tray Rhine wine and Tokayer Ausbruck, coffee and chocolate, bread
and eggs.

He broke his fast with a will, for he had eaten nothing since the day
before at noon; and the Professor Greswold congratulated him on his
good night's rest, and on his happy escape from the Szalrassee.

Then he himself said, with a little confusion:

'I saw a lady last night?'

'Certainly, you saw our lady,' said Greswold, with a smile.

'What do you call her?' he asked, eagerly.

The physician answered:

'She is the Countess Wanda von Szalras. She is sole mistress here.
But for her, my dear sir, I fear me you would be now lying in those
unfathomed depths that the bravest of us fear.'

The stranger shuddered a little.

'I was a madman to try the lake with such an overcast sky; but I had
missed my road, and I was told that it lay on the other side of the
water. Some peasants tried to dissuade me from crossing, but I am a
good rower and swimmer too; so I set forth to pull myself over your
lake.'

'With a sky black as ink! I suppose you are used to more serene
summers. Midsummer is not so different to midwinter here that you can
trust to its tender mercies.'

The stranger was silent.

'She took my gun from me in the morning,' he said abruptly. The memory
of the indignity rankled in him, and made bitter the bread and wine.

The physician laughed.

'Were you poaching? Oh, that is almost a hanging matter in the
Hohenszalras woods. Had you met Otto without our lady he would most
likely have shot you without warning.'

'Are you savages in the Tauern?'

'Oh no; but we are very feudal still, and our forest laws have escaped
alteration in this especial part of the province.'

'She has been very hospitable to me, since my crime was so great.'

'She is the soul of hospitality, and the Schloss is a hospice,' said
the physician. 'When there is no town nearer than ten Austrian miles,
and the nearest posting-house is at Windisch-Matrey, it is very
necessary to exercise the primitive virtues; it is our compensation
for our feudalism. But take some tokayer, my dear sir; you are weaker
than you know. You have had a bath of ice; you had best lie still, and
I will send you some journals and books.'

'I would rather get up and go away,' said the stranger. 'These bruises
are nothing. I will thank your lady, as you call her, and then go on my
way as quickly as I may.'

'I see you do not understand feudal ways, though you have suffered from
them,' said the doctor. 'You shall get up if you wish; but I am certain
my lady will not let you leave here to-day. The rains are falling
in torrents; the roads are dangerous; a bridge has broken down over
the Bürgenbach, which you must cross to get away. In a word, if you
insist on departure, they will harness their best horses for you, for
all the antique virtues have refuge here, and amongst them is a grand
hospitality; but you will possibly kill the horses, and perhaps the
postillions, and you will not even then get very far upon your way. Be
persuaded by me. Wait at least until the morning dawns.'

'I had better burden your lady with an unbidden guest than kill her
horses, certainly,' said the stranger. 'How is she sole mistress here?
Is there a Count von Szalras? Is she a widow?'

'She has never married,' answered Greswold; and gave his patient a
brief sketch of the tragic fates of the lords of Hohenszalras, amongst
whom death had been so busy.'

'A very happy woman to be so rich, and so free!' said the traveller,
with a little impatient envy; and he added, 'She is very handsome also;
indeed, beautiful. I now remember to have heard of her in Paris. Her
hand has been esteemed one of the great prizes of Europe.'

'I think she will never marry,' said the old man.

'Oh, my dear doctor, who can make such at least she looks young. What
age may she be?'

'She was twenty-four years of age on Easter Day. As for happiness,
when you know the Countess Wanda, you will know that she would go out
as poor as S. Elizabeth, and self-dethroned like her, most willingly,
could she by such a sacrifice see her brothers living around her.'

The stranger gave a little cynical laugh of utter incredulity, which
dismayed and annoyed the old professor.

'You do not know her,' he said angrily.

'I know humanity,' said the other. 'Will you kindly take all my
apologies and regrets to the Countess, and give her my name; the
Marquis de Sabran. She can satisfy herself as to my identity at any
embassy she may care to consult.'

When he said his name, the professor gave a great cry and started from
his seat.

'Sabran!' he echoed. 'You edited the "Mexico"!' he exclaimed, and gazed
over his spectacles in awe and sympathy commingled at the stranger, who
smiled and answered----

'Long ago, yes. Have you heard of it?'

'Heard of it!' echoed Greswold. 'Do you take us for barbarians, sir?'
It is here, both in my small library, which is the collection of a
specialist, and in the great library of the castle, which contains a
million of volumes.'

'I am twice honoured,' said the stranger, with a smile of some irony.
The good professor was a little disconcerted, and his enthusiasm was
damped and cooled. He felt as much embarrassment as though he had been
the owner of a discredited work.

'May I not be permitted to congratulate you, sir?' he said timidly. 'To
have produced that great work is to possess a title to the gratitude
and esteem of all educated men.'

'You are very good,' said Sabran, somewhat indifferently; 'but all
that is great in that book is the Marquis Xavier's. I am but the mere
compiler.'

'The compilation, the editing of it, required no less learning than the
original writer displayed, and that was immense,' said the physician,
and with all the enthusiasm of a specialist he plunged into discussion
of the many notable points of a mighty intellectual labour, which had
received the praise of all the cultured world.

Sabran listened courteously, but with visible weariness. 'You are very
good,' he said at last. 'But you will forgive me if I say that I have
heard so much of the "Mexico" that I am tempted to wish I had never
produced it. I did so as a duty; it was all I could do in honour of one
to whom I owed far more than mere life itself.'

Greswold bowed and said no more.

'Give me my belt,' said the stranger to the man who waited on him;
it was a leathern belt, which had been about his loins; it was made
to hold gold and notes, a small six-chambered revolver, and a watch;
these were all in it, and with his money was the imperial permission to
shoot, which had been given, him by Franz Josef the previous autumn on
the Thorstein.

'Your Countess' will doubtless recognise her Emperor's signature,' he
said, as he gave the paper to the physician. 'It will serve at least as
a passport, if not as a letter of presentation.'

Réné, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, was one of those persons who
illustrate the old fairy tale, of all the good gifts at birth being
marred by the malison of one godmother. He had great physical beauty,
personal charm, and facile talent; but his very facility was his bane.
He did all things so easily and well, that he had never acquired the
sterner quality of application. He was a brilliant and even profound
scholar, an accomplished musician, a consummate critic of art; and
was endowed, moreover, with great natural tact, taste, and correct
intuition.

Being, as he was, a poor man, these gifts should have made him an
eminent one or a wealthy one, but the perverse fairy who had cursed
when the other had blessed him, had contrived to make all these graces
and talents barren. Whether it be true or not that the world knows
nothing of its greatest men, it is quite true that its cleverest men
very often do nothing of importance all their lives long. He did
nothing except acquire a distinct repute as a _dilettante_ in Paris,
and a renown in the clubs of being always serene and fortunate at play.

He had sworn to himself when he had been a youth to make his career
worthy of his name; but the years had slipped away, and he had done
nothing. He was a very clever man, and he had once set a high if a cold
and selfish aim before him as his goal. But he had done worse even than
fail; he had never even tried to reach it.

He was only a _boulevardier_; popular and admired amongst men for his
ready wit and his cool courage, and by women often adored and often
hated, and sometimes, by himself, thoroughly despised: never so much
despised as when by simple luck at play or on the Bourse he made the
money which slid through his fingers with rapidity.

All he had in the world were the wind-torn oaks and the sea-washed
rocks of a bleak and lonely Breton village, and a few hundred thousand
francs' worth of pictures, porcelains, arms, and _bibelots_, which
had accumulated in his rooms on the Boulevard Haussmann, bought at
the Drouot in the forenoons after successful play at night. Only two
things in him were unlike the men whose associate he was: he was as
temperate as an Arab, seldom even touching wine; and he was a keen
mountaineer and athlete, once off the asphalte of the Boulevards. For
the rest, popular though he was in the society he frequented, no
living man could boast of any real intimacy with him. He had a thousand
acquaintances, but he accepted no friend. Under the grace and suavity
of a very courtly manner he wore the armour of a great reserve.

'At heart you have the taciturnity and the _sauvagerie_ of the
Armorican beneath all your polished suavity,' said a woman of his world
to him once; and he did not contradict her.

Men did not quarrel with him for it: he was a fine swordsman and a dead
shot: and women were allured all the more surely to him because they
felt that they never really entered his life or took any strong hold on
it.

Such as he was he lay now half-awake on the great bed under its amber
canopy, and gazed dreamily at the colossal figures of the storied
tapestry, where the Tuscan idlers of the Decamerone wore the sombre
hues and the stiff and stately garb of Flemish fashion of the sixteenth
century.

'I wonder why I tried so hard to live last night! I am not in love
with life,' he thought to himself, as he slowly remembered all that
had happened, and recalled the face of the lady who had leaned down
to him from over the stone parapet in the play of the torchlight and
lightnings. And yet life seemed good and worth having as he recalled
that boiling dusky swirl of water which had so nearly swallowed him up
in its anger.

He was young enough to enjoy; he was blessed with a fine constitution
and admirable health, which even his own excesses had not impaired; he
had no close ties to the world, but he had a frequent enjoyment of it,
which made it welcome to him. The recovery of existence always enhances
its savour; and as he lay dreamily recalling the sharp peril he had
run, he was simply and honestly glad to be amongst living men.

He remained still when the physician had left and looked around him;
in the wide hearth a fire of oak logs was burning; rain was beating
against the painted panes of the oriel casements; there was old
oak, old silver, old ivory in the furniture of the chamber, and the
tapestries were sombre and gorgeous. It was a room of the sixteenth
century; but the wine was in jugs of Bacarat glass, and a box of
Turkish cigarettes stood beside them, with the Paris and Vienna
newspapers. Everything had been thought of that could contribute to
his comfort: he wondered if the doctor had thought of all this, or
if it was due to the lady. 'It is a magnificent hospice,' he said to
himself with a smile, and then he angrily remembered his rifle, his
good English rifle, that was now sunk for ever with his little boat in
the waters of the Szalrassee. 'Why did she offer me that outrage?' he
said to himself: it went hard with him to lie under her roof, to touch
her wine and bread. Yet he was aching in every limb, the bed was easy
and spacious, the warmth and the silence and the aromatic scent of the
burning pine-cones were alluring him to rest; he dropped off to sleep
again, the same calm sleep of fatigue that had changed into repose, and
nothing woke him till the forenoon was passed.

'Good heavens! how I am trespassing on this woman's hospitality!' he
thought as he did awake, angry with himself for having been lulled into
this oblivion; and he began to rise at once, though he felt his limbs
stiff and his head for the moment light.

'Cannot I get a carriage for S. Johann? My servant is waiting for me
there,' he said to the youth attending on him, when his bath was over.

The lad smiled with amusement.

'There are no carriages here but our lady's, and she will not let you
stir this afternoon, my lord,' he answered in German, as he aided the
stranger to put on his own linen and shooting breeches, now dry and
smoothed out by careful hands.

'But I have no coat! said the traveller in discomfiture, remembering
that his coat was gone with his rifle and his powder-flask.

'The Herr Professor thought you could perhaps manage with one of these.
They were all of Count Gela's, who was a tall man and about your make,'
said an older man-servant who had entered, and now showed him several
unworn or scarcely worn suits.

'If you could wear one of these, my lord, for this evening, we will
send as soon as it is possible for your servant and your clothes to S.
Johann; but it is impossible to-day, because a bridge is down over the
Bürgenbach.'

'You are all of you too good,' said Sabran, as he essayed a coat of
black velvet.

Pull of his new acquaintance and all his talents, the good man Greswold
had hurried away to obey the summons of his ladies, who had desired
to see him. He found them in the white room, a grand salon hung with
white satin silver-fringed, and stately with white marble friezes
and columns, whence it took its name. It was a favourite room with
the mistress of the Schloss; at either end of it immense windows,
emblazoned and deeply embayed, looked out over the sublime landscape
without, of which at this moment every outline was shrouded in the grey
veil of an incessantly falling rain.

With humble obeisances Greswold presented the message and the
credentials of her guest to Wanda von Szalras; it was the first
occasion that he had had of doing so. She read the document signed by
the Kaiser with a smile.

'This is the paper which this unhappy gentleman spoke of when I
arrested him as a poacher,' she said to her aunt. 'The Marquis de
Sabran. The name is familiar to me: I have heard it before.'

'Surely you do not forget the Pontêves-Bargême, the Ducs de Sabran?'
said the Princess, with some severity. S. Eleazar was a Comte de
Sabran!'

'I know! But it is of something nearer to us than S. Eleazar that I am
thinking; there was surely some work or another which bore that name,
and was much read and quoted.'

'He edited and annotated the great "Mexico",' said Herr Greswold, as
though all were told in that.

'A _savant?_' murmured the Princess, in some contemptuous chagrin.
'Pray what is the "Mexico"?'

'The grandest archæological and botanical work, the work of the finest
research and most varied learning that has been produced out of
Germany,' commenced the Professor, with eagerness, but the Princess
arrested him midway in his eloquence.

'The French are all infidels, we know that; but one might have hoped
that in one of the old nobility, as his name would imply, some
lingering reverence for tradition remained.'

'It is not a subversive, not a philosophic work,' said the Professor,
eagerly; but she silenced him.

'It is a book! Why should a Marquis de Sabran write a book?' said the
Princess, with ineffable disdain.

There were all the Fathers for anyone who wanted to read: what need for
any other use of printer's type? So she was accustomed to think and to
say when, scandalised, she saw the German, French, and English volumes,
of which whole cases were wont to arrive at Hohenszalras for the use
of Wanda von Szalras alone: works of philosophy and of science amongst
them which had been denounced in the 'Index.'

'Dear mother,' said the Countess Wanda, 'I have read the "Mexico":
it is a grand monument raised to a dead man's memory out of his own
labours by one of his own descendants--his only descendant, if I
remember aright.'

'Indeed,' said the Princess, unconvinced. 'I know those scientific
works by repute; they always consider the voyage of a germ of moss,
carried on an aerolite through an indefinite space for a billion of
ages, a matter much easier of credence than the "Life of St. Jerome."
I believe they call it sporadic transmission; they call typhus fever
the same.'

'There is nothing of that in the "Mexico": it is a very fine work on
the archæology and history of the country, and on its flora.'

'I should have supposed a Marquis de Sabran a gentleman,' said the
Princess, whom no precedent from the many monarchs who have been
guilty of inferior literature could convince that literature was other
than a trade much like shoemaking: at its best a sort of clerk's
quill-driving, to be equally pitied and censured.

Here Greswold, who valued his post and knew his place too well to
defend either literature or sporadic germs, timidly ventured to suggest
that the Marquis might be well known amongst the nobility of western
France, although not of that immense distinction which finds its
chronicle in the Hof-Kalender. The Princess smiled.

'_Petite noblesse._ You mean petite noblesse, my good Greswold? But
even the petite noblesse need not write books?'

When, however, the further question arose of inviting the stranger to
come to their dinner-table, it was the haughtier Princess who advocated
the invitation; the mistress of the house demurred. She thought that
all requirements of courtesy and hospitality would be fulfilled by
allowing him to dine in his own apartments.

'We do not know him,' she urged. 'No doubt he may very well be what he
says, but it is not easy to refer to an embassy while the rains are
making an island of the Tauern! Nay, dear mother, I am not suspicious;
but I think, as we are two women alone, we can fulfil all obligations
of hospitality towards this gentleman without making him personally
acquainted with ourselves.'

'That is really very absurd. It is acting as if Hohenszalras were a
_gasthof_,' said the Princess, with petulance. 'It is not so often that
we have any relief to the tedium with which you are pleased to surround
yourself that we should be required to shut ourselves from any chance
break in it. Of course, if you send this person his dinner to his own
rooms, he will feel hurt, mortified; he will go away, probably on foot,
rather than remain where he is insulted. Breton nobility is not very
eminent, but it is very proud; it is provincial, territorial; but every
one knows it is ancient, and usually of the most loyal traditions alike
to Church and State. I should be the last person to advocate making a
friendship, or even an acquaintance, without the fullest inquiry; but
when it is a mere question of a politeness for twenty-four hours,
which can entail no consequences, then I must confess that I think
prejudices should yield before the obligations of courtesy. But of
course, my love, decide as you will: you are mistress.'

The Countess Wanda smiled, and did not press her own opposition. She
perceived that the mind of her aunt was full of vivid and harmless
curiosity.

In the end she suggested that the Princess should represent her, and
receive the foreign visitor with all due form and ceremony; but she
herself was still indisposed to admit a person of whose antecedents she
had no positive guarantee so suddenly and entirely into her intimacy.

'You are extraordinarily suspicious,' said the elder lady, pettishly.
'If he were a pedlar or a colporteur, you would be willing to talk with
him.'

'Pedlars and colporteurs cannot take any social advantage of one's
conversation afterwards,' replied her niece. 'We are not usually
invaded by men of rank here; so the precedent may not be perilous. Have
your own way, mother mine.'

The Princess demurred, but finally accepted the compromise; reflecting
that if this stranger were to dine alone with her, she would be able to
ascertain much more about him than if Wanda, who had been created void
of all natural curiosity, and who would have been capable of living
with people twelve months without asking them a single question, would
render it possible to do were she present.

Meanwhile, the physician hurried back to his new friend, who had a
great and peculiar interest for him as the editor of the "Mexico", and
offered him, with the permission of the Countess von Szalras, to wile
away the chill and gloomy day by an inspection of the Schloss.

Joachim Greswold was a very learned and shrewd man, whom poverty and
love of tranquil opportunities of study had induced to bury himself
in the heart of the Glöckner mountains. He had already led a long,
severe, and blameless life of deep devotion and hard privation,
when the post of private physician at Hohenszalras in general, and
to the Princess Ottilie in especial, had been procured for him by
the interest of Prince Lilienhöhe. He had had many sorrows, trials,
and disappointments, which made the simple routine and the entire
solitude of his existence here welcome to him. But he was none the less
delighted to meet any companion of culture and intelligence to converse
with, and in his monotonous and lonely life it was a rare treat to be
able to exchange ideas with one fresh from the intellectual movements
of the outer world.

The Professor found, not to his surprise since he had read the
"Mexico", that his elegant _grand seigneur_ knew very nearly as much
as he did of botany and of comparative anatomy; that he had travelled
nearly all over the world, and travelled to much purpose, and knew many
curious things of the flora of the Rio Grande, whilst it appeared that
he possessed in his cabinets in Paris a certain variety of orchid that
the doctor had always longed to obtain. He was entirely won over when
Sabran, to whom the dried flower was very indifferent, promised to
send it to him. The French Marquis had not Greswold's absolute love of
science; he had studied every thing that had come to his hand, because
he had a high intelligence, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge;
and he had no other kind of devotion to it; when he had penetrated its
mysteries, it lost all interest for him.

At any rate he knew enough to make him an enchanting companion to a
learned man who was all alone in his learning, and received little
sympathy in it from anyone near him.

'What a grand house to be shut up in the heart of the mountains!' said
Sabran, with a sigh. 'I do believe what romance there still is in the
world does lie in these forests of Austria, which have all the twilight
and the solitude that would suit Merlin or the Sleeping Beauty better
than anything we have in France, except, indeed, here and there an old
château like Chenonceaux, or Maintenon.'

'The world has not spoilt us as yet,' said the doctor. 'We see few
strangers. Our people are full of old faiths, old loyalties, old
traditions. They are a sturdy and yet tender people. They are as
fearless as their own steinbock, and they are as reverent as saints
were in monastic days. Our mountains are as grand as the Swiss ones,
but, thank Heaven, they are unspoilt and little known. I tremble when
I think they have begun to climb the Gross Glöckner; all the mystery
and glory of our glaciers will vanish when they become mere points of
ascension. The alpenstock of the tourist is to the everlasting hills
what railway metals are to the plains. Thank God! the few railroads we
have are hundreds of miles asunder.'

'You are a reactionist, Doctor?'

'I am an old man, and I have learned the value of repose,' said
Greswold. 'You know we are called a slow race. It is only the unwise
amongst us who have quicksilver in their brains and toes.'

'You have gold in the former, at least,' said Sabran, kindly, 'and I
dare say quicksilver is in your feet, too, when there is a charity to
be done?'

Herr Joachim, who was simple in the knowledge of mankind, though shrewd
in mother-wit, coloured a little with pleasure. How well this stranger
understood him!

The day went away imperceptibly and agreeably to the physician and to
the stranger in this pleasant rambling talk; whilst the rain poured
down in fury on the stone terraces and green lawns without, and the