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.