The little hamlet of Romaris, on the coast of Finisterre, was very dull
and dark and silent. A few grave peasant women knitted as they walked
down the beach or sat at their doors; a few children did the same. Out
on the _landes_ some cows were driven through the heather and broom;
out on the sea some fishing-boats with rough, red sails were rocking to
and fro. All was melancholy, silent, poor; life was hard at Romaris for
all. The weatherbeaten church looked grey and naked on a black rock;
the ruins of the old _manoir_ faced it amidst sands and surfs; the only
thing of beauty was the bay, and that for the folk of Romaris had no
beauty; they had seen it kill so many.
There was never any change at Romaris, unless it were a change in the
weather, a marriage, a birth, or a death. Therefore the women and
children who were knitting had lifted up their heads as a stranger,
accompanied by their priest, had come down over the black rocks, on
which the church stood, towards the narrow lane that parted the houses
where they clustered together face to face on the edge of the shore.
Their priest, an old man much loved by them, came slowly towards them,
conversing in low tones with the stranger, who had been young and
handsome, and a welcome sight, since a traveller to Romaris always
needed a sailing-boat or a rowing-boat, a guide over the moors, or a
drive in an ox-waggon through the deep-cut lanes of the country.
But they had ceased to think of such things as these when the curate,
with his hands extended as when he blessed them, had said in _bas_
Breton as he stood beside them:
'My children, this is the last of the Sabrans of Romaris, come back to
us from the far west that lies in the setting of the sun. Salute him,
and show him that in Brittany we do not forget--nay, not in a hundred
years.'
Many years had gone by since then, and of the last of the old race,
Romaris had scarcely seen more than when he had been hidden from
their sight on the other side of the heaving ocean. Sabran rarely came
thither. There was nothing to attract a man who loved the world and
who was sought by it, in the stormy sea coast, the strip of sea-lashed
oak forest, that one tall tower with its gaunt walls of stone which
was all that was left of what had once been the fortress of his race.
Now and then they saw him, chiefly when he had heard that there was
wild weather on the western coast, and at such times he would go out
in their boats to distressed vessels, or steer through churning waters
to reach a fishing-smack in trouble, with a wild courage and an almost
fierce energy which made him for the moment one of themselves. But
such times had been few, and all that Romaris really knew of the last
marquis was that he was a gay gentleman away there in distant Paris.
He had been a mere name to them. Now and then he had sent fifty
napoleons, or a hundred, to the old priest for such as were poor or
sick amongst them. That was all. Now after the war he came hither.
Paris had become hateful to him; his political career was ended, at
all events for the time; the whole country groaned in anguish; the
vices and follies that had accompanied his past life disgusted him
in remembrance. He had been wounded and a prisoner; he had suffered
betrayal at unworthy hands; Cochonette had sold him to the Prussians,
in revenge of his desertion of her.
He was further removed from the Countess von Szalras than ever. In the
crash with which the Second Empire had fallen and sunk out of sight for
evermore, his own hopes had gone down like a ship that sinks suddenly
in a dark night. All his old associations were broken, half his old
friends were dead or ruined; gay châteaux that he had ever been welcome
at were smoking ruins or melancholy hospitals; the past had been
felled to the ground like the poor avenues of the Bois. It affected
him profoundly. As far as he was capable of an impersonal sentiment
he loved France, which had been for so many years his home, and which
had always seemed to smile at him with indulgent kindness. Her vices,
her disgrace, her feebleness, her fall, hurt him with an intense pain
that was not altogether selfish, but had in it a nobler indignation, a
nobler regret.
When he was released by the Prussians and sent across the frontier, he
went at once to this sad sea village of Romaris, to collect as best
he might the shattered fragments of his life, which seemed to him as
though it had been thrown down by an earthquake. He had resigned his
place as deputy when he had offered his sword to France; he had now no
career, no outlet for ambition, no occupation. Many of his old friends
were dead or ruined; although such moderate means as he possessed were
safe, they were too slender to give him any position adequate to his
rank. His old life in Paris, even if Paris arose from her tribulations,
gay and glorious once more, seemed to him altogether impossible. He had
lost taste for those pleasures and distractions which had before the
war--or before his sojourn on the Holy Isle--seemed to him the Alpha
and Omega of a man's existence. '_Que faire?_' he asked himself wearily
again and again. He did not even know whether his rooms in Paris had
been destroyed or spared; a few thousands of francs which he had
made by a successful speculation years before, and placed in foreign
funds, were all he had to live on. His keen sense told him that the
opportunity which might have replaced the Bourbon throne had been lost
through fatal hesitation. His own future appeared to him like a blank
dead wall that rose up in front of him barring all progress; he was no
longer young enough to select a career and commence it. With passionate
self-reproach he lamented all the lost irrevocable years that he had
wasted.
Romaris was not a place to cheer a disappointed and dejected soldier
who had borne the burning pain of bodily wounds and the intolerable
shame of captivity in a hostile land. Its loneliness, its darkness,
its storms, its poverty, had nothing in them with which to restore his
spirit to hope or his sinews to ambition. In these cold, bleak, windy
days of a dreary and joyless spring-time, the dusky moors and the
gruesome sea were desolate, without compensating grandeur. The people
around him were all taciturn, dull, stupid; they had not suffered by
the war, but they understood that, poor as they were, they would have
to bear their share in the burden of the nation's ransom. They barred
their doors and counted their hoarded gains in the dark with throbbing
hearts, and stole out in the raw, wet, gusty dawns to kneel at the
bleeding feet of their Christ. He envied them their faith; he could not
comfort them, they could not comfort him; they were too far asunder.
The only solace he had was the knowledge that he had done his duty by
France, and to the memory of those whose name he bore; that he had
rendered what service he could; that he had not fled from pain and
peril; that he had at least worn his sword well and blamelessly; that
he had not abandoned his discrowned city of pleasure in the day of
humiliation and martyrdom. The only solace he had was that he felt
Wanda von Szalras herself could have commanded him to do no more than
he had done in this the Année Terrible.
But, though his character had been purified and strengthened by the
baptism of fire, and though his egotism had been destroyed by the
endless scenes of suffering and of heroism which he had witnessed, he
could not in a year change so greatly that he could be content with the
mere barren sense of duty done and honour redeemed. He was deeply and
restlessly miserable. He knew not where to turn, either for occupation
or for consolation. Time hung on his hands like a wearisome wallet of
stones.
When all the habits of life are suddenly rent asunder, they are like a
rope cut in two. They may be knotted together clumsily, or they may be
thrown altogether aside and a new strand woven, but they will never be
the same thing again.
Romaris, with its few wind-tortured trees and its leaden-hued dangerous
seas, seemed to him, indeed, a _champ des trépassés_, as it was called,
a field of death. The naked, ugly, half-ruined towers, which no ivy
shrouded and no broken marble ennobled, as one or the other would have
done had it been in England or in Italy, was a dreary residence for
a man who was used to all the elegant and luxurious habits of a man
of the world, who was also a lover of art and a collector of choice
trifles. His rooms had been the envy of his friends, with all their
eighteenth century furniture, and their innumerable and unclassified
treasures; when he had opened his eyes of a morning a pastel of La
Tour had smiled at him, rose-coloured windows had made even a grey
sky smile. Without, there had been the sound of wheels going down
the gay Boulevard Haussmann. All Paris had passed by, tripping and
talking, careless and mirthful, beneath his gilded balconies bright
with canariensis and volubilis; and on a little table, heaped in
their hundreds, had been cards that bade him to all the best and most
agreeable houses, whilst, betwixt them, slipped coyly in many an
amorous note, many an unlooked-for declaration, many an eagerly-desired
appointment.
'_Quel beau temps!_' he thought, as he awoke in the chill, bare,
unlively chamber of the old tower by the sea; and it seemed to him
that he must be dreaming: that all the months of the war had been
a nightmare; that if he fully awakened he would find himself once
more with the April sunshine shining through the rose glass, and
the carriages rolling beneath over the asphalt road. But it was no
nightmare, it was a terrible, ghastly reality to him, as to so many
thousands. There were the scars on his breast and his loins where
the Prussian steel had hacked and the Prussian shot had pierced him;
there was his sword in a corner all dinted, notched, stained; there
was a crowd of hideous ineffaceable tumultuous memories; it was all
true enough, only too true, and he was alone at Romaris, with all his
dreams and ambitions faded into thin air, vanished like the blown burst
bubbles of a child's sport.
In time to come he might recover power and nerve to recommence his
struggle for distinction, but at present it seemed to him that all was
over. His imprisonment had shaken and depressed him as nothing else
in the trials of war could have done. He had been shut up for months
alone, with his own desperation. To a man of high courage and impatient
appetite for action there is no injury so great and in its effect so
lasting as captivity. Joined to this he had the fever of a strong, and
now perfectly hopeless, passion.
Pacing to and fro the brick floor of the tower looking down on the
sands and rocks of the coast, his thoughts were incessantly with Wanda
von Szalras in her stately ancient house, built so high up amidst the
mountains and walled in by the great forests and the ice slopes of the
glaciers. In the heat and stench of carnage he had longed for a breath
of that mountain breeze, for a glance from those serene eyes; he longed
for them still.
As he passed to and fro in the wild wintry weather, his heart was sick
with hope deferred, with unavailing regret and repentance, with useless
longings.
It was near noonday; there was no sun; a heavy wrack of cloud was
sweeping up from the west; on the air the odour of rotting fish and
of fish-oil, and of sewage trickling uncovered to the beach, were too
strong to be driven away by the pungency of the sea.
The sea was high and moaning loud; the dusk was full of rain; the
wind-tormented trees groaned and seemed to sigh; their boughs were
still scarce in bud though May had come. He felt cold, weary, hopeless.
His walk brought no warmth to his veins, and his thoughts none to
his heart. The moisture of the air seemed to chill him to the bone,
and he went within and mounted the broken granite stairs to his
solitary chamber, bare of all save the simplest necessaries, gloomy
and cheerless with the winds and the bats beating together at the high
iron-barred casement. He wearily lighted a little oil lamp, and threw
a log or two of drift-wood on the hearth and set fire to them with a
faggot of dried ling.
He dreaded his long lonely evening.
He had set the lamp on a table while he had set fire to the wood; its
light fell palely on a small white square thing. It was a letter. He
took it up eagerly; he, who in Paris had often tossed aside, with a
passing glance, the social invitations of the highest personages and
the flattering words of the loveliest women.
Here, any letter seemed a friend, and as he took up this his pulse
quickened; he saw that it was sealed with armorial bearings which he
knew--a shield bearing three vultures with two knights as supporters,
and with the motto '_Gott und mein Schwert_;' the same arms, the same
motto as were borne upon the great red and gold banner floating from
the keep on the north winds at the Hohenszalrasburg. He opened it with
a hand which shook a little and a quick throb of pleasure at his heart.
He had scarcely hoped that she would write again to him. The sight of
her writing filled him with a boundless joy, the purest he had ever
known called forth by the hand of woman.
The letter was brief, grave, kind. As he read he seemed to hear the
calm harmonious voice of the lady of Hohenszalras speaking to him in
her mellowed and softened German tongue.
She sent him words of consolation, of sympathy, of congratulation, on
the course of action he had taken in a time of tribulation, which had
been the touchstone of character to so many.
'Tell me something of Romaris,' she said in conclusion. 'I am sure
you will grow to care for the place and the people, now that you seek
both in the hour of the martyrdom of France. Have you any friends near
you? Have you books? How do your days pass? How do you fill up time,
which must seem so dull and blank to you after the fierce excitations
and the rapid changes of war? Tell me all about your present life, and
remember that we at Hohenszalras know how to honour courage and heroic
misfortune.'
He laid the letter down after twice reading it. Life seemed no longer
all over for him. He had earned her praise and her sympathy. It was
doubtful if years of the most brilliant political successes would have
done as much as his adversity, his misadventure, and his daring had
done for him in her esteem. She had the blood of twenty generations of
warriors in her, and nothing appealed so forcibly to her sympathies and
her instincts as the heroism of the sword. Those few lines too were
a permission to write to her. He replied at once, with a gratitude
somewhat guardedly expressed, and with details almost wholly impersonal.
She was disappointed that he said so little of himself, but she did
justice to the delicacy of the carefully guarded words from a man
whose passion appealed to her by its silence, where it would only have
alienated her by any eloquence. Of Romaris he said nothing, save that,
had Dante ever been upon their coast, he would have added another canto
to the 'Purgatorio,' more desolate and more unrelieved in gloom than
any other.
'Does he regret Cochonette?' she thought, with a jealous
contemptuousness of which she was ashamed as soon as she felt it.
Having once written to her, however, he thought himself privileged
to write again, and did so several times. He wrote with ease, grace,
and elegance: he wrote as he spoke, which gives this charm to
correspondence, seem close at hand to the reader in intimate communion.
The high culture of his mind displayed itself without effort, and he
had that ability of polished expression which is in our day too often
a neglected one. His letters became welcome to her: she answered them
briefly, but she let him see that they were agreeable to her. There
was in them the note of a profound depression, of an unuttered, but
suggested hopelessness which touched her. If he had expressed it in
plain words, it would not have appealed to her one half so forcibly.
They remained only the letters of a man of culture to a woman capable
of comprehending the intellectual movement of the time, but it
was because of this limitation that she allowed them. Any show of
tenderness would have both alarmed and alienated her. There was no
reason after all, she thought, why a frank friendship should not exist
between them.
Sometimes she was surprised at herself for having conceded so much,
and angry that she had done so. Happily he had the good taste to take
no advantage of it. Interesting as his letters were they might have
been read from the housetops. With that inconsistency of her sex from
which hitherto she had always flattered herself she had been free, she
occasionally felt a passing disappointment that they were not more
personal as regarded himself. Reticence is a fine quality; it is the
marble of human nature. But sometimes it provokes the impatience that
the marble awoke in Pygmalion.
Once only he spoke of his own aims. Then he wrote:
'You bade me do good at Romaris. Candidly, I see no way to do it
except in saving a crew off a wreck, which is not an occasion that
presents itself every week. I cannot benefit these people materially,
since I am poor; I cannot benefit them morally, because I have not
their faith in the things unseen, and I have not their morality in the
things tangible. They are God-fearing, infinitely patient, faithful
in their daily lives, and they reproach no one for their hard lot,
cast on an iron shore and forced to win their scanty bread at risk
of their lives. They do not murmur either at duty or mankind. What
should I say to them? I, whose whole life is one restless impatience,
one petulant mutiny against circumstance? If I talk with them I only
take them what the world always takes into solitude--discontent. It
would be a cruel gift, yet my hand is incapable of holding out any
other. It is a homely saying that no blood comes out of a stone; so,
out of a life saturated with the ironies, the contempt, the disbelief,
the frivolous philosophies, the hopeless negations of what we call
society, there can be drawn no water of hope and charity, for the
well-head--belief--is dried up at its source. Some pretend, indeed,
to find in humanity what they deny to exist as deity, but I should
be incapable of the illogical exchange. It is to deny that the seed
sprang from a root; it is to replace a grand and illimitable theism by
a finite and vainglorious bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased
mankind, the new creed that would centre itself in man seems to me the
poorest and the most baseless of all. If humanity be but a _vibrion_,
a conglomeration of gases, a mere mould holding chemicals, a mere
bundle of phosphorus and carbon? how can it contain the elements of
worship; what matter when or how each bubble of it bursts? This is the
weakness of all materialism when it attempts to ally itself with duty.
It becomes ridiculous. The _carpe diem_ of the classic sensualists, the
morality of the "Satyricon" or the "Decamerone," are its only natural
concomitants and outcome; but as yet it is not honest enough to say
this. It affects the soothsayer's long robe, the sacerdotal frown, and
is a hypocrite.'
In answer she wrote back to him:
'I do not urge you to have my faith: what is the use? Goethe was
right. It is a question between a man and his own heart. No one should
venture to intrude there. But taking life even as you do, it is surely
a casket of mysteries. May we not trust that at the bottom of it, as
at the bottom of Pandora's, there may be hope? I wish again to think
with Goethe that immortality is not an inheritance, but a greatness
to be achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and
purity of purpose--a reward allotted to the just. This is fanciful, may
be, but it is not illogical. And without being either a Christian or a
Materialist, without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity,
surely the best emotion that our natures know--pity--must be large
enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in
view of the endless suffering, the continual injustice, the appalling
contrasts, with which the world is full. Whether man be the _vibrion_
or the heir to immortality, the bundle of carbon or the care of angels,
one fact is indisputable: he suffers agonies, mental and physical,
that are wholly out of proportion to the brevity of his life, while he
is too often weighted from infancy with hereditary maladies, both of
body and of character. This is reason enough, I think, for us all to
help each other, even though we feel, as you feel, that we are as lost
children wandering in a great darkness, with no thread or clue to guide
us to the end.'
When Sabran read this answer, he mused to himself:
'Pity! how far would her pity reach? How great offences would it cover?
She has compassion for the evil-doers, but it is easy, since the evil
does not touch her. She sits on the high white throne of her honour and
purity, and surveys the world with beautiful but serene compassion.
If the mud of its miry labyrinths reached and soiled her, would her
theories prevail? They are noble, but they are the theories of one who
sits in safety behind a gate of ivory and jasper, whilst outside, far
below, the bitter tide of the human sea surges and moans too far off,
too low down, for its sound to reach within. _Tout comprendre, c'est
tout pardonner._ But since she would never understand, how could she
ever pardon? There are things that the nature must understand rather
than the mind; and her nature is as high, as calm, as pure as the snows
of her high hills.'
And then the impulse came over him for a passing moment to tell her
what he had never told any living creature; to make confession to
her and abide her judgment, even though he should never see her face
again. But the impulse shrank and died away before the remembrance
of her clear, proud eyes. He could not humiliate himself before her.
He would have risked her anger; he could not brave her disdain.
Moreover, straight and open ways were hot natural to him, though he was
physically brave to folly. There was a subtlety and a reticence in him
which were the enemies of candour.
To her he was more frank than to any other because her influence
was great on him, and a strong reverence was awakened in him that
was touched by a timid fear quite alien to a character naturally
contemptuously cynical and essentially proud. But even to her he could
not bring himself to be entirely truthful in revelation of his past.
Truthfulness is in much a habit, and he had never acquired its habit.
When he was most sincere there was always some reserve lying behind
it. This was perhaps one of the causes of the attraction he exercised
on all women. All women are allured by the shadows and the suggestions
of what is but imperfectly revealed. Even on the clear, strong nature
of Wanda von Szalras it had its unconscious and intangible charm. She
herself was like daylight, but the subtle vague charm of the shadows
had their seduction for her; Night holds dreams and passions that fade
and flee before the lucid noon, and who, at noonday wishes not for
night?
For himself, the letters he received from her seemed the only things
that bound him to life at all.
The betrayal of him by a base and mercenary woman had hurt him more
than it was worthy to do; it had stung his pride and saddened him in
this period of adversity with a sense of degradation. He had been sold
by a courtezan; it seemed to him to make him ridiculous as Samson was
ridiculous, and he had no gates of Gaza to pull down upon himself and
her. He could only be idle, and stare at an unoccupied and valueless
future. The summer went on, and he remained at Romaris. An old servant
had sent him word that all his possessions were safe in Paris, and his
apartments unharmed; but he felt no inclination to go there: he felt no
sympathy with Communists or Versaillists, with Gambetta or Gallifet. He
stayed on at the old storm-beaten sea-washed tower, counting his days
chiefly by the coming to him of any line from the castle by the lake.
She seemed to understand that and pity it, for each week brought him
some tidings.
At midsummer she wrote him word that she was about to be honoured again
by a two days' visit of her Imperial friends.
'We shall have, perforce, a large house party,' she said. 'Will you
be inclined this time to join it? It is natural that you should
sorrow without hope for your country, but the fault of her disasters
lies not with you. It is, perhaps, time that you should enter the
world again; will you commence with what for two days only will be
worldly--Hohenszalras? Your old friends the monks will welcome you
willingly and lovingly on the Holy Isle?'
He replied with gratitude, but he refused. He did not make any plea or
excuse; he thought it best to let the simple denial stand by itself.
She would understand it.
'Do not think, however,' he wrote, 'that I am the less profoundly
touched by your admirable goodness to a worsted and disarmed combatant
in a lost cause.'
'It is the causes that are lost which are generally the noble ones,'
she said in answer. 'I do not see why you should deem your life at an
end because a sham empire, which you always despised, has fallen to
pieces. If it had not perished by a blow from without, it would have
crumbled to pieces from its own internal putrefaction.'
'The visit has passed off very well,' she continued. 'Every one was
content, which shows their kindness, for these things are all of
necessity so much alike that it is difficult to make them entertaining.
The weather was fortunately fine, and the old house looked bright.
You did rightly not to be present, if you felt festivity out of tone
with your thoughts. If, however, you are ever inclined for another
self-imprisonment upon the island, you know that your friends, both at
the monastery and at the burg, will be glad to see you, and the monks
bid me salute you with affection.'
A message from Mdme. Ottilie, a little news of the horses, a few
phrases on the politics of the hour, and the letter was done. But,
simple as it was, it seemed to him to be like a ray of sunshine amidst
the gloom of his empty chamber.
From her the permission to return to the monastery when he would
seemed to say so much. He wrote her back calm and grateful words of
congratulation and cordiality; he commenced with the German formality,
'Most High Lady,' and ended them with the equally formal 'devoted and
obedient servant;' but it seemed to him as if under that cover of
ceremony she must see his heart beating, his blood throbbing; she must
know very well, and if knowing, she suffered him to return to the Holy
Isle, why then--he was all alone, but he felt the colour rise to his
face.
'And I must not go! I must not go!' he thought, and looked at his
pistols.
He ought sooner to blow his brains out, and leave a written confession
for her.
The hoarse sound of the sea surging amongst the rocks at the base of
the tower was all that stirred the stillness; evening was spreading
over all the monotonous inland country; a west wind was blowing and
rustling amidst the gorse; a woman led a cow between the dolmen,
stopping for it to crop grass here and there; the fishing-boats were
far out to sea, hidden under the vapours and the shadows. It was all
melancholy, sad-coloured, chill, lonesome. As he leaned against the
embrasure of the window and looked down, other familiar scenes, long
lost, rose up to his memory. He saw a wide green rolling river, long
lines of willows and of larches bending under a steel-hued sky, a vast
dim plain stretching away to touch blue mountains, a great solitude,
a silence filled at intervals with the pathetic song of the swans,
chanting sorrowfully because the nights grew cold, the ice began to
gather, the food became scanty, and they were many in number.
'I must not go!' he said to himself; 'I must never see Hohenszalras.'
And he lit his study lamp, and held her letter to it and burnt it.
It was his best way to do it honour, to keep it holy. He had the
letters of so many worthless women locked in his drawers and caskets
in his rooms in Paris. He held himself unworthy to retain hers. He
had burned each written by her as it had come to him, in that sort
of exaggeration of respect with which it seemed to him she was most
fittingly treated by him. There are less worthy offerings than the
first scruple of an unscrupulous life. It is like the first pure drops
that fall from a long turbid and dust-choked fountain.
As he walked the next day upon the windblown, rock-strewn strip of sand
that parted the old oak wood from the sea, he thought restlessly of her
in those days of stately ceremony which suited her so well. What did he
do here, what chance had he to be remembered by her? He chafed at his
absence, yet it seemed to him impossible that he could ever go to her.
What had been at first keen calculation with him had now become a finer
instinct, was now due to a more delicate sentiment, a truer and loftier
emotion. What could he ever look to her if he sought her but a mere
base fortune-seeker, a mere liar, with no pride and no manhood in him?
And what else was he? he thought, with bitterness, as he paced to and
fro the rough strip of beach, with the dusky heaving waves trembling
under a cloudy sky, where a red glow told the place of the setting sun.
There were few bolder men living than He, and he was cynical and
reckless before many things that most men reverence; but at the thought
of her possible scorn he felt himself tremble like a child. He thought
he would rather never see her face again than risk her disdain; there
was in him a vague romantic wishfulness rather to die, so that she
might think well of his memory, than live in her love through any
baseness that would be unworthy of her.
Sin had always seemed a mere superstitious name to him, and if he had
abstained from its coarser forms it had been rather from the revolt
of the fine taste of a man of culture than from any principle or
persuasion of duty. Men he believed were but ephemera, sporting their
small hours, weaving their frail webs, and swept away by the great
broom of destiny as spiders by the housewife. In the spineless doctrine
of altruism he had had too robust a temperament, too clear a reason,
to seek a guide for conduct. He had lived for himself, and had seen
no cause to do otherwise. That he had not been more criminal had been
due partly to indolence, partly to pride. In his love for Wanda von
Szalras, a love with which considerable acrimony had mingled at the
first, he yet, through all the envy and the impatience which alloyed
it, reached a moral height which he had never touched before. Between
her and him a great gulf yawned. He abstained from any effort to pass
it. It was the sole act of self-denial of a selfish life, the sole
obedience to conscience in a character which obeyed no moral laws, but
was ruled by a divided tyranny of natural instinct and conventional
honour.
The long silent hours of thought in the willow-shaded cloisters of
the Holy Isle had not been wholly without fruit. He desired, with
passion and sincerity, that she should think well of him, but he did
not dare to wish for more; love offered from him to her seemed to him
as if it would be a kind of blasphemy. He remembered in his far-off
childhood, which at times still seemed so near to him, nearer than all
that was around him, the vague, awed, wistful reverence with which
he had kneeled in solitary hours before the old dim picture of the
Madonna with the lamp burning above it, a little golden flame in the
midst of the gloom; he remembered so well how his fierce young soul and
his ignorant yearning child's heart had gone out in a half-conscious
supplication, how it had seemed to him that if he only knelt long
enough, prayed well enough, she would come down to him and lay her
hands on him. It was all so long ago, yet, when he thought of Wanda
von Szalras, something of that same emotion rose up in him, something
of the old instinctive worship awoke in him. In thought he prostrated
himself once more whenever the memory of her came to him. He had no
religion; she became one to him.
Meanwhile, he was constantly thinking restlessly to himself, 'Did I do
ill not to go?'
His bodily life was at Romaris, but his mental life was at
Hohenszalras. He was always thinking of her as she would look in those
days of the Imperial visit; he could see the stately ceremonies of
welcome, the long magnificence of the banquets, the great Rittersaal
with cressets of light blazing on its pointed emblazoned roofs; he
could see her as she would move down the first quadrille which she
would dance with her Kaiser: she would wear her favourite ivory-white
velvet most probably, and her wonderful old jewels, and all her orders.
She would look as if she had stepped down off a canvas of Velasquez
or Vandyck, and she would be a little tired, a little contemptuous, a
little indifferent, despite her loyalty; she would be glad, he knew,
when the brilliant gathering was broken up, and the old house, and the
yew terrace, and the green lake were all once more quiet beneath the
rays of the watery moon. She was so unlike other women. She would not
care about a greatness, a compliment, a success more or less. Such
triumphs were for the people risen yesterday, not for a Countess von
Szalras.
He knew the simplicity of her life and the pride of her temper,
and they moved him to the stronger admiration because he knew also
that those mere externals which she held in contempt had for him an
exaggerated value. He was scarcely conscious himself of how great a
share the splendour of her position, united to her great indifference
to it, had in the hold she had taken on his imagination and his
passions. He did know that there were so much greater nobilities in
her that he was vaguely ashamed of the ascendency which her mere rank
took in his thoughts of her. Yet he could not divest her of it, and
it seemed to enhance both her bodily and spiritual beauty, as the
golden calyx of the lily makes its whiteness seem the whiter by its
neighbourhood.