In the Iselthal the summer was more brilliant and warm than usual. The
rains were less frequent, and the roses on the great sloping lawns
beneath the buttresses and terraces of Hohenszalras were blooming
freely.
Their mistress did not for once give them much heed. She rode long and
fast through the still summer woods, and came back after nightfall. Her
men of business, during their interviews with her, found her attention
less perfect, her interest less keen. In stormy days she sat in the
library, and read Heine and Schiller often, and all the philosophers
and men of science rarely. A great teacher has said that the Humanities
must outweigh the Sciences at all times, and he is unquestionably
true, if it were only for the reason that in the sweet wise lore of
ages every human heart in pain and perplexity finds a refuge; whilst in
love or in sorrow the sciences seem the poorest and chilliest of mortal
vanities that ever strove to measure the universe with a foot-rule.
The Princess watched her with wistful, inquisitive eyes, but dared
not name the person of whom they both thought most. Wanda was herself
intolerant of the sense of impatience with which she awaited the coming
of the sturdy pony that brought the post-bag from Windisch-Matrey.
He in his loneliness and emptiness of life on the barren sea-shore
of Romaris did not more anxiously await her letters than did the
châtelaine of Hohenszalras, amidst all her state, her wealth, and her
innumerable occupations, await his. She pitied him intensely; there was
something pathetic to her in the earnestness with which he had striven
to amend his ways of life, only to have his whole career shattered by
an insensate and unlooked-for national war. She understood that his
poverty stood in the path of his ambition, and she divined that his
unhappiness had broken that spring of manhood in him which would have
enabled him to construct a new career for himself out of the ruins of
the old. She understood why he was listless and exhausted.
There were moments when she was inclined to send him some invitation
more cordial, some bidding more clear; but she hesitated to take a step
which would bind her in her own honour to so much more. She knew that
she ought not to suggest a hope to him to which she was not prepared
to give full fruition. And again, how could he respond? It would be
impossible for him to accept. She was one of the great alliances of
Europe, and he was without fortune, without career, without a future.
Even friendship was only possible whilst they were far asunder.
Two years had gone by since he had come across from the monastery in
the green and gold of a summer afternoon. The monks had not forgotten
him; throughout the French war they had prayed for him. When their
Prior saw her, he said anxiously sometimes: 'And the Markgraf von
Sabran, will he never come to us again? Were we too dull for him?
Will your Excellency remember us to him, if ever you can?' And she
had answered with a strange emotion at her heart: 'His country is
in trouble, holy father; a good son cannot leave his land in her
adversity. No: I do not think he was dull with you; he was quite happy,
I believe. Perhaps he may come again some day, who knows? He shall be
told what you say.'
Then a vision would rise up to her of herself and him, as they would
be perhaps when they should be quite old. Perhaps he would retire into
this holy retreat of the Augustines, and she would be a grave sombre
woman, not gay and pretty and witty, as the Princess was. The picture
was gloomy; she chased it away, and galloped her horse long and far
through the forests.
The summer had been so brilliant that the autumn which followed was
cold and severe, earlier than usual, and heavy storms swept over the
Tauern, almost ere the wheat harvest could be reaped. Many days were
cheerless and filled only with the sound of incessant rains. In the
Pinzgau and the Salzkammergut floods were frequent. The Ache and the
Szalzach, with all their tributary streams and wide and lonely lakes,
were carrying desolation and terror into many parts of the land which
in summer they made beautiful. Almost every day brought her some
tidings of some misfortunes in the villages on the farms belonging to
her in the more distant parts of Austria; a mill washed away, a bridge
down, a dam burst, a road destroyed, a harvest swept into the water,
some damage or other done by the swollen river and torrents, she heard
of by nearly every communication that her stewards and her lawyers made
to her at this season.
'Our foes the rivers are more insidious than your mighty enemy the
salt water,' she wrote to Romaris. 'The sea deals open blows, and men
know what they must expect if they go out on the vasty deep. But here
a little brook that laughed and chirped at noon-day as innocently as
a child may become at nightfall or dawn a roaring giant, devouring
all that surrounds him. We pay heavily for the glory of our mountain
waters.'
These autumn weeks seemed very dreary to her. She visited her horses
chafing at inaction in their roomy stalls, and attended to her affairs,
and sat in the library or the octagon room hearing the rain beat
against the emblazoned leaded panes, and felt the days, and above all
the evenings, intolerably dull and melancholy. She had never heeded
rain before, or minded the change of season.
One Sunday a messenger rode through the drenching storm, and brought
her a telegram from her lawyer in Salzburg. It said: 'Idrac flooded:
many lives lost: great distress: fear town wholly destroyed. Please
send instructions.'
The call for action roused her as a trumpet sounding rouses a cavalry
charger.
'Instructions!' she echoed as she read. 'They write as if I could bid
the Danube subside, or the Drave shrink in its bed!'
She penned a hasty answer.
'I will go to Idrac myself.'
Then she sent a message also to S. Johann im Wald for a special train
to be got in readiness for her, and told one of her women and a trusty
servant to be ready to go with her to Vienna in an hour. It was still
early in the forenoon.
'Are you mad?' cried Madame Ottilie, when she was informed of the
intended journey.
Wanda kissed her hand.
'There is no madness in what I shall do, dear mother, and Bela surely
would have gone.'
'Can you stay the torrents of heaven? Can you arrest a river in its
wrath?'
'No; but lives are often lost because poor people lose their senses in
fright. I shall be calmer than anyone there. Besides, the place belongs
to us; we are bound to share its danger. If only Egon were not away
from Hungary!'
'But he is away. You have driven him away.'
'Do not dissuade me, dearest mother. It would be cowardice not to go.'
'What can women do in such extremities?'
'But we of Hohenszalras must not be mere women when we are wanted in
any danger. Remember Luitgarde von Szalras, the _kuttengeier._'
The Princess sighed, prayed, even wept, but Wanda was gently
inflexible. The Princess could not see why a precious life should be
endangered for the sake of a little half barbaric, half Jewish town,
which was remarkable for nothing except for shipping timber and selling
_salbling._ The population was scarcely Christian, so many Hebrews were
there, and so benighted were the Sclavonian poor, who between them made
up the two thousand odd souls that peopled Idrac. To send a special
messenger there, and to give any quantity of money that the distress
of the moment might demand, would be all right and proper; indeed,
an obligation on the owner of the little feudal river-side town. But
to go! A Countess von Szalras to go in person where not one out of a
hundred of the citizens had been properly baptized or confirmed! The
Princess could not view this Quixotism in any other light than that of
an absolute insanity.
'Bela lost his life in just such a foolish manner!' she pleaded.
'So did the saints, dear mother,' said his sister, gently.
The Princess coloured and coughed.
'Of course, I am aware that many holy lives have been--have been--what
appears to our finite senses wasted,' she said, with a little asperity.
'But I am also aware, Wanda, that the duties most neglected are those
which lie nearest home and have the least display; consideration for
_me_ might be better, though less magnificent, than so much heroism for
Idrac.'
'It pains me that you should put it in that light, dearest mother,'
said Wanda, with inexhaustible patience. 'Were you in any danger I
would stay by you first, of course; but you are in none. These poor,
forlorn, ignorant, cowardly creatures are in the very greatest. I
draw large revenues from the place; I am in honour bound to share
its troubles. Pray do not seek to dissuade me. It is a matter not of
caprice but of conscience. I shall be in no possible peril myself. I
shall go down the river in my own vessel, and I will telegraph to you
from every town at which I touch.'
The Princess ceased not to lament, to oppose, to bemoan her own
powerlessness to check intolerable follies. Sitting in her easy chair
in her warm blue-room, sipping her chocolate, the woes of a distant
little place on the Danube, whose population was chiefly Semitic, were
very bearable and altogether failed to appeal to her.
Wanda kissed her, asked her blessing humbly, and took her way in the
worst of a blinding storm along the unsafe and precipitous road which
went over the hills to Windisch-Matrey.
'What false sentiment it all is!' thought the Princess, left alone.
'She has not seen this town since she was ten years old. She knows that
they are nearly all Jews, or quite heathenish Sclavonians. She can do
nothing at all--what should a woman do?--and yet she is so full of her
conscience that she goes almost to the Iron Gates in quest of a duty in
the wettest of weather, while she leaves a man like Egon and a man like
Sabran wretched for want of a word! I must say,' thought the Princess,
'false sentiment is almost worse than none at all!'
The rains were pouring down from leaden skies, hiding all the sides of
the mountains and filling the valleys with masses of vapour. The road
was barely passable; the hill torrents dashed across it; the little
brooks were swollen to water-courses; the protecting wall on more than
one giddy height had been swept away; the gallop of the horses shook
the frail swaying galleries and hurled the loosened stones over the
precipice with loud resounding noise. The drive to Matrey and thence
with post-horses to S. Johann im Wald, the nearest railway station, was
in itself no little peril, but it was accomplished before the day had
closed in, and the special train she had ordered being in readiness
left at once for Vienna, running through the low portions of the
Pinzgau, which were for the most part under water.
All the way was dim and watery, and full of the sound of running
or of falling water. The Ache and the Szalsach, both always deep
and turbulent rivers, were swollen and boisterous, and swirled and
thundered in their rocky beds; in the grand Pass of Lueg the gloom,
always great, was dense as at midnight, and when they reached Salzburg
the setting sun was bursting through ink-black clouds, and shed a
momentary glow as of fire upon the dark sides of the Untersberg, and
flamed behind the towers of the great castle on its rocky throne. All
travellers know the grandeur of that scene; familiar as it was to her
she looked upward at it with awe and pleasure commingled. Salzburg in
the evening light needs Salvator Rosa and Rembrandt together to portray
it.
The train only paused to take in water; the station was crowded as
usual, set as it is between the frontiers of empire and kingdom, but in
the brief interval she saw one whom she recognised amongst the throng,
and she felt the colour come into her own face as she did so.
She saw Sabran; he did not see her. Her train moved out of the station
rapidly, to make room for the express from Munich; the sun dropped down
into the ink-black clouds; the golden and crimson pomp of Untersberg
changed to black and grey; the ivory and amber and crystal of the
castle became stone and brick and iron, that frowned sombrely over a
city sunk in river-mists and in rain-vapours. She felt angrily that
there was an affinity between the landscape and herself; that so, at
sight of him, a light had come into her life which had no reality in
fact, prismatic colours baseless as a dream.
She had longed to speak to him; to stretch out her hand to him; to
say at least how her thoughts and her sympathies had been with him
throughout the war. But her carriage was already in full onward
movement, and in another moment had passed at high speed out of the
station into that grand valley of the Szalzach where Hohensalzburg
seems to tower as though Friederich Barbarossa did indeed sleep there.
With a sigh she sank backward amongst her furs and cushions, and saw
the soaring fortress pass, into the clouds.
The night had now closed in; the rain fell heavily. As the little
train, oscillating greatly from its lightness, swung over the iron
rails, there was a continual sound of splashing water audible above
the noise of the wheels and the throb of the engine. She had often
travelled at night and had always slept soundly; this evening she could
not sleep. She remained wide awake watching the swaying of the lamp,
listening to the shrill shriek of the wheels as they rushed through
water where some hillside brook had broken bounds and spread out in a
shallow lagoon. The skies were overcast in every direction; the rain
was everywhere unceasing; the night seemed to her very long.
She pondered perpetually on his presence at Salzburg, and wondered if
he were going to the Holy Isle. Three months had gone by since she had
sent him the semi-invitation to her country.
The train sped on; the day dawned; she began to get glimpses of the
grand blue river, now grey and ochre-coloured and thick with mud, its
turbid waves heaving sullenly under the stormy October skies. She had
always loved the great Donau; she knew its cradle well in the north
land of the Teutons. She had often watched the baby-stream rippling
over the stones, and felt the charm, as of some magical transformation,
as she thought of the same stream stretching broadly under the monastic
walls of Klosterneuberg, rolling in tempest by the Iron Gates, and
gathering its mighty volume higher and deeper to burst at last into
the sunlight of the eastern sea. Amidst the levelled monotony of
modern Europe the Danube keeps something of savage grandeur, something
of legendary power, something of oriental charm; it is still often
tameless, a half-barbaric thing, still a Tamerlane amidst rivers: and
yet yonder at its birthplace it is such a slender thread of rippling
water! She and Bela had crossed it with bare feet to get forget-me-nots
in Taunus, talking together of Chriemhilde and her pilgrimage to the
land of the Huns.
The little train swung on steadily through the water above and below,
and after a night of no little danger came safely to Vienna as the dawn
broke. She went straight to her yacht, which was in readiness off the
Lobau and weighed anchor as the pale and watery morning broadened into
day above the shores that had seen Aspern and Wagram. The yacht was
a yawl, strongly built and drawing little water, made on purpose for
the ascent and descent of the Danube, from Passau up in the north to
as far south as the Bosphorus if needed. The voyage had been of the
greatest joys of hers and of Bela's childhood; they had read on deck
alternately the 'Nibelungen-Lied' and the 'Arabian Nights,' clinging
together in delighted awe as they passed through the darkness of the
defile of Kasan.
Idrac was situated between Pesth and Peterwardein, lying low on marshy
ground that was covered with willows and intersected by small streams
flowing from the interior to the Danube.
The little town gave its name and its seigneurie to the owner of its
burg; an ancient place built on a steep rock that rose sheer out of
the fast-running waves, and dominated the passage of the stream. The
Counts of Idrac had been exceeding powerful in the old times, when
they had stopped at their will the right of way of the river; and
their appanages with their title had come by marriage into the House
of Szalras some four centuries before, and although the dominion over
the river was gone, the fortress and the little town and all that
appertained thereto still formed a considerable possession; it had
usually been given with its Countship to the second son of the Szalras.
Making the passage to Pesth in fourteen hours, the yacht dropped
anchor before the Franz Josef Quai as the first stars came out above
the Blocksburg, for by this time the skies had lightened and the rains
had ceased. Here she stayed the night perforce, as an accident had
occurred to the machinery of the vessel. She did not leave the yacht,
but sent into the inner city for stores of provisions and of the local
cordial, the _slibowitza_, to distribute to the half-drowned people
amongst whom she was about to go. It was noonday before the yawl got
under weigh and left the twin-towns behind her. A little way further
down the stream they passed a great castle, standing amidst beech woods
on a rock that rose up from fields covered with the Carlowitz vine. She
looked at it with a sigh: it was the fortress of Kohacs, one of the
many possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely.
The weather had now cleared, but the skies were overcast, and the
plains, which began to spread away monotonously from either shore,
were covered with white fog. Soon the fog spread also over the river,
and the yacht was compelled to advance cautiously and slowly, so that
the voyage was several hours longer than usual. When the light of the
next day broke they had come in sight of the flooded districts on their
right: the immense flat fields that bore the flax and grain which make
the commerce of Baja, of Neusatz, and of other riverain towns, were
all changed to shallow estuaries. The Theiss, the Drave, and many
minor streams, swollen by the long autumnal rains, had burst their
boundaries and laid all the country under water for hundreds of square
leagues. The granaries, freshly filled with the late abundant harvest,
had at many places been flooded or destroyed: thousands of stacks of
grain were floating like shapeless, dismasted vessels. Timber and the
thatched roofs of the one-storied houses were in many places drifting
too, like the flotsam and the hulls of wrecked ships.
There are few scenes more dreary, more sad, more monotonous than those
of a flat country swamped by flood: the sky above them was leaden
and heavy, the Danube beneath them was turgid and discoloured; the
shrill winds whistled through the brakes of willow, the water-birds,
frightened, flew from their osier-beds on the islands, the bells of
churches and watch-towers tolled dismally.
It was late in the afternoon when she came within sight of her little
town on the Sclavonian shore, which Ernst von Szalras had fired on
August 29, 1526, to save it from the shame of violation by the Turks.
Though he had perished, and most of the soldiers and townsfolk with
him, the fortress, the _têtes du pont_, and the old water-gates and
walls had been too strong for the flames to devour, and the town had
been built up again by the Turks and subsequently by the Hungarians.
The slender minarets of the Ottomans' two mosques still raised
themselves amidst the old Gothic architecture of the mediæval
buildings, and the straw-covered roofs and the white-plastered walls
of the modern houses. As they steamed near it the minarets and the
castle towers rose above what looked a world of waters, all else seemed
swallowed in the flood; the orchards, which had surrounded all save the
river-side of the town; were immersed almost to the summits of their
trees. The larger vessels could never approach Idrac in ordinary times,
the creek being too shallow on which it stood; but now the water was
so high that though it would be too imprudent to anchor there, the
yacht easily passed in, and hove-to underneath the water-walls, a pilot
taking careful soundings as they steered. It was about three in the
afternoon. The short, grey day was near its end; a shout of welcome
rose from some people on the walls as they recognised the build and the
ensign of the yawl. Some crowded boats were pulling away from the town,
laden with fugitives and their goods.
'How soon people run away! They are like rats,' she thought. 'I would
sooner be like the stork, and not quit my nest if it were in flames.'
She landed at the water-stairs of the castle. Men, women, and children
came scrambling along the walls, where they were huddled together out
of temporary reach of the flood, and threw themselves down at her
feet and kissed her skirts with abject servility. They were half mad
with terror, and amongst the population there were many hundreds of
Jews, the most cowardly people in all the world. The boats were quite
inadequate in number to the work they had to do; the great steamers
passing up and down did not pause to help them; the flood was so
general below Pesth that on the right shore of the river each separate
village and township was busy with its own case and had no help for
neighbours: the only aid came from those on the opposite shore, but
that was scanty and unwisely ministered. The chief citizens of Idrac
had lost their wits, as she had foreseen they would do. To ring the
bells madly night and day, and fire off the old culverins from the
water-gate, was all they seemed to know how to do. They told her that
many lives had been lost, as the inland waters had risen in the night,
and most of the houses were of only one storey. In the outlying
flax-farms it was supposed that whole households had perished. In the
town itself there were six feet of water everywhere, and many of the
inhabitants were huddled together in the two mosques, which were now
granaries, in the towers, and in the fortress itself; but several
families had been enabled to escape, and had climbed upon the roofs,
clinging to the chimneys for bare life.
Her mere presence brought reviving hope and energy to the primitive
population. Their Lady had a romantic legendary reputation amongst
them, and they were ready to cling round the pennon of the yacht as
their ancestors had rallied round the standard of Ernst von Szalras.
She ascended to the Rittersaal of the fortress, and assembled a few of
the men about her, who had the most influence and energy in the little
place. She soon introduced some kind of system and method into the
efforts made, promised largesse to those who should be the most active,
and had the provisions she had brought distributed amongst those who
most needed them. The boats of the yawl took many away to a temporary
refuge on the opposite shore. Many others were brought in to the
state-room of the castle for shelter. Houses were constantly falling,
undermined by the water, and there were dead and wounded to be attended
to, as well as the hungry and terrified living creatures. Once before,
Idrac had been thus devastated by flood, but it had been far away in
the previous century, and the example was too distant to have been a
warning to the present generation.
She passed a fatiguing and anxious night. It was impossible to
think of sleep with so much misery around. The yacht was obliged to
descend, the river for safe anchorage, but the boats remained. She
went herself, now in one, now in another, to endeavour to inspire the
paralysed people with some courage and animation. A little wine, a
little bread, were all she took; food was very scarce. The victuals of
the yacht's provisioning did not last long amongst so many famishing
souls. She ordered her skipper at dawn to go down as far as Neusatz
and purchase largely. There were five thousand people, counting those
of the neighbourhood, or more, homeless and bereft of all shelter. The
telegraph was broken, the poles had been snapped by the force of the
water in many places.
With dawn a furious storm gathered and broke, and renewed rains added
their quota to the inundation and their discomfort to the exposed
sufferers. The cold was great, and the chill that made them shudder
from head to foot was past all cure by cordials. She regretted not
to have brought Greswold with her. She was indifferent to danger,
indefatigable in exertion, and strong as Libussa, brave as Chriemhilde.
Because the place belonged to her in almost a feudal manner, she held
herself bound to give her life for it if need be. Bela would have done
what she was doing.
Twice or thrice during the two following days she heard the people
speak of a stranger who had arrived fifteen hours before her, and had
wrought miracles of deliverance. Unless the stories told her were
greatly exaggerated, this foreigner had shown a courage and devotion
quite unequalled. He had thrown himself into the work at once on his
arrival there in a boat from Neusatz, and had toiled night and day,
enduring extreme fatigue and running almost every hour some dire peril
of his life. He had saved whole families of the poorest and most
wretched quarter; he had sprung on to roofs that were splitting and
sinking, on to walls that were trembling and tottering, and had borne
away in safety men, women, and children, the old, and the sick, and the
very animals; he had infused some of his own daring and devotedness
into the selfish and paralysed Hebrew population; priests and rabbis
were alike unanimous in his praise, and she, as she heard, felt that
he who had fought for France had been here for her sake. They told
her that he was now out amongst the more distant orchards and fields,
amidst the flooded farms where the danger was even greater than in the
town itself. Some Czechs said that he was S. John of Nepomuc himself.
She bade them bring him to her, that she might thank him, whenever he
should enter the town again, and then thought of him no more.
Her whole mind and feeling were engrossed by the spectacle of a misery
that even all her wealth could not do very much to alleviate. The
waters as yet showed no sign of abatement. The crash of falling houses
sounded heavily ever and again through the gloom. The melancholy sight
of humble household things, of drowned cattle, of dead dogs, borne down
the discoloured flood out to the Danube renewed itself every hour.
The lamentations of the ruined people went up in an almost continuous
wail like the moaning of a winter wind. There was nothing grand,
nothing picturesque, nothing exciting to redeem the dreariness and the
desolation. It was all ugly, miserable, dull. It was more trying than
war, which even in its hideous senselessness lends a kind of brutal
intoxication to all whom it surrounds.
She was incessantly occupied and greatly fatigued, so that the time
passed without her counting it. She sent a message each day to the
Princess at home, and promised to return as soon as the waters had
subsided and the peril passed. For the first time in her life she
experienced real discomfort, real privation; she had surrendered nearly
all the rooms in the burg to the sick people, and food ran short and
there was none of good quality, though she knew that supplies would
soon come from the steward at Kohacs and by the yacht.
On the fourth day the waters had sunk an inch. As she heard the good
tidings she was looking out inland over the waste of grey and yellow
flood; a Jewish rabbi was beside her speaking of the exertions of the
stranger, in whom the superstitious of the townsfolk saw a saint from
heaven.
'And does no one even know who he is?' she asked.
'No one has asked,' answered the Jew. 'He has been always out where the
peril was greatest.'
'How came he here?'
'He came by one of the big steamers that go to Turkey. He pulled
himself here in a little boat that he had bought; the boat in which he
has done such good service.'
'What is he like in appearance?'
'He is very tall, very fair, and handsome; I should think he is
northern.'
Her pulse beat quicker for a moment; then she rejected the idea as
absurd, though indeed, she reflected, she had seen him at Salzburg.
'He must at least be a brave man,' she said quietly. 'If you see him
bring him to me that I may thank him. Is he in the town now?'
'No; he is yonder, where the Rathwand farms are, or were; where your
Excellency sees those dark, long islands which are not islands at all,
but only the summits of cherry orchards. He has carried the people
away, carried them down to Peterwardein; and he is now about to try and
rescue some cattle which were driven up on to the roof of a tower, poor
beasts--that tower to the east there, very far away: it is five miles
as the crow flies.'
'I suppose he will come into the town again?'
'He was here last night; he had heard of your Excellency, and asked for
her health.'
'Ah! I will see and thank him if he come again.'
But no one that day saw the stranger in Idrac.
The rains fell again and the waters again rose. The maladies which
come of damp and of bad exhalations spread amongst the people; they
could not all be taken to other villages or towns, for there was no
room for them. She had quinine, wines, good food ordered by the great
steamers, but they were not yet arrived. What could be got at Neusatz
or Peterwardein the yacht brought, but it was not enough for so many
sick and starving people. The air began to grow fœtid from the many
carcases of animals, though as they floated the vultures from the hills
fed on them. She had a vessel turned into a floating hospital, and
the most delicate of the sick folk carried to it, and had it anchored
off the nearest port. Her patience, her calmness, and her courage did
more to revive the sinking hearts of the homeless creatures than the
cordials and the food. She was all day long out in her boat, being
steered from one spot to another. At night she rested little and passed
from one sick bed to another. She had never been so near to hopeless
human misery before. At Hohenszalras no one was destitute.
One twilight hour on the ninth day, as she was rowed back to the castle
stairs, she passed another boat in which were two lads and a man. The
man was rowing, a dusky shadow in the gloom of the wet evening and the
uncouthness of his waterproof pilot's dress; but she had a lantern
beside her, and she flashed its light full on the boat as it passed
her. When she reached the burg, she said to her servant Anton: 'Herr
von Sabran is in Idrac; go and say that I desire to see him.'
Anton, who remembered him well, returned in an hour, and said he could
neither find him nor hear of him.
All the night long, a cheerless tedious night, with the rain falling
without and the storm that was raging in the Bosphorus sending its
shrill echoes up the Danube, she sat by the beds of the sick women
or paced up and down the dimly-lit Rittersaal in an impatience which
it humiliated her to feel. It touched her that he should be here,
so silently, so sedulously avoiding her, and doing so much for the
people of Idrac, because they were her people. The old misgiving that
she had been ungenerous in her treatment of him returned to her. He
seemed always to have the finer part--the _beau rôle._ To her, royal
in giving, imperious in conduct, it brought a sense of failure, of
inferiority. As she read the psalms in Hungarian to the sick Magyar
women, her mind perpetually wandered away to him.
She did not see Sabran again, but she heard often of him. The fair
stranger, as the people called him, was always conspicuous wherever
the greatest danger was to be encountered. There was always peril in
almost every movement where the undermined houses, the tottering walls,
the stagnant water, the fever-reeking marshes presented at every turn a
perpetual menace to life. 'He is not vainly _un fils des preux_,' she
thought, with a thrill of personal pride, as if someone near and dear
to her were praised, as she listened to the stories of his intrepidity
and his endurance. Whole nights spent in soaked clothes, in half
swamped boats; whole days lost in impotent conflict with the ignorance
or the poltroonery of an obstinate populace, continual risk encountered
without counting its cost to rescue some poor man's sick beast, or pull
a cripple from beneath falling beams, or a lad from choking mud; hour
on hour of steady laborious rowing, of passage to and fro the sullen
river with a freight of moaning, screaming peasantry--this was not
child's play, nor had it any of the animation and excitation which in
war or in adventure make of danger a strong wine that goes merrily and
voluptuously to the head. It was all dull, stupid, unlovely, and he
had come to it for her sake. For her sake certainly, though he never
approached her; though when Anton at last found and took her message
to him he excused himself from obedience to it by a plea that he was
at that moment wet and weary, and had come from a hut where typhoid
raged. She understood the excuse; she knew that he knew well she was no
more afraid than he of that contagion. She admired him the more for his
isolation; in these grey, rainy, tedious, melancholy days his figure
seemed to grow into a luminous heroic shape like one of the heroes of
the olden time. If he had once seemed to seek a guerdon for it the
spell would have been broken. But he never did. She began to believe
that such a knight deserved any recompense which she could give.
'Egon himself could have done no more,' she said in her own thoughts,
and it was the highest praise that she could give to any man, for
her Magyar cousin was the embodiment of all martial daring, of all
chivalrous ardour, and had led his glittering hussars down on to the
French bayonets, as on to the Prussian Krupp guns, with a fury that
bore all before it, impetuous and irresistible as a stream of fired
naphtha.
On the twelfth morning the river had sunk so much lower that the yacht
arriving with medicines and stores of food from Neusatz signalled that
she could not enter the creek on which Idrac stood, and waited orders.
It had ceased to rain, but the winds were still strong and the skies
heavy. She descended to her boat at the water-gate, and told the men to
take her out to the yacht. It was early, the sun behind the clouds had
barely climbed above the distant Wallachian woods, and the scene had
lost nothing of its melancholy. A man was standing on the water-stairs
as she descended them, and turned rapidly away, but she had seen him
and stretched out her long staff and touched him lightly.
'Why do you avoid me?' she said, as he uncovered his head; 'my men
sought you in all directions; I wished to thank you.'
He bowed low over the hand she held out to him. 'I ventured to be near
at hand to be of use,' he answered. 'I was afraid the exposure, and,
the damp, and all this pestilence would make you ill: you are not ill?'
'No; I am quite well. I have heard of all your courage and endurance.
Idrac owes you a great debt.'
'I only pay my debt to Hohenszalras.'
They were both silent; a certain constraint was upon them both.
'How did you know of the inundation? It was unkind of you not to come
to me,' she said, and her voice was unsteady as she spoke. 'I want so
much to tell you, better than letters can do, all that we felt for you
throughout that awful war.'
He turned away slightly with a shudder. 'You are too good. Thousands of
men much better than I suffered much more.'
The tears rose to her eyes as she glanced at him. He was looking pale
and worn. He had lost the graceful _insouciance_ of his earlier manner.
He looked grave, weary, melancholy, like a man who had passed through
dire disaster, unspeakable pain, and had seen his career snapped in
two like a broken wand. But there was about him instead something
soldierlike, proven, war-worn, which became him in her eyes, daughter
of a race of warriors as she was.
'You have much to tell me, and I have much to hear,' she said, after
a pause. 'You should have come to the monastery to be cured of your
wounds. Why were you so mistrustful of our friendship?'
He coloured and was silent.
'Indeed,' she said gravely, 'we can honour brave men in the Tauern and
in Idrac too. You are very brave. I do not know how to thank you for my
people or for myself.'
'Pray do not speak so,' he said, in a very low voice. 'To see you again
would be recompense for much worthier things than any I have done.'
'But you might have seen me long ago,' she said, with a certain
nervousness new to her, 'had you only chosen to come to the Isle. I
asked you twice.'
He looked at her with eyes of longing and pathetic appeal.
'Do not tempt me,' he murmured. 'If I yielded, and if you despised
me----'
'How could I despise one who has so nobly saved the lives of my people?'
'You would do so.'
He spoke very low: he was silent a little while, then he said very
softly:
'One evening, when we spoke together on the terrace at Hohenszalras,
you leant your hand upon the ivy there. I plucked the leaf you touched;
you did not see. I had the leaf with me all through the war. It was
a talisman. It was like a holy thing. When your cousin's soldiers
stripped me in their ambulance, they took it from me.'
His voice faltered. She listened and was moved to a profound emotion.
'I will give you something better,' she said very gravely. He did not
ask her what she would give.
She looked away from him awhile, and her face flushed a little. She was
thinking of what she would give him; a gift so great that the world
would deem her mad to bestow it, and perhaps would deem him dishonoured
to take it.
'How did you hear of these floods along the Danube?' she asked him,
recovering her wonted composure.
'I read about them in telegrams in Paris,' he made answer. 'I had
mustered courage to revisit my poor Paris; all I possess is there.
Nothing has been injured; a shell burst quite close by but did not
harm my apartments. I went to make arrangements for the sale of my
collections, and on the second day that I arrived there I saw the news
of the inundations of Idrac and the lower Danubian plains. I remembered
the name of the town; I remembered it was yours. I remembered your
saying once that where you had feudal rights you had feudal duties, so
I came on the chance of being of service.'
'You have been most devoted to the people.'
'The people! What should I care though the whole town perished? Do not
attribute to me a humanity that is not in my nature.'
'Be as cynical as you like in words so long as you are heroic in
action. I am going out to the yacht; will you come with me?'
He hesitated. 'I merely came to hear from the warder of your health. I
am going to catch the express steamer at Neusatz; all danger is over.'
'The yacht can take you to Neusatz. Come with me.'
He did not offer more opposition; he accompanied her to the boat and
entered it.
The tears were in her eyes. She said nothing more, but she could not
forget that scores of her own people here had owed their lives to his
intrepidity and patience, and that he had never hesitated to throw his
life into the balance when needed. And it had been done for her sake
alone. The love of humanity might have been a nobler and purer motive,
but it would not have touched her so nearly as the self-abandonment of
a man by nature selfish and cold.
In a few moments they were taken to the yawl. He ascended the deck with
her.
The tidings the skipper brought, the examination of the stores, the
discussion of ways and means, the arrangements for the general relief,
were air dull, practical matters that claimed careful attention and
thought. She sat in the little cabin that was brave with marqueterie
work and blue satin and Dresden mirrors, and made memoranda and
calculations, and consulted him, and asked his advice on this, on
that. The government official, sent to make official estimates of the
losses in the township, had come on board to salute and take counsel
with her. The whole forenoon passed in these details. He wrote, and
calculated, and drew up reports for her. No more tender or personal
word was spoken between them; but there was a certain charm for them
both in this intimate intercourse, even though it took no other shape
than the study of how many boatloads of wheat were needed for so many
hundred people, of how many florins a day might be passed to the head
of each family, of how many of the flooded houses would still be
serviceable with restoration, of how many had been entirely destroyed,
of how the town would best be rebuilt, and of how the inland rivers
could best be restrained in the future.
To rebuild it she estimated that she would have to surrender for five
years the revenues from her Galician and Hungarian mines, and she
resolved to do it altogether at her own cost. She had no wish to see
the town figure in public prints as the object of public subscription.
'I am sure all my woman friends,' she said, 'would kindly make it
occasion for a fancy fair or a lottery (with new costumes) in Vienna,
but I do not care for that sort of thing, and I can very well do what
is needed alone.'
He was silent. He had always known that her riches were great, but
he had never realised them as fully as he now did when she spoke of
rebuilding an entire town as she might have spoken of building a
carriage.
'You would make a good prime minister,' she said, smiling; 'you have
the knowledge of a specialist on so many subjects.'
At noon they served her a little plain breakfast of Danubian
_salbling_, with Carlowitzer wine and fruit sent by the steward of
Mohacs. She bade him join her in it.
'Had Egon himself been here he could not have done more for Idrac than
you have done,' she said.
'Is this Prince Egon's wine?' he said abruptly, and on hearing that it
was so, he set the glass down untasted.
She looked surprised, but she did not ask him his reason, for she
divined it. There was an exaggeration in the unspoken hostility more
like the days of Arthur and Lancelot than their own, but it did not
displease her.
They were both little disposed to converse during their meal; after the
dreary and terrible scenes they had been witness of, the atmosphere
of life seems grave and dark even to those whom the calamity had not
touched. The most careless spirit is oppressed by a sense of the
precariousness and the cruelty of existence.
When they ascended to the deck the skies were lighter than they had
been for many weeks; the fog had cleared, so that, in the distance, the
towers of Neusatz and the fortress of Peterwardein were visible; vapour
still hung over the vast Hungarian plain, but the Danube was clear and
the affluents of it had sunk to their usual level.
'You really go to-night?' she said, as they looked down the river.
'There is no need for me to stay; the town is safe, and you are well,
you say. If there be anything I can still do, command me.'
She smiled a little and let her eye meet his for a moment.
'Well, if I command you to remain then, will you do so as my viceroy?
I want to return home; Aunt Ottilie grows daily more anxious, more
alarmed, but I cannot leave these poor souls all alone with their
priests, and their rabbi, who are all as timid as sheep and as stupid.
Will you stay in the castle and govern them, and help them till they
recover from their fright? It is much to ask, I know, but you have
already done so much for Idrac that I am bold to ask you to do more?'
He coloured with a mingled emotion.
'You could ask me nothing that I would not do,' he said in a low tone.
'I could wish you asked me something harder.'
'Oh, it will be very hard,' she said, with an indifference she did not
feel. 'It will be very dull, and you will have no one to speak to that
knows anything save how to grow flax and cherries. You will have to
talk the Magyar tongue all day, and you will have nothing to eat save
_kartoffeln_ and _salbling_; and I do not know that I am even right,'
she added, more gravely, 'to ask you to incur the risks that come from
all that soaked, ground, which will be damp so long.'
'The risks that you have borne yourself! Pray do not wound me by any
such scruple as that. I shall be glad, I shall be proud, to be for ever
so short or so long a time as you command, your representative, your
servant.'
'You are very good.'
'No.'
His eyes looked at hers with a quick flash, in which all the passion
he dared not express was spoken. She averted her glance and continued
calmly: 'You are very good indeed to Idrac. It will be a great
assistance and comfort to me to know that you are here. The poor people
already love you, and you will write to me and tell me all that may
need to be done. I will leave you the yacht and Anton. I shall return
by land with my woman; and when I reach home I will send you Herr
Greswold. He is a good companion, and has a great admiration for you,
though he wishes that you had not forsaken the science of botany.'
'It is like all other dissection or vivisection; it spoils the artistic
appreciation of the whole. I am yet unsophisticated enough to feel the
charm of a bank of violets, of a cliff covered with alpen-roses. I may
write to you?'
'You must write to me! It is you who will know all the needs of Idrac.
But are you sure that to remain here will not interfere with your own
projects, your own wishes, your own duties?'
'I have none. If I had any I would throw them away, with pleasure, to
be of use to one of your dogs, to one of your birds.'
She moved from his side a little.
'Look how the sun has come out. I can see the sparkle of the brass on
the cannon down yonder at Neusatz. We had better go now. I must see my
sick people and then leave as soon as I can. The yacht must take me to
Mohacs; from there I will send her back to you.'
'Do as you will. I can have no greater happiness than to obey you.'
'I am sure that I thank you in the way that you like best, when I say
that I believe you.'
She said the words in a very low tone, but so calmly that the calmness
of them checked any other words he might have uttered. It was a royal
acceptance of a loyal service; nothing more. The boat took them back
to the fortress. Whilst she was occupied in her farewell to the sick
people, and her instructions to those who attended on them, he, left
to himself in the apartment she had made her own, instinctively went
to an old harpsichord that stood there and touched the keys. It had a
beautiful case, rich with the varnish of the Martins. He played with
it awhile for its external beauty, and then let his fingers stray over
its limited keyboard. It had still sweetness in it, like the spinet
of Hohenszalras. It suited certain pathetic quaint old German airs he
knew, and which he half unconsciously reproduced upon it, singing them
as he did so in a low tone. The melody, very soft and subdued, suited
to the place where death had been so busy and nature so unsparing, and
where a resigned exhaustion had now succeeded to the madness of terror,
reached the ears of the sick women in the Rittersaal and of Wanda von
Szalras seated beside their beds.
'It is like the saints in Heaven sighing in pity for us here,' said one
of the women who was very feeble and old, and she smiled as she heard.
The notes, tremulous from age but penetrating in their sweetness, came
in slow calm movements of harmony through the stillness of the chamber;
his voice, very low also, but clear, ascended with them. Wanda sat
quite still, and listened with a strange pleasure. 'He alone,' she
thought, 'can make the dumb strings speak.
It was almost dusk when she descended to the room which she had made
her own. In the passages of the castle oil wicks were lighted in the
iron lamps and wall sconces, but here it was without any light, and
in the gloom she saw the dim outline of his form as he sat by the
harpsichord. He had ceased playing; his head was bent down and rested
on the instrument; he was lost in thought, and his whole attitude was
dejected. He did not hear her approach, and she looked at him some
moments, herself unseen. A great tenderness came over her: he was
unhappy, and he had been very brave, very generous, very loyal: she
felt almost ashamed. She went nearer, and he raised himself abruptly.
'I am going,' she said to him. 'Will you come with me to the yacht?'
He rose, and though it was dusk, and in this chamber so dark that his
face was indistinct to her, she was sure that tears had been in his
eyes.
'Your old harpsichord has the vernis Martin,' he said, with effort.
'You should not leave it buried here. It has a melody in it too, faint
and simple and full of the past, like the smell of dead rose-leaves.
Yes, I will have the honour to come with you. I wish there were a full
moon. It will be a dark night on the Danube.'
'My men know the soundings of the river well. As for the harpsichord,
you alone have found its voice. It shall go to your rooms in Paris.'
'You are too good, but I would not take it. Let it go to Hohenszalras.'
'Why would you not take it?
'I would take nothing from you.'
He spoke abruptly, and with some sternness.
'I think there is such a thing as being too proud? she said, with
hesitation.
'Your ancestors would not say so,' he answered, with an effort; she
understood the meaning that underlay the words. He turned away and
closed the lid of the harpsichord, where little painted cupids wantoned
in a border of metal scroll-work.
All the men and women well enough to stand crowded on the water-stairs
to see her departure; little children were held up in their mother's
arms and bidden remember her for evermore; all feeble creatures lifted
up their voices to praise her; Jew and Christian blessed her; the
water-gate was cumbered with sobbing people, trying to see her face,
to kiss her skirt for the last time. She could not be wholly unmoved
before that unaffected, irrepressible emotion. Their poor lives were
not worth much, but such as they were she, under Heaven, had saved them.
'I will return and see you again,' she said to them, as she made a slow
way through the eager crowd. 'Thank Heaven, my people, not me. And I
leave my friend with you, who did much more for you than I. Respect him
and obey him.'
They raised with their thin trembling voices a loud _Eljén_! of homage
and promise, and she passed away from their sight into the evening
shadows on the wide river.
Sabran accompanied her to the vessel, which was to take her to the town
of Mohacs, thence to make her journey home by railway.
'I shall not leave until you bid me, even though you should forget to
call me all in my life!' he said, as the boat slipped through the dark
water.
'Such oblivion would be a poor reward.'
'I have had reward enough. You have called me your friend.'
She was silent. The boat ran through the dusk and the rippling rays of
light streaming from the sides of the yacht, and they went on board. He
stood a moment with uncovered head before her on the deck, and she gave
him her hand.
'You will come to the Holy Isle?' she said, as she did so.
'If you bid me,' he said, as he bowed and kissed her hand. His lips
trembled as he did so, and by the lamplight she saw that he was very
pale.
'I shall bid you,' she said, very softly, by-and-by. Farewell!'
He bowed very low once more, then he dropped over the yacht's side into
the boat waiting below; the splash of the oars told her he was gone
back to Idrac. The yawl weighed anchor and began to go up the river,
a troublesome and tedious passage at all seasons. She sat on deck
watching the strong current of the Danube as it rolled on under the bow
of the schooner. For more than a league she could see the beacon that
burned by the water-gate of the fortress. When the curve of the stream
hid it from her eyes she felt a pang of painful separation, of wistful
attachment to the old dreary walls where she had seen so much suffering
and so much courage, and where she had learned to read her own heart
without any possibility of ignoring its secrets. A smile came on her
mouth and a moisture in her eyes as she sat alone in the dark autumn
night, while the schooner made her slow ascent through the swell that
accompanies the influx of the Drave.