In two days' time Hohenszalras received its mistress home.
She was not in any way harmed by the perils she had encountered, and
the chills and fever to which she had been exposed. On the contrary,
her eyes had a light and her face had a bloom which for many months had
not been there.
The Princess heard a brief sketch of what had passed in almost
total silence. She had disapproved strongly, and she said that her
disapproval could not change, though a merciful heavenly host had
spared her the realisation of her worst fears.
The name of Sabran was not spoken. Wanda was of a most truthful temper,
but she could not bring herself to speak of his presence at Idrac; the
facts would reveal themselves inevitably soon enough.
She sent Greswold to the Danube laden with stores and medicines.
She received a letter every morning from her delegate; but he wrote
briefly, and with scrupulous care, the statements of facts connected
with the town and reports of what had been done. Her engineer had
arrived from the mines by Kremnitz, and the builders estimated that
the waters would have subsided and settled enough, if no fresh rising
took place, for them to begin the reconstruction of the town with the
beginning of the new month. Ague and fever were still very common, and
fresh cases were brought in every hour to the hospital in the fortress.
He wrote on the arrival of Herr Greswold, that, with her permission, he
himself would still stay on, for the people had grown used to him, and
having some knowledge of hydraulics he would be interested to see the
plans proposed by her engineers for preserving the town from similar
calamities.
Three weeks passed; all that time she spoke but little either of him or
of any other subject. She took endless rides, and she sat many hours
doing nothing in the white room, absorbed in thought. The Princess,
who had learned what had passed, with admirable exercise of tact and
self-restraint made neither suggestion nor innuendo, and accepted the
presence of a French Marquis at a little obscure town in Sclavonia as
if it were the most natural circumstance in the world.
'All the Szalras have been imperious, arrogant, and of complicated
character,' she thought; 'she has the same temper, though it is
mitigated in her by great natural nobility of disposition and strong
purity of motives. She will do as she chooses, let all the world do
what it may to change her. If I say a word either way it may take
effect in some wholly unforeseen manner that I should regret. It is
better to abstain. In doubt do nothing, is the soundest of axioms.'
And Princess Ottilie, who on occasion had the wisdom of the serpent
with the sweetness of the dove, preserved a discreet silence, and
devoured her really absorbing curiosity in her own heart.
At the end of the fourth week she heard that all was well at Idrac,
so far as it could be so in a place almost wholly destroyed. There
was no sign of renewed rising of the inland streams. The illness was
diminished, almost conquered; the people had begun to take heart and
hope, and, being aided, wished to aid themselves. The works for new
embankments, water-gates, and streets were already planned, though
they could not be begun until the spring. Meanwhile, strong wooden
houses were being erected on dry places, which which could shelter
_ad interim_ many hundreds of families; the farmers were gradually
venturing to return to their flooded lands. The town had suffered
grievously and in much irreparably, but it began to resume its trade
and its normal life.
She hesitated a whole day when she heard this. Though Sabran did not
hint at any desire of his own to leave the place, she knew it, was
impossible to bid him remain longer, and that a moment of irrevocable
decision was come. She hesitated all the day, slept little all the
night, then sent him a brief telegram: 'Come to the Island.'
Obey the summons as rapidly as he might, he could not travel by Vienna
and Salzburg more quickly than in some thirty hours or more. The time
passed to her in a curious confusion and anxiety. Outwardly she was
calm enough; she visited the schools, wrote some letters, and took her
usual long ride in the now leafless woods, but at heart she was unquiet
and ill at ease, troubled more than by anything else at the force of
the desire she felt to meet him once more. It was but a month since
they had parted on the deck, and it seemed ten years. She had known
what he had meant when he had said that he would come if she bade him;
she had known that she would only do the sheerest cruelty and treachery
if she called him thither only to dismiss him. It had not been a visit
of the moment, but all his life that she had consented to take when she
had written 'Come to the Island.'
She would never have written it unless she had been prepared to fulfil
all to which it tacitly pledged her. She was incapable of wantonly
playing with any passion that moved another, least of all with his. The
very difference of their position would have made indecision or coyness
in her seem cruelty, humiliation. The decision hurt her curiously with
a sense of abdication, mortification, and almost shame. To a very proud
woman in whom the senses have never asserted their empire, there is
inevitably an emotion of almost shame, of self-surrender, of loss of
self-respect, in the first impulses of love. It made her abashed and
humiliated to feel the excitation that the mere touch of his hand, the
mere gaze of his eyes, had power to cause her. 'If this be love,' she
thought, 'no wonder the world is lost for it.'
Do what she would, the time seemed very long; the two evenings that
passed were very tedious and oppressive. The Princess seemed to
observe nothing of what she was perfectly conscious of, and her
flute-like voice murmured on in an unending stream of commonplaces to
which her niece replied much at random.
In the afternoon of the third day she stood on the terrace looking down
the lake and towards the Holy Isle, with an impatience of which she was
in turn impatient. She was dressed in white woollen stuff with silver
threads in it; she had about her throat an old necklace of the Golden
Fleece, of golden shells enamelled, which had been a gift from Charles
the Fifth to one of her house; over her shoulders, for the approach
of evening was cold, she had thrown a cloak of black Russian sables.
She made a figure beautiful, stately, patrician, in keeping with the
background of the great donjon tower, and the pinnacled roofs, and the
bronze warriors in their Gothic niches.
When she had stood there a few minutes looking down the lake towards
the willows of the monastery island, a boat came out from the willow
thickets, and came over the mile-and-half of green shadowy water. There
was only one person in it. She recognised him whilst he was still far
off, and a smile came on her mouth that it was a pity he could not see.
He was a bold man, but his heart stood still with awe of her, and his
soul trembled within him at this supreme moment of his fate. For he
believed that she would not have bidden him there unless her hand were
ready to hold out destiny to him--the destiny of his maddest, of his
sweetest, dreams.
She came forward a few paces to meet him; her face was grave and pale,
but her eyes had a soft suppressed light.
'I have much for which to thank you,' she said, as she held out her
hand to him. Her voice was tremulous though calm.
He kissed her hand, then stood silent. It seemed to him that there was
nothing to say. She knew what he would have said if he had been king,
or hero, or meet mate for her. His pulses were beating feverishly, his
self-possession was gone, his eyes did not dare to meet hers. He felt
as if the green woods, the shining waters, the rain-burdened skies were
wheeling round him. That dumbness, that weakness, in a man so facile
of eloquence, so hardy and even cynical in courage, touched her to a
wondering pitifulness.
'After all,' she thought once more, 'if we love one another what is it
to anyone else? We are both free.'
If the gift she would give would be so great that the world would blame
him for accepting it, what would that matter so long as she knew him
blameless?
They were both mute: he did not even look at her, and she might have
heard the beating of his heart. She looked at him and the colour came
back into her face, the smile back upon her mouth.
'My friend,' she said very gently,'did never you think that I also----'
She paused: it was very hard to her to say what she must say, and he
could not help her, dared not help her, to utter it.
They stood thus another moment mute, with the sunset glow upon the
shining water, and upon the feudal majesty of the great castle.
Then she looked at him with a straight, clear, noble glance, and with
the rich blood mounting in her face, stretched out her hand to him with
a royal gesture.
'They robbed you of your ivy leaf, my cruel Prussian cousins. Will
you--take--this--instead?'
Then Heaven itself opened to his eyes. He did not take her hand. He
fell at her feet and kissed them.