Chapter III (1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he himself said, with a little confusion:

'I saw a lady last night?'

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

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

The physician answered:

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

The stranger shuddered a little.

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

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

The stranger was silent.

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

The physician laughed.

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

'Are you savages in the Tauern?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greswold bowed and said no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lad smiled with amusement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'You are a reactionist, Doctor?'

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

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

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

The day went away imperceptibly and agreeably to the physician and to the stranger in this pleasant rambling talk; whilst the rain poured down in fury on the stone terraces and green lawns without, and the Szalrassee was hidden under a veil of fog.

'Am I not to see her at all?' thought Sabran. He did not like to express his disquietude on that subject to the physician, and he was not sure himself whether he most desired to ride away without meeting the serene eyes of his châtelaine, or to be face to face with her once more.

He stood long before her portrait, done by Carolus Duran; she wore in it a close-fitting gown of white velvet, and held in her hand a great Spanish hat with white plumes; the two hounds were beside her; the attitude had a certain grandeur and gravity in it which were very impressive.

'This was painted last year,' said Greswold, 'at the Princess's request. It is admirably like----'

'It is a noble picture,' said Sabran. 'But what a very proud woman she looks!'

'Blood tells,' said Greswold, 'far more than most people know or admit. It is natural that my Lady, with the blood in her of so many mighty nobles, who had the power of judgment and chastisement over whole provinces, should be sometimes disposed to exercise too despotic a will, to be sometimes contemptuous of the dictates of modern society, which sends the princess and the peasant alike to a law court for sole redress of their wrongs. She is at times irreconcilable with the world as it stands; she is the representative and descendant in a direct line of arrogant and omnipotent princes. That she combines with that natural arrogance and instinct of dominion a very beautiful pitifulness and even humility is a proof of the chastening influence of religious faith on the nature of women; we are too apt to forget that, in our haste to destroy the Church. Men might get on perhaps very well without a religion of any kind; but I tremble to think what their mothers and their mistresses would become.'

They passed the morning in animated discussion, and as it drew to a close, the good doctor did not perceive how adroitly his new acquaintance drew out from him all details of the past and present of Hohenszalras, and of the tastes and habits of its châtelaine, until he knew all that there was to be known of that pure and austere life.

'You may think her grief for her brother Bela's death--for all her brothers' deaths--a morbid sentiment,' said the doctor as he spoke of her. 'But it is not so--no. It is, perhaps, overwrought; but no life can be morbid that is so active in duty, so untiring in charity, so unsparing of itself. Her lands and riches, and all the people dependent on her, are to the Countess Wanda only as so much trust, for which hereafter she will be responsible to Bela and to God. You and I may smile, you and I, who are philosophers, and have settled past dispute that the human life has no more future than the snail-gnawed cabbage, but yet--yet, my dear sir, one cannot deny that there is something exalted in such a conception of duty; and--of this I am convinced--that on the character of a woman it has a very ennobling influence.'

'No doubt. But has she renounced all her youth? Does she mean never to go into the world or to marry?'

'I am quite sure she has made no resolve of the sort,' But I do not think she will ever alter. She has refused many great alliances. Her temperament is serene, almost cold; and her ideal it would be difficult, I imagine, for any mortal man to realise.'

'But when a woman loves----'

'Oh, of course,' said Herr Joachim, rather drily. 'If the aloe flower!----Love does not I think possess any part of the Countess Wanda's thoughts or desires. She fancies it a mere weakness.'

'A woman can scarcely be amiable without that weakness.'

'No. Perhaps she is not precisely what we term amiable. She is rather too far also from human emotions and human needs. The women of the house of Szalras have been mostly very proud, silent, brave, and resolute; great ladies rather than lovable wives. Luitgarde von Szalras held this place with only a few archers and spearmen against Heinrich Jasomergott in the twelfth century, and he raised the siege after five months. "She is not a woman, nor human, she is a _kuttengeier_," he said, as he retreated into his Wiener Wald. All the great monk-vultures and the gyps and the pygargues have been sacred all through the Hohe Tauern since that year.'

'And I was about to shoot a _kuttengeier_--now I see that my offence was beyond poaching, it was high treason almost!'

'I heard the story from Otto. He would have hanged you cheerfully. But I hope,' said the doctor, with a pang of misgiving, 'that I have not given you any false impression of my Lady, as cold and hard and unwomanly. She is full of tenderness of a high order; she is the noblest, most truthful, and most generous nature that I have ever known clothed in human form, and if she be too proud--well, it is a stately sin, pardonable in one who has behind her eleven hundred years of fearless and unblemished honour.'

'I am a socialist,' said Sabran, a little curtly; then added, with a little laugh, 'Though I believe not in rank, I do believe in race.'

'_Bon sang ne peut mentir_,' murmured the old physician; the fair face of Sabran changed slightly.

'Will you come and look over the house?' said the Professor, who noticed nothing, and only thought of propitiating the owner of the rare orchid. 'There is almost as much to see as in the Burg at Vienna. Everything has accumulated here undisturbed for a thousand years. Hohenszalras has been besieged, but never deserted or dismantled.

'It is a grand place!' said Sabran, with a look of impatience. 'It seems intolerable that a woman should possess it all, while I only own a few wind-blown oaks in the wilds of Finisterre.'

'Ah, ah, that is pure socialism!' said the doctor, with a little chuckle. '_Ote-toi, que je m'y mette._ That is genuine Liberalism all the world over.'

'You are no communist yourself, doctor?'

'No,' said Herr Joachim, simply. 'All my studies lead me to the conviction that equality is impossible, and were it possible, it would be hideous. Variety, infinite variety, is the beneficent law of the world's life. Why, in that most perfect of all societies, the beehive, flawless mathematics are found co-existent with impassable social barriers and unalterable social grades.'

Sabran laughed good-humouredly.

'I thought at least the bees enjoyed an undeniable Republic.'

'A Republic with helots, sir, like Sparta. A Republic will always have its helots. But come and wander over the castle. Come first and see the parchments.'

'Where are the ladies?' asked Sabran, wistfully.

'The Princess is at her devotions and taking tisane. I visited her this morning; she thinks she has a sore throat. As for our Lady, no one ever disturbs her or knows what she is doing. When she wants any of us ordinary folks, we are summoned. Sometimes we tremble. You know this alone is an immense estate, and then there is a palace at the capital, and one at Salzburg, not to speak of the large estates in Hungary and the mines in Galicia. All these our Lady sees after and manages herself. You can imagine that her secretary has no easy task, and that secretary is herself; for she does not believe in doing anything well by others.'

'A second Maria Theresa!' said Sabran.

'Not dissimilar, perhaps,' said the doctor, nettled at the irony of the tone. 'Only where our great Queen sent thousands out to their deaths the Countess von Szalras saves many lives. There are no mines in the world--I will make bold to say--where there is so much comfort and so little peril as those mines of hers in Stanislaw. She visited them three years hence. But I forget, you are a stranger, and as you do not share our cultus for the Grafin, cannot care to hear its Canticles. Come to the muniment-room; you shall see some strange parchments.'

'Heavens, how it rains!' said Sabran, as they left his chambers. 'Is that common here?'

'Very common, indeed!' said the doctor, with a laugh. 'We pass two-thirds of the year between snow and water. But then we have compensation. Where will you see such grass, such forests, such gardens, when the summer sun does shine?'

The Marquis de Sabran charmed him, and as they wandered over the huge castle the physician delightedly displayed his own erudition, and recognised that of his companion. The Hohenszalrasburg was itself like some black-letter record of old South-German history; it was a chronicle written in stone and wood and iron. The brave old house, like a noble person, contained in itself a liberal education, and the stranger whom through an accident it sheltered was educated enough to comprehend and estimate it at its due value. In his passage through it he won the suffrages of the household by his varied knowledge and correct appreciation. In the stables his praises of the various breeds of horses there commended itself by its accuracy to Ulrich, the _stallmeister_, not less than a few difficult shots in the shooting gallery proved his skill to his enemy of the previous day, Otto, the _jägermeister._ Not less did he please Hubert, who was learned in such things, with his cultured admiration of the wonderful old gold and silver plate, the Limoges dishes and bowls, the Vienna and Kronenthal china; nor less the custodian of the pictures, a collection of Flemish and German masters, with here and there a modern _capolavoro_, hung all by themselves in a little vaulted gallery which led into a much larger one consecrated to tapestries, Flemish, French, and Florentine.

When twilight came, and the greyness of the rain-charged atmosphere deepened into the dark of night, Sabran had made all living things at the castle his firm friends, down to the dogs of the house, save and except the ladies who dwelt in it. Of them he had had no glimpse. They kept their own apartments. He began to feel some fresh embarrassment at remaining another night beneath a roof the mistress of which did not deign personally to recognise his presence. A salon hung with tapestries opened out of the bedchamber allotted to him; he wondered if he were to dine there like a prisoner of state.

He felt an extreme reluctance united to a strong curiosity to meet again the woman who had treated him with such cool authority and indifference as a common poacher in her woods. His cheek tingled still, whenever he thought of the manner in which, at her signal, his hands had been tied, and his rifle taken from him. She was the representative of all that feudal, aristocratic, despotic, dominant spirit of a dead time which he, with his modern, cynical, reckless Parisian Liberalism, most hated, or believed that he hated. She was Austria Felix personified, and he was a man who had always persuaded himself and others that he was a socialist, a Philippe Egalité. And this haughty patrician had mortified him and then had benefited and sheltered him!

He would willingly have gone from under her roof without seeing her, and yet a warm and inquisitive desire impelled him to feel an unreasonable annoyance that the day was going by without his receiving any intimation that he would be allowed to enter her presence, or be expected to make his obeisances to her. When, however, the servants entered to light the many candles in his room, Hubert entered behind them, and expressed the desire of his lady that the Marquis would favour them with his presence: they were about to dine.

Sabran, standing before the mirror, saw himself colour like a boy: he knew not whether he were most annoyed or pleased. He would willingly have ridden away leaving his napoleons for the household, and seeing no more the woman who had made him ridiculous in his own eyes; yet the remembrance of her haunted him as something strange, imperious, magnetic, grave, serene, stately; vague memories of a thousand things he had heard said of her in embassies and at courts came to his mind; she had been a mere unknown name to him then; he had not listened, he had not cared, but now he remembered all he had heard; curiosity and an embarrassment wholly foreign to him struggled together in him. What could he say to a woman who had first insulted and then protected him? It would tax all the ingenuity and the tact for which he was famed. However, he only said to the major-domo, 'I am much flattered. Express my profound gratitude to your ladies for the honour they are so good as to do me.' Then he made his attire look as well as it could, and considering that punctuality is due from guests as well as from monarchs, he said that he was ready to follow the servant waiting for him, and did so through the many tapestried and panelled corridors by which the enormous house was traversed.

Though light was not spared at the burg it was only such light as oil and wax could give the galleries and passages; dim mysterious figures loomed from the rooms and shadows seemed to stretch away on every side to vast unknown chambers that might hold the secrets of a thousand centuries. When he was ushered into the radiance of the great white room he felt dazzled and blinded.

He felt his bruise still, and he walked with a slight lameness from a strain of his left foot, but this did not detract from the grace and distinction of his bearing, and the pallor of his handsome features became them; and when he advanced through the opened doors and bent before the chair and kissed the hands of the Princess Ottilie she thought to herself, 'What a perfectly beautiful person. Even Wanda will have to admit that!' Whilst Hubert, going backward, said to his regiment of under-servants: 'Look you! since Count Gela rode out to his death at the head of the White Hussars, so grand a man as this stranger has not set foot in this house.'

He expected to see the Countess Wanda von Szalras. Instead, he saw the loveliest little old lady he had ever seen in his life, clad in a semi-conventual costume, leaning on a gold-headed cane, with clouds of fragrant old lace about her, and a cross of emeralds hung at her girdle of onyx beads, who saluted him with the ceremonious grace of that etiquette which is still the common rule of life amongst the great nobilities of the north. He hastened to respond in the same spirit with an exquisite deference of manner.

She greeted him with affable and smiling words, and he devoted himself to her with deference and gallantry, expressing all his sense of gratitude for the succour and shelter he received, with a few eloquent and elegant phrases which said enough and not too much, with a grace that it is difficult to lend to gratitude which is generally somewhat halting and uncouth.

'His name must be in the Hof-Kalendar!' she thought, as she replied to his protestations with her prettiest smile which, despite her sacred calling and her seventy years, was the smile of a coquette.

'M. le Marquis,' she said, in her tender and flute-like voice, 'I deserve none of your eloquent thanks. Age is sadly selfish. I did nothing to rescue you, unless, indeed, Heaven heard my unworthy prayer!--and this house is not mine, nor anything in it; the owner of it, and, therefore, your châtelaine of the moment, is my grand-niece, the Countess Wanda von Szalras.'

'That I had your intercession with Heaven, however indirectly, was far more than I deserved,' said Sabran, still standing before her. 'For the Countess Wanda, I have been twice in her power, and she has been very generous.'

'She has done her duty, nothing more,' said the Princess a little primly and petulantly, if princesses and petulance can mingle. 'We should have scarce been Christians if we had not striven for your life. As to leaving us this day it was out of the question. The storm continues, the passes are torrents; I fear much that it will even be impossible for your servant to come from S. Johann; we could not send to Matrey even this morning for the post-bag, and they tell me the bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.'

'I have wanted for nothing, and my Parisian rogue is quite as well yawning and smoking his days away at S. Johann,' said Sabran. 'Oh, Madame! how can I ever express to you all my sense of the profound obligations you have laid me under, stranger that I am!'

'At least we were bound to atone for the incivility of the Szalrassee,' said the Princess, with her pretty smile. 'It is a very horrible country to live in. My niece, indeed, thinks it Arcadia, but an Arcadia subject to the most violent floods, and imprisoned in snow and frost for so many months, does not commend itself to me; no doubt it is very grand and romantic.'

The ideal of the Princess was neither grand nor romantic: it was life in the little prim, yet gay north German town in the palace of which she and all her people had been born; a little town, with red roofs, green alleys, straight toylike streets, clipped trees, stiff soldiers, set in the midst of a verdant plain; flat and green, and smooth as a card table.

The new comer interested her; she was quickly won by personal beauty, and he possessed this in a great degree. It was a face unlike any she had ever seen; it seemed to her to bear mystery with it and melancholy, and she loved both those things; perhaps because she had never met with either out of the pages of German poets and novelists of France. Those who are united to them in real life find them uneasy bedfellows.

'Perhaps he is some Kronprinz in disguise,' she thought with pleasure; but then she sadly recollected that she knew every crown prince that there was in Europe. She would have liked to have asked him many questions, but her high-breeding was still stronger than her curiosity; and a guest could never be interrogated.

Dinner was announced as served.

'My niece, the Countess Wanda,' said the Princess, with a little reluctance visible in her hesitation, 'will dine in her own rooms. She begs you to excuse her; she is tired from the storm last night.'

'She will not dine with me,' thought Sabran, with the quick intuition natural to him.

'You leave me nothing to regret, Princess,' he said readily, with a sweet smile, as he offered his arm to this lovely little lady, wrapped in laces fine as cobweb, with her great cross of emeralds pendent from her rosary.

A woman is never too old to be averse to the thought that she can charm; very innocent charming was that of the Princess Ottilie, and she thought with a sigh if she had married--if she had had such a son; yet she was not insensible to the delicate compliment which he paid her in appearing indifferent to the absence of his châtelaine and quite content with her own presence.

Throughout dinner in that great hall, he, sitting on her right hand, amused her, flattered her with that subtlest of all flattery, interest and attention; diverted her with gay stories of worlds unknown to her, and charmed her with his willingness to listen to her lament over the degeneracy of mankind and of manners. After a few words of courtesy as to his hostess's absence he seemed not even to remember that Wanda von Salzras was absent from the head of her table.

'And I have said that she was tired! She who is never more tired than the eagles are! May heaven forgive me the untruth!' thought the Princess more than once during the meal, which was long and magnificent, and at which her guest ate sparingly and drank but little.

'You have no appetite?' she said regretfully.

'Pardon me, I have a good one,' he answered her; 'but I have always been content to eat little and drink less. It is the secret of health; and my health is all my riches.'

She looked at him with interest.

'I should think your riches in that respect are inexhaustible?'

He smiled.

'Oh yes! I have never had a day's illness, except once, long ago in the Mexican swamps, a marsh fever and a snake-bite.'

'You have travelled much?'

'I have seen most of the known world, and a little of the unknown,' he answered. 'I am like Ulysses; only there will be not even a dog to welcome me when my wanderings are done.'

'Have you no relatives?'

'None!' he added, with an effort. Everyone is dead; dead long ago. I have been long alone, and I am very well used to it.'

'But you must have troops of friends?'

'Oh!--friends who will win my last napoleon at play, or remember me as long as they meet me every day on the boulevards? Yes, I have many of that sort, but they are not worth Ulysses' dog.'

He spoke carelessly, without any regard to the truth as far as it went, but no study would have made him more apt to coin words to attract the sympathy of his listeners.

'He is unfortunate,' she thought. 'How often beauty brings misfortune. My niece must certainly see him. I wish he belonged to the Pontêves-Bargêmes!'

Not to have a name that she knew, one of those names that fill all Europe as with the trump of an archangel, was to be as one maimed or deformed in the eyes of the Princess, an object for charity, not for intercourse.

'Your title is of Brittany, I think?' she said a little wistfully, and as he answered something abruptly in the affirmative, she solaced herself once more with the remembrance that there was a good deal of _petite noblesse_, honourable enough, though not in the 'Almanac de Gotha,' which was a great concession from her prejudices, invented on the spur of the interest that he excited in her imagination.

'I never saw any person so handsome,' she thought, as she glanced at his face; while he in return thought that this silver-haired, soft-cheeked, lace-enwrapped Holy Mother was _jolie à croquer_ in the language of those boulevards, which had been his nursery and his palestrum. She was so kind to him, she was so gracious and graceful, she chatted with him so frankly and pleasantly, and she took so active an interest in his welfare that he was touched and grateful. He had known many women, many young ones and gay ones; he had never known what the charm of a kindly and serene old age can be like in a woman who has lived with pure thoughts, and will die in hope and in faith; and this lovely old abbess, with her pretty touch of worldliness, was a study to him, new with the novelty of innocence, and of a kind of veneration. And he was careful not to let her perceive his mortification that the Countess von Szalras would not deign to dine in his presence. In truth, he thought of little else, but no trace of irritation or of absence of mind was to be seen in him as he amused the Princess, and discovered with her that they had in common some friends amongst the nobilities of Saxony, of Wurtemberg, and of Bohemia.

'Come and take your coffee in my own room, the blue-room,' she said to him, and she rose and took his arm. 'We will go through the library; you saw it this morning, I imagine? It is supposed to contain the finest collection of Black Letter in the empire, or so we think.'

And she led him through the great halls and up a few low stairs into a large oval room lined with oaken bookcases, which held the manuscripts, missals, and volumes of all dates which had been originally gathered together by one of the race who had been also a bishop and a cardinal.

The library was oak-panelled, and had an embossed and emblazoned ceiling; silver lamps of old Italian _trasvorato_ work, hung by silver chains, and shed a subdued clear light; beneath the porphyry sculptures of the hearth a fire of logs was burning, for the early summer evening here is chill and damp; there were many open fireplaces in Hohenszalras, introduced there by a chilly Provençal princess, who had wedded a Szalras in the seventeenth century, and who had abolished the huge porcelain stoves in many apartments in favour of grand carved mantel-pieces, and gilded andirons, and sweet smelling simple fires of aromatic woods, such as made glad the sombre hotels and lonely châteaux of the Prance of the Bourbons.