Chapter VI (1)

The days drifted by; the little boat crossed thrice a day from castle to monastery, bringing the physician, bringing books, food, fruit, wine; the rain came often, sheets of white water sweeping over the lake, and blotting the burg and the hills and the forests from sight; the sunshine came more rarely, but when it came it lit up the amphitheatre of the Glöckner group to a supreme splendour, of solemn darkness of massed pines, of snow-peaks shrouded in the clouds. So the month wore away; he was in no haste to recover entirely; he could pay the monks for his maintenance, and so felt free to stay, not being allowed to know that his food came from the castle as his books did. The simple priests were conquered and captivated by him; he played grand Sistine masses for them, and canticles which he had listened to in Nôtre Dame. Herr Joachim marvelled to see him so passive and easily satisfied; for he perceived that his patient could not be by nature either very tranquil or quickly content; but the doctor thought that perhaps the severe nervous shock of the descent on the Umbal might have shakened and weakened him, and knew that the pure Alpine air, the harmless pursuits, and the early hours were the best tonics and restoratives in the pharmacy of Nature. Therefore he could consistently encourage him to stay, as his own wishes moved him to do; for to the professor the companionship and discussion of a scholarly and cultivated man were rarities, and he had conceived an affectionate interest in one whose life he had in some measure saved; for without skilled care the crevasse of the Iselthal might have been fatal to a mountaineer who had successfully climbed the highest peaks of the Andes.

'No doubt if I passed a year here,' thought Sabran, 'I should rebel and grow sick with longing for the old unrest, the old tumult, the old intoxication--no doubt; but just now it is very welcome: it makes me comprehend why De Rancy created La Trappe, why so many soldiers and princes and riotous livers were glad to go out into a Paraclete amongst the hills with S. Bruno or S. Bernard.'

He said something of the sort to Herr Joachim, who nodded consent; but added: 'Only they took a great belief with them, and a great penitence, the recluses of that time; in ours men mistake satiety for sorrow, and so when their tired vices have had time to grow again, like nettles that have been gnawed to the root but can spring up with fresh power to sting, then, as their penitence was nothing but fatigue, they get quickly impatient to go out and become beasts again. All the difference between our times and S. Bruno's lies there; they believed in sin, we do not. I say, "we," I mean the voluptuaries and idlers of your world.'

'Perhaps not,' answered Sabran, a little gloomily. 'But we do believe in dishonour.'

'Do you?' said the doctor, with some irony. 'Oh, I suppose you do. You may seduce Gretchen: you must not forsake Faustine; you must not lie to a man: you may lie to a woman. You must not steal: you may beggar your friend at baccara. I confess I have never understood the confusion of your unwritten laws on ethics and etiquette.'

Sabran laughed, but he did not take up the argument; and the doctor thought that he seemed becoming a little morose; since his escape from the tedium of confinement at Pregratten, confinement intolerable to a man of strength and spirit, he had always found his patient of great equability of temper, and of a good-humour and docility that had seemed as charming as they were invariable.

When he was recovered enough to make movement and change harmless to him, there came to him a note in the fine and miniature writing of the Princess Ottilie, bidding him come over to the castle at his pleasure, and especially inviting him, in her niece's name, to the noon-day breakfast at the castle on the following day, if his strength allowed.

He sat a quarter of an hour or more with the note on his knee, looking out at the light green willow foliage as it drooped above the deeper green of the lake.

'Our ladies are not used to refusals,' said the doctor, seeing his hesitation.

'I should be a churl to refuse,' said Sabran, with some little effort, which the doctor attributed to a remembered mortification, and so hastened to say:

'You are resentful still that the Countess Wanda took your rifle away? Surely she has made amends?'

'I was not thinking of that. She was perfectly right. She only treated me too well. She placed her house and her household at my disposition with a hospitality quite Spanish. I owe her too much ever to be able to express my sense of it.'

'Then you will come and tell her so?'

'I can do no less.'

Princess Ottilie and the mistress of Hohenszalras had had a discussion before that note of invitation was sent; a discussion which had ended as usual in the stronger reasoner giving way to the whim and will of the weaker.

'Why should we not be kind to him?' the Princess had urged; 'he is a gentleman. You know I took the precaution to write to Kaulnitz; Kaulnitz's answer is clear enough: and to Frohsdorf, from which it was equally satisfactory. I wrote also to the Comte de la Barée; his reply was everything which could be desired.'

'No doubt,' her niece had answered for the twentieth time; 'but I think we have already done enough for Christianity and hospitality; we need not offer him our personal friendship; as there is no master in this house he will not expect to be invited to it.' We will wish him God-speed when he is fully restored and is going away.'

'You are really too prudish!' said the Princess, very angrily. 'I should be the last person to counsel an imprudence, a failure in due caution, in correct reserve and hesitation; but for you to pretend that a Countess von Szalras cannot venture to invite a person to her own residence because that person is of the opposite sex----'

'That is not the question; the root of the matter is that he is a chance acquaintance made quite informally; we should have been cruel if we had done less than we have done, but there can be no need that we should do more.'

'I can ask more about him of Kaulnitz,' said Madame Ottilie.

Kaulnitz was one of her innumerable cousins, and was then minister in Paris.

'Why should you?' said her niece. 'Do you think either that it is quite honourable to make inquiries unknown to people? It always savours to me too much of the Third Section.'

'You are so exaggerated in all your scruples; you prefer to be suspicious of a person in silence than to ask a few questions,' said the Princess. 'But surely when two ambassadors and the Kaiser guarantee his position you may be content.'

The answer she had received from Kaulnitz had indeed only moderately satisfied her. It said that there was nothing known to the detriment of the Marquis de Sabran; that he had never been accused of anything unfitting his rank and name; but that he was a _viveur_, and was said to be very successful at play; he was not known to have any debts, but he was believed to be poor and of precarious fortunes. On the whole the Princess had decided to keep the answer to herself; she had remembered with irritation that her niece had suggested baccara as the source of the hundred gold pieces.

'I never intended to convey that ambassadors would disown him or the Kaiser either, whose signature is in his pocket-book. Only,' said Wanda, 'as you and I are all alone, surely it will be as well to leave this gentleman to the monks and to Greswold. That is all I mean.'

'It is a perfectly unnecessary scruple, and not at all like one of your race. The Szalras have always been hospitable and headstrong.'

'I hope I am the first--I have done my best for M. de Sabran; as for being headstrong--surely that is not a sweet or wise quality that you should lament my loss of it?'

'You need not quarrel with me,'said the Princess, pettishly. 'You have a terrible habit of contradiction, Wanda: and you never give up your opinion.'

The mistress of Hohenszalras smiled, and sighed a little.

'Dear mother, we will do anything that amuses you.'

So the note was sent.

The Princess had been always eager for such glimpses of the moving world as had been allowed to her by any accidental change. Her temperament would have led her to find happiness in the frivolous froth and fume of a worldly existence; she delighted in gossip, in innocent gaiety, in curiosity, in wonder; all her early years had been passed under repression and constraint, and now in her old age she was as eager as a child for any plaything, as inquisitive as a marmoset, as animated as a squirrel. Her mother had been a daughter of a great French family of the south, and much of the vivacity and sportive malice and quick temper of the Gallic blood was in her still, beneath the primness and the placidity that had become her habit, from long years passed in a little German court and in a stately semi-religious order.

This stranger whom chance had brought to them was to her idea a precious and providential source of excitement: already a hundred romances had suggested themselves to her fertile mind; already a hundred impossibilities had suggested themselves to her as probable. She did not in the least believe that accident had brought him there. She imagined that he had wandered there for the sake of seeing the mistress of Hohenszalras, who had for so long been unseen by the world, but whose personal graces and great fortune had remained in the memories of many. To the romantic fancy of the Princess, which had never been blunted by contact with harsh facts, nothing seemed prettier or more probable than that the French marquis, when arrested as a poacher, had been upon a pilgrimage of poetic adventure. It should not be her fault, she resolved, if the wounded knight had to go away in sorrow and silence, without the castle gates being swung open once at least.

'After all, if she would only take an interest in anything human,' she thought, 'instead of always horses and mountains, and philosophical treatises and councils, and calculations with the stewards! She ought not to live and die alone. They made me vow to do so, and perhaps it was for the best, but I would never say to anyone--Do likewise.'

And then the Princess felt the warm tears on her own cheeks, thinking of herself as she had been at seventeen, pacing up and down the stiff straight alley of clipped trees at Lilienhöhe with a bright young soldier who had fallen in a duel ere he was twenty. It was all so long ago, so long ago, and she was a true submissive daughter of her princely house, and of her Holy Church; yet she knew that it was not meet for a woman to live and die without a man's heart to beat by her own, without a child's hands to close her glazing eyes.

And Wanda von Szalras wished so to live and so to die! Only one magician could change her. Why should he not come?

So on the morrow the little boat that had brought the physician to him so often took him over the two miles of water to the landing stairs at the foot of the castle rock. In a little while he stood in the presence of his châtelaine.

He was a man who never in his life had been confused, unnerved, or at a loss for words; yet now he felt as a boy might have done, as a rustic might; he had a mist before his eyes, his heart beat quickly, he grew very pale.

She thought he was still suffering, and looked at him with interest.

'I am afraid that we did wrong to tempt you from the monastery,' she said, in her grave melodious voice; and she stretched out her hand to him with a look of sympathy. I am afraid you are still suffering and weak, are you not?'

He bent low as he touched it.

'How can I thank you?' he murmured. 'You have treated a vagrant like a king!'

'You were a munificent vagrant to our chapel and our poor,' she replied with a smile. And what have we done for you? Nothing more than is our commonest duty, far removed from cities or even villages, as we are. Are you really recovered? I may tell you now that there was a moment when Herr Greswold was alarmed for you.'

The Princess Ottilie entered at that moment and welcomed him with more effusion and congratulation. They breakfasted in a chamber called the Saxe room, an oval room lined throughout with lacquered white wood, in the Louis Seize style; the panels were painted in Watteau-like designs; it had been decorated by a French artist in the middle of the eighteenth century, and with its hangings of flowered white satin, and its collection of Meissen china figures, and its great window, which looked over a small garden with velvet grass plots and huge yews, was the place of all others to make an early morning meal most agreeable, whether in summer when the casements were open to the old-fashioned roses that climbed about them, or in winter when on the open hearth great oak logs burned beneath the carved white wood mantelpiece, gay with its plaques of Saxe and its garlands of foliage. The little oval table bore a service of old Meissen, with tiny Watteau figures painted on a ground of palest rose. Watteau figures of the same royal china upheld great shells filled with the late violets of the woods of Hohenszalras.

'What an enchanting little room!' said Sabran, glancing round it, and appreciating with the eyes of a connoisseur the Lancret designs, the Riesiner cabinets, and the old china. He was as well versed in the art and lore of the Beau Siècle as Arsène Houssaye or the Goncourts; he talked now of the epoch with skill and grace, with that accuracy of knowledge and that fineness of criticism which had made his observations and his approval treasured and sought for by the artists and the art patrons of Paris.

The day was grey and mild; the casements were open; the fresh, pure fragrance of the forests came in through the aromatic warmth of the chamber; the little gay shepherds and shepherdesses seemed to breathe and laugh.

'This room was a caprice of an ancestress of mine, who was of your country, and was, I am afraid, very wretched here,' said Wanda von Szalras. 'She brought her taste from Marly and Versailles. It is not the finest or the purest taste, but it has a grace and elegance of its own that is very charming, as a change.'

'It is a madrigal in porcelain,' he said, looking around him. 'I am glad that the _alouette gauloise_ has sung here beside the dread and majestic Austrian vulture.'

'The _alouette gauloise_ always sings in Aunt Ottilie's heart; it is what keeps her so young always. I assure you she is a great deal younger than I am,' said his châtelaine, resting a glance of tender affection on the pretty figure of the Princess caressing her Spitz dog Bijou.

She herself, with her great pearls about her throat, and a gown of white serge, looked a stately and almost severe figure beside the dainty picturesque prettiness of the elder lady and the fantastic gaiety and gilding of the porcelain and the paintings. He felt a certain awe of her, a certain hesitation before her, which the habits of the world enabled him to conceal, but which moved him with a sense of timidity, novel and almost painful.

'One ought to be Dorat and Marmontel to be worthy of such a repast,' he said, as he seated himself between his hostesses.

'Neither Dorat nor Marmontel would have enjoyed your very terrible adventure,' said the Princess, reflecting with satisfaction that it was herself who had saved this charming and chivalrous life, since, at her own risk and loss, she had sent her physicians, alike of body and of soul, to wrestle for him with death by his sick bed at Pregratten.

'Wanda would never have sent anyone to him,' thought the Princess: 'she is so unaccountably indifferent to any human life higher than her peasantry.'

'Adventures are to the adventurous,' quoted Sabran.

'Yes,' said the Princess; 'but the pity is that the adventurous are too often the questionable----'

'Perhaps that is saying too much,' said Wanda; 'but it is certain that the more solid qualities do not often lead into a career of excitement. It has been always conceded--with a sigh--that duty is dull.'

'I think adventure is like calamity: some people are born to it,' he added,'and such cannot escape from it. Loyola may cover his head with a cowl: he cannot become obscure. Eugene may make himself an abbé: he cannot escape his horoscope cast in the House of Mars.'

'What a fatalist you are!'

'Do you think we ever escape our fate? Alexander slew all whom he suspected, but he did not for that die in his bed of old age.'

'That merely proves that crime is no buckler.'

Sabran was silent.

'My life has been very adventurous,' he said lightly, after a pause; 'but I have only regarded that as another name for misfortune. The picturesque is not the prosperous; all beggars look well on canvas, whilst Carolus Duran himself can make nothing of a portrait of Dives, _roulant carrosse_ through his fifty millions.'

He had not his usual strength; his loins had had a wrench in the crashing fall from the Umbal which they had not wholly recovered, despite the wise medicaments of Greswold.

He moved with some difficulty, and, not to weary him, she remained after breakfast in the Watteau room, making him recline at length in a long chair beside one of the windows. She was touched by the weakness of a man evidently so strong and daring by nature, and she regretted the rough and inhospitable handling which he had experienced from her beloved hills and waters. She, who spoke to no one all the year through except her stewards and her priests, did not fail to be sensible of the pleasure she derived from the cultured and sympathetic companionship of a brilliant and talented mind.

'Ah! if Egon had only talent like that!' she thought, with a sigh of remembrance. Her cousin was a gallant nobleman and soldier, but of literature he had no knowledge; for art he had a consummate indifference; and the only eloquence he could command was a brief address to his troopers, which would be answered by an _Eljén_! ringing loud and long, like steel smiting upon iron.

Sabran could at all times talk well.

He had the gift of facile and eloquent words, and he had also what most attracted the sympathies of his hostess, a genuine and healthful love of the mountains and forests. All his life in Paris had not eradicated from his character a deep love for Nature in her wildest and her stormiest moods. They conversed long and with mutual pleasure of the country around them, of which she knew every ravine and torrent, and of whose bold and sombre beauty he was honestly enamoured.

The noon had deepened into afternoon, and the chimes of the clock-tower were sounding four when he rose to take his leave, and go on his way across the green brilliancy of the tumbling water to his quiet home with the Dominican brethren. He had still the languor and fatigue about him of recent illness, and he moved slowly and with considerable weakness. She said to him in parting, with unaffected kindness, 'Come across to us whenever you like; we are concerned to think that one of our own glaciers should have treated you so cruelly. I am often out riding far and wide, but my aunt will always be pleased to receive you.'

'I am the debtor of the Umbal ice,' he said, in a low voice. 'But for that happy fall I should have gone on my way to my old senseless life without ever having known true rest as I know it yonder. Will you be offended, too, if I say that I stayed at Matrey with a vague, faint, unfounded hope that your mountains might be merciful, and let me----'

'Shoot a _kuttengeier?_' she said quickly, as though not desiring to hear his sentence finished. 'You might shoot one easily sitting at a window in the monastery, and watching till the vultures flew across the lake; but you will remember you are on parole. I am sure you will be faithful.'

Long, long afterwards she remembered that he shrank a little at the word, and that a flush of colour went over his face.

'I will,' he said simply; 'and it was not the _kuttengeier_ for which I desired to be allowed to revisit Hohenszalras.'

'Well, if the monks starve you or weary you, you can remember that we are here, and you must not give their organ quite all the music that you bear so wonderfully in your mind and hands.'

'I will play to you all day, if you will only allow me.'

'Next time you come--to-morrow, if you like.'

He went away, lying listlessly in the little boat, for he was still far from strong; but life seemed to him very sweet and serene as the evening light spread over the broad, bright water, and the water birds rose and scattered before the plunge of the oars.

Had the sovereign mistress of Hohenszalras ever said before to any other living friend----to-morrow? Yet he was too clever a man to be vain; and he did not misinterpret the calm kindness of her invitation.

He went thither again the next day, though he left them early, for he had a sensitive fear of wearying with his presence ladies to whom he owed so much.

But the Princess urged his speedy return, and the châtelaine of Szaravola said once more, with that grave smile which was rather in the eyes than on the lips, 'We shall always be happy to see you when you are inclined to cross the lake.'

He was a great adept at painting, and he made several broad, bold sketches of the landscapes visible from the lake; he was famous for many a drawing _brossé dans le vrai_, which hung at his favourite club the Mirliton; he could paint, more finely and delicately also, on ivory, on satin, on leather. He sent for some fans and screens from Vienna, and did in _gouache_ upon them exquisite birds, foliage, flowers, legends of saints, which were beautiful enough to be not unworthy a place in those rooms of the burg where the Penicauds, the Fragonards, the Pettitôts, were represented by much of their most perfect work.

He passed his mornings in labour of this sort; at noonday or in the afternoon he rowed across to Hohenszalras, and loitered for an hour or two in the gardens or the library. Little by little they became so accustomed to his coming that it would have seemed strange if more than a day had gone by without the little striped blue boat gliding from the Holy Isle to the castle stairs. He never stayed very long; not so long as the Princess desired.

'Never in my life have I spent weeks so harmlessly!' he said once with a smile to the doctor; then he gave a quick sigh and turned away, for he thought to himself in a sudden repentance that these innocent and blameless days were perhaps but the prelude to one of the greatest sins of a not sinless life.

He came to be looked for quite naturally at the noonday breakfast in the pretty Saxe chamber. He would spend hours playing on the chapel organ, or on the piano in the octagon room which Liszt had chosen. The grand and dreamy music rolled out over the green lake towards the green hills, and Wanda would look often at the marble figure of her brother on his tomb, lying like the statue of the young Gaston de Foix, and think to herself, 'If only Bela were listening, too!'

Sometimes she was startled when she remembered into what continual intimacy she had admitted a man of whom she had no real knowledge.

The Princess, indeed, had said to her, 'I did ask Kaulnitz: Kaulnitz knows him quite well;' but that was hardly enough to satisfy a woman as reserved in her friendships, and as habituated to the observance of a severe etiquette, as was the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. Every day almost she said to herself that she would not see him when he came, or, if she saw him, would show him, by greater chilliness of manner, that it was time he quitted the island. But when he did come, if he did not see her he went to the chapel and played a mass, a requiem, an anthem, a sonata; and Beethoven, Palestrina, Schumann, Wagner, Berlioz, surely allured her from her solitude, and she would come on to the terrace and listen to the waves of melody rolling out through the cool sunless air, through the open door of the place where her beloved dead rested. Then, as a matter of course, he stayed, and after the noonday meal sometimes he rode with her in the forests, or drove the Princess in her pony chair, or received permission to bear his châtelaine company in her mountain walks. They were seldom alone, but they were much together.

'It is much better for her than solitude,' thought the Princess. 'It is not likely that she will ever care anything for him: she is so cold; but if she did, there would be no great harm done. He is of old blood, and she has wealth enough to need no more. Of course any one of our great princes would be better; but, then, as she will never take any one of them----'

And the Princess, who was completely fascinated by the deferential homage to her of Sabran, and the pleasure he honestly found in her society, would do all she could, in her innocent and delicate way, to give her favourite the opportunities he desired of intercourse with the mistress of Hohenszalras. She wanted to see again the life that she had seen in other days at the Schloss; grand parties for the hunting season and the summer season, royal and noble people in the guest-chambers, great gatherings for the chase on the _rond-point_ in the woods, covers for fifty laid at the table in the banqueting hall, and besides--besides, thought the childless and loving old woman--little children with long fair curls and gay voices wakening the echoes in the Rittersäal with their sports and pastimes.

It was noble and austere, no doubt, this life led by Wanda von Szalras amidst the mountains in the Tauern, but it was lonely and monotonous to the Princess, who still loved a certain movement, gossip, and diversion as she liked to nibble a _nougat_ and sip her chocolate foaming under its thick cream. It seemed to her that even to suffer a little would be better for her niece than this unvarying solitude, this eternal calm. That she should have mourned for her brother was most natural, but this perpetual seclusion was an exaggeration of regret.

If the presence of Sabran reconciled her with the world, with life as it was, and induced her to return to the court and to those pleasures natural to her rank and to her years, it would be well done, thought the Princess; and as for him--if he carried away a broken heart it would be a great pity, but persons who like to move others as puppets cannot concern themselves with the accidental injury of one of their toys; and Mme. Ottilie was too content with her success of the moment to look much beyond it.

'The charm of being here is to me precisely what I daresay makes it tiresome to you,' the mistress of Hohenszalras said to him one day, 'I mean its isolation. One can entirely forget that beyond those mountains there is a world fussing, fuming, brewing its storms in saucers, and inventing a quantity of increased unwholesomeness, in noise and stench, which it calls a higher civilisation. No! I would never have a telegraph wire brought here from Matrey. There is nothing I ever particularly care to know about. If there were anyone I loved who was away from me it would be different. But there is no one. There are people I like, of course----

'But political events?' he suggested.

'They do not attract me. They are ignoble. They are for the most part contemptibly ill-managed, and to think that after so many thousands of years humanity has not really progressed beyond the wild beasts' method of settling disputes----'

'There is so much of the wild beast in it. With such an opinion of political life why do you counsel me to seek it?'

'You are a man. There is nothing else for a man who has talent, and who is--who is as you are, _désœuvré._ Intellectual work would be better, but you do not care for it, it seems. Since your "Mexico"----'

'The "Mexico" was no work of mine.'

'Oh yes, pardon me: I have read it. All your notes, all your addenda, show how the learning of the editor was even superior to that of the original author.'

'No; all that I could do was to simplify his immense erudition and arrange it. I never loved the work; do not accredit me with so much industry: but it was a debt that I paid, and paid easily too, for the materials lay all to my hand, if in disorder.'

'The Marquis Xavier must at least have infused his own love of archæology and science into you?'

'I can scarcely say even so much. I have a facility at acquiring knowledge, which is not a very high quality. Things come easily to me. I fear if Herr Joachim examined me he would find my science shallow.'

'You have so many talents that perhaps you are like one of your own Mexican forests; one luxuriance kills another.'

'Had I had fewer I might have been more useful in my generation,' he said, with a certain sincerity of regret.

'You would have been much less interesting,' she thought to herself, as she said aloud, 'There are the horses coming up to the steps: will you ride with me? And do not be ungrateful for your good gifts. Talent is a _Schlüsselblume_ that opens to all hidden treasures.'

'Why are you not in the Chamber?' she had said a little before to him. 'You are eloquent; you have an ancestry that binds you to do your best for France.'

'I have no convictions,' he had said, with a flush on his face. 'It is a sad thing to confess.'

'It is; but if you have nothing better to substitute for them you might be content to abide by those of your fathers.'

He had been silent.

'Besides,' she had added, 'patriotism is not an opinion, it is an instinct.'

'With good men. I am not one of them.'

'Go into public life,' she had repeated. 'Convictions will come to you in an active career, as the muscles develop in the gymnasium.'

'I am indolent,' he had demurred, 'and I have desultory habits.'

'You may break yourself of these. There must be much in which you could interest yourself. Begin with the fishing interests of the coast that belongs to you.'

'Honestly, I care for nothing except for myself. You will say it is base.'

'I am afraid it is natural.'

He but seldom spoke of his early life. When he did so it was with reluctance, as if it gave him pain. His father he had never known; of his grandfather, the Marquis Xavier, as he usually called him, he spoke with extreme and reverent tenderness, but with little reticence. The grave old man, in the stateliness and simplicity of his solitary life, had been to his youthful imagination a solemn and sacred figure.

'His was the noblest life I have ever known,' he said once, with an emotion in the accent of the words which she had never heard in his voice before, and which gave her a passing impression of a regret in him that was almost remorse.

It might be, she reflected, the remorse of a man who, in his careless youth, had been less heedful of the value of an affection and the greatness of a character which, as he grew older and wiser, he learned to appreciate when it was too late. He related willingly how the old man had trusted him to carry out into the light of the world the fruits of his life of research, and with what pleasure he had seen the instant and universal recognition of the labours of the brain and the hand that were dust. But of his own life in the West he said little; he referred his skill in riding to the wild horses of the pampas, and his botanical and scientific knowledge to the studies which the solitudes of the sierras had made him turn to as relaxation and occupation; but of himself he said little, nothing, unless the conversation so turned upon his life there that it was impossible for him to avoid those reminiscences which were evidently little agreeable to him. Perhaps she thought some youthful passion, some unwise love, had made those flowering swamps and sombre plains painful in memory to him. There might be other graves than that of the Marquis Xavier beneath the plumes of pampas grass. Perhaps, also, to a man of the world, a man of mere pleasure as he had become, that studious and lonesome youth of his already had drifted so far away that, seen in distance, it seemed dim and unreal as any dream.

'How happy you are to have so many admirable gifts!' said Wanda to him one day, when he had offered her a fan that he had painted on ivory. He had a facile skill at most of the arts, and had acquired accuracy and technique lounging through the painting-rooms of Paris. The fan was an exquisite trifle, and bore on one side her monogram and the arms of her house, and on the other mountain flowers and birds, rendered with the delicacy of a miniaturist.

'What is the use of a mere amateur?' he said, with indifference. 'When one has lived amongst artists one learns heartily to despise oneself for daring to flirt with those sacred sisters the Muses.'

'Why? And, after all, when one has such perfect talent as yours, the definition of amateur and artist seems a very arbitrary and meaningless one. If you needed to make your fame and fortune by painting faces you could do so. You do not need. Does that make the fan the less precious? The more, I think, since gold cannot buy it.'

'You are too kind to me. The world would not be as much so if I really wanted its suffrages.'

'You cannot tell that. I think you have that facility which is the first note of genius. It is true all your wonderful talents seem the more wonderful to me because I have none myself. I feel art, but I have no power over it; and as for what are called accomplishments I have none. I could, perhaps, beat you in the shooting gallery, and I will try some day if you like, and I can ride--well, like my Kaiserin--but accomplishments I have none.'

'Surely you were yesterday reading Plato in his own text?'

'I learnt Greek and Latin with my brother. You cannot call that an accomplishment. The ladies of the old time often knew the learned tongues, though they were greater at tapestry or distilling and at the ordering of their household. In a solitary place like this it is needful to know so many useful things. I can shoe my horse and harness a sleigh; I can tell every useful herb and flower in the woods; I know well what to do in frostbite or accidents; if I were lost in the hills I could make my way by the stars; I can milk a cow, and can row any boat, and I can climb with crampons; I am a mountaineer. Do not be so surprised. I do all that I have the children taught in my schools. But in a salon I am useless and stupid; the last new lady whose lord has been decorated because he sold something wholesale or cheated successfully at the Bourse would, I assure you, eclipse me easily in the talents of the drawing-room.'

Sabran looked at her and laughed outright. A compliment would have seemed ridiculous before this beautiful patrician, with her serene dignity, her instinctive grace, her unconscious hauteur, her entire possession of all those attributes which are the best heirlooms of a great nobility. To protest against her words would have been like an insult to this daughter of knights and princes, to whom half the sovereigns of modern Europe would have seemed but parvenus, the accidental mushroom growth of the decay in the contest of nations.

His laughter amused her, though it was, perhaps, the most discreet and delicate of compliments. She was not offended by it as she would have been with any spoken flattery.

'After all, do not think me modest in what I have said,' she pursued. '_Talents de société_ are but slight things at the best, and in our day need not even have either wit or culture: a good travesty at a costume-ball, a startling gown on a racecourse, a series of adventures more or less true, a trick of laughing often and laughing long--any one of these is enough for renown in your Paris. In Vienna we do more homage to tradition still; our Court life has still something of the grace of the minuet.'

'Yet even in Vienna you refuse----'

'To spend my time? Why not? The ceremonies of a Court are wearisome to me; my duties lie here; and for the mirth and pomp of society I have had no heart since the grief that you know of fell upon me.'

It was the first time that she had ever spoken of her brother's loss to him: he bowed very low in silent sympathy.

'Who would not envy his death, since it has brought such remembrance!' he said in a low tone, after some moments.

'Ah, if only we could be sure that unceasing regret consoles the dead!' she said, with an emotion, that softened and dimmed all her beauty. Then, as if ashamed or repentant of having shown her feeling for Bela to a stranger, she turned to him and said more distantly:

'Would it entertain you to see my little scholars? I will take you to the schoolhouses if you like.'

He could only eagerly accept the offer: he felt his heart beat and his eyes lighten as she spoke. He knew that such a condescension in her was a mark of friendship, a sign of familiar intimacy.

'It is but a mile or so through the woods. We will walk there,' she said, as she took her tall cane from its rack and called to Neva and Donau, where they lay on the terrace without.

He fancied that the vague mistrust of him, the vague prejudice against him of which he had been sensible in her, were passing away from her mind; but still he doubted--doubted bitterly--whether she would ever give him any other thought than that due to a passing and indifferent acquaintance. That she admired his intelligence and that she pitied his loneliness he saw; but there seemed to him that never, never, never, would he break down in his own favour that impalpable but impassable barrier due, half to her pride, half to her reserve, and absolutely to her indifference, which separated Wanda von Szalras from the rest of mankind.

If she had any weakness or foible it was the children's schools on the estates in the High Tauern and elsewhere. They had been founded on a scheme of Bela's and her own, when they had been very young, and the world to them a lovely day without end. Their too elaborate theories had been of necessity curtailed, but the schools had been established on the basis of their early dreams, and were unlike any others that existed. She had read much and deeply, and had thought out all she had read, and as she enjoyed that happy power of realising and embodying her own theories which most theorists are denied, she had founded the schools of the High Tauern in absolute opposition to all that the school-boards of her generation have decreed as desirable. And in every one of her villages she had her schools on this principle, and they throve, and the children with them. Many of these could not read a printed page, but all of them could read the shepherd's weather-glass in sky and flower; all of them knew the worm that was harmful to the crops, the beetle that was harmless in the grass; all knew a tree by a leaf, a bird by a feather, an insect by a grub.

Modern teaching makes a multitude of gabblers. She did not think it necessary for the little goatherds, and dairymaids, and foresters, and charcoal-burners, and sennerinn, and carpenters, and cobblers, to study the exact sciences or draw casts from the antique. She was of opinion, with Pope, that 'a little learning is a dangerous thing,' and that a smattering of it will easily make a man morose and discontented, whilst it takes a very deep and even lifelong devotion to it to teach a man content with his lot. Genius, she thought, is too rare a thing to make it necessary to construct village schools for it, and whenever or wherever it comes upon earth it will surely be its own master.

She did not believe in culture for little peasants who have to work for their daily bread at the plough-tail or with the reaping-hook. She knew that a mere glimpse of a Canaan of art and learning is cruelty to those who never can enter into and never even can have leisure to merely gaze on it. She thought that a vast amount of useful knowledge is consigned to oblivion whilst children are taught to waste their time in picking up the crumbs of a great indigestible loaf of artificial learning. She had her scholars taught their 'ABC,' and that was all. Those who wished to write were taught, but writing was not enforced. What they were made to learn was the name and use of every plant in their own country; the habits and ways of all animals; how to cook plain food well, and make good bread; how to brew simples from the herbs of their fields and woods, and how to discern the coming weather from the aspect of the skies, the shutting-up of certain blossoms, and the time of day from those 'poor men's watches,' the opening flowers. In all countries there is a great deal of useful household and out-of-door lore that is fast being choked out of existence under books and globes, and which, unless it passes by word of mouth from generation to generation, is quickly and irrevocably lost. All this lore she had cherished by her schoolchildren. Her boys were taught in addition any useful trade they liked--boot-making, crampon-making, horse-shoeing, wheel-making, or carpentry. This trade was made a pastime to each. The little maidens learned to sew, to cook, to spin, to card, to keep fowls and sheep and cattle in good health, and to know all poisonous plants and berries by sight.

'I think it is what is wanted,' she said. 'A little peasant child does not need to be able to talk of the corolla and the spathe, but he does want to recognise at a glance the flower that will give him healing and the berries that will give him death. His sister does not in the least require to know why a kettle boils, but she does need to know when a warm bath will be good for a sick baby or when hurtful. We want a new generation to be helpful, to have eyes, and to know the beauty of silence. I do not mind much whether my children read or not. The labourer that reads turns Socialist, because his brain cannot digest the hard mass of wonderful facts he encounters. But I believe every one of my little peasants, being wrecked like Crusoe, would prove as handy as he.'

She was fond of her scholars and proud of them, and they were never afraid of her. They knew well it was the great lady who filled all their sacks the night of Santa Claus--even those of the naughty children, because, as she said, childhood was so short that she thought it cruel to give it any disappointments.

The walk to the schoolhouse lay through the woods to the south of the castle; woods of larch and beech and walnut and the graceful Siberian pine, with deep mosses and thick fern-brakes beneath them, and ever and again a watercourse tumbling through their greenery to fall into the Szalrassee below.

'I always fancy I can hear here the echo of the great Krimler torrents,' she said to him as they passed through the trees. 'No doubt it _is_ fancy, and the sound is only from our own falls. But the peasants' tradition is, you may know, that our lake is the water of the Krimler come to us underground from the Pinzgau. Do you know our Sahara of the North? It is monotonous and barren enough, and yet with its vast solitudes of marsh and stones, its flocks of wild fowl, its reedy wastes, its countless streams, it is grand in its own way. And then in the heart of it there are the thunder and the boiling fury of Krimml! You will smile because I am an enthusiast for my country, you who have seen Orinoco and Chimborazo; but even you will own that the old Duchy of Austria, the old Archbishopric of Salzburg, the old Countship of Tirol, have some beauty and glory in them. Here is the schoolhouse. Now you shall see what I think needful for the peasant of the future. Perhaps you will condemn me as a true Austrian: that is, as a Reactionist.'

The schoolhouse was a châlet, or rather a collection of châlets, set one against another on a green pasture belted by pine woods, above which the snows of the distant Venediger were gleaming amidst the clouds. There was a loud hum of childish voices rising through the open lattice, and these did not cease as they entered the foremost house.

'Do not be surprised that they take no notice of our entrance,' she said to him. 'I have taught them not to do so unless I bid them. If they left off their tasks I could never tell how they did them; and is not the truest respect shown in obedience?'

'They are as well disciplined as soldiers,' he said with a smile, as twenty curly heads bent over desks were lifted for a moment to instantly go down again.

'Surely discipline is next to health,' added Wanda. 'If the child do not learn it early he must suffer fearfully when he reaches manhood, since all men, even princes, have to obey some time or other, and the majority of men are not princes, but are soldiers, clerks, porters, guides, labourers, tradesmen, what not; certainly something subject to law if not to a master. How many lives have been lost because a man failed to understand the meaning of immediate and unquestioning obedience! Soldiers are shot for want of it, yet children are not to be taught it!'

Whilst she spoke not a child looked up or left off his lesson: the teacher, a white-haired old man, went on with his recitation.

'Your teachers are not priests?' he said in some surprise.

'No,' she answered; 'I am a faithful daughter of the Church, as you know; but every priest is perforce a specialist, if I may be forgiven the profanity, and the teacher of children should be of perfectly open, simple and unbiassed mind; the priest's can never be that. Besides, his teaching is apart. The love and fear of God are themes too vast and too intimate to be mingled with the pains of the alphabet and the multiplication tables. There alone I agree with your French Radicals, though from a very different reason to theirs. Now in this part of the schools you see the children are learning from books. These children have wished to read, and are taught to do so; but I do not enforce though I recommend it. You think that very barbarous? Oh! reflect for a moment how much more glorious was the world, was literature itself, before printing was invented. Sometimes I think it was a book, not a fruit, that Satan gave. You smile incredulously. Well, no doubt to a Parisian it seems absurd. How should you understand what is wanted in the heart of these hills? Come and see the other houses.'

In the next which they entered there was a group of small sturdy boys, very sunburnt and rough and bright, who were seated in a row listening with rapt attention to a teacher who was talking to them of birds and their uses and ways; there were prints, of birds and birds' nests, and the teacher was making them understand why and how a bird flew.

'That is the natural history school,' she said; 'one day it is birds, another animals, another insects, that they are told about. Those are all little foresters born. They will go about their woods with eyes that see, and with tenderness for all creation.'

In the next school Herr Joachim himself, who took no notice of their entrance, was giving a simple little lecture on the useful herbs and the edible tubers, the way to know them and to turn them to profit. There were several girls listening here.

'Those girls will not poison their people at home with a false cryptogram,' said Wanda, as they passed on to another place, where a lesson on farriery and the treatment of cattle was going on, and another where a teacher was instructing a mixed group of boys and little maidens in the lore of the forests, of the grasses, of the various causes that kill a tree in its prime, of the insects that dwell in them, and of the different soils that they needed. In another chamber there was a spinning-class and a sewing-class under a kindly-faced old dame; and in yet another there were music-classes, some playing on the zither, and others singing part-songs and glees with baby voices.

'Now you have seen all I have to show you,' said Wanda. 'In these two other châlets are the workshops, where the boys learn any trade they choose, and the girls are also taught to make a shoe or a jacket. My children would not pass examinations in cities, certainly; but they are being fitted in the best way they can for their future life, which will pass either in these mountains and forests, as I hope, or in the armies of the Emperor, and the humble work-a-day ways of poor folks everywhere. If there be a Grillparzer or a Kaulbach amongst them, the education is large and simple enough to let the originality he has been born with develop itself; if, as is far more likely, they are all made of ordinary human stuff, then the teaching they receive is such as to make them contented, pious, honest, and useful working people. At least that is what I strive for; and this is certain, that the children come some of them a German mile and more with joy and willingness to their schools, and that this at least they take away with them into their future life--the sense of duty as a supreme rein over all instincts, and mercifulness towards every living thing that God has given us.'

She had spoken with unusual animation, and with an earnestness that brought warmth over her cheek and moisture into her eyes.

Sabran looked at her timidly; then as timidly he touched the tips of her fingers, and raised them to his lips.

'You are a noble woman,' he said very low; a sense of his own utter unworthiness overwhelmed him and held him mute.

She glanced at him in some surprise, vaguely tinged with displeasure.