WANDA

BY

OUIDA

'Doch!—alles was dazu mich trieb;
Gott!—war so gut, ach, war so lieb!'
Goethe

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1873

TO

'A PERFECT WOMAN, NOBLY PLANN'D'

WALPURGA, LADY PAGET

NÉE

COUNTESS VON HOHENTHAL

This book is inscribed

IN ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION

WANDA.

[PROEM.]

Doch—alles was dazu mich trieb,
Gott! war so gut! ach, war so lieb!—GOETHE.

Towards the close of a summer's day in Russia a travelling carriage was compelled to pause before a little village whilst a smith rudely mended its broken wheel. The hamlet was composed of a few very poor dwellings grouped around a large low horse-shoe shaped building, which was the manorial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and dropping to decay; its many windows were barred and shuttered; the grass grew in its courts, and flowering weeds had time to seed and root themselves on its whitewashed walls.

Around it the level ground was at this season covered with green wheat, spreading for leagues on leagues, and billowing and undulating under the wind that blew from the steppes, like the green sea which it resembled. Farther on were woods of larch and clumps of willow; and in the distance, across the great plain to the westward, rolled a vast shining river, here golden with choking sand, here dun-coloured with turbid waves, here broken with islets and swamps of reeds, where the singing swan and the pelican made their nests.

It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the Volga rolls its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was bleak and mournful, though for many leagues the green corn spread and caught the timid sunshine and the shadow of the clouds. There were a few stunted willows near the house, and a few gashed pines; a dried-up lake was glittering with crystals of salt; the domes and minarets of a little city rose above the sky line far away to the south-east; and farther yet northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains; the wall of stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All was desolate, melancholy, isolated, even though the season was early summer; but the vastness of the view, the majesty of the river, the suggestion of the faint blue summits where the Urals rose against the sky, gave solemnity and a melancholy charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous and tedious.

Prince Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff was in Russia because he was on the point of marriage with a great heiress of the southern provinces, and was travelling across from Orenburg to the Krimea, where his betrothed bride awaited him in the summer palace of her fathers. Russia, with the exception of Petersburg, was an unknown and detested place to him; his errand was distasteful, his journey tedious, his temper irritated; and when a wheel of his telegue came off in this miserable village of the Northern Volga district, he was in no mood to brook with patience such an accident. He paced to and fro restlessly as he looked round on the few and miserable cabins of a district that had been continually harried and fired through many centuries by Kossack and Tartar.

'Whose house is that?' he said to his servant, pointing to the great white building.

The servant humbly answered, 'Little father, it is thine.'

'Mine!' echoed Paul Zabaroff. He was astonished; then he laughed, as he remembered that he had large properties around the city of Kazán.

The whole soil was his own as far as his eyes could reach, till the great river formed its boundary. He did not even know his steward here; the villagers did not know him. He had been here once only, a single night, in the late autumn time, long, long before, He was a man in whose life incidents followed each other too rapidly for remembrance to have any abiding-place or regret any home in his mind. He had immense estates, north, south, east, west; his agents forwarded him the revenues of each, or as much of the revenues as they chose him to enjoy, when they themselves were satisfied with their gains.

When he was not in Paris he was in Petersburg, and he was an impassioned and very daring gamester. These great silent houses, in the heart of fir woods, in the centre of grass plains, or on the banks of lonely rivers, were all absolutely unknown to and indifferent to him. He was too admired and popular at his Court ever to have had the sentence passed upon him to retire to his estates; but had he been forced to do so he would have been as utterly an exile in any one of the houses of his fathers as if he had been consigned to Tobolsk itself.

He looked around him now, an absolute stranger in the place where he was as absolutely lord. All these square leagues he learned were his, all these miserable huts, all these poor lives; for it was in a day before the liberation of the serfs had been accomplished by that deliverer whom Russia rewarded with death. A vague remembrance came over him as he gazed around: he had been here once before. The villagers, learning that it was their master who had arrived thus unexpectedly in their midst, came timidly around and made their humble prostrations: the steward who administered the lands was absent that day in the distant town. He was entreated to go within his own deserted dwelling, but he refused: the wheel was nearly mended, and he reflected that a house abandoned for so long was probably damp and in disorder, cold and comfortless. He was impatient to be gone, and urged the smith to his best and quickest by the promise of many roubles. The moujiks, excited and frightened, hastened to him with the customary offerings of bread and salt; he touched the gifts carelessly; spoke to them with good-humoured, indifferent carelessness; and asked if they had any grievances to complain of, without listening to the answer. They had many, but they did not dare to say so, knowing that their lord would be gone in five minutes, but that the heavy hand of his steward would lie for ever upon them.

Soon the vehicle was repaired, and Paul Zabaroff ceased his restless walk to and fro the sandy road, and prepared to depart from this weary place of detention. But, from an isba that stood apart, beneath one of the banks of sand that broke the green level of the corn, the dark spare figure of an old woman came, waving bony hands upon the air, and crying with loud voice to the barine to wait.

'It is only mad Maritza,' said the people; yet they thought Maritza had some errand with their lord, for they fell back and permitted her to approach him as she cried aloud: 'Let me come! Let me come! I would give him back the jewel he left here ten years ago!'

She held a young boy by the hand, and dragged him with her as she spoke and moved. She was a dark woman, once very handsome, with white hair and an olive skin, and a certain rugged grandeur in her carriage; she was strong and of strong purpose; she made her way to Paul Zabaroff as he stood by the carriage, and she fell at his feet and touched the dust with her forehead, and forced the child beside her to make the same obeisance.

'All hail to my lord, and heaven be with him! The poor Maritza comes to give him back what he left.'

Prince Zabaroff smiled in a kindly manner, being a man often careless, but not cruel.

'Nay, good mother, keep it, whatever it be: you have earned the right. Is it a jewel, you say?'

'It is a jewel.'

'Then keep it. I had forgotten even that I was ever here.'

'Ay! the great lord had forgot.'

She rose up with the dust on her white hair, and thrust forward a young boy, and put her hands on the boy's shoulders and made him kneel.

'There is the jewel, Paul Ivanovitch. It is time the Gospodar kept it now.'

Paul Zabaroff did not understand. He looked down at the little serf kneeling in the dust.

'A handsome child. May the land have many such to serve the Tsar. Is he your grandson, good mother?'

The boy was beautiful, with long curling fair hair and a rosy mouth, and eyes like the blue heavens in a night of frost. His limbs were naked, and his chest. He had a shirt of sheepskin.

Old Maritza kept her hands on the shoulders of the kneeling child.

'He is thy son, O lord!'

'My son!'

'Ay. The lord has forgotten. The lord tarried but one night, but he bade my Sacha serve drink to him in his chamber, and on the morrow, when he left, Sacha wept. The lord has forgotten!'

Paul Zabaroff stood silent, slowly remembering. In the boy's face looking up at him, half-sullenly, half-timidly, he saw the features of his own race mingled with something much more beautiful, oriental, and superb.

Yes: he had forgotten; quite forgotten; but he remembered now.

The people stood around, remembering better than he, but thinking it no wrong in him to have forgotten, because he was their ruler and lord, and did that which seemed right to him; and when he had gone away, in Sacha's bosom there had been a thick roll of gold.

'Where is—the mother?' he said at length.

Old Maritza made answer:

'My Sacha died four summers ago. Always Sacha hoped that the lord might some day return.'

Prince Zabaroff's cheek reddened a little with pain.

'Fool! why did you not marry her?' he said with impatience. 'There were plenty of men. I would have given more dowry.'

'Sacha would not wed. What the lord had honoured she thought holy.'

'Poor soul!' muttered Paul Zabaroff; and he looked again at the boy, who bore his own face, and was as like him as an eaglet to an eagle.

'Do you understand what we say?'

The boy answered sullenly, 'I understand.' 'What is your name?'

'I am Vassia.'

'And what do you do?'

'I do nothing.'

'Are you happy?'

'What is that? I do not know.'

Prince Zabaroff was silent.

'Rise up, since you are my son,' he said at length.

The boy rose.

He was sullen, shy, tameless, timid, like a young animal from the pine woods. The old woman took her hands off his shoulders.

'I have delivered the jewel to the lord that owns it. I have done Sacha's will.'

Then she turned herself round and covered her face, and went towards her home.

The child stood, half-fierce, half-fearful, like a dog which an old master drives away, and which fears the new one.

'These jewels are as many as the sands of the sea, and as worthless,' said Paul Zabaroff with a slight smile.

Nevertheless, he resolved, since Maritza spoke truth, that the boy should be cared for and well taught, and have all that gold could get for him, and be sent away out from Russia; for in Russia he was a serf.

The boy's hair hung over his eyes, which were hungrily watching the dark lean figure of the woman as it went away through the tall corn to the white wood hut that stood alone in the fields. He dimly understood that his life was being changed for him, but how he knew not. He wanted to go home with Maritza to his nest of moss, where his bear-cubs slept with him by night and played with him at dawn.

'Farewell,' said Paul Zabaroff, and he touched his son's cheek with his hand.

'You are magnificently handsome, my poor child; indeed, who knows what you will be?—a jewel or only a toad's eye?' he said dreamily; then he sprang up behind his horses, and was borne away through the fast-falling shades of the evening, leaving behind him the boy Vassia and a little rough mound of nameless grass, which he had never seen, and which was Sacha's grave.

The four fiery horses that bore the telegue dashed away with it in the sunlight, scattering the sand in yellow clouds, and the village on the Volga plains beheld its lord never more in life. The boy stood still, and looked after it with a sombre anger on his beautiful fair Circassian face.

'You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia,' said the men to him with envy. The child could not have expressed the vague mute wrath and shame that stirred together in him, but he turned from them without a word, and ran fleet as a roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He loved his great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost passion, though it was silent and almost unconscious of itself. She never checked him, beat him, or cursed him as the other women often did their children. She did her best by him, though they dwelt in a miserable little isba, that often in winter time was covered up with the snow like a bear's hole, and in summer, the fierce brief parching summer of north-east Russia, was as hot as a scorched eye under a sun-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to him. He was loved and he was free: childhood wants nothing more; Maritza was a Persian woman. Years and years before, when she had been in her youth, she had come from the Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are alike alive with the leaping naphtha of the Ghebir worship: she had been born within the iron gates of Derbent, of Persian parentage, and she had known war and capture and violence, and had had many troubles, many privations, many miseries before she had found herself stranded in her old age, with her grandchild, in this little desolate village on the sand-bank by the Volga.

She was very poor; she had an evil reputation: nothing evil was ever really traced to her, but she had Oriental faiths and traditions and worshipped fire, or so said her enemies the black clergy of the scattered villages and their ready believers. Never did Maritza light a lamp at nightfall, but her neighbours saw in the act a devil worship.

She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor; she was hated accordingly. When her granddaughter Sacha bore a child that was the offspring of Prince Paul Zabaroff, though she cursed him, the neighbours envied her and begrudged her such an honour.

Maritza had brought up the young Vassia with little tenderness, yet with a great yearning over the boy, with his pure Persian face and his beautiful fair body, like a pearl. The uttermost she wished for him was that he should grow up a raftsman or a fisherman on the Volga water; all that she dreaded was that the Kossacks would take him and put a lance in his hand and have him slain in war, as in the old stern days of her youth her lovers had been taken by the battle-god, that devoured them one by one, and her sons after them.

She never gave a thought to the boy's parentage as of possible use to him, but she always said to herself, 'If Paul Zabaroff ever come back, then shall he know his son,' and meanwhile the boy was happy, though he had not known the meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny Volga in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts go down it, and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which took the condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a gang of such captives would go by on foot and chained; miserable exceedingly, wounded, exhausted, doomed to twelve months' foot-sore travel ere they reached the endless darkness of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual frost. He watched them; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity nor pity as he lay on the tall rough grass, and they moved by him on the dusty, flint-strewn, ill-made road towards that chain of blue hills which marked their future home and their eternal grave. For sport the boy had the bear, the wolf, the blue fox, the wild hare, in the long wintertime; in the brief summer he helped chase the pelican and the swan along the sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves. He was keen of eye and swift of foot: the men of his native village were always willing to have his company, child though he was. He was fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder still of sport; once he risked his own life to save a stork and her nest on a burning roof. When asked why he did it, he who choked the cygnet and snared the cub, he could not say: he was ashamed of his own tenderness.

He wanted no other life than this rude freedom, but one day, a month or more after Paul Zabaroff had passed through the country, there came to the door of Maritza's hut a stranger, who displayed to her eyes, which could not read, a letter with the Prince's seal and signature. He said: 'I am sent to take away the boy who is called Vassia.'

The Persian woman bowed her head as before a headsman's glaive.

'It is the will of God,' she said.

But the time came when Vassia, grown to man's estate, thought that devils rather than gods had meddled with him then.

'Send him to a great school; send him out of Russia; spare no cost; make him a gentleman,' Paul Zabaroff had said to his agents when he had seen the son of Sacha, and he had been obeyed. The little fierce half-naked boy who in frost was wrapped in wolf-fur and looked like a little wild beast, had been taken from the free, headstrong, barbaric life of the Volga plains, where he was under no law and knew no rule, and passionately loved the river and the chase, and the great silent snow-wrapt world of his birth, and was sent to a famous and severe college near Paris, to the drill, and the class, and the uniform, and the classic learning, and the tape-bound, hard, artificial routine of mechanical education. The pride, of the Oriental and the subtlety of the Slav were all he brought with him as arms in the unequal combat with an unsympathetic crowd.

For a year's time he was insulted, tormented, ridiculed; in another twelve months he was let alone; in a third year he was admired and feared. All the while his heart was bursting within him with the agony of home-sickness and revolt; but he gave no sign of either. Only at nights, when the others of his chamber were all sleeping, he would slip out of bed and stare up at the stars, which did not look the same as he had known, and think of Maritza and of the bear-cubs, and of the Volga's waters bearing the wild white swans upon their breast; and then he would sob his very soul out in silence.

He had been entered upon the books of the college under the name of Vassia Kazán; Kazán having been the place at which he had been baptised, the golden-domed, many-towered, half Asiatic city which was seen afar off from the little square window in Maritza's hut. High influence and much gold had persuaded the principal of a great college—the Lycée Clovis, situated between Paris and Versailles—not to inquire too closely into the parentage of this beautiful little savage from the far north. Russia still remains dim, distant, and mysterious to the western mind; among his tutors and comrades it was taken for granted that he was some young barbarian noble, and the child's own lips were shut as close as if the ice of his own land had frozen them.

Eight years later, on another day when wheat was ripe and willows waved in summer sunshine, a youth lay asleep with his head on an open Lucretius in the deserted playground of a French college. The place of recreation was a dusty gravelled square; there were high stone walls all round it, and a few poplars stood in it white with dust. It was August, and all the other scholars were away; he alone had been forgotten; he was used to being forgotten. He was not dull or sorrowful, as other lads are when left in vacation time alone. He had many arts and pastimes, and he was a scholar by choice, if a capricious one, and he had a quick and facile tact which taught him how to have his own way always; and on many a summer night, when his teachers believed him safe sleeping, he was out of college, and away dancing and singing and laughing at students' halls, and in the haunts of artists, and at the little theatre beyond the barrier, and he had never been found out, and would have cared but little if he had been. And he slept now with his fair forehead leaning on Lucretius, and a drowsy, heavy heat around him, filled with the hum of flies and gnats. He did not dream of the heat and the insects; he did not even dream of the saucy beauty at the barrier ball the night before, who had kicked cherries out of his mouth with her blue-shod feet, and kissed him on his curls. He dreamt of a little, low, dark hut; of an old woman that knelt before a brazen image; of slumbering bear-cubs in a nest of hay; of a winter landscape, white and shining, that stretched away in an unbroken level of snow to the sea that half the year was ice. He dreamed of these, and, dreaming, sighed and woke. He thought he stood on the frozen sea, and the ice broke, and the waters swallowed him.

It was nothing; only the voice of his tutor calling him. He was summoned to the Principal of the Lycée: a rare honour. He rose, a slender, tall, beautiful youth, in the dark close-fitting costume of the institute. He shook the dust off his uniform and his curls, shut his book, and went within the large white prison-like building which had been his home since he had left the lowly isba among the sandhills and the blowing corn by Volga.

The Principal was sitting in one of his private chambers, a grim, dark, book-lined chamber; he held an open letter in his hand, which he had read and re-read. He was a clever man, and unscrupulous and purchasable; but he was not without feeling, and he was disquieted, for he had a painful office to fulfil.

When the youth obeyed his summons he looked up and shaded his eyes with his hand. He hesitated, looking curiously at the young man's attitude, which had an easy grace in it, and some hauteur visible under a semblance of respect.

The Principal took up the open letter: 'I regret, I grieve, to tell you,' he said slowly, 'your patron and friend, the Prince Zabaroff, has died suddenly!'

The face of Vassia Kazán grew very pale, but very cold. He said nothing.

'He died quite suddenly,' continued the director of the college; 'a blood-vessel broke in the brain, after great fatigue in hunting; he was upon one of his estates in White Russia.'

The son of Paul Zabaroff was still silent. His master wished that he would show some emotion.

'It was he who placed you here—was at all costs for your education. I suppose you are aware of that?' he continued, with some embarrassment.

Vassia Kazán bowed and still said nothing. He might have been made of ice or of marble for any sign that he gave. He might only have heard that an unknown man had died in the street.

'You were placed here by him—at least, by his agents; you were the son of a dead friend, they said. I did not inquire closer—payments were always made in advance.'

He passed his hand a little confusedly over his eyes, for he felt a little shame; his college was of high repute, and the agents of Prince Zabaroff had placed sums in his hands, to induce him to deviate from his rules, larger than he would have cared to confess.

The boy was silent.

'If he would only speak!' thought his master. 'He must know—he must know.'

But the son of the dead Zabaroff did not speak.

'I am sorry to say,' resumed his master, still with hesitation, 'I am very sorry to say that the death of the Prince being thus sudden and thus unforeseen, his agents write me that there are no instructions, no arrangement, no testament, in short—you will understand what I mean; you will understand that, in point of fact, there is nothing for you, there is no one to pay anything any longer.'

He paused abruptly; the fair face of the boy grew a shade paler, that was all. He bore the shock without giving any sign.

'Is he made of ice and steel?' thought the old man, who had been proud of him as his most brilliant pupil.

'It pains me to give you such terrible intelligence,' he muttered; 'but it is my duty not to conceal it an hour. You are quite—penniless. It is very sad.'

The boy smiled slightly; it was not a smile for so young a face.

'He has given me learning; he need not have done that,' he said carelessly. The words sounded grateful, but it was not gratitude that glanced from his eyes.

'I believe I am a serf in Russia?' he added, after a short silence.

'I do not know at all,' muttered the Principal, who felt ill at ease and ashamed of himself for having taken for eight years the gold of Prince Paul.

'I cannot tell—lawyers would tell you—I am not sure at all; indeed, I know nothing of your history; but you are young and friendless. You are a brilliant scholar, but you are not fit for work. What will you do, my poor lad?'

The boy did not respond to the kindness that was in the tone, and he resented the pity there was in it.

'That will be my affair alone,' he said, still carelessly and very haughtily.

'All is paid up to the New Year,' said his master, feeling restless and dissatisfied. 'There is no haste—I would not turn you from my roof. You are a brilliant classic—you might be a teacher here, perhaps?'

The youth smiled; then he said coldly:

'You are very good. I had better go away at once. I should wish to be away before the others return.'

'But where will you go?' said the old man, staring at him with a dull and troubled surprise.

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

'The world is large—at least it looks so when one has not been over it. Can you tell me who inherits from Prince Paul Zabaroff?'

'His eldest son by his marriage with a Princess Kourouassine. If he had only left some will, some sort of command or direction—perhaps if I wrote to the Princess, and told her the facts, she—'

'Pray do not do that,' said the boy coldly. 'I thank you for all I have learned here, and I will leave your house to-night. Farewell to you, sir.'

The boy's eyes were dry and calm; the old man's were wet and dim. He rose hurriedly, and laid aside his stern habit of authority for a moment, as he put his hand on the lad's shoulder.

'Vassia, do not leave us like that. I do not like to see you so cold, so quiet, so unnaturally indifferent. You are left friendless and nameless—and after all he was your father.'

The boy drew himself away gently, and shrugged his shoulders once more with his slight gesture of contempt.

'He never called me his son. I wish he had left me by the Volga with the bear-cubs: that is all. Adieu, sir.'

'But what do you mean to do?'

'I will do what offers.'

'But few things offer when one is friendless and you have many faults, Vassia, though you have many talents. I fear for your future.'

'Adieu, sir.'

The boy bowed low, with composure and grace, and left the room. The old man sat in the shadow by his desk, and blamed himself, and blamed the dead. The young collegian went out from his presence with a firm step and a careless carriage, and ascended the staircase of the college to his dormitory. The large long room, with its whitewashed walls, its barred casements, its rows of camp bedsteads, looked like a barrack-room deserted by the soldiers. The aspen and poplar leaves were quivering outside the grated windows; the rays of the bright August sun streamed through and shone on the floor. The boy sat down on his bed. It was at the top of the row of beds, next one of the casements. The sun-rays touched his head; he was all alone. The clamour, the disputes, the mirth, the wrong-doing with which he and his comrades had consoled themselves for the stern discipline of the day, were all things of the past, and he would know them no more. In a way he had been happy here, being lord and king of the rebellious band that had filled this chamber, and knowing so little of his own fate or of his own future that any greatness or glory might be possible to him.

Three years before he had been summoned to a château on the north coast of France in the full summer season. It had entered into the capricious fancy of Prince Zabaroff that he should like to see what the wild young wolf-cub of the Volga plains had become. He had found in him a youth so handsome, so graceful, so accomplished, that a certain fibre of paternal pride had been touched in him; whilst the coldness, the silence, and the disdainfulness of the boy's temper had commanded his respect. No word of their relationship had passed between them, but by the guests assembled there it had been assumed that the young Vassia Kazán was near of kin to their host, whose lawfully-begotten sons and daughters were far away in one of his summer palaces of the Krimea.

The boy was beautiful, keen-witted, precocious in knowledge and tact; the society assembled there, which was dissolute enough, dazzled and indulged him. The days had gone by like a tale of magic. There had been always in him the bitter, mortified, rebellious hatred of his own position; but this he had not shown, and no one had suspected it. These three summer months of unbridled luxury and indulgence had made an indelible impression on him. He had felt that life was not worth the living unless it could be passed in the same manner. He had known that away there in Russia there were young Zabaroff princes, his brethren, who would not have owned him; but the remembrance of them had not dwelt on him. He had not known definitely what to expect of the future. Though he was still there only Vassia Kazán, yet he had been treated as though he were a son of the house. When the party had broken up he had been sent back to his college with many gifts and a thousand francs in gold. When he reached Paris he had given the presents to a dancing girl and the money to an old professor of classics who had lost his sight. Not a word had been said as to his future. Measuring both by the indulgences and liberalities that were conceded to him, he had always dreamed of it vaguely but gorgeously, as sure to bring recognition and reverence, pomp and power, to him from the world. He had vaguely built up ambitious hopes. He had been sensible of no ordinary intelligence, of no common powers; and it had seemed legitimate to suppose that so liberal and princely an education meant that some golden gates would open to him at manhood: why should they rear him so if they intended to leave him in obscurity?

This day, as he had sat in the large white courtyard, shadowed by the Parisian poplar trees, he had remembered that he was within a few weeks of the completion of his eighteenth year, and he had wondered what they meant to do with him. He had heard nothing from Prince Zabaroff since those brilliant, vivid, tumultuous months which had left on him a confused sense of dazzling though vague expectation. He had hoped every summer to hear something, but each summer had passed in silence; and now he was told that Paul Zabaroff was dead.

He had been happy, being dowered with facile talents, quick wit, and the great art of being able to charm others without effort to himself. He had been seldom obedient, often guilty, yet always successful. The place had been no prison to him; he had passed careless days and he had dreamed grand dreams there; and now—

He sat on the little iron bed, and knew that in a few nights to come he might have to make his bed with beggars under bridge arches and in the dens of thieves.

Tears gathered in his eyes, and fell slowly one by one. A sort of convulsion passed over his face. He gripped his throat with his hand, to stifle a sob that rose there.

The intense stillness of the chamber was not broken even by the buzzing of a gnat.

He sat quite motionless, and his thoughts went back to the summer day in the cornfields by the Volga; he saw the scene in all its little details: the impatient good-humour of the great lord, the awe of the listening peasants, the blowing wheat, the wooden cross, the stamping horses, the cringing servants; he heard the voice of his father saying, 'Will you be a jewel or a toad's eye?'

'Why could he not leave me there?' he thought; 'I should have known nothing; I should have been a hunter; I should have done no harm on the ice and the snow there, with old Maritza.'

He thought of his grandmother, of the little hut, of the nest of skins, of the young bears at play, of the glittering plains in winter, of the low red sun, of the black lonely woods, of the grey icy river, of the bright virgin snow—thought, with a great longing like that of thirst. Why had they not let him be? Why had they not left him ignorant and harmless in the clear, keen, solitary winter world?

Instead of that they had flung him into hell, and now left him in it, alone.

There was a far-off murmur on the sultry summer air, and a far-off gleam of metal beyond the leaves of the poplar trees; it was the murmur of the streets, and the glisten of the roofs of Paris.

About his neck there hung a little silver image of St. Paul. His mother had hung it there at birth, and Maritza had prayed him never to disturb it. Now he took it off, he spat on it, he trod on it, he threw it out to fall into the dust.

He did this insult to the sacred thing coldly, without passion. His tears were no more on his cheeks, nor the sobs in his throat.

He changed his clothes quickly, put together a few necessaries, leaving behind nearly all that he possessed, because he hated everything that the dead man's money had bought; and then, without noise and without haste, looking back once down the long empty chamber, he went through the house by back ways that he knew and had used in hours of forbidden liberty, and opening the gate of the courtyard, went out into the long dreary highway, white with dust, that stretched before him and led to Paris.

He had made friends, for he was a beautiful bold boy, gay of wit, agile, and strong, and of many talents; but these friends were artists little known in the world, soldiers who liked pleasure, young dramatists without theatres, pretty frail women who had taught him to eat the sweet and bitter apple that is always held out in the hand of Eve. These and their like were all butterfly friends of a summer noon or night; he knew that very well, for he had a premature and unerring knowledge of the value of human words. They would be of no use in such a strait as his; and the colour flushed back for one instant into his pale cheeks, as he thought that he would die in a hospital before he was twenty rather than ask their aid.

As the grey dust, the hot wind, the nauseous smell of streets in summer smote upon him, leaving the poplar-shadowed court of his old school, he felt once more the same strange yearning of home-sickness for the winter world of his birth, for the steel-grey waters, the darkened skies, the forests of fir, the howl of the wolves on the wind, the joys of the fresh fierce cold, the feel of the ice in the air, the smell of the pines and the river. The bonds of birth are strong.

'If Maritza were not dead I would go back,' he thought. But Maritza had been long dead, laid away under the snow by her daughter's side.

The boy went to Paris.

Would it be any fault of his what he became?

He told himself, No.

It would lie with the dead; and with Paris.

[CHAPTER I.]

In the heart of the Hohe Tauern, province of lakes and streams, there lies one lake called the Szalrassee: known to the pilgrim, to the fisher, to the hunter, but to the traveller little, for it is shut away from the hum and stir of man by the amphitheatre of its own hills and forests. To the south-east of it lies the Iselthal, and to the north-west the Wilde Gerlos; due east is the great Glöckner group, and due west the Venediger. Farther away are the Alps of Zillerthal, and on the opposite horizon the mountains of Karinthia.

Here, where the foaming rivers thunder through their rocky channels, and the ice bastions of a thousand glaciers glow in the sunrise and bar the sight of sunset; here, where a thousand torrents bathe in silver the hillsides, and the deep moan of subterranean waters sounds for ever through the silence of the gorges, dark with the serried pines; here, in the green and cloudy Austrian land, the merry trout have many a joyous home, but none is fairer or more beloved by them than this lovely lake of Hohenszalras; so green that it might have been made of emeralds dissolved in sunbeams, so deep that at its centre no soundings can be taken, so lonely that of the few wanderers who pass from S. Johann im Wald or from Lienz to Matrey, even of those few scarce one in a summer will know that a lake lies there, though they see from afar off its great castle standing, many-turreted and pinnacled, with its frowning keep, backed by the vast black forests, clothing slopes whose summits hide themselves in cloud, whilst through the cold clear air the golden vulture and the throated eagle wing their way.

The lake lies like a crystal bedded in rock, lovely and lonely as the little Gosausee when the skies are fair; perilous and terrible as the great Königs-See in storm, when the north wind is racing in from the Bœhmervald and the Polish steppes, and the rain-mists are dark and dense, and the storks leave their home on the chapel roof because the winter draws nigh. It is fed by snow and ice descending from a hundred hills, and by underground streams and headlong-descending avalanches, and in its turn feeds many a mountain waterfall, many a mountain tarn, many a woodland brook, and many a village fountain. The great white summits tower above it, and the dense still woods enshroud it; there are a pier and harbour at either end, but these are only used by the village people, and once a year by pilgrims who come to the Sacred Island in its midst; pilgrims who flock thither from north, south, east, and west, for the chapel of the Szalrassee is as renowned and blessed as the silver shrine of holy Mariazell itself.

On the right bank of its green glancing water, looking towards the ice-peaks of the Glöckner on the east, and on the south towards the Kitchbull mountains and the limestone Alps, a promontory juts out into the lake and soars many hundred feet above it. It is of hard granite rock. Down one of its sides courses a torrent, the other side is clothed with wood; on the summit is the immense building that is called the Hohenszalrasburg, a mass of towers and spires and high metal roofs and frowning battlements, with a huge square fortress at one end of them: it is the old castle of the Counts of Szalras, and the huge donjon keep of it has been there twelve centuries, and in all these centuries no man has ever seen its flag furled or its portcullis drawn up for a conqueror's entry.

The greater part of the Schloss now existing is the work of Meister Wenzel of Klosterneuburg, begun in 1350, but the date of the keep and of the foundations generally are much earlier, and the prisons and clock tower are Romanesque. Majestic, magnificent, and sombre, though not gloomy, by reason of its rude decoration and the brilliant colours of its variegated roofs, it is scarcely changed since its lords dwelt there in the fourteenth century, when their great banner, black vultures on a ground of gold and red, floated then high up amongst the clouds, even as it now shakes its heavy folds out on the strong wind that blew so keenly from the Prussian and the Polish plains due north.

It is a fortress that has wedded a palace; it is majestic, powerful, imposing, splendid, like the great race, of which it so long has been the stronghold and the birthplace. But it is as lonely in the quiet heart of the everlasting hills as any falcon's or heron's nest hung in the oak branches.

And this loneliness seemed its sweetest charm in the eyes of its châtelaine and mistress, the Countess Wanda von Szalras, as she leaned one evening over the balustrade of her terrace, watching for the after-glow to warm the snows of the Glöckner. She held in her hand an open letter from her Kaiserin, and the letter in its conclusion said: 'You have sorrowed and tarried in seclusion long enough—too long; longer than he would have wished you to do. Come back to us and to the world.'

And Wanda von Szalras thought to herself: 'What can the world give me? What I love is Hohenszalras on earth, and Bela in heaven.'

What could the world give her indeed? The world cannot give back the dead. She wanted nothing of the world. She was rich in all that it can ever give.

In the time of Ferdinand the Second those who were then Counts of Szalras had stitched the cloth cross on their sleeves and gone with the Emperor to the Third Crusade. In gratitude for their escape, father and son, from the perils of Palestine and the dangers of the high seas and of the treacherous Danube water, from Moslem steel, and fever of Jaffa, and chains of swarming Barbary corsairs, they, returning at last in safety to their eyrie above the Szalrassee, had raised a chapel on the island in the lake, and made it dedicate to the Holy Cross, a Szalras of the following generation, belonging to the Dominican community, and being a man of such saintly fervour and purity that he was canonised by Innocent, had dwelt on the Holy Isle, and given to it the benediction and the tradition of his sanctity and good works. As centuries went on the holy fame of the shrine where the Crusader had placed a branch from a thorn-tree of Nazareth grew, and gained in legend and in miracle, and became as adored an object, of pilgrimage as the Holy Phial of Heiligenblut. All the Hohe Tauern, and throngs even from Karinthia on the one side and Tirol on the other, came thither on the day of Ascension.

The old faith still lives, very simple, warm, and earnest, in the heart of Austria, and with that day-dawn in midsummer thousands of peasant-folks flock from mountain villages and forest chalets and little remote secluded towns, to speed over the green lake with flaming crucifix and floating banner, and haunted anthem echoed from hill to hill. One of those days of pilgrimage had made her mistress of Hohenszalras.

It was a martial and mighty race this which in the heart of the green Tauern had made of fealty to God and the Emperor a religion for itself and all its dependants. The Counts of Szalras had always been proud, stern, and noble men: though their records were often stained with fierce crimes, there was never in them any single soil of baseness, treachery, or fear. They had been fierce and reckless in the wild days when they were for ever at war with the Counts of Tirol and the warlike Archbishops of Salzburg. Then with the Renaissance they had become no less powerful, but more lettered, more courtly, and more splendid, and had given alike friendship and service to the Habsburg. Now, of all these princely and most powerful people there was but one descendant, but one representative; and that one was a woman.

Solferino had seen Count Gela fall charging at the head of his own regiment of horse; Magenta had seen Count Victor cut in two by a cannon-shot as he rode with the dragoons of Swartzenberg; and but a few years later the youngest, Count Bela, had been drowned by his own bright lake.

Their father had died of grief for his eldest son; their mother had been lost to them in infancy; Bela and Wanda had grown up together, loving each other as only two lonely children can. She had been his elder by a few years, and he younger than his age by reason of his innocent simplicity of nature and his delicacy of body. They had always thought to make a priest of him, and when that peaceful future was denied him on his becoming the sole heir, it was the cause of bitter though mute sorrow to the boy who was indeed so like a young saint in church legends that the people called him tenderly der Heilige Graf. He had never quitted Hohenszalras, and he knew every peasant around, every blossom that blew, every mountain path, every forest beast and bird, and every tale of human sorrow in his principality. When he became lord of all after his brother's death he was saddened and oppressed by the sense of his own overwhelming obligations. 'I am but the steward of God,' he would say, with a tender smile, to the poor who blessed him.

One Ascension Day the lake was, as usual, crowded with the boats of pilgrims; the morning was fair and cloudless, but, after noontide, wind arose, the skies became overcast, and one of the sudden storms of the country burst over the green waters. The little lord of Hohenszalras was the first to see the danger to the clumsy heavy boats crowded with country people, and with his household rowed out to their aid. The storm had come so suddenly and with such violence that it smote, in the very middle of the lake, some score of these boats laden with the pilgrims of the Pinzgau and the Innthal, women chiefly; their screams pierced through the noise of the roaring winds, and their terror added fresh peril to the dangers of the lake, which changed in a few moments to a seething whirlpool, and flung them to and fro like coots' nests in a flood. The young Bela with his servants saved many, crossing and recrossing the furious space of wind-lashed, leaping, foaming water; but on the fourth voyage back the young Count's boat, over-burdened with trembling peasants, whose fright made them blind and restive, dipped heavily on one side, filled, and sank. Bela could swim well, and did swim, even to the very foot of his own castle rock, where a hundred hands were outstretched to save him; but, hearing a drowning woman's moan, he turned and tried to reach her. A fresh surge of the hissing water, a fresh gust of the bitter north wind, tossed him back into a yawning gulf of blackness, and drove him headlong, and with no more resistance in him than if he had been a broken bough, upon the granite wall of his own rocks. He was caught and rescued almost on the instant by his own men, but his head had struck upon the stone, and he was senseless. He breathed a few hours, but he never spoke or opened his eyes or gave any sign of conscious life, and before the night had far advanced his innocent body was tenantless and cold, and his sweet spirit lived only in men's memories. His sister, who was absent at that time at the court of her Empress, became by his death the mistress of Hohenszalras and the last of her line.

When the tidings of his heroic end reached her at the imperial hunting-place of Gödöllö all the world died for her; that splendid pageant of a world, whose fairest and richest favours had been always showered on the daughter of the mighty House of Szalras. She withdrew herself from her friends, from her lovers, from her mistress, and mourned for him with a grief that time could do little to assuage, nothing to efface. She was then twenty years of age.

She was thinking of that death now, four years later, as she stood on the terrace which overhung the cruel rocks that had killed him.

His loss was to her a sorrow that could never wholly pass away.

Her other brothers had been dear to her, but only as brilliant young soldiers are to a little child who sees them seldom. But Bela had been her companion, her playmate, her friend, her darling. From Bela she had been scarce ever parted. Every day and every night, herself, and all her thoughts and all her time, were given to such administration of her kingdom as should best be meet in the sight of God and his angels. 'I am but Bela's almoner, as he was God's steward,' she said.

She leaned against the parapet, and looked across the green and shining water, the open letter hanging in her hand.

The Countess Wanda von Szalras was a beautiful woman; but she had that supreme distinction which eclipses beauty, that subtle, indescribable grace and dignity which are never seen apart from some great lineage with long traditions of culture, courtesy, and courage. She was very tall, and her movements had a great repose and harmony in them; her figure, richness and symmetry. Her eyes were of a deep brown hue, like the velvety brown of a stag's throat; they were large, calm, proud, and meditative. Her mouth was very beautiful; her hair was light and golden; her skin exceedingly fair. She was one of the most beautiful women of her country, and one of the most courted and the most flattered; and her imperial mistress said now to her, 'Come back to us and to the world.'

Standing upon her terrace, in a gown of pale grey velvet that had no ornament save an old gold girdle with an enamelled missal hung to it, with two dogs at her side, one the black hunting-hound of St. Hubert, the other the white sleuth-hound of Russia, she looked like a châtelaine of the days of Mary of Burgundy or Elizabeth of Thuringia. It seemed as if the dark cedar boughs behind her should lift and admit to her presence some lover with her glove against the plume of his hat, and her ring set in his sword-hilt, who would bow down before her feet and not dare to touch her hand unbidden.

But no lover was there. The Countess Wanda dismissed all lovers; she was wedded to the memory of her brother, and to her own liberty and power.

She leaned on the stone parapet of her castle and gazed on the scene that her eyes had rested on since they had first seen the light, yet of which she never wearied. The intense depth of colour, that is the glory of Austria, was deepening with each moment that the sun went nearer to its setting in the dark blue of thunderclouds that brooded in the west, over the Venediger and the Zillerthal Alps. Soon the sun would pass that barrier of stone and ice, and evening would fall here in the mountains of the Iselthal, whilst it would be still day for the plains of the Ober Pinzgau and Salzkammergut. But as yet the radiance was here; and the dark oak woods and birch woods, the purple pine forests, the blue lake waters, and the glaciers of the Glöckner range, had all that grandeur which makes a sunset in these highlands at once so splendid and so peaceful. There is an infinite sense of peace in those cool, vast, unworn mountain solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping like spectral armies over the level lands below, and the sun-rays slanting heavenward, like the spears of an angelic host. There is such abundance of rushing water, of deep grass, of endless shade, of forest trees, of heather and pine, of torrent and tarn; and beyond these are the great peaks that loom through breaking clouds, and the clear cold air, in which the vulture wheels and the heron sails; and the shadows are so deep, and the stillness is so sweet, and the earth seems so green, and fresh, and silent, and strong. Nowhere else can one rest so well; nowhere else is there so fit a refuge for all the faiths and fancies that can find a home no longer in the harsh and hurrying world: there is room for them all in the Austrian forests, from the Erl-King to Ariel and Oberon.

The Countess Wanda leaned against the balustrade of the terrace and watched that banquet of colour on land and cloud and water; watched till the sun sank out of sight behind the Venediger snows, and the domes of the Glöckner, and all the lesser peaks opposite were changing from the warmth, as of a summer rose, to a pure transparent grey, that seemed here and there to be pierced as with fire.

'How often do we thank God for the mountains?' she thought; 'yet we ought every night that we pray.'

Then she sighed as her eyes sank from the hill-tops to the lake water, dark as iron, glittering as steel, now that the radiance of the sun had passed off it. She remembered Bela.

How could she ever forget him, with that murderous water shining for ever at her feet?

The world called her undiminished tenderness for her dead brother a morbid grief, but then to the world at large any fidelity seems so strange and stupid a waste of years: it does not understand that tout casse, tout lasse, tout passe, was not written for strong natures.

'How could I ever forget him, so long as that water glides there?' she thought, as her eyes rested on the emerald and sparkling lake.

'Yet her Majesty is so right! So right and so wise!' said a familiar voice at her side.

And there came up to her the loveliest little lady in all the empire; an old lady, but so delicate, so charming, so pretty, so fragile, that she seemed lovelier than all the young ones; a very fairy godmother, covered up in lace and fur, and leaning on a gold-headed cane, and wearing red shoes with high gilt heels, and smiling with serene blue eyes, as though she had just stepped down out of a pictured copy of Cinderella, and could change common pumpkins into gilded chariots, and mice into horses, at a wish.

She was the Princess Ottilie of Lilienhöhe, and had once been head of a religious house.

'Her Majesty is so right!' she said once more, with emphasis.

The Countess Wanda turned and smiled, rather with her eyes than with her lips.

'It would not become my loyal affection to say she could be wrong. But still, I know myself, and I know the world very well, and I far prefer Hohenszalras to it.'

'Hohenszalras is all very well in the summer and autumn,' said Princess Ottilie, with a glance of anything but love at the great fantastic solemn pile; 'but for a woman of your age and your possessions to pass your days talking to farmers and fishermen, poring over books, perplexing yourself as to whether it is right for you to accept wealth that comes from such a source of danger to human life as your salt mines—it is absurd, it is ludicrous. You are made for something more than a political economist; you should be in the great world.'

'I prefer my solitude and my liberty.'

'Liberty! Who or what could dictate to you in the world? You reigned there once; you would always reign there.'

'Social life is a bondage, as an empress's is. It denies one the greatest luxury of life—solitude.'

'Certainly, if you love solitude so much, you have your heart's desire here. It is an Alvernia! It is a Mount Athos! It is a snow-entombed paraclete, a hermitage, only tempered by horses!' said the Princess, with a little angry laugh.

Her grand-niece smiled.

'By many horses, certainly. Dearest aunt, what would you have? Austrians are all centaurs and amazons. I am only like my Kaiserin in that passion.'

The Princess sighed.

She had never been able to comprehend the forest life, the daring, the intrepidity, the open-air pastimes, and the delight in danger which characterised all the race of Szalras. Daughter of a North German princeling, and with some French blood in her veins also, reared under the formal etiquette of her hereditary court, and at an early age canoness of one of those great semi-religious orders which are only open to the offspring of royal or of most noble lines, her whole life had been one moulded to form and conventional habit, and only her own sweetness and sprightliness of temper had saved her from the narrowness of judgment and the chilliness of formality which such a life begets. The order of which until late years she had been superior was one for magnificence and wealth unsurpassed in Europe; but, semi-secular in its privileges, it had left her much liberty, and never wholly divorced her from the world, which in an innocent way she had always loved and enjoyed. After Count Victor's death she had resigned her office on plea of age and delicacy of health, and had come to take up her residence at Hohenszalras with her dead niece's children. She had done so because she had believed it to be her duty, and her attachment to Wanda and Bela had always been very great; but she had never learned to love the solitude of the Hohe Tauern, or ceased to regard Hohenszalras as a place of martyrdom. After the minute divisions of every hour and observances of every smallest ceremonial that she had been used to at her father's own little court of Lilienslüst, and in her own religious house, where every member of the order was a daughter of some one of the highest families of Germany or of Austria, the life at Hohenszalras, with its outdoor pastimes, its feudal habits, its vast liberties for man and beast, and its long frozen winters, when not a soul could come near it from over the passes, seemed very terrible to her. She could never understand her niece's passionate attachment to it, and she in real truth only breathed entirely at ease in those few weeks of the year which to please her niece she consented to pass away from the Hohe Tauern.

'Surely you will go to Ischl or go to Gödöllö this autumn, since Her Majesty wishes it?' she said now, with an approving glance at the imperial letter.

'Her Majesty is so kind as always to wish it,' answered the Countess Wanda. 'Let us leave time to show what it holds for us. This is scarcely summer. Yesterday was the fifteenth of May.'

'It is horribly cold,' said the Princess, drawing her silver-grey fur about her. 'It is always horribly cold here, even in midsummer. And when it does not snow it rains; you cannot deny that.'

'Come, come! we have seen the sun all day to-day. I hope we shall see it many days, for they have begun planting-out, you see—the garden will soon be gorgeous.'

'When the mist allows it to be seen, it will be, I dare say,' said Princess Ottilie, somewhat pettishly. 'It is tolerable here in the summer, though never agreeable; but the Empress is so right, it is absurd to shut yourself longer up in this gloomy place; you are bound to return to the world. You owe it to your position to be seen in it once more.'

'The world does not want me, my dear aunt; nor do I want the world.'

'That is sheer perversity——'

'How am I perverse? I know the world very well, and I know that no one is necessary to it, unless it be Herr von Bismarck.'

'I do not see what Herr von Bismarck has to do with your going back to your natural manner of life,' said the Princess, severely, who abhorred any sort of levity in regard to the mighty minister who had destroyed the Lilienhöhe princes one fine morning, as indifferently as a boy plucks down a cranberry bough. 'In summer, or even autumn, Hohenszalras is endurable, but in winter it is—hyperborean—even you must grant that. One might as well be jammed in a ship, amidst icebergs, in the midst of a frozen sea.'

'And you were born on the Elbe, oh fie! But indeed, my dearest aunt, I like the frozen sea. The white months have no terrors for me. What you call, and what calls itself, the great world is far more narrow than the Iselthal. Here one's fancies, at least, can fly high as the eagles do; in the world who can rise out of the hot-house air of the salons, and see beyond the doings of one's friends and foes?'

'Surely one's own friends and foes—people like oneself, in a word—must be as interesting as Hans, and Peter, and Katte, and Grethel, with their crampons or their milkpails,' said the Princess, with impatience. 'Besides, surely in the world there are political movement, influence, interests.'

'Oh, intrigue?—as useful as Mme. de Laballe's or Mme. de Longueville's? No! I do not believe there is even that in our time, when even diplomacy itself is fast becoming a mere automatic factor in a world that is governed by newspapers, and which has changed the tyranny of wits for the tyranny of crowds. The time is gone by when a "Coterie of Countesses" could change ministries, if they ever did do so outside the novels of Disraeli. Drawing-room cabals may still do some mischief perhaps, but they can do no good. Sometimes, indeed, I think that what is called Government everywhere is nothing but a gigantic mischief-making and place-seeking. The State is everywhere too like a mother who sweeps her doorstep diligently, and scolds the neighbours, while her child scalds itself to death unseen within.'

'In the world,' interrupted the Princess oppositely, 'you might persuade them that the sweeping of doorsteps is not sufficient——'

'I prefer to keep my own house in order. It is quite enough occupation,' said the Countess Wanda, with a smile. 'Dear aunt, here amongst my own folks I can do some real good, I have some tangible influence, I can feel that my life is not altogether spent in vain. Why should I exchange these simple and solid satisfactions, for the frivolities and the inanities of a life of pleasure which would not even please me?'

'You are very hard to please, I know,' retorted the Princess. 'But say what you will, it becomes ridiculous for a person of your age, your great position, and your personal beauty, to immure yourself eternally in what is virtually no better than confinement to a fortress!'

'A court is more of a prison to me,' said Wanda von Szalras. 'I know both lives, and I prefer this life. As for my being very hard to please, I think I was very gay and mirthful before Bela's death. Since then all the earth has grown grey for me.'

'Forgive me, my beloved!' said Princess Ottilie, with quick contrition, whilst moisture sprang into her limpid and still luminous blue eyes.

Wanda von Szalras took the old abbess's hand in her own, and kissed it.

'I understand all you wish for me, dear aunt. Believe me, I envy people when I hear them laughing light-heartedly amongst each other. I think I shall never laugh so again.'

'If you would only marry——' said the Princess, with some hesitation.

'You think marriage amusing?' she said, with a certain contempt. 'If you do, it is only because you escaped it.'

'Amusing!' said the Princess, a little scandalised. 'I could speak of no Sacrament of our Holy Church as "amusing." You rarely display such levity of language. I confess I do not comprehend you. Marriage would give you interests in life which you seem to lack sadly now. It would restore you to the world. It would be a natural step to take with such vast possessions as yours.'

'It is not likely I shall ever take it,' said Wanda von Szalras, drawing the soft fine ear of Donau through her fingers.

'I know it is not likely. I am very sorry that it is not likely. Yet what nobler creature does God's earth contain than your cousin Egon?

'Egon? No: he is a good and brave and loyal gentleman, none better; but I shall no more marry him than Donau here will wed a forest doe.'

'Yet he has loved you for ten years. But if not he there are so many others, men of high enough place to be above all suspicion of mercenary motive. No woman has been more adored than you, Wanda. Look at Hugo Landrassy.'

'Oh, pray spare me their enumeration. It is like the Catalogue of Ships!' said the Countess Wanda, with some coldness and some impatience on her face.

At that moment an old man, who was major-domo of Hohenszalras, approached and begged with deference to know whether his ladies would be pleased to dine.

The Princess signified her readiness with alacrity; Wanda von Szalras signed assent with less willingness.

'What a disagreeable obligation dining is,' she said, as she turned reluctantly from the evening scene, with the lake sleeping in dusk and shadow, while the snow summits still shone like silver and glowed with rose.

'It is very wicked to think so,' said her great-aunt. 'When a merciful Creator has appointed our appetites for our consolation and support it is only an ingrate who is not thankful lawfully to indulge them.'

'That view of them never occurred to me,' said the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. 'I think you must have stolen it, aunt, from some abbé galant or some chanoinesse as lovely as yourself in the last century. Alas! if not to care to eat be ungrateful I am a sad ingrate. Donau and Neva are more ready subscribers to your creed.'

Donau and Neva were already racing towards the castle, and Wanda von Szalras, with one backward lingering glance to the sunset, which already was fading, followed them with slow steps to the grand house of which she was mistress.

In the north alone the sky was overcast and of a tawny colour, where the Pinzgau lay, with the green Salzach water rushing through its wooded gorges, and its tracks of sand and stone desolate as any desert.

That slender space of angry yellow to the north boded ill for the night. Bitter storms rolled in west from the Bœhmerwald, or north from the Salzkammergut, many a time in the summer weather, changing it to winter as they passed, tugging at the roof-ropes of the châlets, driving the sheep into their sennerin's huts, covering with mist and rain the mountain sides, and echoing in thunder from the peaks of the Untersburg to the snows of the Ortler Spitze. It was such a sudden storm which had taken Bela's life.

'I think we shall have wild weather,' said the Princess, drawing her furs around her, as she walked down the broad length of the stone terrace.

'I think so too,' said Wanda. 'It is coming very soon; and I fear I did a cruel thing this morning.'

'What was that?'

'I sent a stranger to find his way over our hills to Matrey, as best he might. He will hardly have reached it by now, and if a storm should come——'

'A stranger?' said Princess Ottilie, whose curiosity was always alive, and had also lately no food for its hunger.

'Only a poacher; but he was a gentleman, which made his crime the worse.'

'A gentleman, and you sent him over the hills without a guide? It seems unlike the hospitality of Hohenszalras.'

'Why he would have shot a kuttengeier!'

'A kuttengeier is a horrible beast,' said the Princess, with a shudder; 'and a stranger, just for an hour or so, would be welcome.'

'Even if his name were not in the Hof-Kalender?' asked her niece, smiling.

'If he had been a pedlar, or a clockmaker, you would have sent him in to rest. For a gentlewoman, Wanda, and so proud a one as you are, you become curiously cruel to your own class.'

'I am always cruel to poachers. And to shoot a vulture in the month of May!'

[CHAPTER II.]

The dining-hall was a vast chamber, panelled and ceiled with oak. In the centre of the panels were emblazoned shields bearing the arms of the Szalras, and of the families with which they had intermarried; the long lancet windows had been painted by no less a hand than that of Jacob of Ulm; the knights' stalls which ran round the hall were the elaborate carving of Georges Syrlin; and old gorgeous banners dropped down above them, heavy with broideries and bullion.

There were upper servants in black clothes with knee breeches, and a dozen lacqueys in crimson and gold liveries, ranged about the table. In many ways there were a carelessness and ease in the household which always seemed lamentable to the Princess Ottilie, but in matters of etiquette the great household was ruled like a small court; and when sovereigns became guests there little in the order of the day needed change at Hohenszalras.

The castle was half fortress, half palace; a noble and solemn place, which had seen many centuries of warfare, of splendour, and of alternate war and joy. Strangers used to Paris gilding, to Italian sunlight, to English country-houses, found it too severe, too august, too dark, and too stern in its majesty, and were awed by it. But she who had loved it and played in it in infancy changed nothing there, but cherished it as it had come to her; and it was in all much the same as it had been in the days of Henry the Lion, from its Gothic Silber-kapelle, that was like an ivory and jewelled casket set in dusky silver, to its immense Rittersäal, with a hundred knights in full armour standing down it, as the bronze figures stand round Maximilian's empty tomb in Tirol. There are many such noble places hidden away in the deep forests and the mountain glens of Maximilian's empire.

In this hall there were some fifteen persons standing. They were the priest, the doctor, the high steward, the almoner, some dames de compagnie, and some poor ladies, widows or spinsters, who subsisted on the charities of Hohenszalras. The two noble ladies bowed to them all and said a few kind words; then passed on and seated themselves at their own table, whilst these other persons took their seats noiselessly at a longer table, behind a low screen of carved oak.

The lords of Hohenszalras had always thus adhered to the old feudal habit of dining in public, and in royal fashion, thus.

The Countess Wanda and her aunt spoke little; the one was thinking of many other things than of the food brought to her, the other was enjoying to the uttermost each bouchée, each relevée, each morsel of quail, each mouthful of wine-stewed trout, each succulent truffle, and each rich drop of crown Tokaï.

The repast was long, and to one of them extremely tedious; but these formal and prolonged ceremonials had been the habit of her house, and Wanda von Szalras carefully observed all hereditary usage and custom. When her aunt had eaten her last fruit, and she herself had broken her last biscuit between the dogs, they rose, one glad that the most tiresome, and the other regretful that the most pleasant, hour of the uneventful day was over.

With a bow of farewell to the standing household, they went by mutual consent their divers ways; the Princess to her favourite blue room and her after-dinner doze, Wanda to her own study, the chamber most essentially her own, where all were hers.

The softness and radiance of the after-glow had given place to night and rain; the mists and the clouds had rolled up from the Zillerthal Alps, and the water was pouring from the skies.

Lamps, wax candles, flambeaux, burning in sconces or upheld by statues or swinging from chains, were illumining the darkness of the great castle, but in her own study only one little light was shining, for she, a daughter of the mystical mountains and forests, loved the shadows of the night.

She seated herself here by the unshuttered casement. The full moon was rising above the Glöckner range, and the rain-clouds as yet did not obscure it, though a film of falling water veiled all the westward shore of the lake, and all the snows on the peaks and crests of the Venediger. She leaned her elbows on the cushioned seat, and looked out into the night.

'Bela, my Bela! are you content with me?' she murmured. To her Bela was as living as though he were present by her side; she lived in the constant belief of his companionship and his sight. Death was a cruel—ah, how cruel!—wall built up between him and her, forbidding them the touch of each other's hands, denying them the smile of each other's eyes; but none the less to her was he there, unseen, but ever near, hidden behind that inexorable, invisible barrier which one day would fall and let her pass and join him.

She sat idle in the embrasure of the oriel window, whilst the one lamp burned behind her. This, her favourite room, had scarcely been changed since Maria Theresa, on a visit there, had made it her bower-room. The window-panes had been painted by Selier of Landshut in 1440; the stove was one of Hirschvögel's; the wood-carvings had been done by Schuferstein; there was silver repoussé work of Kellerthaler, tapestries of Marc de Comans, enamels of Elbertus of Köln, of Jean of Limoges, of Leonard Limousin, of Penicaudius; embroidered stuffs of Isabeau Maire, damascened armour once worn by Henry the Lion, a painted spinet that had belonged to Isabella of Bavaria, and an ivory Book of Hours, once used by Carolus Magnus; and all these things, like the many other treasures of the castle, had been there for centuries; gifts from royal guests, spoils of foreign conquest, memorials of splendid embassies or offices of state held by the lords of Szalras, or marriage presents at magnificent nuptials in the old magnificent ages.

In this room she, their sole living representative, was never disturbed on any pretext. In the adjacent library (a great cedar-lined room, holding half a million volumes, with many missals and early classics, and many an editio princeps of the Renaissance), she held all her audiences, heard all petitions or complaints, audited her accounts, conversed with her tenants or her stewards, her lawyers or her peasants, and laboured earnestly to use to the best of her intelligence the power bequeathed to her.

'I am but God's and Bela's steward, as my steward is mine,' she said always to herself, and never avoided any duty or labour entailed on her, never allowed weariness or self-indulgence to enervate her. Qui facit per alium, facit per se had been early taught to her, and she never forgot it. She never did anything vicariously which concerned those dependent upon her. And she was an absolute sovereign in this her kingdom of glaciers and forests; her frozen sea as she had called it. She never avoided a duty merely because it was troublesome, and she never gave her signature without knowing why and wherefore. It is easy to be generous; to be just is more difficult and burdensome. Generous by temper, she strove earnestly to be always just as well, and her life was not without those fatigues which a very great fortune brings with it to anyone who regards it as a sacred trust.

She had wide possessions and almost incalculable wealth. She had salt mines in Galicia, she had Vosläuer vineyards in the Salzkammergut, she had vast plains of wheat, and leagues on leagues of green lands, where broods of horses bred and reared away in the steppes of Hungary. She had a palace in the Herrengasse at Vienna, another in the Residenzplatz of Salzburg; she had forests and farms in the Innthal and the Zillerthal; she had a beautiful little schloss on the green Ebensee, which had been the dower-house of the Countesses of Szalras, and she had pine-woods, quarries, vineyards, and even a whole riverain town on the Danube, with a right to take toll on the ferry there, which had been given to her forefathers as far back as the days of Mathias Carvin, a right that she herself had let drop into desuetude. 'I do not want the poor folks' copper kreutzer,' she said to her lawyers when they remonstrated. What did please her was the fact coupled with this right that even the Kaiser could not have entered her little town without his marshal thrice knocking at the gates, and receiving from the warder the permission to pass, in the words, 'The Counts of Idrac bid you come in peace.'

All these things and places made a vast source of revenue, and the property, whose title-deeds and archives lay in many a chest and coffer in the old city of Salzburg, was one of the largest in Europe. It would have given large portions and dowries to a score of sons and daughters and been none the worse. And it was all accumulating on the single head of one young and lonely woman! She was the last of her race; there were distant collateral branches, but none of them near enough to have any title to Hohenszalras. She could bequeath it where she would, and she had already willed it to her Kaiserin, in a document shut up in an iron chest in the city of Salzburg. She thought the Crown would be a surer and juster guardian of her place and people than any one person, whose caprices she could not foretell, whose extravagance or whose injustice she could not foresee. Sometimes, even to the spiritual mind of the Princess Ottilie, the persistent refusal of her niece to think of any marriage seemed almost a crime against mankind.

What did the Crown want with it?

The Princess was a woman of absolutely; loyal sentiment towards all ancient sovereignties. She believed in Divine right, and was as strong a royalist as it is possible for anyone to be whose fathers have been devoured like an anchovy by M. de Bismarck, and who has the sympathy of fellow feeling with Frohsdorf and Gmünden. But even her devotion to the rights of monarchs failed to induce her to see why the Habsburg should inherit Hohenszalras. The Crown is a noble heir, but it is one which leaves the heart cold. Who would ever care for her people, and her forests, and her animals as she had done? Even from her beloved Kaiserin she could not hope for that. 'If I had married?' she thought, the words of the Princess Ottilie coming back upon her memory.

Perhaps, for the sake of her people and her lands, it might have been better.

But there are women to whom the thought of physical surrender of themselves is fraught with repugnance and disgust; a sentiment so strong that only a great passion vanquishes it. She was one of these women, and passion she had never felt.

'Even for Hohenszalras I could not,' she thought, as she leaned on the embrasure cushions, and watched the moon, gradually covered with the heavy blue-black clouds. The Crown should be her heir and reign here after her, when she should be laid by the side of Bela in that beautiful dusky chapel beneath the shrines of ivory and silver, where all the dead of the House of Szalras slept. But it was an heir which left her heart cold.

She rose abruptly, left the embrasure, and began to examine the letters of the day and put down heads of replies to them, which her secretary could amplify on the morrow.

One letter her secretary could not answer for her; it was a letter which gave her pain, and which she read with an impatient sigh. It urged her return to the world as the letter of her Empress had done, and it urged with timidity, yet with passion, a love that had been loyal to her from her childhood. It was signed 'Egon Vàsàrhely.'

'It is the old story,' she thought. 'Poor Egon! If only one could have loved him, how it would have simplified everything; and I do love him, as I once loved Gela and Victor.'

But that was not the love which Egon Vàsàrhely pleaded for with the tenderness of one who had been to her as a brother from her babyhood, and the frankness of a man who knew his own rank so high and his own fortunes so great, that no mercenary motive could be attributed to him even when he sought the mistress of Hohenszalras. It was the old story: she had heard it many times from him and from others in those brilliant winters in Vienna which had preceded Bela's death. And it had always failed to touch her. Women who have never loved are harsh to love from ignorance.

At that moment a louder crash of thunder reverberated from hill to hill, and the Glöckner domes seemed to shout to the crests of the Venediger.

'I hope that stranger is housed and safe,' she thought, her mind reverting to the poacher of whom she had spoken on the terrace at sunset. His face came before her memory: a beautiful face, oriental in feature, northern in complexion, fair and cold, with blue eyes of singular brilliancy.

The forests of Hohenszalras are in themselves a principality. Under enormous trees, innumerable brooks and little torrents dash downwards to lose themselves in the green twilight of deep gorges; broad, dark, still lakes lie like cups of jade in the bosom of the woods; up above, where the Alpine firs and the pinus cembra shelter him, the bear lives and the wolf too; and higher yet, where the glacier lies upon the mountain side, the merry steinbock leaps from peak to peak, and the white-throat vulture and the golden eagle nest. The oak, the larch, the beech, the lime, cover the lower hills, higher grow the pines and firs, the lovely drooping Siberian pine foremost amidst them. In the lower wood grassy roads cross and thread the leafy twilight. A stranger had been traversing these woods that morning, where he had no right or reason to be. Forest-law was sincerely observed and meted out at Hohenszalras, but of that he was ignorant or careless.

Before him, in the clear air, a large, dark object rose and spread huge pinions to the wind and soared aloft. The trespasser lifted his rifle to his shoulder, and in another moment would have fired. But an alpenstock struck the barrel up into the air, and the shot went off harmless towards the clouds. The great bird, startled by the report, flew rapidly to the westward; the Countess Wanda said quietly to the poacher in her forest, 'You cannot carry arms here,'

He looked at her angrily, and in surprise.

'You have lost me the only eagle I have seen for years,' he said bitterly, with a flush of discomfiture and powerless rage on his fair face.

She smiled a little.

'That bird was not an eagle, sir; it was a white-throated vulture, a kuttengeier. But had it been an eagle—or a sparrow—you could not have killed it on my lands.'

Pale still with anger, he uncovered his head.

'I have not the honour to know in whose presence I stand,' he muttered sullenly. 'But I have Imperial permission to shoot wherever I choose.'

'His Majesty has no more loyal subject than myself,' she answered him. 'But his dominion does not extend over my forests. You are on the ground of Hohenszalras, and your offence——'

'I know nothing of Hohenszalras!' he interrupted, with impatience.

She blew a whistle, and her head forester with three jägers sprang up as if out of the earth, some great wolf-hounds, grinning with their fangs, waiting but a word to spring. In one second the rangers had thrown themselves on the too audacious trespasser, had pinioned him, and had taken his rifle.

Confounded, disarmed, humiliated, and stunned by the suddenness of the attack, he stood mute and very pale.

'You know Hohenszalras now!' said the mistress of it, with a smile, as she watched his seizure seated on a moss-grown boulder of granite, black Donau and white Neva by her side. He was pale with impotent fury, conscious of an indefensible and absurd position. The jäger looked at their mistress; they had slipped a cord over his wrists, and tied them behind his back; they looked to her for a sign of assent to break his rifle. She stood silent, amused with her victory and his chastisement; a little derision shining in her lustrous eyes.

'You know Hohenszalras now!' she said once more. 'Men have been shot dead for what you were doing. If you be, indeed, a friend of my Emperor's, of course you are welcome here; but——'

'What right have you to offer me this indignity,' muttered the offender, his fair features changing from white to red, and red to white, in his humiliation and discomfiture.

'Right!' echoed the mistress of the forests. 'I have the right to do anything I please with you! You seem to me to understand but little of forest laws.'

'Madame, were you not a woman, you would have had bloodshed.'

'Oh, very likely. That sometimes happens, although seldom, as all the Hohe Tauern knows how strictly these forests are preserved. My men are looking to me for permission to break your rifle. That is the law, sir.'

'Since 'Forty-eight,' said the trespasser, with what seemed to her marvellous insolence, 'all the old forest laws are null and void. It is scarcely allowable to talk of trespass.'