WANDA

BY

OUIDA

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

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. II.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1883

On her return she spoke of her royal friends, of her cousins, of society, of her fears for the peace of Europe, and her doubts as to the strength of the empire; but she did not speak of the one person of whom, beyond all others, Mdme. Ottilie was desirous to hear. When some hours had passed, and still she had never alluded to the existence of, the Princess could bear silence no longer, and casting prudence to the winds, said boldly and with impatience:

'And your late guest? Have you nothing to tell me? Surely you have seen him?'

'He called once,' she answered, 'and I heard him speak at the Chamber.'

'And was that all?' cried the Princess, disappointed.

'He speaks very well in public,' added Wanda, 'and he said many tender and grateful things of you, and sent you many messages—such grateful ones that my memory is too clumsy a tray to hold such eggshell china.'

She was angered with herself as she spoke, but the fragrance of the white lilac and the remembrance of its donor pursued her—angered with herself, too, because Hohenszalras seemed for the moment sombre, solitary, still, almost melancholy, wrapped in that winter whiteness and stillness which she had always loved so well.

The next morning she saw all her people, visited her schools and her stables, and tried to persuade herself that she was as contented as ever.

The aurist came from Paris shortly after her, and consoled the Princess by assuring her that the slight deafness she suffered from occasionally was due to cold.

'Of course!' she said, with some triumph. 'These mountains, all this water, rain whenever there is not snow, snow whenever there is not rain; it is a miracle, and the mercy of Heaven, if one saves any of one's five senses uninjured in a residence here.'

She had her satin hood trebly wadded, and pronounced the aurist a charming person. Herr Greswold in an incautious moment had said to her that deafness was one of the penalties of age and did not depend upon climate. A Paris doctor would not have earned his fee of two hundred napoleons if he had only produced so ungallant a truism. She heard a little worse after his visit, perhaps, but if so, she said that was caused by the additional wadding in her hood. He had told her to use a rose-water syringe, and Herr Greswold was forbidden her presence for a week because he averred that you might as well try to melt the glacier with a lighted pastille.

The aurist gone, life at Hohenszalras resumed its even tenor; and except for, the post, the tea-cups, and the kind of dishes served at dinner, hardly differed from what life had been there in the sixteenth century, save that there were no saucy pages playing in the court, and no destriers stamping in the stalls, and no culverins loaded on the bastions.

'It is like living between the illuminated leaves of one of the Hours,' thought the Princess, and though her conscience told her that to dwell so in a holy book like a pressed flower was the most desirable life that could be granted by Heaven to erring mortality, still she felt it was dull. A little gossip, a little movement, a little rolling of other carriage-wheels than her own, had always seemed desirable to her.

Life here was laid down on broad lines. It was stately, austere, tranquil; one day was a mirror of all the rest. The Princess fretted for some little frou-frou of the world to break its solemn silence.

When Wanda returned from her ride one forenoon she said a little abruptly to her aunt:

'I suppose you will be glad to hear you have convinced me. I have telegraphed to Ludwig to open and air the house in Vienna; we will go there for three months. It is, perhaps, time I should be seen at Court.'

'It is a very sudden decision!' said Madame Ottilie, doubting that she could hear aright.

'It is the fruit of your persuasions, dear mother mine! The only advantage in having houses in half a dozen different places is to be able to go to them without consideration. You think me obstinate, whimsical, barbaric; the Kaiserin thinks so too. I will endeavour to conquer my stubbornness. We will go to Vienna next week. You will see all your old friends, and I all my old jewels.'

The determination once made, she adhered to it. She had felt a vague annoyance at the constancy and the persistency with which regret for the lost society of Sabran recurred to her. She had attributed it to the solitude in which she lived: that solitude which is the begetter and the nurse of thought may also be the hotbed of unwise fancies. It was indeed a solitude filled with grave duties, careful labours, high desires and endeavours; but perhaps, she thought, the world for a while, even in its folly, might be healthier, might preserve her from the undue share which the memory of a stranger had in her musings.

Her people, her lands, her animals, would none of them suffer by a brief absence; and perhaps there were duties due as well to her position as to her order. She was the only representative of the great Counts of Szalras. With the whimsical ingratitude to fate common to human nature, she thought she would sooner have been obscure, unnoticed, free. Her rank began to drag on her with something like the sense of a chain. She felt that she was growing irritable, fanciful, thankless; so she ordered the huge old palace in the Herrengasse to be got ready, and sought the world as others sought the cloister.

In a week's time she was installed in Vienna, with a score of horses, two score of servants, and all the stir and pomp that attend a great establishment in the most aristocratic city of Europe, and she made her first appearance at a ball at the Residenz covered with jewels from head to foot; the wonderful old jewels that for many seasons had lain unseen in their iron coffers—opals given by Rurik, sapphires taken from Kara Mustafa, pearls worn by her people at the wedding of Mary of Burgundy, diamonds that had been old when Maria Theresa had been young.

She had three months of continual homage, of continual flattery, of what others called pleasure, and what none could have denied was splendour. Great nobles laid their heart and homage before her feet, and all the city looked after her for her beauty as she drove her horses round the Ringstrasse. It left her all very cold and unamused and indifferent.

She was impatient to be back at Hohenszalras, amidst the stillness of the woods, the sound of the waters.

'You cannot say now that I do not care for the world, because I have forgotten what it was like,' she observed to her aunt.

'I wish you cared more,' said the Princess. 'Position has its duties.'

'I never dispute that; only I do not see that being wearied by society constitutes one of them. I cannot understand why people are so afraid of solitude; the routine of the world is quite as monotonous.'

'If you only appreciated the homage that you receive——'

'Surely one's mind is something like one's conscience: if one can be not too utterly discontented with what it says one does not need the verdict of others.'

'That is only a more sublime form of vanity. Really, my love, with your extraordinary and unnecessary humility in some things, and your overweening arrogance in others, you would perplex wiser heads than the one I possess.'

'No; I am sure it is not vanity or arrogance at all; it may be pride—the sort of pride of the "Rohan je suis." But it is surely better than making one's barometer of the smiles of simpletons.'

'They are not all simpletons.'

'Oh, I know they are not; but the world in its aggregate is very stupid. All crowds are mindless, the crowd of the Haupt-Allee as well as of the Wurstel-Prater.'

The Haupt-Allee indeed interested her still less than the Wurstel-Prater, and she rejoiced when she set her face homeward and saw the chill white peaks of the Glöckner arise out of the mists. Yet she was angry with herself for the sense of something missing, something wanting, which still remained with her. The world could not fill it up, nor could all her philosophy or her pride do so either.

The spring was opening in the Tauern, slow coming, veiled in rain, and parting reluctantly with winter, but yet the spring, flinging primroses broadcast through all the woods, and filling the shores of the lakes with hepatica and gentian; the loosened snows were plunging with a hollow thunder into the ravines and the rivers, and the grass was growing green and long on the alps between the glaciers. A pale sweet sunshine was gleaming on the grand old walls of Hohenszalras, and turning to silver and gold all its innumerable casements as she returned, and Donau and Neva leaped in rapture on her.

'It is well to be at home,' she said, with a smile, to Herr Greswold, as she passed through the smiling and delighted household down the Rittersaal, which was filled with plants from the hothouses, gardenias and gloxianas, palms and ericas, azaleas and camellias glowing between the stern armoured figures of the knights and the time-darkened oak of their stalls.

'This came from Paris this morning for Her Excellency,' said Hubert, as he showed his mistress a gilded boat-shaped basket, filled with tea-roses and orchids; a small card was tied to its handle with 'Willkommen' written on it.

She coloured a little as she recognised the handwriting of the single word.

How could he have known, she wondered, that she would return home that day? And for the flowers to be so fresh, a messenger must have been sent all the way with them by express speed, and Sabran was poor.

'That is the Stanhopea tigrina,' said Herr Greswold, touching one with reverent fingers; 'they are all very rare. It is a welcome worthy of you, my lady.'

'A very extravagant one,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a certain displeasure that mingled with a softened emotion. 'Who brought it?'

'The Marquis de Sabran, by extra-poste, himself this morning,' answered Hubert—an answer she did not expect. 'But he would not wait; he would not even take a glass of tokayer, or let his horses stay for a feed of corn.'

'What knight-errantry!' said the Princess well pleased.

'What folly!' said Wanda, but she had the basket of orchids taken to her own octagon room.

It seemed as if he had divined how much of late she had thought of him. She was touched, and yet she was angered a little.

'Surely she will write to him,' thought the Princess wistfully very often: but she did not write. To a very proud woman the dawning consciousness of love is always an irritation, an offence, a failure, a weakness: the mistress of Hohenszalras could not quickly pardon herself for taking with pleasure the message of the orchids.

A little while later she received a letter from Olga Brancka. In it she wrote from Paris:

'Parsifal is doing wonders in the Chamber, that is, he is making Paris talk; his party will forbid him doing anything else. You certainly worked a miracle. I hear he never plays, never looks at an actress, never does anything wrong, and when a grand heiress was offered to him by her people refused her hand blandly but firmly. What is one to think? That he washed his soul white in the Szalrassee?'

It was the subtlest flattery of all, the only flattery to which she would have been accessible, this entire alteration in the current of a man's whole life; this change in habit, inclination, temper, and circumstance. If he had approached her its charm would have been weakened, its motive suspected; but aloof and silent as he remained, his abandonment of all old ways, his adoption of a sterner and worthier career, moved her with its marked, mute homage of herself.

When she read his discourses in the French papers she felt a glow of triumph, as if she had achieved some personal success; she felt a warmth at her heart as of something near and dear to her, which was doing well and wisely in the sight of men. His cause did not, indeed, as Olga Brancka had said, render tangible, practical, victory impossible for him, but he had the victories of eloquence, of patriotism, of high culture, of pure and noble language, and these blameless laurels seemed to her half of her own gathering.

'Will you never reward him?' the Princess ventured to say at last, overcome by her own impatience to rashness. 'Never? Not even by a word?'

'Hear mother,' said Wanda, with a smile which perplexed and baffled the Princess, 'if your hero wanted reward he would not be the leader of a lost cause. Pray do not suggest to me a doubt of his disinterestedness. You will do him very ill service.'

The Princess was mute, vaguely conscious that she had said something ill-timed or ill-advised.

Time passed on and brought beautiful weather in the month of June, which here in the High Tauern means what April does in the south. Millions of song-birds were shouting in the woods, and thousands of nests were suspended on the high branches of the forest trees, or hidden in the greenery of the undergrowth; water-birds perched and swung in the tall reeds where the brimming streams tumbled; the purple, the white, and the grey herons were all there, and the storks lately flown home from Asia or Africa were settling in bands by the more marshy grounds beside the northern shores of the Szalrassee.

One afternoon she had been riding far and fast, and on her return a telegram from Vienna had been brought to her, sent on from Lienz. Having opened it, she approached her aunt and said with an unsteady voice:

'War is declared between France and Prussia!'

'We expected it; we are ready for it,' said the Princess, with all her Teutonic pride in her eyes. 'We shall show her that we cannot be insulted with impunity.'

'It is a terrible calamity for the world,' said Wanda, and her face was very pale.

The thought which was present to her was that Sabran would be foremost amidst volunteers. She did not hear a word of all the political exultation with which Princess Ottilie continued to make her militant prophecies. She shivered as with cold in the warmth of the midsummer sunset.

'War is so hideous always,' she said, remembering what it had cost her house.

The Princess demurred.

'It is not for me to say otherwise,' she objected; 'but without war all the greater virtues would die out. Your race has been always martial. You should be the last to breathe a syllable against what has been the especial glory and distinction of your forefathers. We shall avenge Jena. You should desire it, remembering Aspern and Wagram.'

'And Sadowa?' said Wanda, bitterly.

She did not reply further; she tore up the message, which had come from her cousin Kaulnitz. She slept little that night.

In two days the Princess had a brief letter from Sabran. He said: 'War is declared. It is a blunder which will perhaps cause France the loss of her existence as a nation, if the campaign be long. All the same I shall offer myself. I am not wholly a tyro in military service. I saw bloodshed in Mexico; and I fear the country will sorely need every sword she has.'

Wanda, herself, wrote back to him:

'You will do right. When a country is invaded every living man on her soil is bound to arm.'

More than that she could not say, for many of her kindred on her grandmother's side were soldiers of Germany.

But the months which succeeded those months of the 'Terrible Year,' written in letters of fire and iron on so many human hearts, were filled with a harassing anxiety to her for the sake of one life that was in perpetual peril. War had been often cruel to her house. As a child she had suffered from the fall of those she loved in the Italian campaign of Austria. Quite recently Sadowa and Königsgrätz had made her heart bleed, beholding her relatives and friends opposed in mortal conflict, and the empire she adored humbled and prostrated. Now she became conscious of a suffering as personal and almost keener. She had at the first, now and then, a hurried line from Sabran, written from the saddle, from the ambulance, beside the bivouac fire, or in the shelter of a barn. He had offered his services, and had been given the command of a volunteer cavalry regiment, all civilians mounted on their own horses, and fighting principally in the Orléannois. His command was congenial to him; he wrote cheerfully of himself, though hopelessly of his cause. The Prussians were gaining ground every day. Occasionally, in printed correspondence from the scene of war, she saw his name mentioned by some courageous action or some brilliant skirmish. That was all.

The autumn began to deepen into winter, and complete silence covered all his life. She thought with a great remorse—if he were dead? Perhaps he was dead? Why had she been always so cold to him? She suffered intensely; all the more intensely because it was not a sorrow which she could not confess even to herself. When she ceased altogether to hear anything of or from him, she realised the hold which he had taken on her life.

These months of suspense did more to attach her to him than years of assiduous and ardent homage could have done. She, a daughter of soldiers, had always felt any man almost unmanly who had not received the baptism of fire.

Mdme. Ottilie talked of him constantly, wondered frequently if he were wounded, slain, or in prison; she never spoke his name, and dreaded to hear it.

Greswold, who perceived an anxiety in her that, he did not dare to allude to, ransacked every journal that was published in German to find some trace of Sabran's name. At the first he saw often some mention of the Cuirassiers d'Orléans, and of their intrepid Colonel Commandant: some raid, skirmish, or charge in which they had been conspicuous for reckless gallantry. But after the month of November he could find nothing. The whole regiment seemed to have been obliterated from existence.

Winter settled down on Central Austria with cold silence, with roads blocked and mountains impassable. The dumbness, the solitude around her, which she had always loved so well, now grew to her intolerable. It seemed like death.

Paris capitulated. The news reached her at the hour of a violent snowstorm; the postillion of her post-sledge bringing it had his feet frozen.

Though her cousins of Lilienhöhe were amongst those who entered the city as conquerors, the fate of Paris smote her with a heavy blow. She felt as if the cold of the outer world had chilled her very bones, her very soul. The Princess, looking at her, was afraid to rejoice.

On the following day she wrote to her cousin Hugo of Lilienhöhe, who was in Paris with the Imperial Guard. She asked him to inquire for and tell her the fate of a friend, the Marquis de Sabran.

In due time Prince Hugo answered:

'The gentleman you asked for was one of the most dangerous of our enemies. He commanded a volunteer cavalry regiment, which was almost cut to pieces by the Bavarian horse in an engagement before Orleans. Two or three alone escaped; their Colonel was severely wounded in the thigh, and had his charger shot dead under him. He was taken prisoner by the Bavarians after a desperate resistance. Whilst he lay on the ground he shot three of our men with his revolver. He was sent to a fortress, I think Ehrenbreitstein, but I will inquire more particularly. I am sorry to think that you have any French friends.

By-and-by she heard that he had been confined not at Ehrenbreitstein but at a more obscure and distant fortress on the Elbe; that his wounds had been cured, and that he would shortly be set free like other prisoners of war. In the month of March in effect she received a brief letter from his own hand, gloomy and profoundly dejected.

'Our plans were betrayed,' he wrote. 'We were surprised and surrounded just as we had hobbled our horses and lain down to rest, after being the whole day in the saddle. Bavarian cavalry, outnumbering us four to one, attacked us almost ere we could mount our worn-out beasts. My poor troopers were cut to pieces. They hunted me down when my charger dropped, and I was made a prisoner. When they could they despatched me to one of their places on the Elbe. I have been here December and January. I am well. I suppose I must be very strong; nothing kills me. They are now about to send me back to the frontier. My beautiful Paris! What a fate! But I forget, I cannot hope for your sympathy; your kinsmen are our conquerors. I know not whether the house I lived in there exists, but if you will write me a word at Romaris, you will be merciful, and show me that you do not utterly despise a lost cause and a vanquished soldier.'

She wrote to him at Romaris, and the paper she wrote on felt her tears. In conclusion she said:

'Whenever you will, come and make sure for yourself that both the Princess Ottilie and I honour courage and heroism none the less because it is companioned by misfortune.'

But he did not come.

She understood why he did not. An infinite pity for him overflowed her heart. His public career interrupted, his country ruined, his future empty, what remained to him? Sometimes she thought, with a blush on her face, though she was all alone: 'I do.' But then, if he never came to hear that?

[CHAPTER XII.]

The little hamlet of Romaris, on the coast of Finisterre, was very dull and dark and silent. A few grave peasant women knitted as they walked down the beach or sat at their doors; a few children did the same. Out on the landes some cows were driven through the heather and broom; out on the sea some fishing-boats with rough, red sails were rocking to and fro. All was melancholy, silent, poor; life was hard at Romaris for all. The weatherbeaten church looked grey and naked on a black rock; the ruins of the old manoir faced it amidst sands and surfs; the only thing of beauty was the bay, and that for the folk of Romaris had no beauty; they had seen it kill so many.

There was never any change at Romaris, unless it were a change in the weather, a marriage, a birth, or a death. Therefore the women and children who were knitting had lifted up their heads as a stranger, accompanied by their priest, had come down over the black rocks, on which the church stood, towards the narrow lane that parted the houses where they clustered together face to face on the edge of the shore.

Their priest, an old man much loved by them, came slowly towards them, conversing in low tones with the stranger, who had been young and handsome, and a welcome sight, since a traveller to Romaris always needed a sailing-boat or a rowing-boat, a guide over the moors, or a drive in an ox-waggon through the deep-cut lanes of the country.

But they had ceased to think of such things as these when the curate, with his hands extended as when he blessed them, had said in bas Breton as he stood beside them:

'My children, this is the last of the Sabrans of Romaris, come back to us from the far west that lies in the setting of the sun. Salute him, and show him that in Brittany we do not forget—nay, not in a hundred years.'

Many years had gone by since then, and of the last of the old race, Romaris had scarcely seen more than when he had been hidden from their sight on the other side of the heaving ocean. Sabran rarely came thither. There was nothing to attract a man who loved the world and who was sought by it, in the stormy sea coast, the strip of sea-lashed oak forest, that one tall tower with its gaunt walls of stone which was all that was left of what had once been the fortress of his race. Now and then they saw him, chiefly when he had heard that there was wild weather on the western coast, and at such times he would go out in their boats to distressed vessels, or steer through churning waters to reach a fishing-smack in trouble, with a wild courage and an almost fierce energy which made him for the moment one of themselves. But such times had been few, and all that Romaris really knew of the last marquis was that he was a gay gentleman away there in distant Paris.

He had been a mere name to them. Now and then he had sent fifty napoleons, or a hundred, to the old priest for such as were poor or sick amongst them. That was all. Now after the war he came hither. Paris had become hateful to him; his political career was ended, at all events for the time; the whole country groaned in anguish; the vices and follies that had accompanied his past life disgusted him in remembrance. He had been wounded and a prisoner; he had suffered betrayal at unworthy hands; Cochonette had sold him to the Prussians, in revenge of his desertion of her.

He was further removed from the Countess von Szalras than ever. In the crash with which the Second Empire had fallen and sunk out of sight for evermore, his own hopes had gone down like a ship that sinks suddenly in a dark night. All his old associations were broken, half his old friends were dead or ruined; gay châteaux that he had ever been welcome at were smoking ruins or melancholy hospitals; the past had been felled to the ground like the poor avenues of the Bois. It affected him profoundly. As far as he was capable of an impersonal sentiment he loved France, which had been for so many years his home, and which had always seemed to smile at him with indulgent kindness. Her vices, her disgrace, her feebleness, her fall, hurt him with an intense pain that was not altogether selfish, but had in it a nobler indignation, a nobler regret.

When he was released by the Prussians and sent across the frontier, he went at once to this sad sea village of Romaris, to collect as best he might the shattered fragments of his life, which seemed to him as though it had been thrown down by an earthquake. He had resigned his place as deputy when he had offered his sword to France; he had now no career, no outlet for ambition, no occupation. Many of his old friends were dead or ruined; although such moderate means as he possessed were safe, they were too slender to give him any position adequate to his rank. His old life in Paris, even if Paris arose from her tribulations, gay and glorious once more, seemed to him altogether impossible. He had lost taste for those pleasures and distractions which had before the war—or before his sojourn on the Holy Isle—seemed to him the Alpha and Omega of a man's existence. 'Que faire?' he asked himself wearily again and again. He did not even know whether his rooms in Paris had been destroyed or spared; a few thousands of francs which he had made by a successful speculation years before, and placed in foreign funds, were all he had to live on. His keen sense told him that the opportunity which might have replaced the Bourbon throne had been lost through fatal hesitation. His own future appeared to him like a blank dead wall that rose up in front of him barring all progress; he was no longer young enough to select a career and commence it. With passionate self-reproach he lamented all the lost irrevocable years that he had wasted.

Romaris was not a place to cheer a disappointed and dejected soldier who had borne the burning pain of bodily wounds and the intolerable shame of captivity in a hostile land. Its loneliness, its darkness, its storms, its poverty, had nothing in them with which to restore his spirit to hope or his sinews to ambition. In these cold, bleak, windy days of a dreary and joyless spring-time, the dusky moors and the gruesome sea were desolate, without compensating grandeur. The people around him were all taciturn, dull, stupid; they had not suffered by the war, but they understood that, poor as they were, they would have to bear their share in the burden of the nation's ransom. They barred their doors and counted their hoarded gains in the dark with throbbing hearts, and stole out in the raw, wet, gusty dawns to kneel at the bleeding feet of their Christ. He envied them their faith; he could not comfort them, they could not comfort him; they were too far asunder.

The only solace he had was the knowledge that he had done his duty by France, and to the memory of those whose name he bore; that he had rendered what service he could; that he had not fled from pain and peril; that he had at least worn his sword well and blamelessly; that he had not abandoned his discrowned city of pleasure in the day of humiliation and martyrdom. The only solace he had was that he felt Wanda von Szalras herself could have commanded him to do no more than he had done in this the Année Terrible.

But, though his character had been purified and strengthened by the baptism of fire, and though his egotism had been destroyed by the endless scenes of suffering and of heroism which he had witnessed, he could not in a year change so greatly that he could be content with the mere barren sense of duty done and honour redeemed. He was deeply and restlessly miserable. He knew not where to turn, either for occupation or for consolation. Time hung on his hands like a wearisome wallet of stones.

When all the habits of life are suddenly rent asunder, they are like a rope cut in two. They may be knotted together clumsily, or they may be thrown altogether aside and a new strand woven, but they will never be the same thing again.

Romaris, with its few wind-tortured trees and its leaden-hued dangerous seas, seemed to him, indeed, a champ des trépassés, as it was called, a field of death. The naked, ugly, half-ruined towers, which no ivy shrouded and no broken marble ennobled, as one or the other would have done had it been in England or in Italy, was a dreary residence for a man who was used to all the elegant and luxurious habits of a man of the world, who was also a lover of art and a collector of choice trifles. His rooms had been the envy of his friends, with all their eighteenth century furniture, and their innumerable and unclassified treasures; when he had opened his eyes of a morning a pastel of La Tour had smiled at him, rose-coloured windows had made even a grey sky smile. Without, there had been the sound of wheels going down the gay Boulevard Haussmann. All Paris had passed by, tripping and talking, careless and mirthful, beneath his gilded balconies bright with canariensis and volubilis; and on a little table, heaped in their hundreds, had been cards that bade him to all the best and most agreeable houses, whilst, betwixt them, slipped coyly in many an amorous note, many an unlooked-for declaration, many an eagerly-desired appointment.

'Quel beau temps!' he thought, as he awoke in the chill, bare, unlively chamber of the old tower by the sea; and it seemed to him that he must be dreaming: that all the months of the war had been a nightmare; that if he fully awakened he would find himself once more with the April sunshine shining through the rose glass, and the carriages rolling beneath over the asphalt road. But it was no nightmare, it was a terrible, ghastly reality to him, as to so many thousands. There were the scars on his breast and his loins where the Prussian steel had hacked and the Prussian shot had pierced him; there was his sword in a corner all dinted, notched, stained; there was a crowd of hideous ineffaceable tumultuous memories; it was all true enough, only too true, and he was alone at Romaris, with all his dreams and ambitions faded into thin air, vanished like the blown burst bubbles of a child's sport.

In time to come he might recover power and nerve to recommence his struggle for distinction, but at present it seemed to him that all was over. His imprisonment had shaken and depressed him as nothing else in the trials of war could have done. He had been shut up for months alone, with his own desperation. To a man of high courage and impatient appetite for action there is no injury so great and in its effect so lasting as captivity. Joined to this he had the fever of a strong, and now perfectly hopeless, passion.

Pacing to and fro the brick floor of the tower looking down on the sands and rocks of the coast, his thoughts were incessantly with Wanda von Szalras in her stately ancient house, built so high up amidst the mountains and walled in by the great forests and the ice slopes of the glaciers. In the heat and stench of carnage he had longed for a breath of that mountain breeze, for a glance from those serene eyes; he longed for them still.

As he passed to and fro in the wild wintry weather, his heart was sick with hope deferred, with unavailing regret and repentance, with useless longings.

It was near noonday; there was no sun; a heavy wrack of cloud was sweeping up from the west; on the air the odour of rotting fish and of fish-oil, and of sewage trickling uncovered to the beach, were too strong to be driven away by the pungency of the sea.

The sea was high and moaning loud; the dusk was full of rain; the wind-tormented trees groaned and seemed to sigh; their boughs were still scarce in bud though May had come. He felt cold, weary, hopeless. His walk brought no warmth to his veins, and his thoughts none to his heart. The moisture of the air seemed to chill him to the bone, and he went within and mounted the broken granite stairs to his solitary chamber, bare of all save the simplest necessaries, gloomy and cheerless with the winds and the bats beating together at the high iron-barred casement. He wearily lighted a little oil lamp, and threw a log or two of drift-wood on the hearth and set fire to them with a faggot of dried ling.

He dreaded his long lonely evening.

He had set the lamp on a table while he had set fire to the wood; its light fell palely on a small white square thing. It was a letter. He took it up eagerly; he, who in Paris had often tossed aside, with a passing glance, the social invitations of the highest personages and the flattering words of the loveliest women.

Here, any letter seemed a friend, and as he took up this his pulse quickened; he saw that it was sealed with armorial bearings which he knew—a shield bearing three vultures with two knights as supporters, and with the motto 'Gott und mein Schwert;' the same arms, the same motto as were borne upon the great red and gold banner floating from the keep on the north winds at the Hohenszalrasburg. He opened it with a hand which shook a little and a quick throb of pleasure at his heart. He had scarcely hoped that she would write again to him. The sight of her writing filled him with a boundless joy, the purest he had ever known called forth by the hand of woman.

The letter was brief, grave, kind. As he read he seemed to hear the calm harmonious voice of the lady of Hohenszalras speaking to him in her mellowed and softened German tongue.

She sent him words of consolation, of sympathy, of congratulation, on the course of action he had taken in a time of tribulation, which had been the touchstone of character to so many.

'Tell me something of Romaris,' she said in conclusion. 'I am sure you will grow to care for the place and the people, now that you seek both in the hour of the martyrdom of France. Have you any friends near you? Have you books? How do your days pass? How do you fill up time, which must seem so dull and blank to you after the fierce excitations and the rapid changes of war? Tell me all about your present life, and remember that we at Hohenszalras know how to honour courage and heroic misfortune.'

He laid the letter down after twice reading it. Life seemed no longer all over for him. He had earned her praise and her sympathy. It was doubtful if years of the most brilliant political successes would have done as much as his adversity, his misadventure, and his daring had done for him in her esteem. She had the blood of twenty generations of warriors in her, and nothing appealed so forcibly to her sympathies and her instincts as the heroism of the sword. Those few lines too were a permission to write to her. He replied at once, with a gratitude somewhat guardedly expressed, and with details almost wholly impersonal.

She was disappointed that he said so little of himself, but she did justice to the delicacy of the carefully guarded words from a man whose passion appealed to her by its silence, where it would only have alienated her by any eloquence. Of Romaris he said nothing, save that, had Dante ever been upon their coast, he would have added another canto to the 'Purgatorio,' more desolate and more unrelieved in gloom than any other.

'Does he regret Cochonette?' she thought, with a jealous contemptuousness of which she was ashamed as soon as she felt it.

Having once written to her, however, he thought himself privileged to write again, and did so several times. He wrote with ease, grace, and elegance: he wrote as he spoke, which gives this charm to correspondence, seem close at hand to the reader in intimate communion. The high culture of his mind displayed itself without effort, and he had that ability of polished expression which is in our day too often a neglected one. His letters became welcome to her: she answered them briefly, but she let him see that they were agreeable to her. There was in them the note of a profound depression, of an unuttered, but suggested hopelessness which touched her. If he had expressed it in plain words, it would not have appealed to her one half so forcibly.

They remained only the letters of a man of culture to a woman capable of comprehending the intellectual movement of the time, but it was because of this limitation that she allowed them. Any show of tenderness would have both alarmed and alienated her. There was no reason after all, she thought, why a frank friendship should not exist between them.

Sometimes she was surprised at herself for having conceded so much, and angry that she had done so. Happily he had the good taste to take no advantage of it. Interesting as his letters were they might have been read from the housetops. With that inconsistency of her sex from which hitherto she had always flattered herself she had been free, she occasionally felt a passing disappointment that they were not more personal as regarded himself. Reticence is a fine quality; it is the marble of human nature. But sometimes it provokes the impatience that the marble awoke in Pygmalion.

Once only he spoke of his own aims. Then he wrote:

'You bade me do good at Romaris. Candidly, I see no way to do it except in saving a crew off a wreck, which is not an occasion that presents itself every week. I cannot benefit these people materially, since I am poor; I cannot benefit them morally, because I have not their faith in the things unseen, and I have not their morality in the things tangible. They are God-fearing, infinitely patient, faithful in their daily lives, and they reproach no one for their hard lot, cast on an iron shore and forced to win their scanty bread at risk of their lives. They do not murmur either at duty or mankind. What should I say to them? I, whose whole life is one restless impatience, one petulant mutiny against circumstance? If I talk with them I only take them what the world always takes into solitude—discontent. It would be a cruel gift, yet my hand is incapable of holding out any other. It is a homely saying that no blood comes out of a stone; so, out of a life saturated with the ironies, the contempt, the disbelief, the frivolous philosophies, the hopeless negations of what we call society, there can be drawn no water of hope and charity, for the well-head—belief—is dried up at its source. Some pretend, indeed, to find in humanity what they deny to exist as deity, but I should be incapable of the illogical exchange. It is to deny that the seed sprang from a root; it is to replace a grand and illimitable theism by a finite and vainglorious bathos. Of all the creeds that have debased mankind, the new creed that would centre itself in man seems to me the poorest and the most baseless of all. If humanity be but a vibrion, a conglomeration of gases, a mere mould holding chemicals, a mere bundle of phosphorus and carbon? how can it contain the elements of worship; what matter when or how each bubble of it bursts? This is the weakness of all materialism when it attempts to ally itself with duty. It becomes ridiculous. The carpe diem of the classic sensualists, the morality of the "Satyricon" or the "Decamerone," are its only natural concomitants and outcome; but as yet it is not honest enough to say this. It affects the soothsayer's long robe, the sacerdotal frown, and is a hypocrite.'

In answer she wrote back to him:

'I do not urge you to have my faith: what is the use? Goethe was right. It is a question between a man and his own heart. No one should venture to intrude there. But taking life even as you do, it is surely a casket of mysteries. May we not trust that at the bottom of it, as at the bottom of Pandora's, there may be hope? I wish again to think with Goethe that immortality is not an inheritance, but a greatness to be achieved like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial, and purity of purpose—a reward allotted to the just. This is fanciful, may be, but it is not illogical. And without being either a Christian or a Materialist, without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity, surely the best emotion that our natures know—pity—must be large enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in view of the endless suffering, the continual injustice, the appalling contrasts, with which the world is full. Whether man be the vibrion or the heir to immortality, the bundle of carbon or the care of angels, one fact is indisputable: he suffers agonies, mental and physical, that are wholly out of proportion to the brevity of his life, while he is too often weighted from infancy with hereditary maladies, both of body and of character. This is reason enough, I think, for us all to help each other, even though we feel, as you feel, that we are as lost children wandering in a great darkness, with no thread or clue to guide us to the end.'

When Sabran read this answer, he mused to himself:

'Pity! how far would her pity reach? How great offences would it cover? She has compassion for the evil-doers, but it is easy, since the evil does not touch her. She sits on the high white throne of her honour and purity, and surveys the world with beautiful but serene compassion. If the mud of its miry labyrinths reached and soiled her, would her theories prevail? They are noble, but they are the theories of one who sits in safety behind a gate of ivory and jasper, whilst outside, far below, the bitter tide of the human sea surges and moans too far off, too low down, for its sound to reach within. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. But since she would never understand, how could she ever pardon? There are things that the nature must understand rather than the mind; and her nature is as high, as calm, as pure as the snows of her high hills.'

And then the impulse came over him for a passing moment to tell her what he had never told any living creature; to make confession to her and abide her judgment, even though he should never see her face again. But the impulse shrank and died away before the remembrance of her clear, proud eyes. He could not humiliate himself before her. He would have risked her anger; he could not brave her disdain. Moreover, straight and open ways were hot natural to him, though he was physically brave to folly. There was a subtlety and a reticence in him which were the enemies of candour.

To her he was more frank than to any other because her influence was great on him, and a strong reverence was awakened in him that was touched by a timid fear quite alien to a character naturally contemptuously cynical and essentially proud. But even to her he could not bring himself to be entirely truthful in revelation of his past. Truthfulness is in much a habit, and he had never acquired its habit. When he was most sincere there was always some reserve lying behind it. This was perhaps one of the causes of the attraction he exercised on all women. All women are allured by the shadows and the suggestions of what is but imperfectly revealed. Even on the clear, strong nature of Wanda von Szalras it had its unconscious and intangible charm. She herself was like daylight, but the subtle vague charm of the shadows had their seduction for her; Night holds dreams and passions that fade and flee before the lucid noon, and who, at noonday wishes not for night?

For himself, the letters he received from her seemed the only things that bound him to life at all.

The betrayal of him by a base and mercenary woman had hurt him more than it was worthy to do; it had stung his pride and saddened him in this period of adversity with a sense of degradation. He had been sold by a courtezan; it seemed to him to make him ridiculous as Samson was ridiculous, and he had no gates of Gaza to pull down upon himself and her. He could only be idle, and stare at an unoccupied and valueless future. The summer went on, and he remained at Romaris. An old servant had sent him word that all his possessions were safe in Paris, and his apartments unharmed; but he felt no inclination to go there: he felt no sympathy with Communists or Versaillists, with Gambetta or Gallifet. He stayed on at the old storm-beaten sea-washed tower, counting his days chiefly by the coming to him of any line from the castle by the lake.

She seemed to understand that and pity it, for each week brought him some tidings.

At midsummer she wrote him word that she was about to be honoured again by a two days' visit of her Imperial friends.

'We shall have, perforce, a large house party,' she said. 'Will you be inclined this time to join it? It is natural that you should sorrow without hope for your country, but the fault of her disasters lies not with you. It is, perhaps, time that you should enter the world again; will you commence with what for two days only will be worldly—Hohenszalras? Your old friends the monks will welcome you willingly and lovingly on the Holy Isle?'

He replied with gratitude, but he refused. He did not make any plea or excuse; he thought it best to let the simple denial stand by itself. She would understand it.

'Do not think, however,' he wrote, 'that I am the less profoundly touched by your admirable goodness to a worsted and disarmed combatant in a lost cause.'

'It is the causes that are lost which are generally the noble ones,' she said in answer. 'I do not see why you should deem your life at an end because a sham empire, which you always despised, has fallen to pieces. If it had not perished by a blow from without, it would have crumbled to pieces from its own internal putrefaction.'

'The visit has passed off very well,' she continued. 'Every one was content, which shows their kindness, for these things are all of necessity so much alike that it is difficult to make them entertaining. The weather was fortunately fine, and the old house looked bright. You did rightly not to be present, if you felt festivity out of tone with your thoughts. If, however, you are ever inclined for another self-imprisonment upon the island, you know that your friends, both at the monastery and at the burg, will be glad to see you, and the monks bid me salute you with affection.'

A message from Mdme. Ottilie, a little news of the horses, a few phrases on the politics of the hour, and the letter was done. But, simple as it was, it seemed to him to be like a ray of sunshine amidst the gloom of his empty chamber.

From her the permission to return to the monastery when he would seemed to say so much. He wrote her back calm and grateful words of congratulation and cordiality; he commenced with the German formality, 'Most High Lady,' and ended them with the equally formal 'devoted and obedient servant;' but it seemed to him as if under that cover of ceremony she must see his heart beating, his blood throbbing; she must know very well, and if knowing, she suffered him to return to the Holy Isle, why then—he was all alone, but he felt the colour rise to his face.

'And I must not go! I must not go!' he thought, and looked at his pistols.

He ought sooner to blow his brains out, and leave a written confession for her.

The hoarse sound of the sea surging amongst the rocks at the base of the tower was all that stirred the stillness; evening was spreading over all the monotonous inland country; a west wind was blowing and rustling amidst the gorse; a woman led a cow between the dolmen, stopping for it to crop grass here and there; the fishing-boats were far out to sea, hidden under the vapours and the shadows. It was all melancholy, sad-coloured, chill, lonesome. As he leaned against the embrasure of the window and looked down, other familiar scenes, long lost, rose up to his memory. He saw a wide green rolling river, long lines of willows and of larches bending under a steel-hued sky, a vast dim plain stretching away to touch blue mountains, a great solitude, a silence filled at intervals with the pathetic song of the swans, chanting sorrowfully because the nights grew cold, the ice began to gather, the food became scanty, and they were many in number.

'I must not go!' he said to himself; 'I must never see Hohenszalras.'

And he lit his study lamp, and held her letter to it and burnt it. It was his best way to do it honour, to keep it holy. He had the letters of so many worthless women locked in his drawers and caskets in his rooms in Paris. He held himself unworthy to retain hers. He had burned each written by her as it had come to him, in that sort of exaggeration of respect with which it seemed to him she was most fittingly treated by him. There are less worthy offerings than the first scruple of an unscrupulous life. It is like the first pure drops that fall from a long turbid and dust-choked fountain.

As he walked the next day upon the windblown, rock-strewn strip of sand that parted the old oak wood from the sea, he thought restlessly of her in those days of stately ceremony which suited her so well. What did he do here, what chance had he to be remembered by her? He chafed at his absence, yet it seemed to him impossible that he could ever go to her. What had been at first keen calculation with him had now become a finer instinct, was now due to a more delicate sentiment, a truer and loftier emotion. What could he ever look to her if he sought her but a mere base fortune-seeker, a mere liar, with no pride and no manhood in him? And what else was he? he thought, with bitterness, as he paced to and fro the rough strip of beach, with the dusky heaving waves trembling under a cloudy sky, where a red glow told the place of the setting sun.

There were few bolder men living than He, and he was cynical and reckless before many things that most men reverence; but at the thought of her possible scorn he felt himself tremble like a child. He thought he would rather never see her face again than risk her disdain; there was in him a vague romantic wishfulness rather to die, so that she might think well of his memory, than live in her love through any baseness that would be unworthy of her.

Sin had always seemed a mere superstitious name to him, and if he had abstained from its coarser forms it had been rather from the revolt of the fine taste of a man of culture than from any principle or persuasion of duty. Men he believed were but ephemera, sporting their small hours, weaving their frail webs, and swept away by the great broom of destiny as spiders by the housewife. In the spineless doctrine of altruism he had had too robust a temperament, too clear a reason, to seek a guide for conduct. He had lived for himself, and had seen no cause to do otherwise. That he had not been more criminal had been due partly to indolence, partly to pride. In his love for Wanda von Szalras, a love with which considerable acrimony had mingled at the first, he yet, through all the envy and the impatience which alloyed it, reached a moral height which he had never touched before. Between her and him a great gulf yawned. He abstained from any effort to pass it. It was the sole act of self-denial of a selfish life, the sole obedience to conscience in a character which obeyed no moral laws, but was ruled by a divided tyranny of natural instinct and conventional honour.

The long silent hours of thought in the willow-shaded cloisters of the Holy Isle had not been wholly without fruit. He desired, with passion and sincerity, that she should think well of him, but he did not dare to wish for more; love offered from him to her seemed to him as if it would be a kind of blasphemy. He remembered in his far-off childhood, which at times still seemed so near to him, nearer than all that was around him, the vague, awed, wistful reverence with which he had kneeled in solitary hours before the old dim picture of the Madonna with the lamp burning above it, a little golden flame in the midst of the gloom; he remembered so well how his fierce young soul and his ignorant yearning child's heart had gone out in a half-conscious supplication, how it had seemed to him that if he only knelt long enough, prayed well enough, she would come down to him and lay her hands on him. It was all so long ago, yet, when he thought of Wanda von Szalras, something of that same emotion rose up in him, something of the old instinctive worship awoke in him. In thought he prostrated himself once more whenever the memory of her came to him. He had no religion; she became one to him.

Meanwhile, he was constantly thinking restlessly to himself, 'Did I do ill not to go?'

His bodily life was at Romaris, but his mental life was at Hohenszalras. He was always thinking of her as she would look in those days of the Imperial visit; he could see the stately ceremonies of welcome, the long magnificence of the banquets, the great Rittersaal with cressets of light blazing on its pointed emblazoned roofs; he could see her as she would move down the first quadrille which she would dance with her Kaiser: she would wear her favourite ivory-white velvet most probably, and her wonderful old jewels, and all her orders. She would look as if she had stepped down off a canvas of Velasquez or Vandyck, and she would be a little tired, a little contemptuous, a little indifferent, despite her loyalty; she would be glad, he knew, when the brilliant gathering was broken up, and the old house, and the yew terrace, and the green lake were all once more quiet beneath the rays of the watery moon. She was so unlike other women. She would not care about a greatness, a compliment, a success more or less. Such triumphs were for the people risen yesterday, not for a Countess von Szalras.

He knew the simplicity of her life and the pride of her temper, and they moved him to the stronger admiration because he knew also that those mere externals which she held in contempt had for him an exaggerated value. He was scarcely conscious himself of how great a share the splendour of her position, united to her great indifference to it, had in the hold she had taken on his imagination and his passions. He did know that there were so much greater nobilities in her that he was vaguely ashamed of the ascendency which her mere rank took in his thoughts of her. Yet he could not divest her of it, and it seemed to enhance both her bodily and spiritual beauty, as the golden calyx of the lily makes its whiteness seem the whiter by its neighbourhood.

[CHAPTER XIII.]

In the Iselthal the summer was more brilliant and warm than usual. The rains were less frequent, and the roses on the great sloping lawns beneath the buttresses and terraces of Hohenszalras were blooming freely.

Their mistress did not for once give them much heed. She rode long and fast through the still summer woods, and came back after nightfall. Her men of business, during their interviews with her, found her attention less perfect, her interest less keen. In stormy days she sat in the library, and read Heine and Schiller often, and all the philosophers and men of science rarely. A great teacher has said that the Humanities must outweigh the Sciences at all times, and he is unquestionably true, if it were only for the reason that in the sweet wise lore of ages every human heart in pain and perplexity finds a refuge; whilst in love or in sorrow the sciences seem the poorest and chilliest of mortal vanities that ever strove to measure the universe with a foot-rule.

The Princess watched her with wistful, inquisitive eyes, but dared not name the person of whom they both thought most. Wanda was herself intolerant of the sense of impatience with which she awaited the coming of the sturdy pony that brought the post-bag from Windisch-Matrey. He in his loneliness and emptiness of life on the barren sea-shore of Romaris did not more anxiously await her letters than did the châtelaine of Hohenszalras, amidst all her state, her wealth, and her innumerable occupations, await his. She pitied him intensely; there was something pathetic to her in the earnestness with which he had striven to amend his ways of life, only to have his whole career shattered by an insensate and unlooked-for national war. She understood that his poverty stood in the path of his ambition, and she divined that his unhappiness had broken that spring of manhood in him which would have enabled him to construct a new career for himself out of the ruins of the old. She understood why he was listless and exhausted.

There were moments when she was inclined to send him some invitation more cordial, some bidding more clear; but she hesitated to take a step which would bind her in her own honour to so much more. She knew that she ought not to suggest a hope to him to which she was not prepared to give full fruition. And again, how could he respond? It would be impossible for him to accept. She was one of the great alliances of Europe, and he was without fortune, without career, without a future. Even friendship was only possible whilst they were far asunder.

Two years had gone by since he had come across from the monastery in the green and gold of a summer afternoon. The monks had not forgotten him; throughout the French war they had prayed for him. When their Prior saw her, he said anxiously sometimes: 'And the Markgraf von Sabran, will he never come to us again? Were we too dull for him? Will your Excellency remember us to him, if ever you can?' And she had answered with a strange emotion at her heart: 'His country is in trouble, holy father; a good son cannot leave his land in her adversity. No: I do not think he was dull with you; he was quite happy, I believe. Perhaps he may come again some day, who knows? He shall be told what you say.'

Then a vision would rise up to her of herself and him, as they would be perhaps when they should be quite old. Perhaps he would retire into this holy retreat of the Augustines, and she would be a grave sombre woman, not gay and pretty and witty, as the Princess was. The picture was gloomy; she chased it away, and galloped her horse long and far through the forests.

The summer had been so brilliant that the autumn which followed was cold and severe, earlier than usual, and heavy storms swept over the Tauern, almost ere the wheat harvest could be reaped. Many days were cheerless and filled only with the sound of incessant rains. In the Pinzgau and the Salzkammergut floods were frequent. The Ache and the Szalzach, with all their tributary streams and wide and lonely lakes, were carrying desolation and terror into many parts of the land which in summer they made beautiful. Almost every day brought her some tidings of some misfortunes in the villages on the farms belonging to her in the more distant parts of Austria; a mill washed away, a bridge down, a dam burst, a road destroyed, a harvest swept into the water, some damage or other done by the swollen river and torrents, she heard of by nearly every communication that her stewards and her lawyers made to her at this season.

'Our foes the rivers are more insidious than your mighty enemy the salt water,' she wrote to Romaris. 'The sea deals open blows, and men know what they must expect if they go out on the vasty deep. But here a little brook that laughed and chirped at noon-day as innocently as a child may become at nightfall or dawn a roaring giant, devouring all that surrounds him. We pay heavily for the glory of our mountain waters.'

These autumn weeks seemed very dreary to her. She visited her horses chafing at inaction in their roomy stalls, and attended to her affairs, and sat in the library or the octagon room hearing the rain beat against the emblazoned leaded panes, and felt the days, and above all the evenings, intolerably dull and melancholy. She had never heeded rain before, or minded the change of season.

One Sunday a messenger rode through the drenching storm, and brought her a telegram from her lawyer in Salzburg. It said: 'Idrac flooded: many lives lost: great distress: fear town wholly destroyed. Please send instructions.'

The call for action roused her as a trumpet sounding rouses a cavalry charger.

'Instructions!' she echoed as she read. 'They write as if I could bid the Danube subside, or the Drave shrink in its bed!'

She penned a hasty answer.

'I will go to Idrac myself.'

Then she sent a message also to S. Johann im Wald for a special train to be got in readiness for her, and told one of her women and a trusty servant to be ready to go with her to Vienna in an hour. It was still early in the forenoon.

'Are you mad?' cried Madame Ottilie, when she was informed of the intended journey.

Wanda kissed her hand.

'There is no madness in what I shall do, dear mother, and Bela surely would have gone.'

'Can you stay the torrents of heaven? Can you arrest a river in its wrath?'

'No; but lives are often lost because poor people lose their senses in fright. I shall be calmer than anyone there. Besides, the place belongs to us; we are bound to share its danger. If only Egon were not away from Hungary!'

'But he is away. You have driven him away.'

'Do not dissuade me, dearest mother. It would be cowardice not to go.'

'What can women do in such extremities?'

'But we of Hohenszalras must not be mere women when we are wanted in any danger. Remember Luitgarde von Szalras, the kuttengeier.'

The Princess sighed, prayed, even wept, but Wanda was gently inflexible. The Princess could not see why a precious life should be endangered for the sake of a little half barbaric, half Jewish town, which was remarkable for nothing except for shipping timber and selling salbling. The population was scarcely Christian, so many Hebrews were there, and so benighted were the Sclavonian poor, who between them made up the two thousand odd souls that peopled Idrac. To send a special messenger there, and to give any quantity of money that the distress of the moment might demand, would be all right and proper; indeed, an obligation on the owner of the little feudal river-side town. But to go! A Countess von Szalras to go in person where not one out of a hundred of the citizens had been properly baptized or confirmed! The Princess could not view this Quixotism in any other light than that of an absolute insanity.

'Bela lost his life in just such a foolish manner!' she pleaded.

'So did the saints, dear mother,' said his sister, gently.

The Princess coloured and coughed.

'Of course, I am aware that many holy lives have been—have been—what appears to our finite senses wasted,' she said, with a little asperity. 'But I am also aware, Wanda, that the duties most neglected are those which lie nearest home and have the least display; consideration for me might be better, though less magnificent, than so much heroism for Idrac.'

'It pains me that you should put it in that light, dearest mother,' said Wanda, with inexhaustible patience. 'Were you in any danger I would stay by you first, of course; but you are in none. These poor, forlorn, ignorant, cowardly creatures are in the very greatest. I draw large revenues from the place; I am in honour bound to share its troubles. Pray do not seek to dissuade me. It is a matter not of caprice but of conscience. I shall be in no possible peril myself. I shall go down the river in my own vessel, and I will telegraph to you from every town at which I touch.'

The Princess ceased not to lament, to oppose, to bemoan her own powerlessness to check intolerable follies. Sitting in her easy chair in her warm blue-room, sipping her chocolate, the woes of a distant little place on the Danube, whose population was chiefly Semitic, were very bearable and altogether failed to appeal to her.

Wanda kissed her, asked her blessing humbly, and took her way in the worst of a blinding storm along the unsafe and precipitous road which went over the hills to Windisch-Matrey.

'What false sentiment it all is!' thought the Princess, left alone. 'She has not seen this town since she was ten years old. She knows that they are nearly all Jews, or quite heathenish Sclavonians. She can do nothing at all—what should a woman do?—and yet she is so full of her conscience that she goes almost to the Iron Gates in quest of a duty in the wettest of weather, while she leaves a man like Egon and a man like Sabran wretched for want of a word! I must say,' thought the Princess, 'false sentiment is almost worse than none at all!'

The rains were pouring down from leaden skies, hiding all the sides of the mountains and filling the valleys with masses of vapour. The road was barely passable; the hill torrents dashed across it; the little brooks were swollen to water-courses; the protecting wall on more than one giddy height had been swept away; the gallop of the horses shook the frail swaying galleries and hurled the loosened stones over the precipice with loud resounding noise. The drive to Matrey and thence with post-horses to S. Johann im Wald, the nearest railway station, was in itself no little peril, but it was accomplished before the day had closed in, and the special train she had ordered being in readiness left at once for Vienna, running through the low portions of the Pinzgau, which were for the most part under water.

All the way was dim and watery, and full of the sound of running or of falling water. The Ache and the Szalsach, both always deep and turbulent rivers, were swollen and boisterous, and swirled and thundered in their rocky beds; in the grand Pass of Lueg the gloom, always great, was dense as at midnight, and when they reached Salzburg the setting sun was bursting through ink-black clouds, and shed a momentary glow as of fire upon the dark sides of the Untersberg, and flamed behind the towers of the great castle on its rocky throne. All travellers know the grandeur of that scene; familiar as it was to her she looked upward at it with awe and pleasure commingled. Salzburg in the evening light needs Salvator Rosa and Rembrandt together to portray it.

The train only paused to take in water; the station was crowded as usual, set as it is between the frontiers of empire and kingdom, but in the brief interval she saw one whom she recognised amongst the throng, and she felt the colour come into her own face as she did so.

She saw Sabran; he did not see her. Her train moved out of the station rapidly, to make room for the express from Munich; the sun dropped down into the ink-black clouds; the golden and crimson pomp of Untersberg changed to black and grey; the ivory and amber and crystal of the castle became stone and brick and iron, that frowned sombrely over a city sunk in river-mists and in rain-vapours. She felt angrily that there was an affinity between the landscape and herself; that so, at sight of him, a light had come into her life which had no reality in fact, prismatic colours baseless as a dream.

She had longed to speak to him; to stretch out her hand to him; to say at least how her thoughts and her sympathies had been with him throughout the war. But her carriage was already in full onward movement, and in another moment had passed at high speed out of the station into that grand valley of the Szalzach where Hohensalzburg seems to tower as though Friederich Barbarossa did indeed sleep there. With a sigh she sank backward amongst her furs and cushions, and saw the soaring fortress pass, into the clouds.

The night had now closed in; the rain fell heavily. As the little train, oscillating greatly from its lightness, swung over the iron rails, there was a continual sound of splashing water audible above the noise of the wheels and the throb of the engine. She had often travelled at night and had always slept soundly; this evening she could not sleep. She remained wide awake watching the swaying of the lamp, listening to the shrill shriek of the wheels as they rushed through water where some hillside brook had broken bounds and spread out in a shallow lagoon. The skies were overcast in every direction; the rain was everywhere unceasing; the night seemed to her very long.

She pondered perpetually on his presence at Salzburg, and wondered if he were going to the Holy Isle. Three months had gone by since she had sent him the semi-invitation to her country.

The train sped on; the day dawned; she began to get glimpses of the grand blue river, now grey and ochre-coloured and thick with mud, its turbid waves heaving sullenly under the stormy October skies. She had always loved the great Donau; she knew its cradle well in the north land of the Teutons. She had often watched the baby-stream rippling over the stones, and felt the charm, as of some magical transformation, as she thought of the same stream stretching broadly under the monastic walls of Klosterneuberg, rolling in tempest by the Iron Gates, and gathering its mighty volume higher and deeper to burst at last into the sunlight of the eastern sea. Amidst the levelled monotony of modern Europe the Danube keeps something of savage grandeur, something of legendary power, something of oriental charm; it is still often tameless, a half-barbaric thing, still a Tamerlane amidst rivers: and yet yonder at its birthplace it is such a slender thread of rippling water! She and Bela had crossed it with bare feet to get forget-me-nots in Taunus, talking together of Chriemhilde and her pilgrimage to the land of the Huns.

The little train swung on steadily through the water above and below, and after a night of no little danger came safely to Vienna as the dawn broke. She went straight to her yacht, which was in readiness off the Lobau and weighed anchor as the pale and watery morning broadened into day above the shores that had seen Aspern and Wagram. The yacht was a yawl, strongly built and drawing little water, made on purpose for the ascent and descent of the Danube, from Passau up in the north to as far south as the Bosphorus if needed. The voyage had been of the greatest joys of hers and of Bela's childhood; they had read on deck alternately the 'Nibelungen-Lied' and the 'Arabian Nights,' clinging together in delighted awe as they passed through the darkness of the defile of Kasan.

Idrac was situated between Pesth and Peterwardein, lying low on marshy ground that was covered with willows and intersected by small streams flowing from the interior to the Danube.

The little town gave its name and its seigneurie to the owner of its burg; an ancient place built on a steep rock that rose sheer out of the fast-running waves, and dominated the passage of the stream. The Counts of Idrac had been exceeding powerful in the old times, when they had stopped at their will the right of way of the river; and their appanages with their title had come by marriage into the House of Szalras some four centuries before, and although the dominion over the river was gone, the fortress and the little town and all that appertained thereto still formed a considerable possession; it had usually been given with its Countship to the second son of the Szalras.

Making the passage to Pesth in fourteen hours, the yacht dropped anchor before the Franz Josef Quai as the first stars came out above the Blocksburg, for by this time the skies had lightened and the rains had ceased. Here she stayed the night perforce, as an accident had occurred to the machinery of the vessel. She did not leave the yacht, but sent into the inner city for stores of provisions and of the local cordial, the slibowitza, to distribute to the half-drowned people amongst whom she was about to go. It was noonday before the yawl got under weigh and left the twin-towns behind her. A little way further down the stream they passed a great castle, standing amidst beech woods on a rock that rose up from fields covered with the Carlowitz vine. She looked at it with a sigh: it was the fortress of Kohacs, one of the many possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely.

The weather had now cleared, but the skies were overcast, and the plains, which began to spread away monotonously from either shore, were covered with white fog. Soon the fog spread also over the river, and the yacht was compelled to advance cautiously and slowly, so that the voyage was several hours longer than usual. When the light of the next day broke they had come in sight of the flooded districts on their right: the immense flat fields that bore the flax and grain which make the commerce of Baja, of Neusatz, and of other riverain towns, were all changed to shallow estuaries. The Theiss, the Drave, and many minor streams, swollen by the long autumnal rains, had burst their boundaries and laid all the country under water for hundreds of square leagues. The granaries, freshly filled with the late abundant harvest, had at many places been flooded or destroyed: thousands of stacks of grain were floating like shapeless, dismasted vessels. Timber and the thatched roofs of the one-storied houses were in many places drifting too, like the flotsam and the hulls of wrecked ships.

There are few scenes more dreary, more sad, more monotonous than those of a flat country swamped by flood: the sky above them was leaden and heavy, the Danube beneath them was turgid and discoloured; the shrill winds whistled through the brakes of willow, the water-birds, frightened, flew from their osier-beds on the islands, the bells of churches and watch-towers tolled dismally.

It was late in the afternoon when she came within sight of her little town on the Sclavonian shore, which Ernst von Szalras had fired on August 29, 1526, to save it from the shame of violation by the Turks. Though he had perished, and most of the soldiers and townsfolk with him, the fortress, the têtes du pont, and the old water-gates and walls had been too strong for the flames to devour, and the town had been built up again by the Turks and subsequently by the Hungarians.

The slender minarets of the Ottomans' two mosques still raised themselves amidst the old Gothic architecture of the mediæval buildings, and the straw-covered roofs and the white-plastered walls of the modern houses. As they steamed near it the minarets and the castle towers rose above what looked a world of waters, all else seemed swallowed in the flood; the orchards, which had surrounded all save the river-side of the town; were immersed almost to the summits of their trees. The larger vessels could never approach Idrac in ordinary times, the creek being too shallow on which it stood; but now the water was so high that though it would be too imprudent to anchor there, the yacht easily passed in, and hove-to underneath the water-walls, a pilot taking careful soundings as they steered. It was about three in the afternoon. The short, grey day was near its end; a shout of welcome rose from some people on the walls as they recognised the build and the ensign of the yawl. Some crowded boats were pulling away from the town, laden with fugitives and their goods.

'How soon people run away! They are like rats,' she thought. 'I would sooner be like the stork, and not quit my nest if it were in flames.'

She landed at the water-stairs of the castle. Men, women, and children came scrambling along the walls, where they were huddled together out of temporary reach of the flood, and threw themselves down at her feet and kissed her skirts with abject servility. They were half mad with terror, and amongst the population there were many hundreds of Jews, the most cowardly people in all the world. The boats were quite inadequate in number to the work they had to do; the great steamers passing up and down did not pause to help them; the flood was so general below Pesth that on the right shore of the river each separate village and township was busy with its own case and had no help for neighbours: the only aid came from those on the opposite shore, but that was scanty and unwisely ministered. The chief citizens of Idrac had lost their wits, as she had foreseen they would do. To ring the bells madly night and day, and fire off the old culverins from the water-gate, was all they seemed to know how to do. They told her that many lives had been lost, as the inland waters had risen in the night, and most of the houses were of only one storey. In the outlying flax-farms it was supposed that whole households had perished. In the town itself there were six feet of water everywhere, and many of the inhabitants were huddled together in the two mosques, which were now granaries, in the towers, and in the fortress itself; but several families had been enabled to escape, and had climbed upon the roofs, clinging to the chimneys for bare life.

Her mere presence brought reviving hope and energy to the primitive population. Their Lady had a romantic legendary reputation amongst them, and they were ready to cling round the pennon of the yacht as their ancestors had rallied round the standard of Ernst von Szalras.

She ascended to the Rittersaal of the fortress, and assembled a few of the men about her, who had the most influence and energy in the little place. She soon introduced some kind of system and method into the efforts made, promised largesse to those who should be the most active, and had the provisions she had brought distributed amongst those who most needed them. The boats of the yawl took many away to a temporary refuge on the opposite shore. Many others were brought in to the state-room of the castle for shelter. Houses were constantly falling, undermined by the water, and there were dead and wounded to be attended to, as well as the hungry and terrified living creatures. Once before, Idrac had been thus devastated by flood, but it had been far away in the previous century, and the example was too distant to have been a warning to the present generation.

She passed a fatiguing and anxious night. It was impossible to think of sleep with so much misery around. The yacht was obliged to descend, the river for safe anchorage, but the boats remained. She went herself, now in one, now in another, to endeavour to inspire the paralysed people with some courage and animation. A little wine, a little bread, were all she took; food was very scarce. The victuals of the yacht's provisioning did not last long amongst so many famishing souls. She ordered her skipper at dawn to go down as far as Neusatz and purchase largely. There were five thousand people, counting those of the neighbourhood, or more, homeless and bereft of all shelter. The telegraph was broken, the poles had been snapped by the force of the water in many places.

With dawn a furious storm gathered and broke, and renewed rains added their quota to the inundation and their discomfort to the exposed sufferers. The cold was great, and the chill that made them shudder from head to foot was past all cure by cordials. She regretted not to have brought Greswold with her. She was indifferent to danger, indefatigable in exertion, and strong as Libussa, brave as Chriemhilde. Because the place belonged to her in almost a feudal manner, she held herself bound to give her life for it if need be. Bela would have done what she was doing.

Twice or thrice during the two following days she heard the people speak of a stranger who had arrived fifteen hours before her, and had wrought miracles of deliverance. Unless the stories told her were greatly exaggerated, this foreigner had shown a courage and devotion quite unequalled. He had thrown himself into the work at once on his arrival there in a boat from Neusatz, and had toiled night and day, enduring extreme fatigue and running almost every hour some dire peril of his life. He had saved whole families of the poorest and most wretched quarter; he had sprung on to roofs that were splitting and sinking, on to walls that were trembling and tottering, and had borne away in safety men, women, and children, the old, and the sick, and the very animals; he had infused some of his own daring and devotedness into the selfish and paralysed Hebrew population; priests and rabbis were alike unanimous in his praise, and she, as she heard, felt that he who had fought for France had been here for her sake. They told her that he was now out amongst the more distant orchards and fields, amidst the flooded farms where the danger was even greater than in the town itself. Some Czechs said that he was S. John of Nepomuc himself. She bade them bring him to her, that she might thank him, whenever he should enter the town again, and then thought of him no more.

Her whole mind and feeling were engrossed by the spectacle of a misery that even all her wealth could not do very much to alleviate. The waters as yet showed no sign of abatement. The crash of falling houses sounded heavily ever and again through the gloom. The melancholy sight of humble household things, of drowned cattle, of dead dogs, borne down the discoloured flood out to the Danube renewed itself every hour. The lamentations of the ruined people went up in an almost continuous wail like the moaning of a winter wind. There was nothing grand, nothing picturesque, nothing exciting to redeem the dreariness and the desolation. It was all ugly, miserable, dull. It was more trying than war, which even in its hideous senselessness lends a kind of brutal intoxication to all whom it surrounds.

She was incessantly occupied and greatly fatigued, so that the time passed without her counting it. She sent a message each day to the Princess at home, and promised to return as soon as the waters had subsided and the peril passed. For the first time in her life she experienced real discomfort, real privation; she had surrendered nearly all the rooms in the burg to the sick people, and food ran short and there was none of good quality, though she knew that supplies would soon come from the steward at Kohacs and by the yacht.

On the fourth day the waters had sunk an inch. As she heard the good tidings she was looking out inland over the waste of grey and yellow flood; a Jewish rabbi was beside her speaking of the exertions of the stranger, in whom the superstitious of the townsfolk saw a saint from heaven.

'And does no one even know who he is?' she asked.

'No one has asked,' answered the Jew. 'He has been always out where the peril was greatest.'

'How came he here?'

'He came by one of the big steamers that go to Turkey. He pulled himself here in a little boat that he had bought; the boat in which he has done such good service.'

'What is he like in appearance?'

'He is very tall, very fair, and handsome; I should think he is northern.'

Her pulse beat quicker for a moment; then she rejected the idea as absurd, though indeed, she reflected, she had seen him at Salzburg.

'He must at least be a brave man,' she said quietly. 'If you see him bring him to me that I may thank him. Is he in the town now?'

'No; he is yonder, where the Rathwand farms are, or were; where your Excellency sees those dark, long islands which are not islands at all, but only the summits of cherry orchards. He has carried the people away, carried them down to Peterwardein; and he is now about to try and rescue some cattle which were driven up on to the roof of a tower, poor beasts—that tower to the east there, very far away: it is five miles as the crow flies.'

'I suppose he will come into the town again?'

'He was here last night; he had heard of your Excellency, and asked for her health.'

'Ah! I will see and thank him if he come again.'

But no one that day saw the stranger in Idrac.

The rains fell again and the waters again rose. The maladies which come of damp and of bad exhalations spread amongst the people; they could not all be taken to other villages or towns, for there was no room for them. She had quinine, wines, good food ordered by the great steamers, but they were not yet arrived. What could be got at Neusatz or Peterwardein the yacht brought, but it was not enough for so many sick and starving people. The air began to grow fœtid from the many carcases of animals, though as they floated the vultures from the hills fed on them. She had a vessel turned into a floating hospital, and the most delicate of the sick folk carried to it, and had it anchored off the nearest port. Her patience, her calmness, and her courage did more to revive the sinking hearts of the homeless creatures than the cordials and the food. She was all day long out in her boat, being steered from one spot to another. At night she rested little and passed from one sick bed to another. She had never been so near to hopeless human misery before. At Hohenszalras no one was destitute.

One twilight hour on the ninth day, as she was rowed back to the castle stairs, she passed another boat in which were two lads and a man. The man was rowing, a dusky shadow in the gloom of the wet evening and the uncouthness of his waterproof pilot's dress; but she had a lantern beside her, and she flashed its light full on the boat as it passed her. When she reached the burg, she said to her servant Anton: 'Herr von Sabran is in Idrac; go and say that I desire to see him.'

Anton, who remembered him well, returned in an hour, and said he could neither find him nor hear of him.

All the night long, a cheerless tedious night, with the rain falling without and the storm that was raging in the Bosphorus sending its shrill echoes up the Danube, she sat by the beds of the sick women or paced up and down the dimly-lit Rittersaal in an impatience which it humiliated her to feel. It touched her that he should be here, so silently, so sedulously avoiding her, and doing so much for the people of Idrac, because they were her people. The old misgiving that she had been ungenerous in her treatment of him returned to her. He seemed always to have the finer part—the beau rôle. To her, royal in giving, imperious in conduct, it brought a sense of failure, of inferiority. As she read the psalms in Hungarian to the sick Magyar women, her mind perpetually wandered away to him.

She did not see Sabran again, but she heard often of him. The fair stranger, as the people called him, was always conspicuous wherever the greatest danger was to be encountered. There was always peril in almost every movement where the undermined houses, the tottering walls, the stagnant water, the fever-reeking marshes presented at every turn a perpetual menace to life. 'He is not vainly un fils des preux,' she thought, with a thrill of personal pride, as if someone near and dear to her were praised, as she listened to the stories of his intrepidity and his endurance. Whole nights spent in soaked clothes, in half swamped boats; whole days lost in impotent conflict with the ignorance or the poltroonery of an obstinate populace, continual risk encountered without counting its cost to rescue some poor man's sick beast, or pull a cripple from beneath falling beams, or a lad from choking mud; hour on hour of steady laborious rowing, of passage to and fro the sullen river with a freight of moaning, screaming peasantry—this was not child's play, nor had it any of the animation and excitation which in war or in adventure make of danger a strong wine that goes merrily and voluptuously to the head. It was all dull, stupid, unlovely, and he had come to it for her sake. For her sake certainly, though he never approached her; though when Anton at last found and took her message to him he excused himself from obedience to it by a plea that he was at that moment wet and weary, and had come from a hut where typhoid raged. She understood the excuse; she knew that he knew well she was no more afraid than he of that contagion. She admired him the more for his isolation; in these grey, rainy, tedious, melancholy days his figure seemed to grow into a luminous heroic shape like one of the heroes of the olden time. If he had once seemed to seek a guerdon for it the spell would have been broken. But he never did. She began to believe that such a knight deserved any recompense which she could give.

'Egon himself could have done no more,' she said in her own thoughts, and it was the highest praise that she could give to any man, for her Magyar cousin was the embodiment of all martial daring, of all chivalrous ardour, and had led his glittering hussars down on to the French bayonets, as on to the Prussian Krupp guns, with a fury that bore all before it, impetuous and irresistible as a stream of fired naphtha.

On the twelfth morning the river had sunk so much lower that the yacht arriving with medicines and stores of food from Neusatz signalled that she could not enter the creek on which Idrac stood, and waited orders. It had ceased to rain, but the winds were still strong and the skies heavy. She descended to her boat at the water-gate, and told the men to take her out to the yacht. It was early, the sun behind the clouds had barely climbed above the distant Wallachian woods, and the scene had lost nothing of its melancholy. A man was standing on the water-stairs as she descended them, and turned rapidly away, but she had seen him and stretched out her long staff and touched him lightly.

'Why do you avoid me?' she said, as he uncovered his head; 'my men sought you in all directions; I wished to thank you.'

He bowed low over the hand she held out to him. 'I ventured to be near at hand to be of use,' he answered. 'I was afraid the exposure, and, the damp, and all this pestilence would make you ill: you are not ill?'

'No; I am quite well. I have heard of all your courage and endurance. Idrac owes you a great debt.'

'I only pay my debt to Hohenszalras.'

They were both silent; a certain constraint was upon them both.

'How did you know of the inundation? It was unkind of you not to come to me,' she said, and her voice was unsteady as she spoke. 'I want so much to tell you, better than letters can do, all that we felt for you throughout that awful war.'

He turned away slightly with a shudder. 'You are too good. Thousands of men much better than I suffered much more.'

The tears rose to her eyes as she glanced at him. He was looking pale and worn. He had lost the graceful insouciance of his earlier manner. He looked grave, weary, melancholy, like a man who had passed through dire disaster, unspeakable pain, and had seen his career snapped in two like a broken wand. But there was about him instead something soldierlike, proven, war-worn, which became him in her eyes, daughter of a race of warriors as she was.

'You have much to tell me, and I have much to hear,' she said, after a pause. 'You should have come to the monastery to be cured of your wounds. Why were you so mistrustful of our friendship?'

He coloured and was silent.

'Indeed,' she said gravely, 'we can honour brave men in the Tauern and in Idrac too. You are very brave. I do not know how to thank you for my people or for myself.'

'Pray do not speak so,' he said, in a very low voice. 'To see you again would be recompense for much worthier things than any I have done.'

'But you might have seen me long ago,' she said, with a certain nervousness new to her, 'had you only chosen to come to the Isle. I asked you twice.'

He looked at her with eyes of longing and pathetic appeal.

'Do not tempt me,' he murmured. 'If I yielded, and if you despised me——'

'How could I despise one who has so nobly saved the lives of my people?'

'You would do so.'

He spoke very low: he was silent a little while, then he said very softly:

'One evening, when we spoke together on the terrace at Hohenszalras, you leant your hand upon the ivy there. I plucked the leaf you touched; you did not see. I had the leaf with me all through the war. It was a talisman. It was like a holy thing. When your cousin's soldiers stripped me in their ambulance, they took it from me.'

His voice faltered. She listened and was moved to a profound emotion.

'I will give you something better,' she said very gravely. He did not ask her what she would give.

She looked away from him awhile, and her face flushed a little. She was thinking of what she would give him; a gift so great that the world would deem her mad to bestow it, and perhaps would deem him dishonoured to take it.

'How did you hear of these floods along the Danube?' she asked him, recovering her wonted composure.

'I read about them in telegrams in Paris,' he made answer. 'I had mustered courage to revisit my poor Paris; all I possess is there. Nothing has been injured; a shell burst quite close by but did not harm my apartments. I went to make arrangements for the sale of my collections, and on the second day that I arrived there I saw the news of the inundations of Idrac and the lower Danubian plains. I remembered the name of the town; I remembered it was yours. I remembered your saying once that where you had feudal rights you had feudal duties, so I came on the chance of being of service.'

'You have been most devoted to the people.'

'The people! What should I care though the whole town perished? Do not attribute to me a humanity that is not in my nature.'

'Be as cynical as you like in words so long as you are heroic in action. I am going out to the yacht; will you come with me?'

He hesitated. 'I merely came to hear from the warder of your health. I am going to catch the express steamer at Neusatz; all danger is over.'

'The yacht can take you to Neusatz. Come with me.'

He did not offer more opposition; he accompanied her to the boat and entered it.

The tears were in her eyes. She said nothing more, but she could not forget that scores of her own people here had owed their lives to his intrepidity and patience, and that he had never hesitated to throw his life into the balance when needed. And it had been done for her sake alone. The love of humanity might have been a nobler and purer motive, but it would not have touched her so nearly as the self-abandonment of a man by nature selfish and cold.

In a few moments they were taken to the yawl. He ascended the deck with her.

The tidings the skipper brought, the examination of the stores, the discussion of ways and means, the arrangements for the general relief, were air dull, practical matters that claimed careful attention and thought. She sat in the little cabin that was brave with marqueterie work and blue satin and Dresden mirrors, and made memoranda and calculations, and consulted him, and asked his advice on this, on that. The government official, sent to make official estimates of the losses in the township, had come on board to salute and take counsel with her. The whole forenoon passed in these details. He wrote, and calculated, and drew up reports for her. No more tender or personal word was spoken between them; but there was a certain charm for them both in this intimate intercourse, even though it took no other shape than the study of how many boatloads of wheat were needed for so many hundred people, of how many florins a day might be passed to the head of each family, of how many of the flooded houses would still be serviceable with restoration, of how many had been entirely destroyed, of how the town would best be rebuilt, and of how the inland rivers could best be restrained in the future.

To rebuild it she estimated that she would have to surrender for five years the revenues from her Galician and Hungarian mines, and she resolved to do it altogether at her own cost. She had no wish to see the town figure in public prints as the object of public subscription.

'I am sure all my woman friends,' she said, 'would kindly make it occasion for a fancy fair or a lottery (with new costumes) in Vienna, but I do not care for that sort of thing, and I can very well do what is needed alone.'

He was silent. He had always known that her riches were great, but he had never realised them as fully as he now did when she spoke of rebuilding an entire town as she might have spoken of building a carriage.

'You would make a good prime minister,' she said, smiling; 'you have the knowledge of a specialist on so many subjects.'

At noon they served her a little plain breakfast of Danubian salbling, with Carlowitzer wine and fruit sent by the steward of Mohacs. She bade him join her in it.

'Had Egon himself been here he could not have done more for Idrac than you have done,' she said.

'Is this Prince Egon's wine?' he said abruptly, and on hearing that it was so, he set the glass down untasted.

She looked surprised, but she did not ask him his reason, for she divined it. There was an exaggeration in the unspoken hostility more like the days of Arthur and Lancelot than their own, but it did not displease her.

They were both little disposed to converse during their meal; after the dreary and terrible scenes they had been witness of, the atmosphere of life seems grave and dark even to those whom the calamity had not touched. The most careless spirit is oppressed by a sense of the precariousness and the cruelty of existence.

When they ascended to the deck the skies were lighter than they had been for many weeks; the fog had cleared, so that, in the distance, the towers of Neusatz and the fortress of Peterwardein were visible; vapour still hung over the vast Hungarian plain, but the Danube was clear and the affluents of it had sunk to their usual level.

'You really go to-night?' she said, as they looked down the river.

'There is no need for me to stay; the town is safe, and you are well, you say. If there be anything I can still do, command me.'

She smiled a little and let her eye meet his for a moment.

'Well, if I command you to remain then, will you do so as my viceroy? I want to return home; Aunt Ottilie grows daily more anxious, more alarmed, but I cannot leave these poor souls all alone with their priests, and their rabbi, who are all as timid as sheep and as stupid. Will you stay in the castle and govern them, and help them till they recover from their fright? It is much to ask, I know, but you have already done so much for Idrac that I am bold to ask you to do more?'

He coloured with a mingled emotion.

'You could ask me nothing that I would not do,' he said in a low tone. 'I could wish you asked me something harder.'

'Oh, it will be very hard,' she said, with an indifference she did not feel. 'It will be very dull, and you will have no one to speak to that knows anything save how to grow flax and cherries. You will have to talk the Magyar tongue all day, and you will have nothing to eat save kartoffeln and salbling; and I do not know that I am even right,' she added, more gravely, 'to ask you to incur the risks that come from all that soaked, ground, which will be damp so long.'

'The risks that you have borne yourself! Pray do not wound me by any such scruple as that. I shall be glad, I shall be proud, to be for ever so short or so long a time as you command, your representative, your servant.'

'You are very good.'

'No.'

His eyes looked at hers with a quick flash, in which all the passion he dared not express was spoken. She averted her glance and continued calmly: 'You are very good indeed to Idrac. It will be a great assistance and comfort to me to know that you are here. The poor people already love you, and you will write to me and tell me all that may need to be done. I will leave you the yacht and Anton. I shall return by land with my woman; and when I reach home I will send you Herr Greswold. He is a good companion, and has a great admiration for you, though he wishes that you had not forsaken the science of botany.'

'It is like all other dissection or vivisection; it spoils the artistic appreciation of the whole. I am yet unsophisticated enough to feel the charm of a bank of violets, of a cliff covered with alpen-roses. I may write to you?'

'You must write to me! It is you who will know all the needs of Idrac. But are you sure that to remain here will not interfere with your own projects, your own wishes, your own duties?'

'I have none. If I had any I would throw them away, with pleasure, to be of use to one of your dogs, to one of your birds.'

She moved from his side a little.

Wanda, Vol. 2 (of 3)