Wanda, countess von Szalras. A novel

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1^5

^

WANDA,

COUNTESS VON SZALKAS.

A NOVEL.

By OUIDA,

t. B. LIPPIMCOTT COMPANY.
1901.

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685405

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WANDA

PROEiVL

Doob — allM was dazn mfob trieb,

Gott t war so gut ! aoh, war so iieb ! — Gobths.

Towards the close of a summer'^ day in Russia a travel*
ling-carriage was compelled to pause before a little village
whilst a smith rudely mended its broken wheel. The hamlet
was composed of a few very poor dwellings grouped around
a large low horseshoe-shap^ building, which was the mano*
rial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and
dropping to decay ; its many windows were barred and shut-
tered ; the grass grew in its courts, and flowering weeds had
time to seed and root themselves on its whitewashed walls.

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

It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the
Volga rolls its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was
bleak and mournful, though for many leagues the green corn
spread and caught the timid sunshine and the shadow of the
clouds. There were a few stunted willows near the house,
and a few gashed pines ; a dried-up lake was glittering with
crystals of salt ; the domes and minarets of a little city rose
above the sky-line far away to the southeast ; and farther yel

1* 6

g WANDA.

northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains, — the
wall of stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All
was desolate, melancholy, isolated, even though the season
was early summer ; but the vastness of the view, the majesty
of the river, the suggestion of the faint blue summits where
the Ural? rose against the sky, gave solemnity and a melan-
choly charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous
and tedious.

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

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

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

'* Mine 1" echoed Paul Zabaroff. He was astonished; then
he laughed, as he remembered that he had large properties
around the city of Kazdn.

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

When he was ncr; in Paris he was in Petersburg, and he
was an impassioned and very daring gamester. These great
silent houses, in the heart of fir woods, in the centre of gras9

WANDA. 7

plains, or on the banks of lonely rivers, were all absolutely
unknown to and indifferent to him. He was too admired and
popular at his court ever to have had the sentence passed upon
him to retire to his estates ; but had he been forced to do so
he would have been as utterly an exile in any one of the
houses of his fatheis as if he had been consigned to Tobolsk
itself.

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

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

" It is only mad Maritza," said the people ; yet they thought
Maritza had some errand with their lord, for they fell back
and permitted her to approach him as she cried aloud, " Lc(

8 WANDA.

me come I Let me come I I would give him back the jewel
he lefl here ten years ago I''

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

'^All hail to my lord, and heaven be with him 1 The poor
Maritza comes to give him back what he lefl."

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

^^Nay, good mother, keep it, whatever it be: you have
earned the right. I& it a jewel, you say ?"

" It is a jewel."

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

"Ay I the great lord had forgotten."

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

" There is the jewel, Paul Ivanovitch. It is time the Gh)fih
podar kept it now."

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

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

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

Old Maritza kept her hands on the shoulders of the kneel-
ing child.

" He is thy son, 0 lord V

« My son 1"

"Ay. The lord has forgotten. The lord tarried but one
night, but he bade my Sacha serve drink to him in his cham-
ber, and on the morrow, when he left, Sacha wept The lord
has forgotten I"

Paul Zabarofif stood silent, slowly remembering. In the

WANDA. 0

boy'g face looking up at him half sullenly, half timidly, he
Baw the features of his own race, mingled with something
much more beauti^l, Oriental, and superb.

Yes, he had forgotten, quite forgotten ; but ho remembered
now.

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

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

Old Maritza made answer, —

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

Prince Zabaroff 's cheek reddened a little with pain.

'* Fool 1 why did you not marry her ?" he said with impa-
tience. " There were plenty of men. I would have given
more dowry."

^^ Sacha would not wed. What the lord had honored she
thought holy."

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

" Do yoli understand what we say ?"

The boy answered, sullenly, " I understand."

" What is your name ?"

" I am Vassia."

" And what do you do ?"

" I do nothing.*'^

" Are you happy ?"

« What is that ? I do not know."

Prince Zabaroff was silent.

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

The boy rose.

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

" I have delivered the jewel to the lord that owns it. 1
have done Sacha*s will."

Then she turned herself round, and (x>vered her face, and
went towards her home.

10 WANDA.

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

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

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

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

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

The four fiery horses that bore the tdegue dashed away
with it in the sunlight, scattering the sand in yellow clouds,
and the village on the Volga plains beheld its lord never more
in life. The boy stood still, and looked after it with a sombre
anger on his beautiful, fair Circassian face.
V " You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia," said the
men to him, with envy. The child could not have expressed
the vague mute wrath and shame that stiiTcd together in him,
but he turned from them without a word, and ran fleet as a
roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He loved hi?
great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost
passion, though it was so silent and almost unconscious of
itself. She never checked him, beat him, or cursed him, as
the other women often did their children. She did her best
by him, though they dwelt in a miserable little ts6a, that
often in winter-time was covered up with the snow like a
bear's hole, and in summer the fierce brief parching summer
of Northeast Russia was as hot as a scorched eye under a

WANDA, 11

Bnn-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to
him. He was loved, and he was free: childhood wants
nothing more. *

Maritza was a Persian woman. Years and years before,
when she had been in her youth, she had come from the
Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are alike alive with
• the leaping naphtha of the Ohebir worship ; she had been born
within the iron gates of Lerbent, of Persian parentage, and
she had known war and capture and violence, and had had
many troubles, many privations, many miseries, before she
had found herself stranded in her old age, with her grand-
child, in this little desolate village on the sand-bank by the
Volga.

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

She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor ; she
was hated accordingly. When her grand-daughter Sacha
bore a child that was the ofispring of Prince Paul Zabaroff,
though she cursed him, the neighbors envied her and be-
grudged her such an honor.

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

She never gave a thought to the boy's parentage as of pos-
sible use to him, but she always said to herself, ** If Paul
Zabaroff ever come back, then shall he know his son ;" and
meanwhile the boy was happy, though he had not known the
meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny Volga
in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts p:o
down it and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which

12 WANDA.

took the condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a
gang of such captives would go by on foot and chained, mis-
erable exceedingly, wounded, exhausted, doomed to twelve
months' foot-sore travel ere they reached the endless darkness
of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual frost. lie
wat/;hed them ; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity
nor pity as he lay on the tall rough grass and they moved by
him on the dusty, flint-strewn, ill-made road towards that
chain of blue hills which marked their future home and their
eternal grave. For sport the boy had the bear, the wolf, the
blue fox, the wild hare, in the long winter- time ; in the brief
summer he helped chase the pelican and the swan along the
sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves. He
was keen of eye and swift of foot : the men of his native vil-
lage were always willing to have his company, child though
he was. He was fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder
still of sport: once he risked his own life to save a stork and
her nest on a burning roof. When asked why he did it, he
who choked the cygnet and snared the cub, he could not say :
he was ashamed of his own tenderness.

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

The Persian woman bowed her head as before a heads-
man's glaive.

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

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

" Send him to a great school ; send him out of Russia ;
spare no cost ; make him a gentleman," Paul Zabaroff had
said to his agents when he had seen the son of Sacha ; and
he had been obeyed. The little, fierce, half-naked boy, who
in frost was wrapped in wolf-fur and looked like a little wild
beast, had been taken from the free, headstrong, barbaric life
of the Volga plains, where he was under no law and knew no
rule, and passionately loved the river and the chase, and the
great silent snow-wrapped world of his birth, and was sent to

WANDA. 18

% fiunoiu an-l severe collego near Paris, to the drill, and the
clu98, and the UDilorm, anil tlie classiv learoio^, aud ihe tupe-
boDDd, hard, artificial routine of meclianiual education. Tlie
pride of tha Oriental and the Bubtluty of the Slav were all
he brought ivilh him us arms in the uuliiuuI combat with an
nDBympathelic crowd.

Por a year's time he was insulted, tormented, ridiculed ; in
-•Dother twelTO-mcinth he was let alone ; in a third year lio
admired i^ud feared. All tbe while his heart was burst-
ling within tim with the agony of iiomesickness and revolt ;
"wt he gave no sign of either. Only at nighls, when the
ithers of hia chamber were all sleeping, he would slip out of
red and stare up at the stars, which did not look the same us
lie bad kuowu, and think of Maritz^, and of the bear-cubs,
Bnd of the Volga's waters bearing the wild wiiite swans upon
their breaste ; and then he would sob his very soul out iu

He had been entered upon the books of the collef^ under
t&e natno of Vassia Kaz&n, — KaKdn having been the ])lucc at
which he had been baptized, the golden-domed, many-tow-
ered, b^lf-Asialio oily which waa seen afar off from the little
square window in Maritza'ti hut. High influenoo and much
gold had persuaded the principal of a great college — the
Iiyo^ Olovia, situnted between I'aris and Versailles— not to
iiKjuTre too closely into the parentage of this beautiful little
savage from the far North. Kus«ia still rcmaius dim, dis-
tant, and mysterious to the Weetern mind : among his tutors
and comrades it was taken for granted that he was some young
barbarian noble, and the child's own lips were shut as close as
if the ice of his own land had frozen them.

Kight years later, on another day when wheat was ripe and
willows waved in summer sunshine, a youth lay asleep, with
his head on an open Lucretius, in the deserted play-ground of
■ French college. The place of recreation was a dusty grav-
eled square; there were high stone walls all round it, and a
few poplars stood in it white with dust. It was August, and
all the other scholars were away ; he alone had been forgotten j
he was ured to being fori^otten. He was not dull or sorrow-
iiil, as other lads are when Icfl in vnoatinn-time alone. He
ind many arts and pastime!*, and he was a scholar by choice,
' 4 capricious one, and ho had u quick and facile tact which

14 WANDA.

taught him how to hr.TO his own way i Iways ; and on many a
summer night, when his teachers believed him safe sleeping,
he was out of college, and away dancing and singing and
laughing at students' balls, and in the haunts of artists, and
at the little theatre beyond the barrier, and he had never
been found out, and would have cared but little if he had
been.

And he slept now with his fair forehead leaning on Lucre-
tius, and a drowsy, heavy heat around him, filled with the
hum of flies and gnats. He did not dream of the heat and
the insects ; he did not even dream of the saucy beauty at the
barrier ball the night before, who had kicked cherries out of
his mouth with her blue-shod feet and kissed him on hia
curls. He dreamt of a little, low, dark hut ; of an old woman
that knelt before a brazen image ; of slumbering bear-cubs in
a nest of hay ; of a winter landscape, white and shining, that
stretched away in an unbroken level of snow to the sea that
half the year was ice. He dreamed of these, and, dreaming,
sighed and woke. He thought he stood on the frozen sea,
and the ice broke, and the watera swallowed him.

It was nothing ; only the voice of his tutor calling him.
He was summoned to the principal of the Lyc^e, — a rare
honor. He rose, a slender, tall, beautiful youth, in the dark,
close-fitting costume of the institute. He shook the dust ofif
his uniform and his curls, shut his book, and went within the
large whito prison-like building which had been his home
since he had left the lowly isba among the sand-hills and the
blowing corn by Volga.

The principal was sitting in one of his private chambers, —
a grim, dark, book-lined chamber ; he held an open letter in
hb hand, which he had read and re-read. He was a clever
man, and unscrupulous and purchasable ; but he was not with-
out feeling, and he was disquieted, for he had a painful office
to fulfil.

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

The principal took up the open letter. " I regret, I grieve,
to tell you," ho said, slowly, ^^ your patron and fiiend, the
Prince Zabaroff| has died suddenly.''

WAJSfDA. 15

The face of Yassia Kaz&n grew vory pale, but very cold
He said nothing.

^' He died quite suddenly/* continued the director of the
college. "A blood-vessel broke in the brain, after great fatigue
in hunting : he was upon one of his estates in White Kussia."

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

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

Yassia Kaz&n bowed and still said nothing. He might
have been made of ice or of marble, for any sign that ho gave.
He might only have heard that an unknown man had died in
the street.

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

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

The boy was silent

"If he would only speak!" thought his master. "He
must know ; he must know.*'

But the son of the dead Zabaroff did not speak.

" I am sorry to say," resumed his master, still with hesita-
tion, " I am very sorry to say that, the death of the prince
being thus sudden and thus unforeseen, his agents write me
that there are no instructions, no arrangement, no testament ;
in short, you will understand what I mean ; you will under-
stand that, in point of fact, there is nothing for you, there \a
BO one to pay anything any longer."

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

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

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

16 WANDA.

The boy smiled slightly : it was not a smile for so yoang •
face.

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

" I believe I am a serf in Hussia/* he added, after a short
silence.

" I do not know at all/* muttered the principal, who felt
ill at ease and ashamed of himself for having taken for eight
years the gold of Prince Paul. "I cannot tell: lawyers
would tell you. I am not sure at all ; indeed, I know
nothing of your history ; but you are young and friendless.
You are a brilliant scholar, but you are not fit for work.
What will you do, my poor lad ?'*

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

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

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

The youth smiled : then he said, coldly, —

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

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

The boy shrugged his shoulders.

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

" His eldest son by his marriage with a Princess K^urou-
•ssine. If he had only left some will, some sort of a direction.
Perhaps if I wrote to the princess and told her the facts *'

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

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

WAl^DA. 17

" Vassia, do not lea^e U8 like that I do not like to see
you so cold) so quiet) so UDnaturallj indifferent. You are
left friendless and nameless; and, after all, he was your
father."

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

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

'^ But what do you mean to do ?"

" I will do what offers."

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

" Adieu, sir."

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

Three years before, he had been summoned to a chriteau
on the north coast of France in the full summer season. It
had entered into the capricious fancy of Prince Zabaroff that
he should like to see what the wild young wolf-cub of the
Volga plains had become. He had found in him a youth so
handsome, so graceful, so accomplished, that a certain fibre
k 2*

18 WANDA,

of paternal pride had been touched in hira ; whilst the cold
ness, the silence, and the disdainfulness of the boy's temper
had commanded his respect. No word of their relationship
had passed between them, but by the guests assembled there
it had been assumed that the young Vassia Kazdn was near
of kin to their host, whose lawfully-begotten sons and daugh-
t<}rs were fur away in one of his summer palaces of the
Crimea.

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

This summer day, as he had sat in the large white cour*^
yard, shadowed by the Parisian poplar-treest he had remem'
bered that he was within a few weeks of the completion of
his eighteenth year, and he had wondered what they meant

WANDA. W

fco do with him. He had heard Dothing from Prince Zabaroff
since those brilliant^ vivid, tumultuous months, which had left
on him a confused sense of dazzling though vague expectation.
He had hoped every summer to hear something, but each sum-
mer had passed in silence; and now he was told that Paul
Zabaroff was dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a far-off murmur on the sultry summer air, and a

20 WANDA.

far-off gleam of metal beyond the leaves of the poplar-trees :
it was the murmur of the streets and the glisten of the roofs
of Paris.

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

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

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

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

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

* If Maritza were not dead, I would go back,'* he thought

WANDA, 21

But Maritza had been long dead, laid away under the snow b7
her daughter's side.

The boy went to Paris.

Would it be any fault of his what he became ?

He told himself, No.

It would lie with the dead, and with Paris.

CHAPTER L

In the heart of the Hohe Tauem, province of lakes and
streams, there lies one lake called the Szalrassee, — known tc
the pilgrim, to the fisher, to the hunter, but to the traveller
little, for it is shut away from the hum and stir of man by the
amphitheatre of its own hills and forests. To the southeast
of it lies the Isclthal, and to the northwest the Wilde Gerlos ;
due east is the great Glookner group, and due west the Venc-
diger. Farther away are the Alps of Zillerthal, and on the
opposite horizon the mountains of Carinthia.

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

The lake lies like a crystal bedded in rock, lovely and

22 WANDA.

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

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

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

WAJSDA, 23

lo 22i a fortress that has wedded a palace ; it is majestioy
powerful, imposing, splendid, like the great race of which it
BO long has been the stronghold and the birthplace. But it
is as lonely in the quiet heart of the everlasting hills as anj
falcon's or heron's nest hung in the oak branches.

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

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

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

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

The old faith still lives, very simple, warm, and earnest, in

24 WATJDA.

the heart of Aastria, and with that day-^iawn in midsQmmcr
thonsands of peasant- folks flock from mountain -villages and
forest-chalets and little remote secluded towns, to speed over
the green lake with flaming crucifix and floating banner, and
chanted anthem echoed from hill to hill. One of those days
of pilgrimage had made her mistress of Hohenszalras.

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

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

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

WAyVA. 25

tions. " I am but the steward of God,** he wonid say, with
a tender smile, to the poor who blessed him.

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

When the tidings of his heroic end reached her at the
imperial hunting-place of Godollo, all the world died for her,-^
that splendid pageant of a world, whose fairest and riohesi
B 8

26 WANDA.

favors had been always showered on the daughter of the
mighty house of Szalras. She withdrew herself from her
friends, from her lovers, from her mistress, and mourned for
him with a grief that time could do little to assuage, nothing
to efface. She was then twenty years of age.

She was thinking of that death now, four years later, as
8ho stood on the terrace which overhung the cruel rocks that
had killed him.

His loss was to her a sorrow that could never wholly pasa
•way.

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

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

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

Standing upon her terrace, in a gown :f pale-gray velvet
that had no ornament save an old gold girdle with an enam-
elled missal hung to it, with two dogs at her side, one the
black hunting-hound of St. Hubert, the other the white
•leuth-hound of Bussia, she looked like a ch^ltclaine of the
days of Mary of Burgundy or Elizabeth of Thuringia. It

WANDA. 27

seemed as if the dt.rk cedar boughs behind her should lift
aud admit to her preaeuce some lover with her glove against
the plume of his hat, and her ring set in his sword-hilt, who
would bow down before her feet and not dare to touch her
hand unbidden.

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

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

The Countess Wanda leaned against the balustrade of the
terrace and watched that banquet of color on land and cloud
and water, — watched till the sun sank out of sight behind

28 WANDA.

the Yeneiiger snows and the domes of t!;e Clockner, and all
the lesser peaks opposite were changing from the warmth, as
of a summer rose, to a pure transparent gray, that seemed
here and there to he pierced as with fire.

" How oflen do we thank God for the mountains ?" she
thought. " Yet we ought every night that we pray."

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

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

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

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

" Yet her majesty is so right I — so right and so wise 1'
said a familiar voice at her side.

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

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

'^ Her majesty is so right I" she said, once more, with em-
phasis.

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

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

/* nohcnszahras is ail very well in the summer and autumUi '

WANDA. 29

Bald Princess Otiilie, with a glance of anytldng bat love at
the great fantastic solemn pile ; " but for a woman of your
age and your possessions to pass your days talking to farmers
and fishermen, poring over books, perplexing yourself as to
whether it ir right for you to accept wealth that comes from
Buch a sourci of danger to human life as your salt-miues, it is
absurd, it is ludicrous. You are made for something more
than a political economist; you should be in the erreat
world,"

" I prefer my solitude and my liberty."

" Liberty I Who or what could dictate to you in the world T
You reigned there once ; you would always reign there."

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

" Certainly, if you love solitude so much, you have your
heart's desire here. It is an Alvernia I It is a Mount Athos 1
It is a snow-entombed paraclete, a hermitage, only tempered
by horses I" said the princess, with a little angry laugh.

Her grand-niece smiled.

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

The princess sighed.

She had never been able to comprehend the forest life, the
daring, the intrepidity, the open-air pastimes, and the delight
in danger which characterized all the race of Szalras. Daughter
of a North-German princeling, and with some French blood
in her veins also, reared under the formal etiquette of her
hereditary court, and at an early age canoness of one of those
gr^at semi-religious orders which are only open to the offspring
of royal or of most noble lines, her whole life had been one
moulded to form and conventional habit, and only her own
■weetness and sprightliness of temper had saved her from the
narrowness of judgment and the chilliness of formality which
such a life begets. The order of which until late years she
had been superior was one for magnificence and wealth unsur-
passed in Europe ; but, semi-secular in its privileges, it had
left her much liberty, and never wholly divorced her from the
world, which in rn innocent way she had always loved and
enjoyed. After Count Victor's death she had resigned her
office CD the plea of ago and delicacy of health, and had come

8*

30 WANDA.

to take up her residence at Hohcnszalras with her dead niecc't
childreD. She had done so because she had believed it to 09
her duty, and her attachment to Wanda and Bela had always
been very great ; but she had never learned to love the soli*
tude of the Hohe Tauern or ceased to resrard Hohcnszalras bm
a place of martyrdom. After the minute divisions of every
hour and observance of every smallest ceremonial that she had
been used to at her father's own little court of Lilienslust, and
in her own religious house, where every member of the order
was a daughter of some one of the highest families of Ger-
many or of Austria, the life at Hohcnszalras, with its out-door
pastimes, its feudal habits, its vast liberties for man and beast,
and its long frozen winters, when not a soul could come near it
from over the passes, seemed very terrible to her. She could
never understand her niece's passionate attachment to it, and
she in real truth only breathed entirely at ease in those few
weeks of the year which — to please her — her niece consented
to pass away frpm the Hohe Tauero.

" Surely you will go to Ischl or to Godollo this autumn,
since her majesty wishes it ?" she said, now, with an approving
plance at the imperial letter.

" Her majesty is so kind as always to wish it," answered the
Countess Wanda. " Let us leave time to show what it holds
for us. This is scarcely summer. Yesterday was the 15th
of May."

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

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

" When the mist allows it to be seen, it will be, I dare say,**
said Princess Ottilie, somewhat pettishly. " It is tolerable
here in the summer, though never agreeable. But the Em*
press is so right ; it is absurd to shut yourself longer up in
this gloomy place ; you are bound to return to the world.
You 6we it to your position to be seen in it once more."

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

" That is sheer perversity "

ffTANDA. ^1

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

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

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

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

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

** In the world," interrupted the princess, appositely, " you
might perauade them that the sweeping of door-steps is not
lufficient "

32 WANDA.

" I prefer td keep my own house in order. It is quite
enough occupation," said the Counte&s Wanda, witL a smile.
** Dear aunt, here among my own folks I can do some real
good, I have some tangible influence, I can feci that my life
is not altogether spent in vain. Why should I exchange
these simple and solid satisfactions for the frivolities and the
inanities of a life of pleasure which would pot even please
mer

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

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

" Forgive me, my beloved I" said Princess Ottilie, with
quick contrition, whilst moisture sprang into her limpid and
Btill luminous blue eyes.

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

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

** If you would only marry " said the princess, with

some hesitation.

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

'* Amusing I'' said the princess, a little scandalized. '^ I
could speak of no sacrament of our Holy Church as ^ amus*
ing.' You rarely display such levity of language. I confess^
I do not comprehend you. Marriage would give you inter-
ests in life which you seem to lack sadly now. It would re-
store you to the world. It would be a natural step to take,
with such vast possessions as yours."

" It is not likely I shall ever take it," said Wanda von
Szalras, drawing the soil fine ear of Donau through her fin-
gers.

'* I know i'. a not likely. I am very sorry that it is no4

WANDA, 33

likely. Yet ^ihat nobler creature does Gk)d*8 earth <!oi.taiti
than your cousin Egon ?'*

'* Egon ? Yes, he is t. good and brave and loyal gentle-
man, none better ; but I shall no more marry him than Donau
here will wed a forest doe."

'* Yet he has loved you for ten yew's. Bat, if not he, there
are so many others, men of high enough j^lace to be above all
suspicion of mercenary motive. No woman has been more
adored than you, Wanda. Look at Hugo Landrassy."

"Uh, pray spare me their enumeration, It is like the
Catalogue of Ships I'* ^aid the Countess Wanda, with somo
coldness and some impatience on her face.

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

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

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

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

"That view of them never occurred to me," said the
chatelaine of Ilohensialras. " I think you must have stolen
it, aunt, from some ahbe galant or some chanmnesse as lovely
as yourself in the last century. Alas 1 if not to care to eai
be ungrateful, I am a sad ingrate. Donau and Neva are more
ready subscribers to your creed."

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

In the north alone the sky was overcast and of a tawny
color, where the Piuzgau lay, with the i:;reen Sulzach water
rushing through its wooded gorges, and its tracts of sand and
stone desolate as any desert.

Tha* slender space of angry yellow to the north boded ill
for ih« night. . Bitter storms rolled in west from the Bohmer-

34 WANDA.

wald or north from the Salzkammergut, taanj a time in the
summer weather, changing it to winter as they passed, tug-
ging at the rocf-ropes of the chalets, driving the sheep into
their sennerin'o huts, covering with mist and rain the moun-
tain-sides, and echoing in thunder from the peaks of the
Unterherger to the snows of the Ortler-spitz. It was such a
Audden storm whicli had taken Bela's life.

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

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

" What was that ?"

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

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

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

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

" Why, he would have shot a kutengeier /"

" A kutengeier is a horrible beast," said the princess, with
a shudder, ^^ and a stranger, just for an hour or so, would be
welcome."

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

** If he had been a peddler, or a clock-maker, you would
have sent him in to rest. For a gentlewoman, Wanda, and
BO proud a one as you are, you are curiously cruel to your own
class."

*< I am always cruel to poachers. And to shoot a Tultnrr
in the month of May I"

WANDA. 85

CHAPTER 11.

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

There were upper servants in black clothes with knee-
breeches, and a dozen lackeys in purple and silver liveries,
ranged about the table. In many ways there was a careless-
ness and ease in the household which always seemed l:imcnta«
ble to the Princess Ottilie, but in matters of etiquette the
great household was ruled like a small court ; and when sov-
ereigns became guests there little in the order of the day
needed change at Hohenszalras.

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

In this hall there wore some fifteen persons standing. They
were the priest, the doctor, the high steward, the almoner,
some dames de compagnie^ and some poor ladies, widows or
spinsters, who subsisted on the charities of Hohenszalras. The
two noble ladies bowed to them all and said a few kind words,

86 WANDA.

then passed on and seated themselves at their own tahle,
whilst these other persons took their scats noiselessly at a
longer table, behind a low screen of carved oak.

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

The Countess Wanda and her aunt spoke little ; the one
was thinking of many other things than of the food brought
to her, the other Was enjoying to the uttermost each hovx^Me^
oach reUvS^ each morsel of quail, each mouthful of wine-
0towed trout, each succulent truffle, and each rich drop of
orown tokay.

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

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

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

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

She seated herself here by the unshuttered casement. The
moon was glancing like a broad silver scutcheon above the
Glockner range, and the rain-clouds as yet did not obscure it,
though a Aim of falling water veiled all the westward shore of
the lake and all the snows on the peaks and crests of the Yene-
diger. She leaned her elbows on the cushioned seat, and
looked out into the night

" Bda, my Bcia 1 are you content with mo ?'* she murmured.

WAXDA. 37

To her Bcia was as living as though ho were proseni by hci
side; she lived in the constant belief of his compaiionsbip
and his eight. Death was a cruel — ah, how cruel! — wall
built up between him and her, forbidding them the touch of
each other's hands, denying them the smiles of each other's
eyes ; but none the less to her was he there, unseen, but ever
near, hidden behind that inexorable, invisible barrier which
one day would fall and let her pass and join him.

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

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

<* I am but God's and Bela*s steward, as my steward i^ mine,"
she said always to herself, and never avoided any duty oi
labor entailed on her, never allowed weariness or self-indulg-
enoe to enervate her. Qui faeit per aiium /acitjyer se, had
been early taught to her, and she never forgot it. She nevei
did anything vicariously which concerned those dependent

4

38 WANDA.

upon her. And she was an absolute sovereign il this her
kingdom of glaciers and forests,— ^ler frozen &ea, as she ha<l
called it. She never avoided a duty merely because it was
troublesome, and she never gave her signature without know-
ing why and wherefore. It is easy to be generous ; to be jusfc
b more difficult and burdensome. Generous by temper, sho
strove earnestly to be always j^st as well, and her life was
not without those fatigues which a very great fortune brings
with it to any one who regards it as a sacred trust.

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

All these things and places made a vast source of revenue,
and the property, whose title-deeds and archives lay in many
a chest and coffer in the old city of Salzburg, was one of the
largest in Europe. It would have given large portions and
dowries to a score of sons and daughters and been none the
worse. And it was all accumulating on the single head of
one young and lonely woman I She was the last of her race ;
there were distant collateral branches, but none of them near
enough to have any title to Hohenszalras. She could bequeath
it where she would, and she had already willed it to her
Kaiserinn, in a document shut up in an iron chest in the city
of Salzburg. Sho thought the crown wculd be a surer and

WANDA. 39

joster guardian of her place and people than any one person,
whose caprices she could not foretell, whose extravagance or
whose injustice she could not foresee. Sometimes, even to
the spiritual mind of the Princess Ottilie, the persistent refusal
of her niece to think of any marriage seemed almost a crime
tigainst mankind.

What did the Crown want with it?

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

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

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

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

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

One letter her secretary could not answer for her ; it was a
letter which gave her pain, and which she read with an im-
patient sigh. It urged her return to the world, as the letter
gf her Empress had done, and it urged with timidity, yet with

40 WANDA.

passion, a love that had been loyal to her from hei ehildhood.
It was signed " Egon VJisJirhely."

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

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

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

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

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

Before him, in the clear air, a large, dark object rose and

WAl^DA. 41

spread huge pinions to the wind and soared aloft. The tres-
passer lifted bis rifle to his shoulder, tjiud in another moment
would have fired. But an alpenstock struck the barrel up
into the air, and the shot went oif harmless towards the
clonda The great bird, startled by the report, flew rapidly
to the westward ; the Countess Wanda said quietly to the
poacher in her forest, " You cannot carry arms here."

He looked at her angrily and in surprise.

" You have lost me the only eagle 1 have seen for years,*'
he said, bitterly, with a flush of discomfiture and powerless
rage on his fair face.

She smiled a little.

" That bird was not an eagle, sir ; it was a white-throated
vulture, a hutengeier. But had it been an eagle — or a spar-
row— ^you could not have killed it on my lands."

Pale still with anger, he uncovered his head.

" 1 have not the honor to know in whose presence I stand,"
he muttered, sullenly. " But I have imperial permission to
shoot wherever I choose."

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

" I know nothing of Hohenszalras I" he interrupted, with
impatience.

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

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

" You know Hohenszalras now 1" said the mistress of it,
with a smile, as she watched his seizure, seated on a moss-
grown boulder of granite, black Bonau and white Neva by
her side. He was pale with impotent fury, conscious of an
indefensible and absurd position. The jiigcrs looked at their
mistress ; they had slipped a cord over his wrists, and tied
them behind his back ; they looked to her for a sign of assent
to break his rifle. She stood silent, amused with her victpry

4»

ii WANDA.

and his ohastbcmont, a little tension si jQing in her lustrous
eyes.

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

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

^^ Right I" echoed the mistress of the forests. ^^ I have the
right to do anything I please with you 1 You seem to me to
understand but little of forest laws."

^* Madame, were you not a woman, you would have bad
bloodshed."

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

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

A look of deep anger passed over her face. " The follies
of 'Forty-eight have nothing to do with Hohenszalras," she
said, very coldly. " We hold under charters of our own, by
grants and rights which even Rudolph of Hapsburg never
dared meddle with. I am not called on to explain this to
you, but you appear to labor under such strange delusions that
it is as well to dispel them."

He stood silent, his eyes cast downward. His humiliation
seemed to him enormously disproportioned to his offending.
The hounds menaced him with deep growls and grinning
fangs ; the j'agers held his gun ; his wrists were tied behind
him. " Are you indeed a friend of the Kaiser ?" she re
peated to him.

'^ I am no friend of his," he answered, bitterly and sul-
lenly. ^^ I met him awhile ago zad-hunting on the Thorstein.
His signature is in my pocket; bid your jagers take it out."

" I will not doubt your word," she said to him. " You look
a gentleman. If you will give me your promise to shoot no
more on these lands, I will lot them set you free, and render
jrou up your ri^o."

WANDA. 43

" You have the law with you," said the trespasser, moodily.
" Since I can do no less, I promise."

" You are ungracious, sir," said Wanda, with a touch of
severity and irritation. " That is neither wise nor grateful,
since you are nothing more nor better than a poacher on my
lands. Nevertheless, I will trust you."

Then she gave a sign to the jagers and a touch to the
hounds : the latter rose and ceased their growling ; the former
instantly, though very sorrowfully, untied the cord off the
wrists of their prisoner and gave him back his unloaded rifle.

^^ Follow that path into the ravine ; cross that ; ascend the
opposite hills, and you will find the high-road. I advise you
to take it, sir. Good-day to you."

She pointed out the forest- path which wound downward
under the arolla pines. He hesitated a moment, then bowed
very low with much grace, turned his back on her and her
foresters and her dogs, and began slowly to descend the moss-
grown slope.

He hated her for the indignity she had brought upon him,
and the ridicule to which she forced him to submit ; yet the
beauty of her had startled and dazzled him. He had thought
of the great queen of the Nibelungenlied, whose armor lies
in the museum of Vienna.

" Alas ! why have you let him go, my countess ?" mur-
mured Otto, the head forester.

" The Kaiser had made him sacred," she answered, with a
smile ; and then she called Donau and Neva, who were roam-
ing, and went on her way through her forest.

" What strange and cruel creatures we are 1" she thought.
" Tlie vulture would have dropped into the ravine. He would
never have found it. The audacity, too, to fire on a kate^n-
geier I if it had been any lesser bird one might have pardoned
it."

For the eagle, the gypsBte, the white-throated pygargue, the
buzzard, and all the family of falcons were held sacred at
Hohenszalras, and lived in their mountain haunts rarely
troubled. It was an old law there that the great winged
monarchs should never be chased, except by the Kaiser him-
self when he came there. So that the crime of the stranger
had been more than trespass, and almost treason I Her heart
was hard to him, and she felt that she had been too lenient

4 4 WANDA.

Who could toll but that that rifle would . ring iown some free
lord of the air ?

She listeued with the keen ear of one used to the solitude
of the hills and woods ; she thought he would shoot some-
thing out of bravado. But all was client in that green defile
beneath whose boughs the stranger was wending on his way.
She listened long, but she heard no shots, although in those
still heights the slightest noise echoed from a hundred walls
of rock and ice. She walked onward through the deep
shadow of the thick-growing beeches ; she had her alpenstock
in her right hand, her little silver horn hung at her belt, and
beside it was a pair of small ivory pistols, pretty as toys, but
deadly as revolvers could be. She stooped here and there to
gather some lilies of the valley, which were common enough
in these damp grassy glades.

** Where could that stranger have come from, Otto ?" she
asked of her jager.

" He must have come over the Hundspitz, my countess,"
said Otto. " Any other way he would have been stopped by
bur men and lightened of his rifle.''

" The Hundspitz I" she echoed, in wonder, for the mountain
so called was a wild inaccessible place, divided by a parapet of
ice all the year round from the range of the Gross Glockner.

'' That must he," said the huntsman ; ^* and for sure if an
honest man had tried to come that way he would have beea
hurled headlong down the ice- wall "

" He is the Kaiser's prot6g6^ Otto," said his mistress, with
a smile ; but the old j^ger muttered that they had only his
own word for that. It had pierced Otto's soul to let the
poacher's rifle go.

She thought of all this with some compunction now, as she
sat in her own warm safe chamber and heard the thunder,
the wind, the raging of the storm, which had now fairly
broken in full fury. She felt uneasy for the erring stranger.
The roads over the passes were still perilous from avalanches
and half-melted snow in the crevasses ; the time of year was
more dangerous than mid-winter.

" I ought to have given him a guide," she thought, and
went out and joined the Princess Ottilie, who had awakened
from her after-dinner repose under the loud roll of th«
thunder and the constantly recurring flashes of lightning.

WANDA. 45

'* I am troubled for that traveller whom saw in the woods
to-day/' she said to her aunt. ^' I trust he is safe housed."

'* If he had been a pastry-cook from the EDgadine, or a
seditious heretical colporteur from Geneva, you would have
sent him into the kitchens to feast," said the princess, sen-
tentiously.

" I hope he is safe housed," repeated Wanda. " It is several
hours ago : he may very well have reached the post-house.'

'' You have the satisfaction of thinking the kuteiige^er la
Bafe, sitting on some rock tearing a fish to pieces," said the
princess, who was irritable because she was awakened before
her time. ^' Will you have some coffee or some tea ? You
look disturbed, my dear. After all, you say the man was a
poacher."

" Yes. But I ought to have seen him safe off my ground.
There are a hundred kinds of death on the hills for any one
who does not know them well. Let us look at the weather
from the hall : one can see better from there."

From the Kittersaal, whose windows looked straight down
the seven miles of the lake water, she watched the tempest.
All the mountains were sending back echoes of thunder,
which sounded like salvoes of artillery. There was little to
be seen for the dense rain-mist : the beacon of the Holy Isle
glimmered redly through the darkness. In the upper aii
snow was falling ; the great white peaks and pinnacles ever
and again flashed strangely into view as the lightning il-
lumined them; the Gross Wanda in the Glockner towered
above all others a moment in the glare, and seemed like ice
and fire mingled.

" They are like the great white thrones of the Apocalypse,"
she thought.

Beneath, the lake boiled and seethed in blackness like a
witches' caldron.

A storm was always terrible to her from the memory of
Bela.

In the lull of a second in the tempest of sound it seemed
to her as if she heard some other cry than that of the wind.

'* Open one of these windows and listen," she said to Hu-
bert, her major-domo. " I fancy I hear a shout, — a scream.
I am not certain ; but listen well."

'^ There is some sound," said Hubert, after a moment of at

46 WANDA,

tontion. ** It comos from tho lake. Bu no boat lould live
lung in that water, my countess.*'

** No 1'' hHo said, with a quick sigh, remembering how hei
brother had died. ** But wo must do what we can. It may
bo one of tho lako-iishcrmen, caught in the storm before he
oould make for home. Ring the alarm-bell, and go out, all
of you, to tho water^itairs. I will come, too.''

In a few moments the deep bell that hung in the chime-
towor, and which was never sounded except for death oi
dangiT, added its sonorous brazen voice to the clang and damoi
of tho storm. All the household paused, and at the sum-
mons, coming from north, south, east, and west of the great
I tile of buildings, grooms, gardeners, huntsmen, pages, soul-
ions, underlings, all answered to the metal tongue which told
thorn of some peril at Ilohenszalras.

With a hooded cloak thrown over her, she went out into
the driving rain, down the terrace, to the head of what were
called tho wat^T-stairs, — a flight of granite steps leading to
tho little quay uiK>n tho eastward shore of the Szalrassee, where
wt^re m(H>rtHi in fair weather the pleasure-boats, the fishing-
punt^s and the canoos which belonged to the casde, — crafb all
now safe in the lH>at -house,

'' Make no o^^n fusion/' she said to them. '' There is no
danger in tho castle. There is some boat, or some swimmer,
on tho lakc« Light the terrace beacon, and we shall see."

8hc wad Terr pale. There was no storm on thoee waters
that did not bring back to her, as poignant as the first fireeh
hours of it$ griofl the death of Bela.

The hugo lH>ac\>n of in>n. a cage set on high and filled
with tow and tar and all infianimable things, was set on fire,
and s*x^n threw a scarlet glare over the scene.

The shouts had ctvuscd.

*' They may be viix^wned/* she said, with her lips proged
li^tly t^^thcT. '' I hear nothing now. Have yon the rope
and the lite K^at rwidy? We must wait for more light."

At that mt^ment the whv>lc of the tar canghu aini the bea-
«« blaikMUHl at ita fiorcecst in its ii\>n <ai*^\ as it bad used tc
bhiae in the ageis cvh^c by as a war-signal, when the pKlatei
of Salibvn; an^l Herchtc^Rcaden were marchiiur across the
marshes of l^ncgau in ouarrel or f£^nd with the loids of the
•uvvi^Xfi^ t\^rt4XK« in tho Hohc T^iucn^.

WANDA. 47

In the struggling light which met the ; i le glance of the
lightning they could see the angry waters of the lake as fai
as the Holy Isle, and near to land, only his head above the
water, was a man drowning, as the pilgrims had drowned.

" For the love of God, the rope !'* she cried, and almost
before the words had escaped from her her men had thrown
a life-buoy to the exhausted swimmer and pushed one of the
boats into the seething darkness of the lake. But the swim<«
mer had strength enough to catch hold of the buoy as it was
hurled to him by the Jischmeister^s unerring hand, and he
clung to it and kept his grasp on it, despite the raging of the
wind and waters, until the boat reached him. He was fifly
yards off the shore, and he was pulled into the little vessel,
which was tossed to and fro upon the black waters like a
shell ; the /ohn was blowing iSerccly all the time, and flung
the men headlong on the boat's bottom twice ere they could
seize the swimmer, who helped himself, for, though mute and
almost breathless, he was not insensible, and had not lost all
his strength. If he had not been so near the land, he and
the boat's crew would all have sunk, and dead bodies would
once more have been washed on the shore of the Szalrassce
with the dawn of another day.

Drenched, choked with water, and thrown from side to side
as the wind played with them as a child with its ball, the men
ran their boat at last against the stairs, and landed with their
prisse.

Dripping from head to foot, and drawing deep breaths of
exhaustion, the rescued man stood on the terrace steps bare-
headed and in his shirt-sleeves, his brown velvet breechej
pulled up to his knees, his fair hair lifted by the wind and
soaked with wet.

She recognized the trespasser of the forest.

" Madame, behold me in your power again I" he said, with
a little smile, though he breathed with labor and his voice was
breathless and low.

"You are welcome, sir Any stranger or friend would be
welcome in such a night," she said, with the red glow of the
beacon-light shed upon her. " Pray do not waste breath or
time in courtesies. Come up the steps and hurry to the house.
Tou must be faint and bruised."

" No, no," said the swimmer ; but, as he spoke, his eyes

48 WANDA,

alo8ocl, ho staggered a little ; a deadly faintness and cold had
seized him, aud cramp came on all his limhs.

The men caught him, and carried him up the staii.-i ; he strove
to struggle and protest, hut Otto the forester stooped over him.

** Keep you still," he muttered. " You have the countess'g
orders. Trespass has cost you dear, my master."

^ I do not think he is greatly hurt," said the mistress of
Ssaravola to her house physician. " But go you to him,
doctor, and sec that he is warmly housed and has hot drinks.
Put him in the strangers* gallery, and pray take care my aunt
18 not alarmed."

The Princess Ottilie at that moment was alternately eating
a nougat out of her sweetmeat-box and telling the beads of
her rosary. The sound of the wind and the noise of the storm
could not reach her in her favorite blue-room, all capitonni
with turquoise silks as it was, — the only chamber in all Szara-
vola that was entirely modern and French.

*' I do hope Wanda is running no risk," she thought, fvom
time to time. '^ It would be quite like her to row down the
lake."

But she sat still in her lamp-light, and told her beads.

A few moments later her niece entered. Her water-proof
mantle had kept her white gown from the rain and spray.

There was a little moisture on her hair, that was all. She
did not look as if she had stirred farther from her drawing-
room than the abbess had done.

Now that the stranger was safe and sound, he had ceased
to have any interest for her ; he was nothing more than any
flotsam of the lake ; only one other to sleep beneath the roo&
of Hohenszalras, where half a hundred slept already.

The castle, in the wild winters that shut out the Kobe
Tauern from the world, was oftentimes a hospice for travellers,
though usually those travellers were only peddlers, colporteurs,
mule-drivers, clock-makers of the Zillerthal, or carpet- weavers
of the Defereggentkal, too late in the year to pursue their cus-
tomary passage over the passes in safety. To such the great
beacon of the Holy isle and the huge servants' hall of Szaravola
were well known.

She sat down to her embroidery-frame without speaking;
she was working some mountain-fiowers in silks on velvet, fn
a frvend in Paris. The flowers stood in a glass on a table.

WANDA, 49

'' It is unkind of you to go out in that mad way on such a
night as this, and return looking so unlike having had h&
adventure I*' said the princess, a little pcttislily.

" There has been no adventure," said Wanda von Ssalras,
with a smile. " But there is what may do as well, — a hand-
some stranger who has been saved from drowning."

Even as she spoke her face changed, her mouth quivered ;
she crossed herself, and murmured, too low for the other to
hear, —

" Bela, my beloved, think not that I forget I"

Thtt Princess Ottilie sat up erect in her chair, and her blue
eyes brightened like a girl of sixteen.

" Then there is an adventure ! Toll it me, quick ! My
dear, silence is very stately and very becoming to you, but
sometimes — excuse me — ^you do push it to annoying extremes."

" I was afraid of agitation for you," said the Countess
Wanda ; and then she told the abbess what had occurred that
night.

" And I never knew that a poor soul was in peril !" cried
the princess, conscience-stricken. " And is that the last you
have seen of him ? Have you never asked ?"

" Hubert says he is only bruised. They have taken him
to the strangers* gallery. Here is Herr Qreswold : he will
tell us more."

The person who entered was the physician of Hohenszalras.
He was a little old man of great talent, with a clever, humor-
ous, mild countenance ; he had, coupled with a love for rural
life, a passion for botany and natural history, which made his
immurement in the Iselthal welcome to him, and the many
fancied ailments of the abbess endurable. He bowed very
low alternately to both ladies, and refused with a protest the
chair to which the Countess Wanda motioned him. He said
that the stranger was not in the least seriously injured ; he
had been seized with cramp and chills, but he had administered
a cordial, and these were passing. The gentleman feeemed
indisposed to speak, shivered a good deal, and was inclined tc
sleep.

'^ He f9 ft gentleman, think you?" asked the princess.

The 19 err Professor said that to him it appeared so.

•< And of what rank ?"

Tlie physician thought it was impossible to say.
o d 6

5C WANDA,

" It is always possible," said the abbess, a little impatiently.
'^Is Lis linen fine? Is his skin smooth? Are his bands
white and slender ? Are his wrists and ankles small ?''

Herr Greswold said that he was sorely grieved, but he had
not taken any notice as to any of these things ; he had bcea
occupied with his diagnosis of the patient's state ; for, he
added, he thought the swimmer had been long in the water,
and the Szalrassee was of very dangerously low temperature
at night, fed as it was from the glaciers and snows of the moun-
tains.

" It is very interesting," said the princess ; " but pray ob-
serve what I have named, now that you return to his chamber."

Greswold took the hint, and bowed himself out of the
drawing-room. Frau Ottilie returned to her nougats,

" I wish that one could know who he was," she said, regret-
fully. To harbor an unknown person was not agreeable to
her in these days of democracies and dynamite.

" What does it matter ?" said her niece. " Though he were
a Nihilist, or a convict from the mines, he would have to be
sheltered to-night."

" The Herr Professor is very inattentive," said the princess,
with an accent that, from one of her sweetness, was almost
severe.

" The Herr Professor is compiling the Flora of the Hohe
Tauern," said her niece, ^* and he will publish it in Lcipsic some
time in the next twenty years. How can a botanist care for
so unlovely a creature as a man ? If it were a flower, indeed !"

" I never approved of that herbarium," said the princess,
still severely. ^* It is too insignificant an occupation beside
those great questions of human ills which his services are
retained to study. He is inattentive, and he grows even im-
pertinent: he almost told me yesterday that my neuralgia
was all imagination I"

" He took you for a flower, mother mine, because you are
so lovely ; and so he thought you could have no mortal pain/'
said Wanda, tenderly.

Then after a pause she added, —

" Dear aunt, come with me. I have asked Father Ferdi-
nand to havQ a mass to-night for Bela. I fancy Bela is glad
ihat no other life has been taken by the lake.^*

The princess rose quickly and kissed her.

WANDA. 51

In the strangers' gallery, in a great chamber of panelled
oak and Flemish tapestries, the poacher, as he lay almost
asleep on a grand old bed with yellow taffeta hangings and
with the crown of the Szalras counis in gilded bronze above
his head, heard as if in his dream the sound of chanting
voices and the deep slow melodies of an organ.

He stirred and opened his drowsy eyes.

" Am I in heaven ?" he asked, feebly. Yet he was a man
who, when he was awake and well, believed not in heaven.

The physician, sitting by his bedside, laid his hand upon
his wrist. The pulse was beating strongly but quickly.

" You are in the burg of Hohenszalras," he answered him.
^ The music you hear comes from the chapel : there is a mid-
night mass, — a mass of thanksgiving for you."

The heavy lids fell over the eyes of the weary man, and
the dreamy sense of warmth and peace that was upon him
lulled him into the indifference of slumber.

CHAPTER III.

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

It was still early in the day when the stranger was aroused
to the full sense of awaking in a room unknown to him. He
had slept all through the night ; he was refreshed and with-
out fever. His lefl arm was strained, and he had many
bruises ; otherwise he was conscious of no hurt.

** Twice in that woman's power," he thought, with anger,
as he looked round the great tapestried chamber that sheU
tered him, and tried to disentangle his actual memories of the
past night from the dreams that had haunted him of the Ni-
bclungen queen, whom all night long he had seen in her
golden armor, with her eyes which, like those of the Greek
nymph, dazzled those on whom they gazed to madness.
Dream and &ct had so interwoven themselves that it was
with an effort he could sever the two, awakening as he did
now in an unfamiliar chamber and surrounded with those ta«

62 WANDA.

peslricfl whose colossal figures seemed the phbDtoms of a spirit*
world.

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

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

'* How does the most high and honorable genfleman feel
himself this morning?" asked of him, in German, a tall
white-haired woman, who might have stepped down ^om an
old panel of Metzu.

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

The physician also drew near his bed to question him ;
and a boy brought on a tray Rhine wine and tokay du Krone,
coifee and chocolate, bread and eggs.

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

Then he himself said, with a little confusion,—

" I saw a lady last night?'*

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

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

The physician answered, —

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

The stranger shuddered a little.

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

WANDA. 53

"With a sky black as ink! .1 suppose you are used to
^oro serene summers. Midsummer is not so different from
midwinter here that you can trust to its tender mercies."

The stranger was silent.

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

The physician laughed.

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

" Are you savages in the Tauem ?"

" Oh, nc ; bnt we are very feudal still, and our forest-laws
liave escaped alteration in this especial part of the province."

'* She has been Tery hospitable to me, since my crime was
«o great."

^^ She is the soul of hospitality, and the Schloss is a hos-
pice," said the physician. " When there is no town nearer
than ten Austrian miles, and the nearest posting-house is at
IfVindisch-Matrey, it is very necessary to exercise the primi-
tive virtues : it is our compensation for our feudalism. But
take some tokay, my dear sir : you are weaker than you know.
ITou have had a bath of ice ; you had best lie still, and I will
send you some journals and books."

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

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

^ 1 had better burden your lady with an unbidden guesl

6*

5 1 WANDA.

than kill hor horses, cftrtainly," said the stranger. " IIow s
she solo mistress here ? Is there a Count von Szalras ? Ie
she a widow?'*

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

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

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

" Oh, my dear doctor, who can make such a prophecy for
any woman who is still young? — at least she looks young.
What age may she be ?"

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

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

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

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

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

" Sabran I" he echoed. " You edited the * Mexico' !" he
exclaimed, and gazed over his spectacles in awe and sympathy
commingled at the stranger, who smiled and answered, ^^ Long
ago, yes. Have you heard of it?"

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

" I am twice honored," said the stranger, with a smile of
some irony. The good professor was a little disconcerted,
and his enthusiasm was damped and cooled. He felt as much

WANDA. 55

embarrassment as though he had been the rwncr of a dis-
credited work.

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

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

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

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

Greswold bowed and said no more.

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

" Your countess will doubtless recognize her Emperor's sig-
nature," he said, as he gave the paper to the physician. " It
will serve at least as a passport, if not as a letter of presenta-
tion."

R6n^, Marquis de Sabran-Komaris, was one of those persons
who illustrate the old fairy-talc of all the good gifts at birth
being marred by the malison of one godmother. He had
great physical beauty, personal charm, and facile talent ; but
his very facility was his bane. He did all things so easily and
well that he had never acquired the sterner quality of applica-
tion. He was a brilliant and even profound scholar, an accom-
plished musician, a consummate critic of art, and was endowed,
moreover, with great natural tact, taste, and correct intuition.

56 WANDA.

Buibg, as ho ^as, a poor man, th&se gifls should havo.made
him an omincut one or a wealthy one, but the perverse fairy
who had cursed when the other had blessed him had contrived
to make all these graces and talents barren. Whether it be
true or not that the world knows nothing of its greatest meoi
it is quite true that its cleverest men very oflen do nothing of
importance all their lives long. He did nothing except ac-
quire a distinct repute as a dilettante in Paris, and a renowo
in the clubs of being always serene and fortunate at play.

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

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

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

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

Men did not quarrel with him for it : he was a fine swords-
man and a dead shot : and women were allured all the mor»

WANDA. fi7

Buroly to liim because they felt that they never really entprod
Lis lire or took any strong hold on it.

Such as he was, he lay now half awake on the great bed
under its amber canopy, and gazed dreamily at the colossal
figures of the storied tapestry, where the Tuscan idlers of tli6
Decamerone wore the sombre hues and the stiff and stately
garb of Flemish fashion of the sixteenth century.

" I wonder why I tried so hard to live last night 1 I am
not in love with life," he thought to himself, as he slowly re-
membered all that had happened, and recalled the face of the
lady who had leaned down to him from over the stone parapet
in the play of the .torchlight and lightnings. And yet life
seemed good and worth having as he recalled that boiling
dusky swirl of water which had so nearly swallowed him up
in its anger.

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

He remained still when the physician had lefl, and looked
around him. In the wide hearth a fire of oak logs was burn
ing; rain was beating against the piiinted panes of the oriel
casements; there was old oak, old silver, old ivory, in the
furniture of the chamber, and the tapestries were sombre and
gorgeous. It was a room of the sixteenth century ; but the
wine was in jugs of Baccarat glass, and a bag of Turkish ci-
garettes stood beside them, with the Paris and Vienna news-
papers. Everything had been tt ought of that could contribute
to his comfort : he wondered if the doctor had thought of all
this, or if it was due to the lady. ^^ It is a magnificent hos-
pice," he said to himself, with a smile, and then he angrily
remembered his rifle, his good English rifle, that was now
sunk forever with his little boat in the waters of the Szalras-
see. " Why did she offer me that outrage ?" he said to him-
self: it went hard with him to lie under her roof, to touch
her wine and bread. Yet he was aching in every limb, the
bed was easy and spacious, the warmth and the silence and
the aromatic scent of the burning pine-cones were alluring

53 WANDA.

biui to rest : lie dropped off to sleep again, the same calai
sleep of fatigue that had changed into repose, and nothing
woke him till the forenoon was passed.

'^ Good heavens 1 how I am trespassing on this woman's
hospitality 1" he thought, as he did awake, angry with him-
self for having heen lulled into this oblivion ; and he began
to rise at once, though he felt his limbs stiff and his head for
the moment light.

" Cannot I get a carriage for Lend ? My servant is wait-
ing for me there," he said to the youth attending on him,
when his bath was over.

The lad smiled with amusement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

WANDA, gS

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

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

" Surely you do not forget," said the princess, with some
Beverity, "that St. Eleazar was a Comte de Sabran ?"

^^ I know 1 But it is of something nearer to us than St.
Eleazar that I am thinking ; there was surely some work or
other which bore that name and was much read and quoted."

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

" Le savant f " murmured the princess, in some contemptu-
ous chagrin. " Pray what is the * Mexico* ?"

*' The grandest archaeological and botanical work, the work
of the finest research and most varied learning, that has been
produced out of Germany," commenced the professor, with
eagerness ; but the princess arrested him midway in his elo-
quence.

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

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

"It is a book T' said the princess, with ineffable disdain.
"Why should he write a book ?"

There were all the Fathers for any one who wanted to read :
what need for any other use of printers* type ? So she wa3
accustomed to think and to say when, scandalized, she saw
the German, French, and English volumes, of which whole
cases were wont to arrive at Hohenszalras for the use of
Wanda von Szalras alone, — works of philosophy and of science
among them, which had been denounced in the " Index."

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

" Indeed I" said the princess, unconvinced. " I know thoH«

60 WANDA,

Bcientifio works by reputo ; they always cousider tho vo) «g6
of a germ of moss, carried on ao aerolite through an indefiuite
space for a billion of ages, a matter much easier of credence
than the ' Life of St. Jerome.' I believe they call it sporadic
transmission ; they call typhus fever the same."

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

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

Here Greswold, who valued his post and knew his place
too well to defend either literature or sporadic germs, timidly
ventured to suggest that the Marquises of Sabran were well
known among the nobility of Western France, although not of
that immense distinction which finds its chronicle in the Hof-
Kalender. The princess smiled.

" Petite noblesse. You mean petite noblesse, my good Gres-
wold ? But even the petite noblesse need not write books."

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

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

"That is really very absurd. It is acting as if Hohen*
Bsalras were a gasthof,^^ said the prii.cess, with petulance,
'^ It is not so often that we have any relief to the tediun:
with which you are pleased to surround yourself, that we
should be required to shut ourselves from any chance break
in it. Of course, if you send this person his dinner to hif

\VA^DA. 6i

own rooms, ho will feci hurt, mortified; ho will go away,
probably on f(iOt, rather than remain where he is insulted.
Breton nobility is not very eminent, but it is very proud : it
is provincial, territorial, but every one kuows it is ancient, and
usually of the most loyal traditions alike to Church and State.
I should be the last petson to advocate making a friendship,
or even an acquaintance, without the fullest inquiry ; but
when it is a mere question of a politeness foi twenty-four
hours, which can entail no consequences, then I must confess
that I think prejudices should yield before the obligations of
courtesy. But of course, my love, decide as you will : you
are mistress."

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

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

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

" Peddlers and colporteurs cannot take any social advantat^e
of one's conversation afterwards," replied her niece. " We
are not usually invaded by men of rank here : so the pre-
cedent may not be perilous. Have your own way, mbthei
mine."

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

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

Tlio professor was a very learned and shrewd man, whom

6

62 WAI^VA.

poverty and love of tranquil opportunities of study had ia
iuccd to bury himself in the heart of the Glockner mountaina
fie had already led a Ions:, severe, and blameless life of deep
devotion and hard privation, when the post of private physi-
cian at Hohenszalras in general, and to the Princess Ottilie io
especial, had been procured for him by the interest of Prince
Lilienhbhe. He had had many sorrows, trials, and disap-
pointments, which made the simple routine and the entire
solitude of his existence here welcome to him. But he waa
none the less delighted to find any companion of culture and
intelligence to converse with, and in his monotonous and
lonely life it was a rare treat to be able to exchange ideas
with one fresh from the intellectual movements of the outer
world

The professor found, not to his surprise (since he had read
the " Mexico"), that his elegant grand siigneur knew very
nearly as much as he did of botany and of comparative anat-
omy,— that he had travelled nearly all over the world, and
travelled to much purpose, and knew many curious things of
the flora of the Ilio Grande ; and it appeared that he pos-
sessed in his cabinets in Paris a certain variety of orchid that
the doctor had always longed to possess. He was entirely wod
over when Sabran, to whom the dried flower was very indiffer-
ent, promised to send it to him. The French marquis had
not Greswold's absolute love of science ; he had studied every
thing that had come to his hand, because he had a high in-
telligence and an insatiable appetite for knowledge, and he had
no other kind of devotion to it : when he had penetrated its
mybteries, it lost all interest for him.

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

^* What a grand house to be shut up in the heart of the
mountains 1" said Sabran, with a sigh. <^ I do believe whal
romance there still is in the world does lie in these forests of
Austria, which have all the twilight and the solitude that
would suit Merlin or the Sleeping Beauty better than anything
we have in France, except, indeed, here and .here an old
chateau like Chenonceaux or Maintenon."

'* The world has not spoiled us as yet,*' said the doctor.
'* We see few strangers. Our people are full of old faiths.

WAHDA.

old It^ties, old traJitiona. They are a Blurdy and yet tewder
people. They are ua iearleas aa their own Htisiabock, and they
■re as TOTerent as eaints were in iiiunnsiiQ ilaya. Our mouo-
taina are as grand aa the Swiss ones, but thank heaven they
arc Diiapoilcd and little known. I tremble when I think they
have begun to climb tbe Gross Glockner: all the mjaiorj
«nd glory of our glaciers will vauish whcu tliej' become mete
points of ascensiuD. The alpenslock of the liouriat \a. lo
the everlasting hills what rail way-metals are to the plains.
Thank God, the few railroads we have are hundreds of
miles asunder."

" You are a reactionist, doctor ?"

" I am nn old man, and I have Icnrncd the value of repose,'
said Greswold. " You know we nre called a slow race. It it
only the unwise among us who have quicksilver ta their brainn
and toes."

" You have gold in the fonncr, at least," aaid Sobran,
kindly, " and I dare say quieksiWcr is in your feet, too, when
tbcro is charity to bo done."

Herr Joachim, who was simple in the knowledge of man-
kind, though shrewd in mother-wit, colored a little with pleas-
ure. How well this stranger understood him I

The day went away imperceptibly and t^eeably to the
pfaysidan and to the stranger in this pleasant rambling talk
whilst tbo rain poured down in fury on the stone terraces and
green lawns without, and the Szolrassce was hidden under a
veil of fog.

" Am 1 not to Bee her at all?" thought Sabran : he did not
like t9 express his diequictude on that subject to the physician,
and he was not sure himself whether he most desired to ride
Kway without meeting the serene eyes of his ch&telaine, or tb
be face to face with her once more.

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

" This was painted last year," said Greswcld, " at the prin

oees's request It ia admirably like "

^^^ "It is a noble picture," said Sabran. " But wluit x very
^^Hwond wouuia she looks 1"

64 WANDA.

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

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

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

" Nc doubt But has she renounced all her youth ? Does
Bhe mean never to go into the world or to marry ?*'

'* I am quite sure she has made no resolve of the sort. Bat
I do not think she will ever alter. She has refused manj

WANDA. 65

groat *lIi&nocH. Tier temperament is eercne, almost cold ; and
her ideal it would bo diffiuult, I imagiae, Tor auj morul man
to realixa."

" But when a womnn loves "

" Oh, of oouree," wiid Herr Joaohim, rather dryl;. " If

the aloe flower I Love does not, I thipli, possosa any part

of the Countess Wanda's thoughts or desires. She funeics it
• mere weakness."

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

" No. Perhaps she ia not precisely what wo term aniiubla.
She is rather loo far also irom human emotions and human
needs. The woi^en of the house of Ssalros have been mostlj
Terf proud, siient, brave, and resolute, — great ladies rather
than lovable wives. Luitgarde von Szalraa held this place
with only a few archers and spearmen against Eeinrich Jaso-
mirgott in tiie twelilh century, and he rabed the siege alter
five months. 'She is not a woman, nor human: she is a
ktUengeier,' he said, as he retreated ioto bis Wienerwald.
All the great monk-vultures and the gyps and the pygargues
hare been sacred all through the HohcTaucrn since that year."

" And I was about to shoot a kutengeier ! Now I see that
my offcuoe was beyoud poaching : it was high treaauu, al-

" I heard the story from Otto. Ho would have banged
;ou cheerfully. But I hope," suid the duotor, with a pang of
misgiving, " that I have not given you any false impression
of my lady, as cold and hard and unwomanly. Bhc is full of
tenderness of a high order; she is the noblest, most truthful,
and most generous nature that I have ever known clothed ir
human form; and if she he too proud — well, it is a stoitely
eia, pardonable in one who has behind her eleven hundred
joan of fearless and nnblGmiahed honor,"

" I am a sooiali:>i," said Sabran, a little uurlly, then added,
with a little laugh, " though I believe not in rank, I do be-
lieve in raoo."

"Hon taaff ne peat meatir," Diurmurcd the old physician.
The fur face of Sabran changed slightly.

" Will you come and look over the house ?" said the pro-
fessor, who noticed nothing, and only thought of propiliating
,.the owner of tite rare orchid. " There is almost as ujuuh to
0 as in tho Burg at Vienna. Everything has auoumulated

66 WANDA.

here nndisturbed for a thousand years. Hohenssalnui has
been besieged, but never deserted or dismantled."

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

"Ah 1 ah 1 that Js pure socialism 1'' said the doctor, with a
little chuckle. *' Ote-toi^ que je m'y niette. That is genuine
Liberalism all the world over."

" You are no communist yourself, doctor 1"

" No," said Herr Joachim, simply. "All my studies lead
me to the conviction that equality is impossible, and were it pos-
sible it would be hideous. Variety, infinite variety, 19 the
beneficent law of the world's life. Why, in that most perfect
of all societies, the bee-hive, flawless mathematics are found
coexistent with impassable social barriers and unalterable so-
cial grades."

Sabran laughed good-humoredly.

" I thought at least the bees enjoyed an undeniable republic/*

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

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

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

" A second Maria Theresa I" said Sabran.

" Not dissimilar, perhaps," said the doctor, nettled at the
irony of the tone. " Only where our great queen sent thou-
sands out to their deaths the Countess von Szalras saves many
lives. There are no mines in the world, I will make bold to
say, where there is so much comfort and so little peril as those
mines of hers in Stanislaw. She visited them three yean

WANDA. 67

«go. But I forget yon are a stranger, fcnd as you do not share
our cultus for the Grilfinn, cannot care to hear its Canticles.
Gome to the muniment-room; you shall see some strange
parchments."

'^ Heavens, how it rains!" said Sahran, as they left his
ehambers. '^ Is that common here ?'*

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

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

When twilight came, and the grayness of the rain-chargod
atmosphere deepened into the dark of night, Sabran bad made
all living things at the Hohenszalrasburg his firm friends,
down to the dogs of the house, save and except the ladies who
dwelt in it. Of them he had had no glimpse. They kept
their own apartments. He began to feel some fresh em bar-
rassmont at remaining another night beneath a roof the mistress

68 WANDA.

of which did not deign personally to recognize his presence
A salon hung with tapestries opened out of the bedchamber
allotted to him : he wondered if he were to dine there, like a
prisoner of state. He felt an extreme reluctance united to a
strong curiosity to meet again the woman who had treated
him with such cool authority and indifference as a common
poacher in her woods. His cheek tingled still whenever he
thought of the manner in which, at her signal, his hands had
been tied and his rifle taken from him. She was the repre-
sentative of all that feudal, aristocratic, despotic, dominant
spirit of a dead time which he with his modern, cynical, reck-
less Parisian liberalism most hated or believed that he hated.
She was Austria Felix personified, and he was a man who had
always persuaded himself and others that he was a socialist, a
Philippe £galit4. And this haughty patrician had mortified
him and then had benefited and sheltered him ! He would
willingly have gone from under her roof without seeing her,
and yet a warm and inquisitive desire impelled him to feel an
unreasonable annoyance that the day was going by without
his receiving any intimation that he would be allowed to enter
her presence or be expected to make his obeisances to her.
When, however, the servants entered to light the many can-
dles in his room, Hubert entered behind them, and expressed
the desire of his lady that the marquis would favor them
with his presence ; they were about to dine.

Sabran, standing before the mirror, saw himself color like
a boy : 1 5 knew not whether he were most annoyed or pleased.
He woul 1 willingly have ridden away leaving his napoleons
for the household, and seeing no more the woman who had
made him ridiculous in his own eyes, yet the remembrance
of her haunted him as something strange, imperious, mag-
netic, grave, serene, stately. Vague memories of a thousand
things he had heard said of her in embassies and at courts
came to his mind ; she had been a mere unknown name to
him then he had not Ibtened, he had not cared, but now he
remembered all he had heard ; curiosity and an embarrass-
ment wholly foreign to him struggled together in him.
What could he say to a woman who had first insulted and
then protected him ? It would tax all the ingenuity and the
tact for which he was famed. However, he only said to the
major-domo, ^* I am much honored. Express my profound

WANDA, G'J

gratitude to your ladies for the honor they aro so good as to
do me.*' Then he made his attire look as well as it could,
and, considering that punctuality is due from guests as well
as from monarchs, he said that he was ready to follow tho
Bervant waiting for him, &nd did so through the many tapes-
tried and panelled corridors by which the enormous house
was traversed.

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

He felt his bruise still, and he walked with a slight lame-
ness from a strain of his led foot, but this did not detract
from the grace and distinction of his bearing, and the pallor
of his handsome features became them, and when he . ad-
vanced through the open doors and bent before the chair
and kissed the hands of the Princess Ottilie she thought to
herself, " What a perfectly beautiful person I Even Wanda
will have to admit that 1" Whilst Hubert, going backward,
said to his regiment of uuder-servants, ^^Look you, since
Count Gela rode out to his death at the head of the White
Hussars, so grand a man as this stranger has not set foot in
this house."

He Expected to see the Countess Wanda von Szalras. In-
stead he saw the loveliest little old lady he had ever seen in
.lis life: a person like an imaginative child's dream of a
fairy godmother, Icaninp; on a gold-headed cane, with clouds
of fragrant old lace about her, and a cross of emeralds hung
Rt her girdle of onyx beads, saluted him with the ceremonious
grace of that etiquette which is still the common rule of life
among the great nobilities of the North. He hastened to
respond in the same spirit, with an exquisite deference of
manner.

She greeted him with affable and smiling words, and he
devoted himself to her with deference and gallantry, express-
ing all his sense of gratitude for the succor and shelter he
had received, with a few eloquent and elegant phrases which
■aid enough and uot too much, with a grace that it is difficult

70 WANDA.

to lend to gratitude, which is generally somewhat lialting and
uncouth.

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

" Monsieur le Marquis," she said, in her tender and flute-
like voice, " I deserve none of your eloquent thanks. Age is
sadly selfish. I did nothing to rescue you, unless, indeed,
heaven heard my unworthy prayer I — and this house is not
mine, nor anything in it. The owner of it, and, therefore,
your chS.telaine of the moment, is my grand-niece, the Coun-
tess Wanda von Szalras."

" That I had your intercession with heaven, however indi-
rectly, was far more than I deserved," said Sabran, still stand-
ing before her. " For the Countess Wanda, T have been
twice in her power, and she has been very generous."

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

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

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

The ideal of the princess was neither grand nor romantic r
it was life in the little, prim, yet gay North-German town io
(ho palace of which she and all her people had been born,—

WAN1>A. n

a littte town, with red roofs, green alleys, straight toy-like
streets, clipped trees, stiff soldiers, set iu the midst of a ver-
dant plain, flat and green, and smooth as a card-tahle.

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

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

Dinner was announced as served.

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

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

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

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

Throughout dinner in that great hall, he, sitting on her
right hand, amused her, flattered her with that subtlest of all
flattery, interest and attention, diverted her with gay stories
of worlds unknown to her, and charmed her with his willing-
ness to listen to her lament over the degeneracy of mankind
tod of manners. Afler a few words of courtesy as to hi9

\

72 WA^'DA.

hostess's abscnee, he seemed not even to remember that Wanda
von Szalras was absent from the head of her table.

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

" You have no appetite ?" she said, regretfully.

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

She looked at him with interest.

" I should think your riches in that respect are inezhausti-
ble?**

He smiled.

" Oh, yes I T have never had a day's illness, except once,
long ago, in the Mexican swamps, — a marsh-fever and a snake-
bite."

" You have travelled much ?"

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

" Have you no relatives ?*'

" None ! Every one is dead, — dead long ago. I have been
long abne, and 1 am very well used to it."

" But you must have troops of friends ?"

" Oh, friends who will win my last napoleon at play, or re-
member me as long as they meet me every day on the Boule-
vards ? Yes, I have many of that sort, but they are not worth
Ulysses's dog.**

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

" He is unfortunate,** she thought. " How often beauty
brings misfortune \ My niece must certainly see him, I wish
it were a name that one knew *'

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

WANDA, 7il

'* Tour title is of Brittany, I think ?" she said, a littlo wist-
Allj, and, as he answered somewhat abruptly in the affirma-
tive, she solaced herself once more with the remembrance that
t^here was a good deal of petite noblesse^ honorable enoagh,
t^hough not in the " Almanach de Gotha ;" which was a great
c^ODcession from her prejudices, invented on the spur of the
mnterest that he excited in her imagination.

" I never saw any person so handsome," she thought, as she
^§]aDe3d at his face, while he in return thought that this silver-
Isaired, soft-cheeked, lace-enwrapped Holy Mother vrsisjolte di
oqtter, in the language of those boulevards which had been
is nursery and his palsestrum. She was so kind to him, she
as so gracious and graceful, she chatted with him so frankly
nd. pleasantly, and she took so active an interest in his wel-
, that he was touched and grateful. He had known many
omen, many young ones and gay ones ; he had never known
bat the charm of a kindly and serene old age can be like in
woman who has lived with pure thoughts and will die in hope
nd in faith ; and this lovely old abbess, with her pretty touch
f worldliness, was a study to him, new with the novelty of
nnocence and of a kind of veneration. And he was careful
ot to let her perceive his mortification that the Countess von
ras would not deign to dine in his presence. In truth, he
'^liought of little else ; but no trace of irritation or of absence
o:f mind was to be seen in him as he amused the princess and
<Hscovered with her that they had in common some friends
dmong the nobilities of Saxony, of Wiirtemberg, and of Bo-
hemia.

" Come and take your coffee in my own room, the blue

xroom," she said to him, and she rose and took his arm. " We

"Will go through the library : you saw it this morning, I im-

a^ne ? It is supposed to contain the finest collection of black

letter in the empire, or so we think."

And she led him through the great halls and up a few low

Btairs into a large oval room lined with oaken bookcases, which

held the manuscripts, missals, and volumes of all dates, that

had been originally gathered together by one of the race who

had been also a bishop and a cardinal.

The library was oak-panelled, and had an embossed and
emblazoned ceiling; silver lamps of old Italian trasvorato
Work, hung by silver chains, shed a subdued clear light j bo-

74 WAA'DA.

iieath the porphyry sculptures of the hearth a fire of lop;s was
burning, for the early summer evening here is chill and
damp; there were many open fireplaces in Uohenszalras, in-
troduced there by a chilly Provencal princess who had wedded
A Szalras in the seventeenth century, and who had abolished
the huge porcelain stoves in many apartments in favor of
grand carved mantel-pieces, and gilded andirons, and sweet-
smelling simple fires of aromatic woods, such as made glad
the sombre hdtcls and lonely ch§,tcaux of the France of the
Bourbons.

Before this hearth, with the dogs stretched on the black
bearskin rugs, his hostess was seated: she had dined in a
small dining-hall opening out of the library, and was sitting
reading with a shaded light behind her. She rose with ius-
tonishment, and, as he fancied, anger, upon her face as she
saw him enter, and stood in her full height beneath the light
of one of the silver hanging lamps. She wore a gown of
olive-colored velvet, with some pale roses fastened among the
old lace at her breast ; she had about her throat several rows
of large pearls, which she always wore, night and day, that
they should not change their pure whiteness by disuse. She
looked very stately, cold, annoyed, disdainful, as she stood
there without speaking.

^^ It is my niece, the Countess von Szalras,'' said the prin-
cess to her companion, in some trepidation. ^' Wanda, my
love, I waa not aware you were here : I thought you were
in your own octagon room. Allow me to make you acquainted
with your guest, whom you have already received twice with
little ceremony, I believe."

The trifling falsehoods were trippingly but timidly said;
the princess's blue eyes sought consciously her niece's forgive-
ness with a pathetic appeal, to which Wanda, who loved her ten-
derly, could not be long obdurate. Had it been any other than
Frau Ottilie who had thus brought by force into her presence
a stranger whom she had marked her desire to avoid, the se-
rene temper of the mistress of the Hohenszalrasburg would
not have preserved its equanimity, and she would have quitted
hcrr library on the instant, sweeping a grand courtesy which
should have been greeting and farewell at once to one too
audacious. But the shy entreating appeal of the princess's
look touched her heart, and the veneration she had borne

WANDA. 7ft

firom cbildliood to ono so holy, and so sacred by years of
graoe, checked in her any utterance or sign of annoyance.

Sabran, meanwhile, standing by in some hesitation and em-
barrassment, bowed low with consummate grace and a timidity
not less graceful.

She advanced a step and held her hand out to him.

^' I fear I have been inhospitable, sir," she said to him, in
his own tongue. " Are you wholly unhurt ? You had a
rough greeting from Hohenszalras."

He took the tip of her fingers on his own and bent over
them as humbly as over an empress's.

Well used to the world as he was, to its ceremonies, courts,
and etiquettes, he was awed by her as if he were a youth : he
lost his ready aptness of language and his easy manner of
adaptability.

** I am but a vagrant, madame I" he murmured, as he bowed
over her hand. *' I have no right even to your charity 1"

For the moment it seemed to her as if he spoke in bitter
and melancholy earnest, and she looked at him in a passing
surprise that changed into a smile.

" You were a poacher, certainly ; but that is forgiven. My
aunt has taken you under her protection, and you had tho
Kaiser's already : with such a dual shelter you are safe. Are
you quite recovered ?*^ she said, bending her grave glance upon
him. '^ I have to ask your pardon for my great negligence in
not sending one of my men to guide you over the pass to
Matrey."

'* Nay, if you had done so I should not have enjoyed the
happiness of being your debtor," he replied, meeting her close
gaze with a certain sense of confusion most rare with him, and
added a few words of eloquent gratitude, which she interrupted
almost abruptly :

" Pray carry no such burden of imaginary debt, and have
no scruples in staying as long as you like : we are a moun-
tain-refuge ; use it as you would a monastery. In the winter
we have many travellers. We are so entirely in the heart of
the hills that we are bound by all Christian laws to give a
refuge to all who need it. But how came you on the lake
last evening? Could you not read the skies?"

He .explained his own folly and hardihood, and added, with
a glance at her, ^^ The o£fcudiug rific is in the Szalrassoe. It

76 WANDA,

waa my haste to quit your dominioDS that made me yenture '
on to the lake. I had searched Id vain for the high-road thai
you had told me of, and I thought if I crossed the lake 1
should be oif your soil."

" No ; for many leagues you would not have been off it,**
she answered him. " Our lands are very large, and, like the
Archbishopric of Berchtesgaden, are as high as they are broad.
Our hills are very dangerous for strangers, especially until the
snows of the passes have all melted. I repented me too late
that I did not send a j'agcr with you as a guide."

" All is well that ends well," said the princess. " Monsieur
is not the worse for his bath in the lake, and we have the
novelty of an incident, and of a guest who we will hope in
the future will become a friend."

" Madame, if I dared hope that I should have much to live
for!" said the stranger, and the princess smiled sweetly upon
him.

" You must have very much to live for, as it is. Were I
a man, and as young as you, and as favored by nature, I am
afraid I should be tempted to IWe for — myself.'*

" And I am most glad when I can escape from so poor a
companion," said he, with a melancholy in the accent and a
passing pain that was not assumed.

Before this gentle and gracious old wofnan in this warm and
elegant chamber he felt suddenly that he was a wanderer, —
peniaps an outcast.

" You need not use the French language with him, Wanda,"
interrupted the abbess. ^' The marquis speaks admirable Ger-
man : it is impossible to speak better."

" We will speak our own tongue, then," said Wanda, who
always regarded her aunt as though she were a petted and
rather wayward child. ** Are you quite rested, M. de Sabran ?
and quite unhun V I did not dine with you. It must have
seemed churUsh. But I am very solitary in my habits, and
my aunt entertains strangers so much better than I do that I
grow more hermit-like every year."

He -smiled ; he thought there was but little of the hermit
in this woman's supreme elegance and dignity as she stood
beside her hearth, with its ruddy, fitful light playing od the
great pearls at her throat and burnishing into gold the brooie
shadows of her velvet gown.

WANDA. 77

" The princess has told me that you are cruel to the world,"
he answered her. " But it is natural with such a kingdom
that you seldom care to leave it."

" It is a kingdom of snow for seven months out of the
year," said the abbess, peevishly, ** and a water kingdom the
other five. You see what it is to-day ; and this is the middle
of May r

'* I think one might well foi^et the rain and every other ill
between these four walls," said the French marquis, as he
glanced around him and then slowly let his eyes rest on his
ch&telaine.

'' It is a grand library," she answered him, " but I must
warn you that there is nothing more recent in it than Diderot
and Descartes. The cardinal — Hugo von Szalras — who collected
it lived in the latter half of last century, and since his day
no Szalras has been bookish save myself. The cardinal, how-
ever, had all the MSS. and the black-letters, or nearly all,
ready to his hand : what he added is a vast library of science
and history, and he also got together some of the most beau-
tiful missals in the world. Are you curious in such things ?"

She rose as she spoke, and unlocked one of the doors of
the oak bookcase and brought out an ivory missal carved by
the marvellous Pyonner of Klagenfurt, with the arms of the
Szalras on one side of it and those of a princely German
house on the other.

" That was the nuptial missal of Gcorg von Szalras and Ida
Windischgratz in 1501," she said, "and these are all the
other marriage-hours of our people, if you care to study them ;
and in that case next to this there is a wonderful Evangelista-
lium, with miniatures of Angelico^s. But I see they tell all
their stories to you ; I see by the way you touch them that
you are a connoisseur."

" I fear I have studied them chiefly at the sales of the Rue
Drouot," said Sabran, with a smile ; but he had a great deal
of sound knowledge on all arts and sciences, and a true taste,
which never led him wrong. With an illuminated chronicle
in his hand, or a book of hours on his knee, he conversed
easily, discursively, charmingly, of the early scribes and the
early masters, — of monkish painters and of church libra-
ries,— of all the world has lost, and of all the aid that art
had brought to faith.

7»

78 WANDA

Ho talked well, with graceful and woll-ohoseu langnage,
with picturesque illustration, with a memory that neyer was
at fault for name or date or apt quotation ; he spoke fluent
and eloquent German, in which there was scarcely aoj tracfi
of foreign accent, and he disclosed without effort the resources
of a cultured and even learned mind.

The antagonism she had felt against the poacher of her
woods melted away as she listened and replied to him ; there
was a melody in his voice and a charm in his manner that it
was not easy to resist ; and with the pale lights from tlie
Italian lamp which swung near upon the fairness of his face
she reluctantly owned that her aunt had been right, — he was
singularly handsome, with that uncommon and grand cast of
beauty which in these days is rarer than it was in the times
of Vandyck and of Velasquez, for manners and moods leave
their trace on the features, and thia age is not great.

The princess in her easy-chair, for once not sleeping after
dinner, listened to her and thought to herself, " She is angry
with me ; but how much better it is to talk with a living
being than to pass the evening over a philosophical treatise,
or the accounts of her schools or her stables 1'*

Sabran, having conquered the momentary reluctance and
embarrassment which had overcome him in the presence of
the woman to whom ho owed both an outrage and a rescue,
endeavored, with all the skill he possessed, to interest and
beguile her attention. He knew that she was a great lady, a
proud woman, a recluse, a student, and a person averse to
homage and flattery of every kind ; he met her on the com-
mon ground of art and learning, and could prove himself
her equal at all times, even occasionally her master. When
he fancied she had enough of such serious themes, ho passed
by an easy transition to song and music. There was a new
opera then out at Paris of which the music was as yet scarcely
known. He looked round the library and said to her, —

" Were there an organ here, or a piano, I could give yow
some idea of the motive : I can recall most of it.'*

" There are both, in my own room. It is near here,** she
said to him. " Will you come ?" Then she led the way
across the gallery, which alone separated the library from that
octagon room which was so essentially her own, where all were
hers. The abbess accompanied her, content as a child is who

WANDA, 79

has put a Hglit to a slow match that leads it knows not
whither. '^ She must approve of him, or she would not take
him there," thought the wise princess.

" Play to us," said Wanda von Szalras, as her guest entered
the saered room. *' I am sure you are a great musician : you
speak of music as we only speak of what we love.**

" What do you love ?" he wondered, mutely, as he sat down
before the grand piano and struck a few chords. He sat
down and played without prelude one of the most tender and
most grave of Schubert's sonatas. It was music the most
flubtile, the most delicate, the most difficult to interpret, but
he ^ve it with consummate truth of touch and feeling.

He was a great musician, and he had always loved German
music best. He played on and on, dreamily, with a perfec-
tion of skill that was matched only by his tenderness of in-
terpretation.

" You are a great artist," said his hostess, as he paused.

He rose and approached her.

"Alas ! no ; I am only an amateur," he answered her. " To
be an artist one must needs have immense failh in one's nrt
and in one's self: I have no faith in anything. An artist
steers straight to one goal ; I drift."

" You have drifted to wise purpose. You must have stud-
ied much."

" In my youth : not since. An artist I Ah ! how I envy
artists ! They believe ; they aspire ; even if they never at-
tain, they are happy, happy in their very torment, and through
it, like lovers."

« But your talent "

" Ah, madame, it is only talent : it is nothing else. The
Jeu sacrS is wanting."

She looked at him with some curiosity.

" Perhaps the habit of the world has put out that fire ; it
oi^n does. But, if even it be only talent, what a beautiful
talent it is ! To carry all that store of melody safe in your
memory, — ^it is like having sunlight and moonlight ever at
command.'*

Liszt had more than once summoned the spirits of heaven
to his call there in that same room in Hohenszalras ; and
since his touch no one had ever made the dumb notes speak
fts ty\8 Granger could do, and the subdued power of his voice

80 WANDA.

added to tlio melody he evoked. The light of the lamps filled
with silvery shadows the twilight of the chamber ; the hues
of the tapestries, of the ivories, of the gold- and silver-work,
of the paintings, of the embroideries, made a rich chiar-oscuro
of color ; the pine-cones and the dried thyme burning on the
hearth shed an aromatic smell on the air ; there were large
baskets and vases full of hot-house roses and white lilies from
the gardens. She sat by the hearth, left in shadow ex-
cept where the twilight caught the gleam of her pearls and
the shine of her eyes ; she listened, the jewels on her hand
glancing like little stars as she slowly waved to and fro a
feather screen in rhythm with what he sang or played ; so
might Mary Stuart have looked, listening to llizzio or Ron-
sard. ^' She is a queen T' he thought, and he sang, —

«Sij'4tai8roi!"

" Go on I" she said, as he paused : he had thrown eloquenoo
and passion into the song.

** Shall I not tire you ?"

" That is only a phrase 1 Save when Liszt passes by here,
I never hear such music as yours.*'

He obeyed her, and played and sang many and very differ-
ent things.

At last he rose a little abruptly.

Two hours had gone by since they had entered the octagon
chamber.

^^ It would be commonplace to thank you,** she murmured,
with a little hesitation. '^ You have a great gift,— one of all
gifts the most generous to others.'*

He made a gesture of repudiation, and walked across to a
spinet of the fifteenth century, inlaid with curious devicoa by
Martin Pacher of Brauneck, and having a painting of his in
its lid.

^^ What a beautiful old box T' he said, as he touched it.
" Has it any sound, I wonder ? If one be disposed to be sad,
surely of all sad things an old spinet is the saddest I To
think of the hands that have touched it, of the children thai
have danced to it, of the tender old ballads that have been
sung to the notes that to us seem so hoarse and so faulty I
All the musicians dead, dead so long ago, and the old spinet

WANDA, 81

Btill answering when any one calls 1 Shall I sing yen a mad-
rigal to it r

Very tenderly, very lightly, he touched the ivory keys of
the painted toy of the ladies so long dead and gone, and lift
Bang in a minor key the sweet, sad, quaint poem, —

" Oil sont les neiges d'ontan V*

That hallad of fair women echoed soflly through the stillness
of the chamher, touched with the sobbing notes of the spinet,
ev 3n as it might have been in the days of its writer :

" Oil sont les.oeiges d'antan t"

The chords of the old music-box seemed to sigh and tremble
with remembrance. Where were they, ail the beautiful dead
women, all the fair imperious queens, all the loved, and all
the lovers ? Where were they ? The snow had fallen through
so many, white winters since that song was sung, — so many 1
8o many !

The last words thrilled very sadly and sweetly through the
Bilencc.

He rose and bowed very low.

" I have trespassed too long on your patience, madamc : I
have the honor to wish you good-night.*'

Wanda von Szalras was not a woman quickly touched to
any emotion, but her eyelids were heavy with a mist of unshed
tears, as she raised them and looked up from the fire, letting
drop on her lap the screen of plumes.

" If there be a Lorelei in our lake, no wonder from envy she
tncd to drown you," she said, with a smile that cost her a little
effort. " Good-night, sir. Should you wish to leave us in
the morning, Hubert will see you reach Sanct Johann safely
and as quickly as can be.*'

" Your goodness overwhelms me," he murmured. " I can
never hope to show my gratitude "

" There is nothing to be grateful for," she said, quickly.
** And if there were, you would have repaid it : you have made
« spinet, silent for centuries, speak, and speak to our hearts.
Good-night, sir : may you have good rest and a fair journey I"

When he had bowed himself out, and the tapestry of the
door had closed behind him, she rose and looked at a clock.

82 WANDA.

" It is actually twelve I"

*^ Acknowledge at least that he has made the evcDiog pasii
well !*' said the princess, with a little petulance and much tri-
umph.

*^ He has made it pass admirably/' said her niece. " At
the same time, dear aunt, I think it would have been perhapR
better if you had not made a friend of a stranger."

" Why ?" said the abbess, with some asperity.

" Because I think we can fulfil all the duties of hospitality
without doing so, and we know nothing of this gentleman."

" He is certainly a gentleman," said the princess, with no
abatement of her asperity. " It seems to me, my dear Wanda,
that you are for once in your life — if you will pardon me the
expression — ill-natured."

The Countess Wanda smiled a little.

" I cannot imagine myself ill-natured, but I may bo so.
One never knows one's self."

" And ungrateful," added the princess. " When, I should
like to know, have you for years reached twelve o'clock at
night without being conscious of it ?"

** Oh, he sang beautifully, and he played superbly," said
her niece, still with the same smile, balancing her ostrich-
feathers. " But let him go on his way to-morrow : you and
I cannot entertain strange men, even though they give us
music like Rubinstein's."

"If Egon were here "

" Oh, poor Egon I I think he would not like your friend at
all. They both want to shoot eagles "

" Perhaps he would not like him for another reason," said
the abbess, with a look of mystery. '^ Egon could never make
the spinet speak."

" No ; but— who knows ? — ^perhaps he can take better caits
of his own soul because he cannot lend one to a spinet 1"

" Yon arc perverse, Wanda I"

" Perverse, inhospitable, and ill-natured ? I fear I shali
carry a heavy burden of sins to Father Ferdinand in the
morning 1"

" I wish you would not send horses to Sanct Johann in the
morning. We never have anything to amuse us in thia
lolemn solitary place."

" Dear aunt, one would think you were very indiscreet."

WANDA. 83

•

" I wish you were more so I" said the pretty old lady, with
impatience, and then her hand made a sign over the cross of
emeralds, for she knew that she had uttered an .unholy wish.
She kissed her niece with repentant tenderness, and went to
her own apartments.

Wanda von Szalras, leil alone in her chamber, stood awhile
thoughtfully beside the fire ; then she moved away and touched
the yellow ivory of the spinet-keys.

" Why could he make them speak,*' she said to herself,
** when every one else always failed ?"

CHAPTER IV.

Sabran, as he undressed himself and laid himself down
under the great gold-fringed canopy of the stately bed, thought,
** Was I only a clever comedian to-night ? Or did my eyes
really grow wet as I sang that old song and saw her face
through a mist as if she and I had met in the old centuries
long ago ?*'

He stood and looked a moment at his own reflection in the

great mirror with the wax candles burning in its sconces. He

was very pale.

« on 8ont les neiges d'antan 7**

The burden of it ran through his mind.

Almost it seemed to him that long ago — long ago— she had
been his lady and he her knight, and she had stooped to him,
and he had died for her. Then he laughed a little harshly.

" I grow that best of all actors," he thought, " an actor who
believes in himself T'

Then he turned from the mirror and stretched himself on
the great bed, with its carved warriors at. its foot, and its
golden erown at its head, and its heavy amber tissues shining
in the shadows. He was a sound sleeper at all times. He
had slept as peacefully on a wreck, in a hurricane, in a lonely
hut on the Andes, as after a night of play in Paris, in Vienna,
in Monaco. He had a nerve of stoel, and that perfect natural
oonstitution which even excess and dissipation cannot easily

84 WANDA.

impair. But this night, in the guest-chamber of Hohcnsza!«

raS) he could not summon sleep at his will, and he lay long

wide awake .and restless, watching the firelight play on the

figures upon the tapestried walls, where the lords and ladies of

Tuscan Boccaccio and their sinful loves were portrayed in

stately and sombre guise and German costumes of the days of

Maximilian.

"OH rant les neiges d'antan t"

The line of the old romaunt ran through his brain, and when
towards dawn he did at length fall asleep it was not of Hohen-
szalras that he dreamed, but of wide white steppes, of a great
ice-fed rolling river, of monotonous pine woods, with the
gilded domes of a half-Eastern city rising beyond them in the
pale blue air of a Northern twilight.

With the early morning he awoke, resolute to get away be
the weather what it would. As it chanced, the skies were
heavy still, but no rain fell ; the sun was faintly struggling
through the great black masses of clouds ; the roads might bo
dangerous, but they were not impassable ; the bridge over the
Burgcnbach might be broken, but at least Matrey could be
reached, if it were not possible to go on farther to Taxenbach
or Sanct Johannim Wald. To the north, where far away
stretched the wild marshes and stony swamps of the Pinzgau
(the Pinzgau so beautiful, where in its hilly district the grand
Salzach rolls on its impetuous way beneath the deep shade of
fir-clad hills), the sky was overcast, and of an angry tawny
color that boded ill for the fall of night. But the skieii
were momentarily clear, and he desired to rid of his presence
the hospitable roof beneath which he was but an alien and
unbidden.

He proposed to leave on foot, but of this neither Greswold
nor the major-domo would hear : they declared that such an
indignity would dishonor the Hohenszalrasburg for evermore.
Guests there were masters. " Bidden guests, perhaps," said
Sabran, reluctantly yielding to be sped on his way by a pair
of the strong Hungarian horses that he had seen and admired
in their stalls He did not venture to disturb the ladies of
the castle by a request for a farewell audience at the early
hour at which it was necessary he should depart if he wished
to try to reach a railway the same evening, but he left twe

WANDA. 85

notes for them, couched in that graceful compIimcDt of which
lis Parisian culture made him an admirable master, aud took
a warm adieu of the good physician, with a promise not to
ibrget the orchid of the £spiritu Santo. Then he breakfasted ,
liastilj, and lefl the tapestried chamber in which he had'
«li*eamed of the Nibelungcn queen.

At the door he drew a ring of great value from his finger
sind offered it to Hubert, but the old man, thanking him,
;yrotcsted he dared not take it.

*' Old as I am in her service," he said, *^ the countess would
dismiss me in an hour if I accepted any gifts from a guest."

" Your lady is very severe,*' said Sabran. "It is happy for
Xier she has servitors who subscribe to feudalism. If she were
in Paris "

" We are bound to obey," said the old man, simply. " Tho
^souDtess deals with us most generously and justly. We are
'l)ound, in return, to render her obedience."

** All tho antique virtues have found refuge hero," said
'Sabran ; but he lcl\ the ring behind him lying on a table in
%he Rittersaal.

Four instead of two vigorous and half-broke horses from
die Magyar plains bore him away in a light travelling-carriage
towards the Virgenthal, the household, with Herr Joachim at
Chcir head, watching with regret the travelling-carriage wind
"tip among the woods and disappear on the farther side of the
lake. He himself looked back with a pang of envy and re-
gret at the stately pile towering towards the clouds, with its
ciccp-red banner streaming out on the wind that blew from the
Northern plains.

" Happy woman I" he thought ; " happy — thrice happy — to
possess such dominion, such riches, and such ancestry 1 If [
liad had them, I would have had the world under my foot as
Vrcll I"

It was with a sense of pain that he saw the great house
clisappear behind its screen of mantling woods, as his horses
olimbcd the hilly path beyond, higher and higher at every
Btep, until all that he saw of Hohenszali-as was a strip of the
^rccn lake — green as an arura-leaf — lying far down below,
V^earin^ oc its waters the gray willows of the Holy Isle.

** When I am very old and weary I will come and die
tliere," he thought, with a touch of that melancholy which all

8

86 WAXDA.

his irony and cyDicisiii could not dispel from his natural tem-
per. There were moments when he felt that ho was but a
lonely and homeless wanderer on the face of the earth, and
this was one of those moments, as, alone, ho went upon his
way along the perilous path, cut along tho face of precipitous
rocks, passing over rough bridges that spanned deep dcfilen
and darkening ravines, clinging to the side of a mountain as
a swallow's nest clings to the wall of a house, and running
high on swaying galleries, above dizzy depths where nameless
torrents plunged with noise and foam into impenetrable chasms.
The road had been made in the fifleenth century by the Szalras
lords themselves, and the engineering of it was bold and vig-
orous though rude, and kept in sound repair, though not much
changed.

He had left a small roll of paper lying beside the ring in
the knight's hall. Hubert took them both to his mistress
when, a few hours later, he was admitted to her presence.
Opening the paper, she saw a roll of a hundred napoleons, and
on the paper was written, " There can be no poor where the'
Countess von Szalras rules. Let these be spent in massos for
the dead."

'^ What a delicate and graceful sentiment T' oaid the Princess
Ottilie, with vivacity and emotion.

"It is prettily expressed and gracefully thought of," her
niece admitted.

" Charmingly 1 admirably !" said the princess, with a much
warmer accent. " There is delicate gratitude there, as well as
a proper feeling towards a merciful God."

" Perhaps," said her niece, with a little smile, " the money
was won at play, in giving some one else what they call a ciilotte :
what would you say then, dear aunt ? Would it be purified
by entering the service of the Church ?"

" I do not know why you are satirical," said the princess ;
*' and I cannot tell, either, how you can bring yourself to use
Parisian bad words."

" I will send these to the bishop," said Wanda, rolling up the
gold. " Alas 1 alas ! there are always poor. As for the ring,
Hubert, give it to Herr Greswold, and he will transmit it to
this gentleman's address in Paris, as though it had been left
behind by accident. You were so right not to take it ; bui
my dear people are always faithful."

WAKDA, 87

These few words were dearer and more precious U the
holiest old man than all the jewels in the world could ever have
become. But the offer of it, and the gifc of the gold for the
Ghuroh*s use, had confirmed the high opinion in which he
and the whole household of Hohenszalras held the departed
guest

'' Allow at least that this evening will he much duller than
last," said the princess, with much initation.

" Your friend played admirably,'* said Wanda von Szalras,
as she sat at her embroidery-frame.

*^ You speak as if he were an itinerant pianist 1 What is
your dislike to your fellow-creatures, when they are of your
own rank, based upon ? If he had been a carpet-weaver
from the Defereggenthal, as I said before, you would have
bidden him stay a month."

*^ Dearest aunt, be reasonable. How was it possible to keep
here on a visit a French marquis of whom we know absolutely
nothing except from himself?"

" I never knew you were prudish I"

" I never knew either that I was," said the Countess Wanda,
with her serene temper unruffled. ** I quite admit your new
friend has many attractive qualities, — on the surface, at any
rate ; but, if it were possible for mc to be angry with you,
I should be so for bringing him as you did into the library
last night."

" You would never have known your spinet could speak if
I had not. You are very ungrateful ; and I should not be in
the least surprised to find that he is a crown-prince or a grand
duke travelling incognito."

" We know them all, I fear."

'* It is impossible he should not have his name in the Ilof-
Kalender," insisted the princess. " He looks pnnce du sang^
if ever any one did ; so "

'^ There is good blood outside your Hof-Kalender, dear
■Bother mine."

" Certainly," said the princes.] ; " though I grant it would
be more satisfactory if one found his record there. One can
never know too much or too certainly of a person whom one
admits to friendship."

" Friendship is a very strong word," said Wanda von Szal-
ras, with a smile. *' This gentleman has only made a hostelry

88 WAJSVA,

of fJohenszalras for a day or two, and even that was made
against his will. But, as you are so interested in him, mtine
Uebe, read this little record I have found."

She gave the princess an old leather-bound volume of
memoirs written and published at Lausanne, by an obscure
noble in his exile, in the year 1798. She had opened tbe
book at one of the pages that narrated the fates of many
nobles of Brittany, relatives or comrades of the writer.

^^ And foremost among these," said this little book, " do I
ever and unceasingly regret the loss of my beloved consin and
friend, Yvon, Marquis de Sabran-Komaris. So beloved was
he in his own province that even the Convention was afraid
to touch him, and, being poor, despite his high descent, as his
father had ruined his fortunes in play and splendor at the
court of Louis XV., he thought to escape the general pro-
scription, and dwell peaceably on his rock-bound shores with
his young children. But the blood-madness of the time so
grew upon the nation that even the love of his peasantry and
his own poverty could not defend him, and one black, bitter
day an armed mob from Yannes came over the heath, burn-
ing all they saw of ricks, or homesteads, or ch0,teaux, or cots,
that they might warm themselves by those leaping fires ; and
60 they came on at last, yelling and drunk, and furious, with
torches flaming and pikes blood-stained, up through the gates
of Bomaris. Sabran went out to meet them, leading his eldest
son by the hand, a child of eight years. * What seek ye ?'
he said to them. * I am as poor as the poorest of you, and
consciously have done no living creature wrong. What do
you come for here?' The calm courage of him, and the
glance of his eyes, which were very beautiful and proud,
quelled the disordered, mouthing, blood-drunk multitude in a
manner, and moved them to a sort of reverence, so that the
leader of them, stepping forth, said, roughly, * Citizen, we
come to slit your throat and burn your house ; but if you will
curse God and the king, and cry, " Long live the sovereign
people I" we will leave you alone, for you have been the
friend of the poor. Come, say it I — come, shout it with both
lungs 1 — it is not much to ask.' Sabran put his little boy
behind him with a tender gesture, then kissed the hilt of his
sword, which he hold unsheathed in his hand. ' I sorrow for
the people,' he said, ^ since they are misguided and mad. Bill

WANDA. 89

I believe in my God, and I love my king, and even so shall
my children do after me ;' and the words were scarce out of
his mouth before a score of pik^s ran him through the body,
and the torches were tossed into his house, and he and his
perished, like so many gallant gentlemen of the time, a prey
to the blind fury of an ingrate mob.''

The Princess Ottilie's tender eyes moistened as she read,
and she closed the volume reverently, as though it were a
sacred thing.

*' I thank you for sending me such a history," she said.
'* It does one's soul good in these sad, bitter days of spiritless
selfishness and utter lack of all impersonal devotion. This
gentleman must, then, be a descendant of the child named in
this narrative?"

^'The story says that he and his perished," replied her
niece. " But I suppose that child, or some other younger
»De, escaped the fire and the massacre. If ever we see him
again, we will ask him. Such a tradition is as good as a page
in the Almanach de Goth a."

" It is," assented the abbess. " Where did you find it ?"

*' I read those memoirs when I was a child, with so many
others of that Ume," answered the Countess Wanda. " When
I heard the name of your new friend, it seemed familiar to
me, and, thinking over it, I remembered these Breton narra-
tives."

" At least you need not have been afraid to dine with
him 1" said the Princess Ottilie, who could never resist hav-
ing the last word, thought she felt that the retort was a little
ungenerous and perhaps undeserved.

Meantime, Sabran went on his way through the green
valley, under the shadow of the Klein and the Kristallwand,
with the ice of the great Schaltten Gletscher descending like
a huge frozen torrent. When he reached the last stage before
Matrey, he dismissed his postilions with a gratuity as large as
the money remaining in his belt would permit, and insisted on
taking his way on foot over the remaining miles. Baggage
he had none, and he had not even the weight of his knapsack
and rifle. The men remonstrated with him, for they were
afraid of their lady's anger if they returned when they were
still two long German miles ofl^ their destination. But he
was determined, and sent them backwards whilst they could

8*

90 WANDA.

yoi reach home by daylight. The path to Matrey passed
aoro8s pastures and tracts of stony ground : he took a little
goatherd with him as a guide, being unwilling to run the risk
of a second misadventure, and pressed on hb way without
delay.

The sun had come forth from out a watery world of cloud
and mist, which shrouded from sight all the domes and peaks
and walls of ice of the mountain-region in which he was once
more a wanderer. But when the mists had lifted, and the
sun was shining, it was beautiful exceedingly : all the grasses
were full of the countless wild-flowers of the late Austrian
spring ; the swollen brooks were blue with mouse-ear, and the
pastures with gentian ; clumps of daffodils blossomed in all
the mossy nooks, aud hyacinths purpled the pine woods. Oa
the upper slopes the rain -fog still hung heavily, but the sun-
rays pierced it here aud there, and the white vaporous atmos-
phere was full of fantastic suggestions and weird half-seen
shapes, as pine-trees loomed out of the mist or a vast black
mass of rock towered above the clouds. A love of nature,
of out-of-door movement, of healthful exercise and sports,
resisted in him the enervating influences of the Paris life
which he had led. He had always left the gay world at
intervals for the simple and rude pleasures of the mountaineer
aud the hunter. There was an impulse towards that foreift
freedom which at times mastered him and made the routine
of worldly dissipation and diversion wholly intolerable to him.
It was what his fair critic of Paris had called his barbarism,
which broke up out of the artificial restraints and habits im-
posed by the world.

His wakeful night had made him fanciful, and his depart-
ure from Hohenszalras had made him regretful ; for he, on
his way back to Paris and all his habits and associates and
pleasures, looking around him on the calm white mountain-
sides, and penetrated by the pure, austere mountain silence,
suddenly felt an intense desire to stay amidst that stillness
and that solitude and rest here in the green heart of the
Tauern.

" Who knows but one might see her again ?" he thought,
as the sound of the fall of the Schlossbach came on his ear
from the distance. That stately figure seated by the great
wood fire, with the light on her velvet skirts, and the poarlf

WAA'DA. 91

ftt her throat, and the hounds lying couched beside her, was
always before his memory and his vision.

And he paid and dismissed his guide at the humble door
of the Zum Rautter in Windisch-Matrey, and that evening
began discussing with Christ Rangediner and Egger, the
guides there, the ascent of the Kahralpe and the Lasorling,
and the pass to Krimml, over the ice-crests of the Yenediger
group.

A mountaineer who had dwelt beneath the shadow of
Orizaba was not common in the heart of the Tauern, and the
men made much of their new comrade, not the less because
the gold pieces rattled in his pouch and the hunting-watch
he carried had jewels at its back.

'* If any one had told me that in the month of May I
should bury myself under an Austrian glacier 1" he thought,
with some wonder at his own decision, for he was one of
those foster-sons of Paris to whom paridiie is an habitual and
necessary intoxication.

But there comes a time when even parisine, like chloral,
ceases to have power to charm. In a vague way he had often
felt the folly and the hollowness of the life that turned night
into day, made the green cloth of the gaming-table the sole
field of battle, and offered as all form of love the purchased
smile of the heUe petite. A sense of repose and of fresh-
ness, like the breath of a cool morning blowing on tired eyes,
came to him as he sat in the gray twilight amidst the green
landscape, with the night coming down upon the eternal
snows above, whilst the honest, simple souls around him
talked of hill-perils and mountaineers' adventures and all the
exploits of a hardy life ; and in the stillness, when their voices
ceased, there was no sound but the sound of water up above
amidst the woods, tumbling and rippling in a hundred unseen
brooks and falls.

'^ If they had let me alone," he thought, " I should have
been a hunter all my days ; a guide, perhaps, like this Christ
and this Egger here. An honest man, at least "

His heart was heavy and his conscience ill at ease. The
grand, serene glance of Wanda von Szalras seemed to have
reached his soul and called up in him unavailing regrets,
pangs 01 doubt long dormant, vague remorse long put to sleep
with the opiate of the world-taught cynicism which had be

92 WAXDA.

come his second nature. The most impenetrable cynicism
m\\ yield and mcft, and seem but a poor armor when :t if
brought amidst the solemnity and solitude of the high hills.

CHAPTER V.

A PEW days later there arrived by post the " Espfritu Santo,*
of Mexico, addressed to the Professor Joachim Greswold.

If he had received the order of the Saint Esprit he would
not have been more honored, more enchanted ; and he was
deeply touched by the remembrance of him testified by the giA*,
whose donor he supposed was back in the gay world of men,
not knowing the spell which the snow-mountains of the Tauem
had cast on a worldly soul. When he was admitted to the pres*
ence of the Princess Ottilie to consult with her on her variooa
ailments, she conversed with him of this passer-by who had
so fascinated her fancy, and she oven went so far as to permit
him to bring her the great volumes of the " Mexico" out of
the library and point her out those chapters which he con
sidered most likely to interest her.

** It is the work of a true Catholic and gentleman," she said,
with satisfaction, and perused with special commendation the
passap;es which treated of the noble conduct of the Cathoie
priesthood in those regions, their frequent martyrdom and
their devoted self-negation. When she had thoroughly iden-
tified their late guest with the editor of these goodly and
blameless volumes, she was content to declare that better cre«
dcntials no man could bear. Indeed, she talked so continually
of this single point of interest in her monotonous routine of
life, that her niece said to her, with a jest that was more than
half earnest, " Dearest mother, almost you make me regret
that this gentleman did not break his neck over the Engei-
horn, or sink with his rifle."

" The spinet would never have spoken," said the princess ;
*^ and I am surprised that a Christian woman can say such
things, even in joke 1"

The weather cleared, the sun shone, the gardens began to
^w gorgeous, and great parterres of roses glowed between

WANDA, 93

the emerald of the velvet lawns : an Austrian garden has not
a long life, but it has a very brilliant one. All on a sudden,
as the rains ceased, every alley, group, and terrace was filled
with every variety of blossom, and the flora of Africa and
India was planted out side by side with the gentians and the
Alpine roses natural to the soil. All the Northern ComifertB
spread the deep green of their branches above the turf, and
the larch, the birch, the beech, and the oak were massed in
clusters, or spread away in long avenues, — deep defiles of
foliage, through which the water of the lake far down below
glistened like a jewel.

*' If your friend had been a fortnight later, he would havo
seen Hohenszalras in all its beauty," said its mistress once to
the Princess Ottilie. '* It has two seasons of perfection : one
its midsummer flowering, and the other when all the world is
frozen round it"

The princess shivered in retrospect and in anticipation. She
hated winter. " I should never live through another winter,"
she said, with a sigh.

" Then you shall not be tried by one : we will go elsewhere,"
Baid Wanda, to whom the ice-bound world, the absolute silence,
the sense of the sleigh flying over the hard snow, the perfect
purity of the rarefied air of night and day, made up the most
welcome season of the year.

" I suppose it is dull for you," she added, indulgently. " I
have so many occupations in the winter : a pair of skates and
a sleigh are to me of all forms of motion the most delightful.
But you, shut up in your blue-room, do no doubt find our
winter hard and long."

** I hibernate ; I do not live," said the princess, pettishly.
" It is not even as if the house were full."

" With ill-assorted guests, whose cumbersome weariness one
would have to try all day long to dissipate I Oh, my dear
aunt, of all wearisome corvSes the world holds there is nothing
so bad Ks a house-party, — even when Egon is here to lead the
eotillon and the hunting."

" You are very inhospitable I"

" That is the third time lately you have made that charge
against me. I begin to fear that I must deserve it."

** You deserve it, certainly. Oh, you arc hospitable to the
poor. You set peddlers, or mule-drivcre, or tmvelling clock*

94 WANDA.

makers, by the doxen round your hall ures, and yon would
feed a pilgrimage all the winter locg. But to your own
order, to your own society, you are inhospitable. In your
mother's time the Schloss had two hundred guestd for the
autumn parties, and then the winter season, from Carnival to
Easter^ was always spent in the capital."

'* She liked that, I suppose."

" Of course she liked it : every one ought to like it at whal
was her age then, and what is yours now."

^'I like this," said the Countess Wanda, to change the
subject, as the servants set a little Japanese tea-table and two
arm-chairs of gilt osier-work under one of the Siberian pines,
whose great velvet-like boughs spread tent-like over the grass,
on which the dogs were already stretched in anticipation of
sugar and cakes.

From this lawn there were seen only the old keep of the
burg, and the turrets and towers of the rest of the building ;
ivy clambered over one-half of the great stone pile, that bad
been raised with hewn rock in the ninth century ; and some
arolla pines grew about it. A low terrace, with low broad
steps, separated it from the gardens. A balustrade of stone,
ivy-mantled, protected the gardens from the rocks; while
these plunged in a perpendicular descent of a hundred feet
into the lake. Some black yews and oaks, very large and
old, grew against the low stone pillars. It was a favorite spot
with the mistress of Hohenszalras ; it looked westward, and
beyond the masses of the vast forests there shone the snow-
summit of the Vanediger, and the fantastic peaks of the Klein
and the Kristallwand, whilst on a still day there could be heard
b low sound which she, familiar with it, knew came from the
thunder of the subterranean torrents filling the Szalrassee.

"Oh, it is very nice," said the princess, a little deprccatingly,
** And of course I at my years want nothing better than a gUt
chair in the sunshine. But then there is so very little sun-
shine 1 The chair must generally stand by the stove 1 And
I confess that I think it would be fitter for your years and
your rank if these chairs were multiplied by ten or twenty,
and if thero were some pretty people laughing and talking
and playing games in those great gardens."

** It is glorious weather now," said her niece, who would
not assent and did not desire to dispute*

WANDA. 95

" TeB," interrnpted the princess. " But it will rain to-
morrow. You know we never have two fine days together/'

*' We will take it while we have it, and be thankful/' said
Wanda, with a good humor that refused to be ruffled. *^ Here
is Hubert coming out to us. What can he want? He looks
very startled and alarmed."

The old major-domo's face was indeed gravely troubled, as
he bowed before his lady.

'* Pardon me the intrusion, my countess," he said, hur-
riedly, ** but I thought it right to inform you myself that a
lad has come over from Steiner's Inn to say that the foreign
gentleman who was here fifleen days ago has had an accident
on the Umbal glacier. It seems he stayed on in Matrey for
the sake of the climbing and the shooting. I do not make out
from the boy what the accident was, but the Umbal is very dan-
i;erous at this season. The gentleman lies now at Pregratten.
You know, my ladies, what a very wretched place that is."

" I suppose they have come for the Herr Professor?" said
Wanda, vaguely disturbed, while the princess very sorrowfully
was putting a score of irrelevant questions which Hubert
could not answer.

'' No doubt he has no doctor there, and these people send
for that reason," said Wanda, interrupting with an apology
the useless interrogations. " Get horses ready directly, and
send for Greswold at once, wherever he may be ; but it is a
long bad way to Pregratten ; I do not see how he can return
ander twenty-four hours."

" Let him stay two nights, if he be wanted," said the prin-
cess, to whom she spoke. She had always insisted that the
physician should never be an hour out of Hohenszalras whilst
she was in it.

'' Your friend has been trying to shoot a kutengeier again,
I suppose," said her niece, with a smile. ^^ He is very ad-
▼enturous."

" And you are very heartless."

Wanda did not deny the charge ; but she went into the
house, saw the doctor, and requested him to take everything
with him of linen, wines, food, or cordials that might possibly
be wanted.

" And stay as long as you are required," she added, " and
Boud mules over to us for anything you wish for. Do uoi

96 WANDA.

think of us. If my dear aunt should ail anything, I can dis-
patch a messenger to you, or call a physician from Salzburg.'*

Herr Joachim said a very few words, thanked her grate-
fully, and took his departure behind two sure-footed moun-
tain-cobs, that could cHmb almost like chamois.

^^ I think one of the Fathers should have gone too/* said
Princess Ottilie, regretfully.

" I hope he is not in cx^rewits," said her nieoo. ** And I
fear if he were he would hardly care for spiritual assistance."

" You are so prejudiced against him, Wunda I"

'^ I do not think I am ever prejudiced," said the Counieflii
von Szalras.

" That is so like a prejudiced person 1" said the prinoo8i|
triumphantly.

For twenty-four hours they heard nothing from Pregratten,
which is in itself a miserable little hamlet lying amidst some
of the grandest scenes that the earth holds : towards evening
the next day a lad of the village came on a mule and brought
a letter to his ladies from the Herr Professor, who wrote that
the accident had been due, as usual, to the gentleman's own
carelessness, and to the fact of the snow being melted by the
midsummer sun until it was a thin crust over a deep crevasse :
he had found his patient suifering from severe contusions,
high fever, lethargy, and neuralgic pains, but he did not as
yet consider there were seriously dangerous symptoms. He
begged permission to remain, and requested certain things to
be sent to him from his medicine-chests and the kitchens.

The boy slept at Hohenszalras that night, and in the morn
ing returned over the hills to Pregratten with all the doctor
had asked for. Wanda selected the medicines herself, and
sent also some fruit and wine, for which he did not ask. The
princess sent a bone of St. Ottilie in an ivory case, and the
assurance of her constant prayers. She was sincerely anxious
and troubled. " Such a charming person, and so handsome/*
she said, again and again. " I suppose the priest of Pregrat-
ten is with him."

Her niece did not remind her that her physician did not
greatly love any priests whatever, though on that subject he
was always discreetly mute at Hohenszalras.

For the next ten days Greswold stayed at Pregratten, and
the princess lore his absence, since it was to serve a person

WANDA. 97

who had had the good fortune to fascinate her, and whom also
she chose to uphold because ^er niece was, as she considered,
unjust to him. Moreover, life at the burg was very dull to
the canoness, whatever it might be to its chatelaine, who had
80 much .interest in its farms, its schools, its mountains, and its
villages, — an interest which to her great-aunt seemed quite out
of place, as all those questions, she considered, should belong to
the priesthood and the stewards, who ought not to be disturbed
in their direction, the one of spiritual and the other oi' agri-
cultural matters. This break in the monotony of her time
was agreeable to her of the bulletins from Pregratten, of the
dispatch of all that was wanted, of the additional pleasure of
complaining that she was deprived of her doctor's counsels,
and also of feeling at the same time that in enduring this de-
privation she was doing a charitable and self-denying action.
She further insisted on sending out to Steiner's Inn, greatly to
his own discomfort, her own confessor.

" Nobles of Brittany have always deep religious feeling,"
ehe said to her niece, '^ and Father Ferdinand has such skill
and persuasion with the dying."

" But no one is dying," said Wanda, a little impatiently.

'' That is more than any human being can tell," said the
princess, piously. " At-^ali events. Father Ferdinand always
uses every occasion judiciously and well."

Father Ferdinand, however, was not very comfortable in
Pregratten, and soon returned, much jolted and worn by the
transit on a hill-pony. He was reserved about his visitation,
and told his patroness sadly that he had been unable to effect
much spiritual good, but that the stranger was certainly re-
covering from his hurts, and had the ivory case of St. Ottilio
on his pillow ; he had seemed averse, however, to confessiop,
and therefore, of course, there had been no possibility for ad-
ministration of the sacrament.

The princess was inclined to set this rebelliousness down to
the fault of the physician, and determined to talk seriously to
Greswold on spiritual belief as soon as he should return.

" If he be not orthodox we cannot keep him," she said,
aeverely.

" He is orthodox, dear aunt," said Wanda von Szalras, with
a smile. " He adores the wonders of every tiny blossom that
blows, and every little moss that clothes the rocks."
K ^ 9

98 WANDA.

"What a profano, almost sacrilegious answer 1" said th«
princess. " I never should have imagined that you woald
have jested on sacred themes/*

" I did not intend a jest. I was never more serious. A
life like our old professor's is a perpetual prayer."

" Your great-aunt Walburga belonged to the Perpetual Ado-
ration," rejoined the princess, who only heard the last word
but one. " The order was very severe. I always think it too
great a strain on finite human powers. She was betrothed to
the Markgraf Paul, but he was killed at Austerlitz, and she
t>ook refuge in a life of devotion. I always used to think that
you would change Hohenszalras into a sacred foundation, but
now I am afraid. You are a" deeply religious woman, Wanda,
—at least, I have always thought so, — but you read too much
(jerman and French philosophy, and I fear it takes something
from your fervor, from your entirety of devotion. You have
a certain liberty of expression that alarms me at times."

" I think it is a poor faith that dares not examine its ad-
versaries* charges," said her niece, quietly. " You would
have faith blindfolded. They call me a bigot at the court,
however. So, you see, it is hard to please all."

" Bigot is not a word for a Christian and Catholic sover-
eign to employ," said the canoness, severely. " Her majesty
must know that there can never be too great an exoess in
faith and service."

On the eleventh day Greswold returned over the hills, and
was admitted to immediate audience with his ladies.

" Herr von Sabran is well enough for me to leave him," he
said, after his first very humble salutations. " But, if your
excelleucies permit, it would be desirable for me to return
there in a day or two. Yes, my ladies, he is lying at Steiner's
Inn in Pregratten, a poor place enough, but your good-
ness supplied much that was lacking in comfort. He can be
moved before long. There was never any great danger, but
it was a very bad accident. He is a good mountaineer, it
seems, and he had been climbing a vast deal in the Venedigei
group : that morning he meant to cross the Umbal glacier to
the Ahronthal, and he refused to take a guide, so Steinei
tells rae."

" But I thought he left here to go to Paris ?"

" He did so, my countess," answered the doctor. ^ Bat ii

WANDA, 99

ieems he lo7^ tlio monntains, and their gpcll fell on liiin.
When he sent back your postilions he went on foot to Matrey,
and there he remained ; he thought the weather advanced
eno'igh to make climbing safe, but it is a dangerous pastime
BO early in summer, though Christ from Matrey, who came
over to see him, tells me he is of the first form as a moun-
taineer. He reached the Clarabutte safely, and broke hia
fast there ; crossing the Umbal the ice gave way, and he fell
into a deep crevajsse. He would have been a dead man if a
hunter on the Welitz side had not seen him disappear and
given the alarm at the hut. With ropes and men enough
they conf rived to haul him up, after some hours, from a great
depth. These accidents are very common, and he has to
thank his own folly in going out on to the glacier unaccon.-
panicd. Of course he was insensible, contused, and in hig*i
fever when I reached there : the surgeon they had called
from Matrey was an ignorant, who would soon have sent him
forever to as great a deep as the crevasse. He is very grate-
ful to you both, my ladies, and would be more so were he not
so angry with himself that it makes him sullen with the
world. Men of his kind bear isolation and confinement ill.
Steiner^s is a dull place : there is nothing to hear but the
tolling of the church-bell and the fret of the Isel waters."

" That means, my friend, that you want him moved as soon
as he can bear it ?" said Wanda. '^ I think he cannot very
well come here. We know nothing of him. But there is no
reason why you should not bring him to the lake monastery.
There is a good guest-chamber (the archbishop stayed there
once), and he could have your constant care there, and from
here every comfort."

" Why should he not be brought to this house ?" inter-
rupted Princess Ottilie : " there are fifty men in it already — "

" Servants and priests, no strangers. Besides, this gentle-
man will be much more at his ease on the Holy Isle, where
he can recompense the monks at his pleasure : he would feel
infinitely annoyed to be further burdened with a hospitality
ho never asked."

*^ Of course it is as you please," said the princess, a little
irritably.

'^ Dear aunt, when he is on the island you can send him
all the luxuries and all the holy books you may think good

lUO WANDA.

for him. Go over to the monks, if yon will ho so good, Hen
Joachim, and prepare them for a sick guest ; and as for trans-
port and all the rest of the assistance you may need, use the
horses and the household as you see fit. I give you eari^
blayiche, I know your wisdom and your prudence and your
charity."

The physician again returned to Pregratten, where he found
his pafient fretting with restless impatience at his enforced
imprisonment : he had a difficulty in persuading Sabran to go
back to that Szalrassee which had cost him so dear, but when
he was assured that he could pay the monks what he chose
for their hospitality, he at last consented to be taken to the
island.

" I shall see her again," he thought, with a little anger at
himself. The mountain-spirits had their own way of granting
wishes, but they had granted his.

On the Holy Isle of the Szalrassee there was a small Ati-
gustinian congregation, never more than twelve, of men chiefly
peasant-bom, and at this time all advanced in years. The
monastery was a low, gray pile, almost hidden beneath the
great willows and larches of the isle, but rich within from
many centuries of gifts in art from the piety of the lords of
Szaravola. It had two guest-chambers for male visitors, which
were lofty and hung with tapestry, and which looked down
the lake towards the north, and west to where, beyond the
length of water, there rose the mighty forest-hills washed by
the Salzach and the Ache, backed by the distant Rhfietian
Alps.

The island was almost in the centre of the lake, and, at a
distance of three miles, the rocks, on which the fortress and
palace stood, faced it across the water that rippled around it
and splashed its trees and banks. It was a refuge chosen in
wild and -rough times, when repose was precious, and no spot
on earth was ever calmer, quieter, more secluded than this,
where the fishermen never landed without asking a blessing
of those who dwelt there, and nothing divided the hours except
the bells that called to prayer or frugal food. The green wil-
lows and the green waters met and blended and covered up
this house of peace, as a warbler's nest is hidden in the reeds.
A stranger resting-place had never befallen the world-tossed,
restless, imperious, and dissatisfied spirit of the man who waa.

-t * . . -^

brought there by careful hands (ying on a lict€r, on a rail, ohc
gorgeous evening of a summer's day, one month after he had
lifted his rifle to bring down the hviengeier in the woods of
Wanda von Szalras.

" Almost thou makest me believe," he murmured, when lie
lay and looked upward at the cross that shone against the
evening skies, while the raft glided slowly over the water, and
from the walled retreat upon the isle there came the low sound
of the monks chanting their evensong.

They laid him down on a low, broad bed opposite a window
of three bays, which let him look from his couch along the
shining length of the Szalrassee towards the great burg, where
it frowned upon its wooded cliffs, with the stone brows of
many mountains towering behind it, and behind them the
glaciers of the Glockner and its lesser comrades.

The sun had just then set. There was a lingering glow
upon the water, a slender moon had risen above a distant
chain of pine-clothed hills, the slow, soft twilight of the Ger-
man Alps was bathing the grandeur of the «ccne with teudor-
est, faintest colors and mists ethereal. The Ave Maria was
ringing from the chapel, and presently the deep bells of the
monastery chimed a Laus Deo.

" Do you believe in fate ?" said Sabran abruptly to \m
companion, Ores wold.

The old physician gave a little gesture of doubt.

" Sometimes there seems something stronger than ourselves
and our will, but maybe it is only our own weakness that has
risen up and stands in another shape like a giant before us, as
our shadow will do on a glacier in certain seasons and states of
the atmosphere."

'* Perhaps that is all," said Sabran. But he laid his head
back on his pillow with a deep breath that had in it an equal
share of contentment and regret, and lay still, looking eastward,
while the peaceful night came down upon land and water
unbroken by any sound except that of a gentle wind stirring
amidst the willows or the plunge of an otter in the lake.

That deep stillness was strange to him who had lived sc
long in all the gayest cities of the world, but it was welcome ;
it seemed like a silent blessing : his life seemed to stand still
while holy men prayed for him and the ramparts of the mouo
fcains shut out the mad and headlong world.

9»

102 ^ WAND a:

* * With theso fancies he fell asleep, and dreamed of pathlen
Bteppes, which in the winter snows were so vast and vague,
stretching away, away, away to the frozen sea and the ice, thai
no suus can melt, and ceaseless silence, where sleep is death.

In the monastic quiet of the isle he soon recovered snffi*
cient strength to leave his hut, and move ahout slowly, though
he was still stiff and sprained from the fall on the Umbal ; ho
could take his dinner in the refectory, could get Dut and bh
under the great willows of the bank, and could touch their
organ as the monks never had heard it played.

It was a monotonous and perfectly simple life, but, eith(^
because his health was not yet strong, or because he had been
surfeited with excitement, it was not disagreeable or irksome
to him ; he bore it with a serenity and cheerfulness which the
monks attributed to religious patience, and Herr Joachim to
philosophy. It was not one or the other : it was partly from
such willingness as an over-taxed racer feels to lie down in the
repose of the stall for a while to recruit his courage and speed ;
it was partly due to the certainty which he felt that now,
sooner or later, he must see face to face once more the woman
who had forbidden him to shoot the vulture.

The face which had looked on him in the pale sunlight of
the pine woods and made him think of the Nibelungen queen
had been always present to his though ts^ even during the
semi-stupor of sedative-lulled rest in his dull chamber by the
lonely Isel stream.

From this guest-room, where he passed his convalesoenoe,
the wide casements all day long showed him the towers and
turrets, the metal roofs and pinnacles and spires, of her mighty
home, backed by its solemn neighbors, the glacier and the
alps, and girdled with the sombre green of the great forests.
Once or twice he thought as he looked at it and saw the noon
6un make its countless oriels sparkle like diamonds, or the star^
light change its stones and marbles into dream-like edifices
meet for Arthur's own Avalon, once or twice he thought to
himself, " If I owned Hohenszalras, and she Romaris, I would
write to her and say, ' A moment is enough for love to be
bom.' "

But Romans was his ; those aged oaks, torn by sea-winds
and splashed with Atlantic spray, were all ho had ; and she
was mistrcis here.

WANDA, W6

When a young man made his first appearance in the society
of Paris who was called E(^n^ Philippe Xavier, Marquis de
Sabran-Komaris, his personal appearance, which was singu-
larly attractive, his manners, which were of extreme distino-
iioD, and his talents, which were great, made him at once
successful in its highest society. He had a romantic history.

The son of that Marquis de Sabran who had fallen under
the pikes of the mob of Carrier had been taken in secret out
of the country by a faithful servant, smuggled on board a
cAoMemar^e, which had carried him to an outward-bound
sailing-ship destined for the seaboard of America. The chap-
lain was devoted, the servant faithful. The boy was brought
up well at a Jesuit college in Mexico, and placed in full pos-
session, when he reached manhood, of his family papers and
of such remnants of the family jewels as had been brought
away with him. His identity as his father's only living son
and the sole representative of the Sabrans of Komaris was
fully established and confirmed before the French consulate of
the city. Instead of returning to his country, as his Jesuit
tutors advised and desired, the youth, when he loll college,
gave the reins to a spirit of adventure and a passion for
archiBology and natural history. He was possessed beyond
all with the desire to penetrate the mystery of the buried
cities, and he had conceived a strong attachment to the flowery
and romantic land of Nezahualcoyotl and of Montezuma. He
plunged, therefore, into the interior of that country, and, half as
a Jesuit lay-missionary and half as an archaeological explorer,
let all his best years slip away under the twilight shadows
of the virgin forests, and amidst the flowering wilderness of
the banks of the great rivers, making endless notes upon the
ancient and natural history of these solitudes, and gathering
together an interminable store of tradition from the Indians
and the half-breeds with whom he grew familiar. He went
farther and farther away from the cities, and let longer and
longer intervals elapse without his old friends and teachers
hearing anything of him. All that was known of him was
that he had married a beautiful Mexican woman, who was
«aid to have in her the blood of the old royal race, and that he
tived far from the steps of white men in the depths of the hills
whence the Pacific was in sight. Once he went to the capi-
tal for the purpose of registering and baptizing his son by his

104 WANDA.

Mexican wife. Afler that ho was lost sight of by tho&B who
sarcd for him, and it was only known that he was compiling a
history of those lost nations whose temples and tombs, amidist
the wilderness, had so powerfully attracted his interest as a
boy. A quarter of a century passed ; his old friends died
away one by one, nobody remained in the country who remem-
bered or asked for him. The West is wide, and wild, and
silent ; endless wars and revolutions changed the surface of
the country and the thoughts of men ; the scholarly Marquis
de Sabran, who cared only for a hieroglyphic, or an orchid, or
a piece of archaic sculpture, passed away from the memories
of the white men whose fellow-student he had been. The
land was soaked in blood, the treasures were given up to ad-
venturers, the chiefs that each reigned their little hour slew,
and robbed, and burned, and fell in their turn, shot like vul-
tures or stabbed like sheep, and no one in that murderous
tohuhohu had either time or patience to give to the thought
of a student of perished altars and of swamp flora. The
college, even, where the Jesuits had sheltered him, had been
sacked and set on fire, and the old men and the young men
butchered indiscriminately. When, six-and-twenty years later,
he again returned to the capital to register the birth of his
grandson, there was no one who remembered his name.
Another quarter of a century passed by, and when his young
representative left the Western world for Paris he received a
tender and ardent welcome from men and women to whom his
name was still a talisman, and found a cordial recognition from
that old nobility whose pride is so cautious and impregnable
in its isolation and reserve. Every one knew that the young
Marquis de Sabran was the legitimate representative of the
old race that had made its nest on the rocks with the sea-birds
through a dozen centuries : that he had but little wealth was
rather to his credit than against it.

When he gave to the world, in his grandfather's name, the
result of all those long years of study and of solitude in Ike
heart of the Mexican forests, he carried out the task as only
a scientific scholar could have done it, and the vast undigested
mass of record, tradition, and observation which the elder
man had collected together in his many years of observation
and abstraction were edited and arranged with so much skill
that their mere preparation placed their young compiler ii

WANDA. lOa

the front rank of culture. That he disclaimed all merit of
his own, uffirmiug that he had simply put together into shape
all the scattered memoranda of the elder scholar, did not de-
tract from the value of his annotations. The volumes hecanie
the first authority on the ancient history and the natural his-
tory of a strange country, of which alike the past and the
present were of rare interest, and their production made his
name known where neither rank nor grace would have taken
it. To those who congratulated him on the execution of so
oomplicated and learned a work, he only replied, " It is no
merit of mine : all the learning is his. In giving it to the
world I do but pay my debt to him, and I am but a mere in-
Btniment of his, as the printing-press is that prints it." This
modesty, this affectionate loyalty, in a young man whose at-
tributes seemed rather to lie on the side of arrogance, of dis-
dainfulness, and of coldness, attracted to him the regard of
many persons to whom the mere idler, which he soon became,
would have been utterly indifferent. He chose, as such per-
sons thought most unfortunately, to let his intellectual powers
lie in abeyance, but he had shown that he possessed them.
No one without large stores of learning and a great variety
of attainments could have edited and annotated as he had
done the manuscripts bequeathed to him by the Marquis
Xavier as his most precious legacy. He might have occupied
a prominent place in the world of science, but he was too in-
dolent, or too sceptical even of natural facts, or too swayed
towards the pleasures of manhood, to care for continued
eonsecration of his life to studies of which he was early a
master, and it was the only serious work that he ever carried
out or seemed likely ever to attempt. Gradually these severe
studies had been left further and further behind him ; but
they had given him a certain place that no future carelessness
could entirely forfeit. He had grown to prefer to hear a
hiuette iCaTnateur praised at the Mirliton, to be more flattered
when his presence was prayed for at a premdhre of the Fran-
9aise ; but it had carried his name wherever in remote corners
of the earth two or three wise men were gathered together.

" You edited the great * Mexico '!" Horr Greswold had
cried, who would not have known the name of Gounod, of
Gdrdme, or of Octave Feuillet. The " Mexico" was a noble
jnonumcnt raised to the memory of a dead man, who in aa

10ft WANDA.

entirely obscure and almost entirely lonelj life had been both
beloved and revered.

He had no possessions in France to entail any obligatioDS
upon him. The single tower of the manor which the flames
had left untouched^ and an acre or two of barren shoire, were
all that the documents of the Sabrans enabled him to claim.
The people of the department were indeed ready to adore him
for the sake of the name he bore, but he had the true Paris-
ian's impatience of the province, and the hamlet of Romans
but rarely saw his face. He seldom went near Romans.
The sombre seaboard, with its primitive people, its wintry
storms, its monotonous country, its sad, hard, pious ways of
life, had nothing to attract a man who loved the gaslights
of the Chanips-Elys6es. Women loved him for that anion
of coldness and of romance which always most allured them,
and men felt a certain charm of unused power in him which,
coupled with his great courage and his skill at all games, fas-
cinated them often against their judgment. He was a much
weaker man than they thought him, but none of either sex
ever discovered it. Perhaps he was also a better man than
he himself believed. As he dwelt in the calm of this religious
community, his sins seemed to him many and beyond the
reach of pardon.

CHAPTER VI.

The days drifted by ; the little boat crossed thrice a day
from castle to monastery, bringing the physician, bringing
books, food, fruit, wine ; the rain came often, sheets of white
water sweeping over the lake and blotting the burg and the
hills and the forests from sight ; the sunshine came more
rarely, but when it came it lit up the amphitheatre of the
Olockner group to a supreme splendor, of solemn darkness
»f massed pines, of snow-peaks shrouded in the clouds. So
the month wore away : he was in no haste to recover entirely ;
be could pay the monks for his maintenance, and so felt fieo
to stay, not being allowed to know that his food came Gmm

WANDA. 107

the castle, as his books did. The simple priests were conquered
and fasoinated by him : he played grand Sistine masses foi
them, and canticles which he had listened to in Notre-Dame.
Ilerr Joachim marvelled to see him so passive and easily sat-
isfied ; for he perceived that his patient could not be by -nature
either very tranquil or quickly content ; but the doctor thought
that perhaps the severe nervous shock of the descent on the
Umbal might have shakened and weakened him, and knew
that the pure Alpine air, the harmless pursuits, and the early
hours were the best tonics and restoratives in the pharmacy
of nature. Therefore he could consistently encourage him tx)
stay, as his own wishes moved him to do ; for to the professor
the companionship and discussion of a scholarly and cultivated
man were rarities, and he had conceived an affectionate interest
in one whose life he had in some measure saved ; for without
skilled care the crevasse of the Isekhal might have been fatal
to a mountaineer who had succcessfully climbed the highest
peaks of the Andes.

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

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

" Perhaps not," answered Sabran, a little gloomily. " But
we do believe in dishgnor."

" Do you ?" said the doctor, with some irony. " Oh, 1 sup-
pose you do. You may seduce Gretchen, you must not for-
sake Faustine ; you must not lie to a man, you may lie to a

108 WAA'DA.

womau. Yon mast not steal, yoa may beggar your fVieiid wt
baccara. I confess I have never understood the confusioii of
your unwritten laws on ethics and etiquette."

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

Yet, even with remorse and a sense of shame in the back-
ground of the simple, tranquil life, it did him good. The
simple fare, the absence of excitement, the silent lake-dwelling
where no sound came, except that of the bells or the organ,
or the voices of fishermen on the waters, the " early to bod
and early to rise," which were the daily laws of the monastie
life, these soothed, refreshed, and ennobled his life.

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

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

" Our ladies are not used to refusals," said the doctor, see-
ing his hesitation.

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

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

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

" Then you will come and tell her so ?"

" I can do no less."

Princess Ottilie and the mistress of Hohenszalras had had
a discussion before that note of invitation was sent,— a duh

WANDA. 109

eassion which had ended, as usnal, in tho stronger reasoner
giving way to the whim and will of the weaker.

" Why should we not be kind to him ?" the princess had
^ DTged ; " he is a gentleman. You know I took the precau-
tion to write to Kaulnitz ; Kaulnitz's answer is clear enough :
and to Frohsdorf, from which it was equally satisfactory. I
wrote also to the Comte de la Bar^ ; his reply was every thiLg
tbat could be desired.'*

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

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

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

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

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

" Why should you ?" said her niece. " Do you think,
either, that it is quite honorable to make inquiries unknown
to people ? It always savors to me too much of tho Third
Section."

" You are so exaggerated in all your scruples : you prefer
to be suspicious of a person in silence rather than to ask a few
quest».ons," said the princess. " But surely, when two ambas-
sadors and the King of France guarantee his position ? "

The answer she had received from Kaulnitz had indeed
only moderately satisfied her. It said that there was nothing
known to the detriment of the Marquis de Sabran, that he had
never been accused of anything unfitting his rank and name,
but that h( was a viveur^ and was said to be very successful

10

110 WANDA.

at play ; he was not known' to have any debts, but he was be
lieved to be poor and of precarious fortunes. On the whole,
the princess had decided to keep the answer to herself; shu
had rememberpd with irritation that her niece had suggested
baccara as the source of the hundred gold pieces.

" I never intended to convey that ambassadors would dis-
own him, or the Kaiser either, whose signature is in his pookot-
book. Only, as you and I are all alone, surely it will be at
well to leave this gentleman to the monks and to Greswold*
That is all I mean."

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

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

" You need not quarrel with me," said the princess, pet-
tishly. " You have a terrible habit of contradiction, Wanda ;
and you never give up your opinion."

The mistress of Hohcnszalras smiled, and sighed a little.
" Dear mother, we will do anything that amuses you."
So the note was sent.

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

This stranger whom chance had brought to them was to her
idea a precious and providential source of excitement ; already
a hundred romances had suggested themselves to her fertile
mind ; already a hundred impossibilities had suggested them*
selves to her as probable. She did not in the least believe

WANDA. 11,

that accident had brought him there. She imagined that he
had wandered there for the saice of seeing the mistress of
Hohenszalras, who had for so long been unseen hj the world,
but whose personal graces and great fortune had remained
in the memories of many. To the romantic fancy of the
princess, which had never been blunted by contact with harsh
facts, nothing seemed prettier or more probable than that the
French marquis, when arrested as a poacher, had been upon
a pilgrimage of poetic adventure. It should not be her fault,
she resolved, if the wounded knight had to go away in sorrow
and silence, without the castle gates being swung open once
at least

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

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

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

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

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

8he thought he was still suffering, and looked at him with
jiterest

I am afraid that we did wrong to tempt you from the

i(

112 WANDA.

monastery/' she said, in her grave melodious voice and sht
strctehed out her hand to him with a look of sympathy. " I
am afraid you are still suffering and weak, are you not?"

He bent low as he touched it.

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

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

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

" What an enchanting little room 1*' said Sabran, glancing
round it, and appreciating with the eyes of a connoisseur the
Lancret designs, the Rieseuer cabinets, and the old china.
lie was as well versed in the art and lore of the Beau Si^le
as Ars^ne Houssaye or the Goncourts ; he talked now of tl«
epoch with skill and grace, with that accuracy of knowledge
and that fineness of criticism which had made his observations
and his approval treasured and sought for by the artists and
the art patrons of Paris.

The day was gray and mild ; the casements wci*e open \ the

WANDA. 113

fresli, pure fragrance of the forests came in tlirongh the aro-
matic warmth of the chamber ; the little gay shepherds and
Bhepherdesses seemed to breathe and laugh.

*' This room was a caprice of an ancestress of mine, wlio was
of your country, and was, I am afraid, very wretched here,"
fiai<3 Wanda von Szalras. " She brought her taste from Marly
an<l Versailles. It is not the finest or the purest taste, but it
Has a grace and elegance of its own that is very charming, as
a cHange."

** It is a madrigal in porcelain," he said, looking around him.
'^ X a.m glad that the alouette gauloise has sung hero beside the
dread and majestic Austrian vulture."

** The alouette gauloise always sings in Aunt Ottilie's heart ;
>^t is what keeps her so young always. I assure you she is a
Prosit deal younger than I am," said his chUtelaine, resting a
glance of tender affection on the pretty figure of the princess
caroasing her Spits dog Bijou.

Slie herself, with her great pearls about her throat, and a
gO'Wn of white serge, looked a stately and almost severe figure
t>osi<Je the dainty picturesque prettiness of the elder lady and
the iantastic gayety and gilding of the porcelain and the
paintings. He felt a certain awe of her, a certain hesitation
before her, which the habits of the world enabled him to con-
^al > but which moved him with a sense of timidity novel and
^iiiost painful.

** One ought to be Dorat and Marmontel to bo worthy of
^c"h a repast," he said, as he seated himself between his
Hostesses.

** Neither Dorat nor Marmontel would have enjoyed your
^^^ terrible adventure," said the princess, reflecting with
^^tiaf^Qtion that it was herself who had saved this charming
**^^ chivalrous life, since, at her own risk and loss, she had
?^**< her physicians, alike of body and of soul, to wrestle for
*^iui with death by his sick-bed at Pregratten.

** Wanda would never have sent any one to him," thought
!'^^ abbess: " she is so unaccountably indifferent to any human
*"e higher than her peasantry."

'* Adventures are to the adventurous," quoted Sabran.

** Yes," said the princess ; " but the pity is that the adven-

^^U8 are too often the questionable "

^^ Perhaps that is saying too much," said Wanda; ^^but it
A 10»

It A WANDA,

\a certain that tho more solid qaalitics do not often lead into
A sareer of excitement. It has been always conceded" — ^with
% iigh— « that duty is dull."

" I think adventure is like calamity : some people aro bom
to it," replied Sabran, "and such cannot escape from it.
Loyola may cover his head with a cowl : he cannot become
obscure. Eugene may make himself an abb6 : he cannot ed-
uape his hoToscope cast in the House of Mars."

" What a fatalist you are !"

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

" That merely proves that crime is no buckler."

Sabran was silent.

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

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

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

'*Ah 1 if Egon had only talent like that I"' she thought,
with a sigh of remembrance. Her cousin was a gallant
nobleman and soldier, but of literature he had no knowledge,
for art he had a consummate indifference, and the only
eloquence he could command was a brief address to his
troopers, which would be answered by an Elgenl ringing
loud and long, like steel smiting upon iron.

WANDA. 115

Sabran oonld at all times talk well.

He had the gift of facile and eloquent words, and he had

.Iso, what most attracted the sympathies of his hostess, a

muine and healthful love of the mountains and forests.

XL his life in Paris had not eradicated from his character a

.eep love for nature in her wildest and her stormiest moods.

^hey conversed long and with mutual pleasure of this coun

around them, of which she knew every ravine and tor-

-^nt, and of whose bold and sombre beauty he was honestly

lamored.

The Doon had deepened into aflemoon, and the chimes of

te clock-tower were sounding four, when he rose to take his

^ave and go on his way across the green brilliancy of the

imbling water to his quiet home with the Augustinian

ithren. He had still the languor and fatigue about him of

'^^soent illness, and he moved slowly and with considerable

<«akness. She said to him in parting, with unaffected kind-

I, '' Come across to us whenever you like : we are con-

Bmed to think that one of our own glaciers should have

'^ated you so cruelly. I am often out riding far and wide.

It my aunt will always be pleased to receive you."

** I am the debtor of the Umbal ice,'' he said, in a low

lice. " But for that happy fall, I should have gone on my

ay to my old senseless life without ever having known true

«t as 1 know it yonder. Will you be offended, too, if I say

at I stayed at Matrey with a vague, faint, unfounded hope

lit your mountains might be merciful, and let me "

" Shoot a kutengeier f she said, quickly, as though not
siring to hear his sentence finished. " You might shoot
^ >< easily, sitting at a window in the monastery and watching
^^ 1 1 the vultures flew across the lake ; but you will remember
y^:>"ii are on parole. I am sure you will be faithful."

Xong, long afterwards she remembered that he shrank a
»*^^t:lo at the word, and that a flush of color went over his
f».oe.

** 1 will," he said, simply ; " and it was not the kiitengeier
*^ip which I desired to be allowed to revisit Hohenszalras."

** Well, if the monks starve you or weary you, you can re-
^■^cmber that we are here, and you must not give their organ
^^ite all the music that you bear so wonderfully in your mind
*«id hands."

116 UGANDA.

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

** Next time you come, — to-morrow if you like."

He went away, lying listlessly in the little boat, for ho wa8
Htill far from strong ; but life seemed to him very sweet and
serene as the evening light spread over the broad, bright
water, and the water-birds rose and scattered before the plunge
of the oars.

Had the sovereign mistress of Ilohenszalras ever said be-
fore to any other living friend, " To-morrow" ? Yet he waB
too clever a man to be vain ; and he did not misinterpret the
calm kindness of her invitation.

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

But the princess urged hb speedy return, and the ch&te-
laine of Szaravola said once more, with that grave smile which
was rather in the eyes than on the lips, " We shall always be
happy to see you when you are inclined to cross the lake."

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

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

" Never in my life have I spent weeks so harmlessly !" he
said once, with a smile, to the doctor ; then he gave a quiok
sigh and turned away, for he thought to himself in a sudden
repentance that these innocent and blameless days wore per

WANDA. 117

haps but the prelude to one of the greatest sins of a not sin-
less life.

lie eame to be looked for quite natnrallj at the noonday
breakfast in the pretty Saxe chamber. He would spend hours
playing on the chapel organ, or on the piano in the octagon
room, which Liszt had Qhosen The grand and dreamy music
rolled out over the green lake towards the green hills, and she
would look often at the marble figure of her brother on his
tomb, lying like the young Gaston de Foiz, and think to her- '
self, " If only Bela were listening, too I"

Sometimes she was startled when she remembered into what
continual intimacy she had admitted a man of whom she had
DO real knowledge.

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

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

And tho princess, who was completely fascinated by the
dcfereatiid homage to her of Sabran and the pleasure he

118 WANDA.

honestly found in licr society, would do all she cot.id, in het
innocent and delicate way, to give her favorite the opportuni-
ties he desired of intercourse with the mistress of Hohenszalras.
She wanted to see again the life that she had seen in other
dayg at the Schloss, — grand parties for the hunting season
and the summer season, royal and noble people in the guest-
chambers, great gatherings for the chase on the rond-point in
the woods, covers for fifty laid at the table in the banqueting-
hall, and besides — ^besides, thought the childless and loving
old woman — little children with long fair curls and gay voices
wakening the echoes in the Rittersaal with their sports and
pastimes.

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

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

" The charm of being here is to me precisely what I dare
Aay makes it tiresome to you," the mistress of Hohenszalras
said to him one day : ^*- 1 mean its isolation. One can entirely
forget that beyond those mountains there is a world fussing,
fuming, brewing its storms in saucers, and inventing a quan-
tity of increased unwholesomencss, in noise and stench, which
it calls a higher civilization. No ! I would never have a
telegraph-wire brought here from Matrey. There is nothing
I ever particularly care to know about. If there were any
one I loved who was away from me, it would be different
But there is no one. There are people I like, of course-

WANDA. 119

** But political events ?" he suggested.

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

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

'* You are a man. There is nothing else for a man who
has talent, and who is — ^who is, as you arc, ddsoeuvri. Intel-
lectual work would be better, but you do not care for it, it
seems. Since your * Mexico* "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*^ I have no convictions,*' he said, with a flush on his faca.
^^ It IS a sad thing to confess.**

}

120 WANDA.

Sit

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

He had been silent.

'^ Besides," she added, <' patriotism is not an opinion ; it b
an instinct."

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

" Go into public life," she had repeated. " Convictions will I* "
oome to you in an active career, as the muscles develop in the ^9^ -^
gymnasium."

*' I am indolent," he had demurred, " and I havo desultory
habits."

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

" Honestly, I care for nothing except for myself. You will M,m^^
say it is base."

^' I am afraid it is natural."

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

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

It might be, she reflected, the remorse of a man who, in
his careless youth, had been less heedful of the value of an
afiection and ' the greatness of a character which, as he grew
older and wiser, he learned to appreciate when it was too late.
He related willingly how the old man had trusted him to carry
out into the light of the world tlie fruits of his life of research,
and with what pleasure he had seen the instant and universal
recognition of the labors of the brain and the hand that were
dust. But of his own life in the West he said little : he re-
ferred his skill in riding to the wild horses of the pampas, and
his botanical and scientific knowledge to the studies which
the solitudes of the sierras had made him turn to as relaxation
and occupation ; but of himself he said little, nothings unless

WANDA 1 21

the conversation so turned upon his life there that it was im-
possible for him to avoid those reminiscences which were evi-
dently little agreeable to him. Perhaps, she thought, som«
youthful passion, some unwise love, had made those flowering
swamps and sombre plains painful in memory to him. There
might be other graves than that of the Marquis Xavier be-
neath the plumes of pampas grass. Perhaps, also, to a man
of the world, a man of mere pleasure as he had become, that
studious and lonesome youth of his already had drifted so far
away that, seen in distance, it seemed dim and unreal as any
dream.

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

*' What is the use of a mere amateur ?" he said, with indif-
ierence. '* When one has lived among artists, one learns
lieartily to despise one's self for daring to flirt with those
sacred sisters the Muses.'*

" Why ? And, after all, when one has such perfect talent
«8 yours, the definition of amateur and artist seems a very ar-
bitrary and meaningless one. If you needed to make your
Jame and fortune by painting faces, you could do so. You
^o not need. Does that make the fan the less precious ?
TThe more, I think, since gold cannot buy it."

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

" You cannot tell that I think you have that facility
'^hich is the first note of genius. It is true, all your wonder-
ful talents seem the more wonderful to me because I have
Hone myself. I feel art, but I have no power over it ; and as
iV)r what are called accomplishments, I have none. 1 could,
l>erhaps, beat you in the shooting-gallery, and I will try some
<iay if you like, and I can ride — well, like my Kaiserinn, —
l^ut accomplishments I have none."

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

T 11

i

122 WANDA.

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

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

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

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

" Yet even in Vienna you refuse "

" To spend my time ? Why not ? The ceremonies of a
Kuurt arc wearisome to mo ; my duties lie here, and for the

WAXDA. 123

mirth and pomp of Bociety I have Iiad no heart sinco tlio
gricF that you know of fell upon me."

It was the first time ihat sho had ever apoken of her
brother's loss t« him ; he bowed very low in fiileot sympathy.

" Who would not eovy his dejith, siuce it haa brought
each remembrunoe ?" he eaid, in a low tone, aAier bome

" Ah, if only we could be sure that unceasing regret oon-
nlod the dead I" she said, with an emotion that softened aad
dimmed all her beauty. Then, as if ashiimed or repentant of
having ahowo her feeling for Eela to a stranger, she turned to
him, and said, more distantly, —

" Would it entertain you to Goe my little seholars ? I will
take jou to the Bvhool-houses if you like."

He could only eagerly aceept the ofier : he felt hia heurt
beat and hia eyes lighten as ahc spoke. He knew that suuh
^ QondeeceosioQ in her was a mark of fricodahip, a sign of
(kmiliar intimacy.

" It is but a mile or so tliroufrh the woods. Wo will walk
there," she said, as she took her tall cane from its rack and
called to Neva and Don^u, where they lay on the teiracn
without.

He fancied that the vagne miatnist of him, the vague
prejudice agniost him, of which he had been sensible in her,
were paBsiog away from her mind; but still he doubted —
doubted bitterly — whether she would ever give him any other
thought than that due to a passing and indifferent acquaiut-
aace. That she admired his intelligence and that she pitied
his loneliness he saw ; but there seemed to him that never,
never, never would he break down in hia own favor that im-
palpable but impassable harrier, due half to hor pride, half to
her reserve, aud abaolutely to lier indittbrcnoe, wliicfa gcpa-
lated Wauda vou Szalraa frotu tlie rest of mankiud.

If ihu had any woakneaa or foible, it waa the diildrea'a
Bchoola on the estates in the Hohe Taueru and elsewhere.
They had been founded on a scheme of Bcla's and her own,
when they had been very young and the world to them a
lovely day without end. Their too elaborate theorios had
been of neoceaity curtailed, but the achools hud been estab-
lished on the basis of their early dreams, aod were uulike any
others that existed. Shu hud ruud mueh aud duoply, and had

121 WASDA.

thought out all she had read, and, as she enjoyed that happy
power of realizing and embodying her own theories which
most theorists are denied, she had founded the schools of the
Hohe Tauern, in absolute opposition to all that the school-
boards of her generation have decreed as desirable. And in
every one of her villages she had her schools on this principle,
and they throve, and the children with them. Many of these
oould not read a printed page, but all of them could read the
shepherd's weather-glass in sky and flower ; all of them knew
the worm that was harmful to the crops, the beetle that was
harmless in the grass ; all knew a tree by a leaf, a bird by a
feather, an insect by a grub.

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

She did not believe in culture for little peasants who have
to work for their daily bread at the plough-tail or with the
reaping-hook. She knew that a mere glimpse of a Canaan of
art and learning is cruelty to those who never can enter into
and never even can have leisure to merely gaze on it. She
thought that a vast amount of useful knowledge is consigned
to oblivion whilst children are taught to waste their time in
picking up the crumbs of a great indigestible loaf of artificial
learning. She had her scholars taught their " A B C," and
that was all. Those who wished to write were taught, but
writing was not enforced. What they were made to learn was
the name and use of every plant in their own country ; the
habits and ways of all animals ; how to cook plain food well,
and make good bread ; how to brew simples from the herbs
of their fields and woods, and how to discern the coming
weather from the aspect of the skies, the shutting-up of
certain blossoms, and the time of day from those " poor men's

WANDA. 125

Watches,** the opening flowers. In all oouDtries there is a
great deal of useful household and out-of-door lore that is fast
being choked out of existence under books and globes, and
which, unless it passes by word of mouth from generation to
generation, is quickly and irrevocably lost. All this lore she
had cherished by her school-children. Her boys were taught,
in addition, any useful trade they liked, — ^boot-making, crampon-
making, horseshoeing, wheel-making, or carpentry. This trade
was made a pastime to each. The little maidens learned to
sew, to cook, to spin, to card, to keep fowls and sheep and
cattle in good health, and to know all poisonous plants and
berries by sight.

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

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

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

" I always fancy I can hear, here, the echo of the great Khm-
ler torrents," she said to him, as they passed through the
trees. " No doubt it is fancy, and the sound is only from our
own falls. But the peasants' tradition is, you may know, that

11*

126 WANDA.

onr lake is the water of the Krirolcr come to us undergrouDcl
from the PiDsgau. Do you know our Sahara of the North ?
It is monotonous and barren enough, and yet, with its vast
solitudes of marsh and stones, its flocks of wild fowl, its
reedy wastes, its countless streams, it is grand in its own way.
And then in the heart of it there are the thunder and the
boiling fury of Krimml 1 You will smile because I am an
enthusiast for my country, you who have seen Orinoco and
Chimborazo ; but even you will own that the old duchy of Aus-
tria, the old archbishopric of Salzburg, the old countship of
Tyrol, have some beauty and glory in them. Here is the school-
house. Now you shall see what I think needful for the peasant
of the future. Perhaps you will condemn me as a true Aus-
trian ; that is, as a Reactionist."

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

*^ Do not be surprised that they take no notice of our en-
trance," she said to him. " I have taught them not to do so un-
less I bid them. If they lefl off their tasks I could never tell
how they did them ; and is not the truest respect shown in
obedience ?"

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

" Surely discipline is next to health," added Wanda. " If
the child do not learn it early, he must suffer fearfully when
he reaches manhood, since all men, even princes, have to obey
some time or other, and the majority of men are not princes, but
are soldiers, clerks, porters, guides, laborers, tradesmen, — what
not ; certainly something subject to law, if not to a mast-er.
How many lives have been lost because a man failed to under-
stand the meaning of immediate and unquestioning obedience 1
Soldiers are shot for want of it, yet children are not to be
taught it I"

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

WANDA 127

** Tonr teachers are not priests ?" he said, in some surprise

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

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

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

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

<* Those girls will not poison their people at home with a
false cryptogam,*' said Wanda, as they passed on to another
place, where a lesson on farriery and the treatment of cattle
was going on, and to another, where a teacher was instructing
a mixed group of boys and little maidens in the lore of the

128 WANDA.

forests, of tlio grasses, of tbe various causes that kill a tree in
itti prime, of tbe insects that dwell in them, and of the differ-
ent soils that they need. In another chamber there was a
spinning-class and a sewing-class under a kindly-faced old
dame; and in yet another there were music-classes, some
playing on the zither, and others singing part-songs and glees
with baby voices.

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

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

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

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

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

'* There are schools on every estate," she said, a little
angrily and disconnectedly. '* These are modelled on my
Dwn whim ; that is all. The world would say I ought to

WAKDA. 12a

teaoh those litllo peasants the Bctenoo that dissects its own
sources, and the philosophies that resolve all creation into an
egg. But I follow ancient ways enough to think the coun-
try life the best, the healthiest, the sweetest : it is for this
that they are born, and to this I train them. If we had
more naturalists, we should have fewer Communists."

'' Yes, Audubon would scarcely have been a regicide, or
Humboldt a Camorrist," he answered her, regaining his self-
possession. ^ No doubt a love of nature is a triple armor
against self-love. How can I say how right I think your
system with these children? You seem not to believe me.
There is only one thing in which I differ with you : you
think the ' eyes that see* bring content. Surely not 1 surely
not I"

'< It depends on what they see," she said, meditatively.
<' When they are wide open in the woods and fields, when
they have been taught to see how the tree-bee forms her cell
and the mole his fortress, how the warbler builds his nest for
his love and the water-spider makes his little raft, how the
leaf comes forth from the hard st«m and the fungi from the
rank mould, then I think that sight is content, — content in the
simple life of the woodland place, and in such delighted won-
der that the heart of its own accord goes up in peace and
praise to the Creator. The printed page may teach envy, de-
sire, covetousness, hatred, but the book of nature teaches
resignation, hope, willingness to labor and live, submission to
die. The world has gone farther and farther from peace since
larger and larger have grown its cities, and its shepherd kings
are no more."

Ho was silent.

Her voice moved him like sweet remembered music ; yet
in his own remembrance what were there ? Only " envy, de-
sire, covetousness, hatred," the unlovely shapes that were to
her as emblems of the powers of evil. His reason was with
her, and his emotions were with her also, but memory was
busy in him, and in it he saw, as in a glass darkly, all his
passionate, cold, embittered youth, all his warped, irresolute,
iseless, aiid untrue manhood.

<< Do not think," she added, unconscious of the pain that
she had caused him, '^ that I undervalue the blessing of
groat books ; but I do think that, to reoognizo the beauty of

130 WANDA.

literature, as much culture and comprehenmon are needed ai
to uuderstaud Leonardo's painting or the structure of Wag-
ner's music. Those who read well are as rare as those who
love well ; the curse of our age is superficial knowledge ; it ia
a cryptogam of the rankest sort, and I will not let my scholan
touch it. Do you not think it is better for a country child to
<now what flowers are poisonous for her cattle and what herbs
jure useful in her neighbor's fever, than to be able to spell
through a Jesuit's newspaper or suck evil from a Commun-
ist's pamphlet? You will not have your horse well shod
if the smith be thinking of Bakounine while he hammers the
iron."

^* I have held the views of Bakounine myself," said Sabran,
with hesitation. " I do not know what you will think of me.
I have even been tempted to be an anarchist, a Nihilist."

'* You speak in the past tense. You must have abandoned
those views ? You are received at Frohsdorf ?"

*^ They have, perhaps, abandoned me. My life has been
idle, sinful oflen. I have liked luxury, and have not denied
myself folly. I recognized the absurdity of such a man as I
Was joining in any movement of seriousness and self-negation ;
so I threw away my political persuasions, as one throws off a
knapsack when tired of a journey on foot."

" That was not very conscientious, surely ?'*

^' No, madame. It is, perhaps, however, better than helping
to adjust the contradictions of the world with dynamite. And
I cannot even claim that they were persuasions : I fear they
were mere personal impatience with narrow fortanes and
useless ambitions."

" I cannot pardon any one of an old nobility turning repub-
lican ; it is like a son insulting the tombs of his fathers I" she
said, with emphasis ; then, fearing she had reproved him too
strongly, she added, with a smile, " And yet I also could
almost join the anarchists, when I see the enormous wealth of
base-born speculators and Hebrew capitalists in such bitter
contrast with the hunger of the poor, who starve all over the
world in winter like birds frozen on the snow. Oh, do not
suppose that, though I am an Austrian, I cannot see thai
feudalism is doomed. We are still feudal here, but then in
so much we are still as we were in crusading days. The
nobles have been, almost everywhere except here, ousted bj

WANDA. 131

ipitalists, and tho .capitalists will in tarn bo devoured by the
democracy. Le8 laiipM se mangeront eiitre enx. Yon see,
though I may be prejudiced, I am not blind. But you, as a
Breton, should think feudalism a loss, as I do."

'* In those days, Barbe-Bleue and Gillcs de lletz were the
nearest neighbors of Romaris,'' he said, with a smile. " Yet
if feudalism could be sure of such chtitelaines as the Countess
Ton Szalras, I would wish it back to-morrow.'*

*^ That is very prettily put for a Socialist. But you cannot
be a Socialist You are received at Frohsdorf. Bretons are
always royal : they are born with the cultus of God and the
King."

He laughed a little, not quite easily.

'^ Paris is a witches' caldron, in which all cvJtes are melted
down and evaporate in a steam of disillusion and mockery.
Into the caldron we have long flung, alas 1 cross and crown
actual and allegoric. I am not a Breton : I am that idle
creation of modern life, a boulevardier"

" But do you never visit Komaris ?"

" Why should I ? There is nothing but a few sea-
tormented oaks, endless sands, endless marsb&s, and a dark
dirty village jammed among rocks and reeking with the smell
of the oil and the fish."

'* Then I would go and make the village clean and the
marshes healthy, were I you. There must be something of
interest in any people who remain natural in their ways and
dwell beside a sea. Is Romaris not prosperous ?"

" Prosperous 1 God and man have forgotten it ever since
the world began, I should say. It is on a bay so treacherous
that it is called the Pool of Death. The landes separate it
by leagues from any town. All it has to live on is the fishing.
It is dull as a grave, harried by every storm, unutterably hor-
rible."

" Well, I would not forsake its horrors were I a son of
Romaris," she said, softly ; then, as she perceived that some
association made the name and memory of the old Armorican
village painful to him, she blew the whistle she always used,
and at tho summons the eldest pupil of the school, a hand-
some boy of fourteen, came out and stood bareheaded before
tier.

*^ Hansl, ask the teachers to grant you all an hour's frolic.

132 WANDA.

that you may amuse this gentleman/* she said to him. ^' And,
HuDsl, take care that you do your best, all of you, in dancing
wrestling, and singing, and above all with the sither, for the
honor of the Empire."

The lad, with a face of sunshine, bowed low and ran into
the school-houses.

" It is almost their hour for rest, or T would not have dis-
turbed them," she said to him. << They come here at sun-
rise ; they bring their bread and meat, and milk is given
them ; they disperse, according to season, a little before sunset.
They have two hours' rest at different times, but it is hardly
wanted, for their labors interest them, and their classes are
varied."

Soon the children all trooped out, made their bow or courtesy
reverently, but without shyness, and began with song and
national airs played on the zither or the ^* jumping wood."
Their singing and music were tender, ardent, and yet perfectly
precise. There was no false note or slurred passage. Then
they danced the merry national dances that make gay the long
nights in the snow-covered chalets in many a mountain-village
which even the mountain letter-carrier, on his climbing-irons,
cannot reach for months together, when all the high lands are
ice. They ended their dances with the Hungarian caardaH,
into which they threw all the vigor of their healthful young
limbs and happy hearts.

" My cousin Egon taught them the czardas : have you ever
seen the Magyar nobles in the madness of that dance ?"

" Your cousin Egon ? Do you mean Prince Ylisiirholy ?*

" Yes. Do you know him ?"

" I have seen him.'*

His face grew paler as he spoke. He ceased to watch with
interest the figures of the jumping children in their picturesque
national dress, as they whirled and shouted in the sunshine
on the green turf, with the woods and the rocks towering be-
yond them.

When the czardas was ended, the girls sat down on che
sward to rest, and the boys began their leaping, running, and
Btone-heaving, with their favorite wrestling at the close.

'' They are as strong as chamois,** she said to him. '^ There
is no need here to have a gymnasium. Their mountains teach
them climbing, and every Sunday on their village green their

WAA'DA. 133

fiitlicrs mnko tlicm wrestle and sboot at marks. The favorite
sport here is one I will not countenance, — the finger- hooking.
If T gave the word, any two of those little fellows would hook
their middle fingers together and pull till a joint broke.*'

The boys were duly commended for their skill, and Sabran
would have thrown them a shower of florin notes had she al-
lowed it. Then she bade them sing as a farewell the Kaiser's
Hymn.

The grand melody rolled out on the fresh clear Alpine air
in voices as fresh and as clear, that went upward and upward
towards the zenith like the carol of the larks.

"I would fain be the Emperor to have that prayer sung so
for me," said Sabran, with truth, as the glad young voices
dropped down into silence, — the intense silence of the earth
where the glaciers reign.

" He heard them last year, and he was pleased," she said,
as the children raised a loud ^^ Hoch 1" made their reverence
once more at a sign of dismissal from her, and vanished in a
proud and happy crowd into the school-houses.

'^ Do you never praise them or reward them ?" he asked,
u surprise.

" Santa Clans rewards them. As for praise, they know
when I smile that all is well."

" But surely they have shown very unusual musical talent ?"

" They sing well because they are well taught. But they
are not any of them going to become singers. Those zithers
and part-songs will all serve to enliven the long nights of the
farm-house or the summer solitude of the cattle-hut. We do
not cultivate music one-half enough among the peasantry. It
lightens labor ; it purifies and strengthens the home-life ; it
sweetens black-bread. Do you remember that happy picture
of Jordaens's, — " Where the old sing, the young chirp," —
where the old grandfather and grandmother, and the baby in
its mother's arms, and the hale five-year-old boy, and the rough
servant, are all joining in the same melody, while the gout
erops the vine-leaves ofi" the table ? I should like to sec every
cottage interior like that when the work was done. I would
hang up an etching from Jordaens where you would hang up,
perhaps, the programme of Proudhon."

Then she walked back with him through the green suu-
glcaming woods.

12

134 WASDA.

** I hope that 1 1 »ch them eonteDt,** she continaod. ^ II
is the leflBOD most neidecled in oar duv. ^Niemamd umJ em
Schuster teyn^ Jederman tm IHehterJ It is true, we are
very happy io oar sarroandings. A moanuineer's is sach a
beaatifal life, — so simple, h^thfoi. hardj, and fine, always
face to face with natare. I trv to teach them what an inesti-
mablc joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the
proeaic views of raial life. It is true that the peasant digging
his trench sees the clod, not the sky ; bat then when he does
lift his head the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling.
That b so mach in itself. And here the sky is an everlasting
graudear: doads and domes of snow are blent together.
When the stars are oat above the glaciers, how serene the
night is, how majestic 1 Even the hamblest ereatare feels
lifted up into that eternal greatness. Then yoa think of the
home-life in the long winters as dreary; bat it is not so.
Over away there, at Lahn, and other places on the Hallstadt-
ersee, they do not see the san for five months ; the wall of
rock behind them shuts them from all light of day ; but they
live together, they dance, they work. The young men recite
poems, and the old men tell talcs of the mountains and the
French war, and they sing the songs of Groheim and Grill-
parser. Then when winter passes, when the sun oomes again
up over the wall of rocks, when they go out into the light
once more, what happiness it is ! One old man said to mo,
' It is like being bom again I' and another said, ' Where it is
always warm and light I doubt they forget to thank God for
the sunshine ;* and quite a yonng child said, all of his own ao-
cord, ' The primroses live in the dusk all the winter, like as,
and then when the sun comes up we and they run out to-
gether, and the Mother of Christ has set the waters and the
little birds laughing.' I would rather have the winter of
liahn than the winter of Belleville.'*

^' But they do go away from their mountains a good deal t
One meets them "

'* My own people never do, but from the valleys around
they go, — ^yes, sometimes ; but then they always come back.
The Defereggenthal men, over yonder where you see those
ice-summits, constantly go elsewhere on Teaching manhood \
but as soon as they have made a little money they return to
dwell at homo for the remainder of their days. I think living

WANDA. 135

amidst the great mountains creates a restfulness, a steadfast-
ness, in the character. If Paris wjre set amidst Alps you
would have had Lamartine, you would not have had Roche-
fort"

When she spoke thus of her own country, of her own pec
pie, ail her coldness vanished, her eyes grew full of light, hei
reserye was broken up into animation. They were what aha
truly loved, what touched her affections and her sympathies.

When he heard her speak thus, he thought if any man
should succeed in arousing in her the love and the loyalty
that she gave her Austrian Alps, what treasures he would
win, into what a kingdom he would enter 1 And then some-
thing that was perhaps higher than vanity and deeper than
egotism stirring in him whispered, " If any, why not you ?"

Herr Joachim had at a message from her joined them.
He talked of the flowers around them, and of the culture and
flora of Mexico. Sabran answered him with apparent interest,
and with that knowledge which he had always the presence of
mind to recall at need, but his heart was heavy and his mind
absent.

She had spoken to him of Bomaris, and he had once known
Egon VksJirhely.

Those two facts overshadowed the sweetness and sunshine
of the day ; yet he knew very well that he should have been
prepared for both.

The Princess Ottilie, seated in her gilt wicker-work chair
inder the great yew on the south ^ide of the house, saw them
approach with pleasure.

" Come and have a cup of tea," she said to them. " But,
my beloved Wanda, you should not let the doctor walk beside
you. Oh, I saw him in the distance ; of course he left you
oefore you joined me. He is a worthy man, a most worthy
man ; but so is Hubert, and you do not walk with Hubert
and converse with him about flowers."

^ Are you so inexorable as to social grades, madame ?"
murmured Sabran, as he took his cup from her still pretty
hand.

" Most certainly 1" said the princess, with a little, a very
little, asperity. *' The world was much happier when dis«
tinctions and divisions were impassable. There are no sumiv.
toary laws now. What is the consequence? That your

136 WANDA.

bourgeoiso ruins her husband in wearing gowns fit only for a
duchess, and your prince imagines it makes him popular to
look precisely like a cabman or a bailiff.'*

'< And even in the matter of utility/* said Sabran, who always
agreed with her, " those sumptuary laws had much in their
favor. If one look through the chronicles and miniatures, say,
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, how much mora
sensible for the change of seasons and the ease of work teems
the costume of the working-people I The cotte hardie was a
thousand times more comfortable and more becoming than
anything we have. If we could dross once more as all did
under Louis Treize, gentle and simple would alike benefit."

" What a charmingly intelligent person he is I" thought the
princess, as she remarked that in Austria they wore happier
than the rest of the world : there were peasant costumes still
there.

Wanda Icflb them a little later, to confer with one of her
land-stewards. Sabran remained seated by the princess, in
whom he felt that he possessed a friend.

** What did you think of those schools ?" said Fran Ottilie.
'^ Oh, of course you admire and approve : you must admire
and approve when they are the hobby of a beautiful woman,
who is also your hostess."

^^ Does that mean, princess, that you do not ?*'

" No doubt the schools are excellent," replied the princess,
in a tone which condemned them as ridiculous. " But for
my own part I prefer those things led to the Church, of which
they constitute aUke the privilege and the province. I cannot
see, either, why a peasant child requires to know how a tree
grows ; that a merciful Providence placed it there is all he can
need to be told, and that he should be able to cut it down
without cutting off his own fingers is all the science that can
possibly be necessary to him. However, Wanda thinks other
wise, and she is mistress here.*'

<' But the schools surely are eminently practical ones.*'

" Practical I Is it practical to weave a romance as long as
* Pamela' about the changes of a chrysalis ? I fail to see it.
That a grub is a destructive creature is all that any one needs
to know. There is nothing practical in making it the heroine,
of an interminable metempsychosis. But all those ideas of
Wanda's havo a taint of that modern poison which hor mind.

WANDA. 137

though it is so strong in man^ things, has not been strong
enough to resist. She does not believe in the efficacy of our
holy relics (such as that which I sent you, and which wrought
your cure), but she does belieye in the fables that naturalists
invent about weeds and beetles, and she finds a Kosmos in a
puddle 1"

" You are very severe, princess."

T dislike inconsistency, and my niece is inconsistent,
though she imagines that perfect consistency is the staple of
her character.*'

"Nay, madame, surely her character is the most evenly
balanced, the most harmonious, and consequently the most
perfect, that is possible to humanity."

The princess looked at him with a keen little glance.

" You admire her very much ? Are you sure you under-
stand her?"

'' I should not dare to say that, but I dare to hope it. Her
nature seems to me serene and transparent as fine sunlight."

" So it is ; but she has faults, I can assure you," said the
princess, with her curious union of shrewdness and simplicity.
" My niece is a perfectly good woman, so far as goodness is
possible to finite nature : she is the best woman I have ever
known out of the cloister. But then there is this to be
said: she has never been tempted. True, she might be
tempted to be arrogant, despotic, tyrannical ; and she is not
so. But that is not precisely the temptation to try her.
She is mild and merciful out of her very pride; but her
character would be sure destruction of her pride were such a
thing possible. You think she is not proud because she is so
gentk? You might as well say that her majesty is not Em-
press beeause she washes the feet of the twelve poor inen !
Wanda is the best woman that I know here, but she is also
the proudest."

" The countess has never loved any one ?" said Sabran, who
grew paler as he heard.

** Terrestrial love; no. It has not touched her. But it
would not alter her, believe me. Some women lose them-
selves in their affections : she would not. She would always
remain the mistress of it, and it would be a love like hct
character. Of that I am sure."

Sabran wae silent : he was discouraged.

12*

138 WANDA,

*' I think the boldest man would always be held at a dis-
tance from her/* he said, after a pause. '* I think none would
ever acquire dominion over her life."

^' That is exactly what I have said/' replied the princess.
<* Your phrase is differently worded, but it comes to the same
thing."

" It would depend very much "

"On what?"

'^ On how much she loved, and perhaps a little on how
much she was loved."

" Not at all," said the princess, decidedly. " You cannot g^
more out of a nature than there is in it, and there is no sort
of passion in the nature of my niece."

lie was silent again.

" She was admirably educated," added the princess, hastily,
conscious of a remark not strictly becoming in herself; '' and
her rare temperament is serene, well balanced, void of all ex-
cess. Heaven has mercifully eliminated from her almost all
mortal errors."

« * By pride
Angela have fallen ere thy time !' "

suggested Sabran.

" Angels, perhaps," said the princess, dryly. " But for
women it is an admirable preservative, second only to piety."

He went home, sculling himself across the lake, now per-
fectly calm beneath the rose and gold of a midsummer sunset.
His heart was heavy, and a dull fear seemed to beat at his
conscience like a child suddenly awaking who knocks at a
long-closed door. Still, ao 4 crime allures men who contem-
plate it by the fascination of its weird power, so the sin he
desired to commit held him with its unholy beguilement, and
almost it looked holy to him because it wore the guise of
Wanda von Szalras.

He was not insensible to the charm of this interchange of
tliought. He had had many passions in which his senses
alone had been enlisted. There was a more delicate attraction
in the gradual and numberless steps by which, only slowly
and with patience, could he win any way into her regard.
She had for him the puissance that the almost unattainable
has for all humanity. When he could feel that he had

WANDA 139

A'W^lcened any sympathj in her, his pride was more flattered
tlian it could have been by the most complete subjection of
any other woman. He had looked on all women with the
cbill, amorous cynicism of the Parisian psychology, as VMemei
/^^ntinin^ at best v&^^la forme perverse^ vaporense^ langour-
«*»e, 9ouple comme Us roseaitx, hlancke comme les Us, inca-
P<*hle de 86 mouvoir pendant les deux tiers dujour — sans Squi-
libre^ sans Imtj sans Squateur, donnant son corps en pdture d
9a. eSteJ* He had had no other ideal, no other conception.
^his psychology, like some other sciences, brutalizes as it
dualizes. In the woman who had risen up before him in
the night of storm upon the Szalrassee he had recognized
with his intelligence a woman who made his psychology at
fault, who aroused something beyond his mere instincts, who
was not to be classified with the Lias, or the C^sarines, or the
tFeanne de Simeroses, who had been in his love, as in his lit-
erature, the various types of the ^^ Stemel fSmimn,^^ The
siiuplicity and the dignity of her life astonished and con-
vinced him ; he began to understand that where he had
^inagined he had studied the universe in his knowledge of
Women he had in reality only seen two phases of it, — the
not-house and the ditch. It is a common error to take the
forced flower and the slime-weed and think that there is noth-
^g between or beyond the two.

He had the convictions of his school that all women were
*t heart coquettes or hypocrites, consciously or unconsciously.
Wanda von Szalras routed all his theories. Before her
f^ndor, her directness and gravity of thought, her serene
indifiTerenoe to all forms of compliment, all his doctrines and
wl hiB experiences were useless. She inspired him witTi rev-
erential and hopeless admiration, which was mingled with an
^P^ astonishment and something of the bitterness of envy.
Sometimes, as he sat and watched the green water of the lake
fcQmble and roll beneath a north wind's wrath, under a cloudy
»y 'Which hid the snows of the Glockner range, ho remem-
bered, a horrible story that had once fascinated him of Mala
J^^ of Rimini slaying the princess that would have none of
niB love, striking his sword across her white throat in the
dusky evening time, and casting her body upon the silken
curtains of her wicket litter. Almost he could have found
» lu him to do such a crime, — almost. Only he thought

i40 WAJ^DA.

that at one look of her eyes his sword womd have dropped
iipon the dust.

Her personal heautj had inspired him with a suddeo paa-
eioD, but her character checked it with the sense of fear which
it imposed on him, — fear of those high and blameless io*
stincts which were an integral part of her nature, fear of that
frank, unswerving truth which was the paramount law of hei
life. As he rode with her, walked with her, conversed with
her in the long, light summer hours, he saw more and more of
the purity and nobility of her temper, but he saw, or thought
he saw, also an inexorable pride and a sternness in judgment
which made him believe that she would be utterly aoforgiv-
ing to weakness or to sin.

She remained the Nibelungen queen to him, clothed io
flawless armor and aloof from men.

He lingered on at the Holy Isle, finding a fresh charm
each day in this simple and peaceful existence, filled with
dreams of a woman unlike every other he had known. He
knew that it could not last, but he was unwilling to end it
himself. To rise to the sound of the monks' matins, to pass
his forenoons in art or open-air exercise, to be sure that some
hour or other before sunset he would meet her, either in her
home or abroad in the woods, to go early to bed, seeing, as he
lay, the pile of the great burg looming high above the water,
like the citadel of the Sleeping Beauty, — all this, together
making up an existence so monotonous, harmless, and calm
that a few months before he would have deemed it impossible
to endure it, was soothing, alluring, and beguiling to him.
Ho had told no one where he was ; his letters might lie and
accumulate by the hundred in his rooms in Paris, for aught
that he cared ; he had no creditors, for he had been always
scrupulously careful to avoid all debt, and ho had no friend for
whose existence he cared a straw. There were those who
cared for him, indeed, but these seldom trouble any man very
greatly.

In the last week of August, however, a letter found its way
to him : it was written in a very bad hand, on paper gorgeous
with gold and silver. It was signed " Cochonette."

It contained a torrent of reproaches made in the broadest
language that the slang of the hour furnished, and every
third word was misspelled. How the writer had tracked hia

WANDA. 141

she did not say. Ho tore the letter up and threw the pLecofl
into the water floating beneath his window. Had he ever
passionately desired and triumphed in the possession of that
woman ? It seemed wonderful to him now. She was an idol
of Paris, — a creature with the voice of a lark and the laugh
of a child, with a lovely, mutinous face and eyes that could
speak without words. As a pierrot, as a mousquetaire, as a
little prince, as a fairy king of operetta, she had no rival in
the eyes of Paris. She blazed with jewels when she played
a peasant, and she wore the costliest costume of F61ix's devis-
ing when she sung her triplets as a soubrette. She had been
constant to no one for three months, and she had been con-
stant to him for three years, or, at the least, had made him
believe so : and she wrote to him now furiously, reproachfully,
entreatingly, — fierce reproaches and entreaties, all misspelled.

The letter which he threw into the lake brought all the
memories of his old life before him : it was like the flavor of
absinthe afler drinking spring- water. It was a life which had
had its successes, a life, as the world called it, of pleasure ;
and it seemed utterly senseless to him now as he tore up the
note of Cochonette, and looked down the water to where the
towers and spires and battlements of Hohenszalras soared up-
ward in the mists. He shook himself, as though to shake
dff the memory of an unpleasant dream, as he went out, de-
scended the landing-steps, drew his boat from under the willows,
and sculled himself across towards the water-stairs of the
SchlosB. In a quarter of an hour he was playing the themes
of the " Gotterd'ammorung," whilst his chatelaine sat at her
spinning-wheel a few yards from him.

^* Good heavens ! can she and Cochonette belong to the same
human race?" he thought, as whilst ho played his glance
wandered to that patrician figure seated in the light from the
oriel window, with the white hound leaning against her velvet
skirts, and her jewelled fingers plying the distaff and disen-
tangling the flax.

After the noonday breakfast the sun shone, the mists lifled
from the water, the clouds drifted from the lower mountains,
only leaving the snow-cappea head of the Glockner envelope«
in them.

" I am going to ride : will you come ?" said Wanda von
Szalras to him. He absented with ardor, and a hunter, Sieg

142 WANDA.

fried^the mount which was always given to him, was lod roi»*^^
under the great terrace, in company with her Arab riding-ho*^^
AH. They rode far and fast through the forests and out
the one level road there was, which swept round the soi
side of the lake, — a road turf-bordered, overhung with hi
trees, closed in with a dewy veil of greenery, across whi
ever and anon some flash of falling water or some shimmer
glacier or of snow-crest shone through the dense leafap '^
They rode too fast for conversation, both the horses racing li^ — "^^
greyhounds ; but as they returned, towards the close of t — "®
afternoon, they slackened their pace in pity to the steamier' ^o
heaving flanks beneath their saddles, and then they oould he^^=^^
each other's voices.

" What a lovely life it is here I" he said, with a sigh. " TI ^^^*
world will seem very vulgar and noisy to me after it."

" You would soon tire, and wish for the world," she answer*-^^^®^
him.

" No," he said, quickly. " I have been two months on tC-^"®
Holy Isle, and I have not known weariness for a moment."

" That is because it is still summer. If you were here in tB'-^"®
winter you would bemoan your imprisonment, like my aur -^ci"''
Ottilie. Even the post sometimes fails us."

" I should not lament the post," he replied, thinking of tSi'-^
letter he had cast into the lake. " My old life seems to ja^c:^^®
insanity, fever, disease, beside these past two months I ha^" «^ve
spent with the monks."

" You can take the vows," she suggested, with a smile,
smiled too. ,

" Nay; I should not dare to so insult our mother ChurcK^^-^
One must not empty ashes into a reliquary."

" Your life is not ashes yet." ..

He was silent. He could not say to her what he wouL^--^
have said could he have laid his heart bare.

" When you go away," she pursued, " remember my woi
Choose some career ; make yourself some aim in life ; do m
fold your talents in a tiapkin, — in a napkin that lies on th
supper-table at Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attrac
ive, I dare say, in its way, but it must grow wearisome an<
unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house hav*
never been content with it ; they have always been 8oldi<
statesmen, something or other besides mere nobles.'/

WANDA, 143

^ But thoy havo had a great position."

'* Men make their own position : thoy cannot make a name
(at least, not to my thinking). You have that good fortune ;
you have a great name ; you only need — pardon me — to makn
your manner of life worthy of it.''

He grew pale as she spoke.

*' Cannot make a name ?" he said, with forced gayety.
^ Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the
ministries and half the nobilities I"

A great contempt passed over her face. '^ You mean that
Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency, or
an earl ? What does that change ? It alters the handle ; it
does not alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood
is blood ; nobility ican only be inherited ; it cannot be con-
ferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meanin<z and
essence of nobility are descent, inherited traditions, instincts,
habits, and memories, — ^all that is meant by noblesse oblige"

" Would you allow," thought her companion, " the same
nobility to Falconbridge as to Plantagenet ?"

But he dared not name the bar sinister to this daughter of
princes.

Siegfried started and reared : his rider did not reply, being
absorbed in calming him.

" What frightened him ?'* she asked.

" A hawk flew by," said Sabran.

''A hawk, flying low enough for a horse to see it? it
must be wounded."

He did not answer, and they quickened their pace, as the
sun sank behind the glaciers of the west.

When he returned to the monastery, the evening had closed
in ; the lantern was lit at his boat's prow. Dinner was pre-
pared for him, but he ate little. Later the moon rose, — golden
and round as a bowl. It was a beautiful spectacle as it gave
its light to the amphitheatre of the mountains, to the rippling
surface of the lake, to the stately, irregular lines of the castle
backed by the blackness of its woods. He sat long by tho
open window, lost in thought, pondering on the great race
which had ruled there. L'honneur parle : il suffit^ had been
their law, and she who represented them held a creed no less
stem and pure than theirs. Her words spoken in their ride
were like a weight of ice on his heart. Never to her, never,

)

144 WAXDA.

could he confess the errors of his past. lie was a man bol^^-^^
to temerity, but he was not bold enough to risk the contemp ^r"jK^
of Wanda von Szalras. lie had never much heeded right or ^ci:>ot
wrong, or much believed in such ethical distinctions, onl^i M" Aj
adhering to the conventional honor and good breeding of th»^^=A^
world, but before her his moral sense awakened.

"The Marquis Xavier would bid me go from her," h mtK^-
thouf2;ht to himself, as the nij'ht wore on, and he heard th^ mtM'J^^
footfall of the monks passing down the passage to their mid K^^gw
night orisons.

" After all these years in the pourrifure of Paris, have E ^* 1
such a thing as conscience left ?" he asked his own thoughts^ ^ -^tG
bitterly. Tlie moon passed behind a cloud, and darkness icLff ^3^ ^^
over the lake and hid the great pile of the Hohenszalrasbur^'x: Kir]
from his sight. He closed the casement and turned away^^^^Esaji
** Farewell 1*' he said to the vanished castle.

" Will you think of me sometimes, dear princess, when I ^^^
am far away?" said Sabran abruptly the next morning to hkM^^~^^
best friend, who looked up startled.

" Away ? Are you going away?"

" Yes," said Sabran, abruptly ; " and you, I think,
who have been so good to me, can guess easily why."

" You love my niece ?"

He inclined his head in silence.

" It is very natural," said the princess, faintly. " Wandt.^^ ^^^
is a beautiful woman ; many men have loved her ; they migh
as well have loved that glacier yonder."

" It is not that," said Sabran, hastily. " It is my o
poverty "

The princess looked at him keenly

" Do you think her not cold ?"

" She who can so love a brother would surely love her loveD^^"^^
not less, did she stoop to one," he replied, evasively. " At 1
I think so: I ought not to presume to judge."

" And you care for her?" The glance her eyes gave hi — .
added, as plainly as words could have done, " It is not onl^-^ ^^
her wealth, her position ? Are you sure ?"

He colored very much as he answered, quickly, " Were shi
beggared to-morrow, you would see."

" It is a pity," murmured the princess. He did not
her what she regretted : he knew her sympathy was with lii

i

hi

m

WANDA, 145

Thoy wore both mute. The princeBS pushed the end of
Ler cane thoughtfully into the velvet turf. She hesitated
some moments, then said, in a low voice, " Were I you, I
"Would stay."

'' Do not tempt me I I have stayed too long as it is. What
can she think of me ?"

*' She does not think about your reasons ; she is too proud
K woman to be vain. In a measure you have won her friend-
ship. Perhaps — I do not know, I have no grounds to say so —
but perhaps in time you might win more."

She looked at him as she concluded. He grew exceedingly
pale.

He stooped over her chair, and spoke very low :

'' It is just because that appears possible that I go. • Bo not
misunderstand me : I am not a coxcomb \ je neme pose pas
en vainqueur. But I have no place here, since I have no
equality with her from which to be able to say, * I love you 1*
Absence alone can say it for me without offence as without
lope."

The princess was silent. She was thinking of the maxim,
** IJahsimce iteint lea pelites passions et allume les ^ramies"
Which was his?

" You have been so good to me," he murmured, caress-
ingly, " so benevolent, so merciful, I dare to ask of you a
greater kindness yet. Will you explain for me to the Count-
ess von Szalras that I am called away suddenly, and make my
excuses and my farewell ? It will save me much fruitless
pain."

" And if it give her pain ?"

" I cannot suppose that, and I shoulcl not dare to hope it."

" I have no reasoc to suppose it either, but I think you are
<2e ^lerre las before the battle is decided."

" There is no battle possible for me. There is only a quite
certain dishonor."

His face was dark and weary. He spoke low and with
effort. She glanced at him, and felt the vague awe with
^hich strong unintelligible emotion always filled her.

" You must judge the question for yourself," she said, with
B little hesitation. "I will express what you wish to my
niece, if you really desire it."

" You are always bo good to me !" he murmured, with some
o ^ 13

146 WANDA.

■gitation, and he bont down boforo hor and reverently kissed
her little white hands.

^^ Ood be with yon, sir/' she said, with tears in her own
tender eyes.

" You have been so good to me," he murmured : " th«
purest hours of my worthless life have been spent at Hohoo-
szalras. Here only have I known what peace and holinesi
can mean. Give me your blessing ere I go."

In another moment he had bowed himself from her pres-
ence, and the princess sat mute and motionless in the snn.
When she looked up at the great feudal pile of the Schloss
which towered above her, it was with reproach and aversion
to that stone emblem of the great possessions of its chdtelaine.

^' If slie were a humbler woman," she thought. '< how much
\appicr she would be I What a pity it all is 1 whdt a pity i
Of course ho is right ; of course he can do nothing else ; if
he did do anything else the world would condemn him, and
even she very likely would despise him ; but it is such a pity 1
If only she could have a woman's natural life about her!
This life is not good. It is very well while she is young ; but
when she shall be no longer young ? "

And the tender heart of the old gentlewoman ached for a
sorrow not her own ; and could she have given him a duchy
to make him able to declare his love, she would have done so
at all costs.

CHAPTEK VII.

ToB sun was setting when the Countess Wanda returned
from her distant ride. She dismounted at the foot of the
terrace-steps and ascended them slowly, with Donau and Neva
behind her, both tired and breathless.

'^ You are safe home, my love ?** said the princess, turning
her head towards the steps.

^* Yes, deair mother mine : you always, I know, think that
Death gets up on the saddle. Is anything amiss ? You look
troubled."

" I have a message for you," said the princess, with a sigh«
and she gave Sabran*s.

a von Szalras lionrd in mlunce. She showed neklici

the princess waited a liltlc.

" Willi," she said, ot length, " well, jou do not even aalt me
why he goes I"

" You say he has been called away," her niece answered,
" Surely that is reason enough."

" You have no heart, Wanda."

"I do not understand you," said the Countess von Sialraa,
very coldly.

" Do yon mean to Bay you have not Been that lie loved
you ?"

The face of Wanda grew colder still.

" Did he instruct you to say this also ?"

" No, no," aaid tlie princess, hurriedly, perceiving her error,
" He only bade me say that ho waa oalled away and must leiivo
at onee, and begged you to accept tlirough me his adieus and
the expression of his gratitude. But it is very certain that
he does love yon, and that because he is too poor and too
proud to say ho he goes."

" You must weave your little romance !" said her niece,
with some impatience, striking the gilt wicker table with bet
riding-whip. " I prefer to think tbat M. de Sabran is, vary
naturally, gone back to the world to which he belongs. My
only wonder has been that he has borne so long with the sol-
iludca of the Sialraasco."

" If you wore not tho most sincere woman in the world, I
should believe you were endeavoring to deceive mo. As it
IB," said the princess, with some tamper, " I can only suppose
that you deceive yourself."

" Have you any lea there ?" said her niece, laying aside her
gauntlets and her whip and casting some cakes to the two
hnnndfl.

Sho had very pluinly and resolutely closed the subject al-
most before it was fairly opened. The princess, a little intim-
idated and keenly disappointed, did not venture to renew iL

When, the next morning, questioning Hubert, tho priocesa
Faund that indeed h.er favorite had left the island monastery
at dawn, the landscape of the Hohc Tauern seemed to her
more monotonous and melancholy than it had over befora
done, aud the days uioro tcdionfl and dull.

148 WANDA.

" You m\\ miss the music, at least/' she said, with asperitj,
to her niece. " I suppose you will give him as much regret
as you have done at times to the Ahh^ Liszt ?*'

** I shall miss the music, certainly," said the Countess
Wanda, calmly. " Our poor kapellmeister is very indifferent.
If he were not so old that it would be cruel to displace him,
I would take another from the Conservatorium."

The princess was irritated and even incensed, at the reply,
but she let it pass. Sabran's name was mentioned no more
ketween them for many days.

No one knew whither he had gone, and no tidings came of
him to Hohenszalras.

One day a foreign journal, among the many news-sheets
that came by post there, contained his name : " The Marquis
de Sabran broke the bank at Monte Carlo yesterday," was all
that it said, in its news of the Riviera.

" A winner at a tripot ! — what a hero for .you, mother
mine 1" she said, with some bitterness, handing the paper to
the princess. She was surprised at the disgust and impationoe
which she felt herself. What could it concern her?

That day, as she rode slowly through the grass drives of
her forests, she thought with pain of her companion of a few
weeks, who so late had ridden over these very paths beside
her, the dogs racing before them, the wild-flowers scenting
the air, the pale sunshine falling down across the glossy necks
of their horses.

" He ought to do better things than break a bank at a
gaming-place," she thought, with regret. ^* With such natu-
ral gifts of body and mind, it is a sin — a sin against himself
and others — to waste his years in those base and trivial follies.
When he was here, he seemed to feel so keenly the charm of
nature, the beauty of repose, the possibility of noble effort."

She let the reins droop on her mare's throat, and paced
slowly over the moss and the grass : though she was all alone, —
for in her own forests she would not be accompanied even by
a groom, — the color came into her face as she remembered
many things, many words, many looks, which confirmed tho
assertion Madame Ottilie had made to her.

" That may very well be," she thought ; " but, if it be, I
think my memory might have restrained him from becoming
the hero of a gambling apotheosis."

WANDA. 149

And bIio was HStoniEhed at hersslfto End how mucti regret
tuin<;lcd with her disgust, and how much her disgust waa ia-
tciisi6ed bj a sentiment of porsooal ofTeDce.

When she reached liome it waa twilight, and she was told
that her cousin Prince Egon Vfiafirhely had airired. She
would have been giad to Bee him if she had been perfeetly
sure that he would have accepted quietly the reply she hod
sent to his letter received on the night of the great Btonii.
As it was, she met him in the blue-room before the Princesj
Uttjiie, and nothing could he said on that gubjeet,

Prince Hgon. though still young, had already a glorious past
behind him. He came of a race of warriora, and the Vits^r-
hdy IIuasarB had been famous since the days of Maria The-
resa. The command of that brilliant regiment was hereditary,
and ho had led them in repeated charges into the French
lines and the Prussian lines with such headlong nnd dautitlesa
gallantry that he had been called the " Wild Boar of Tar6o"
throughout the army. His huggars were the most splendid
cavalry that ever shook their bridles in the eunlight on the
wide Magyar plaius. Their uniform remained the same as in .
the days of Aspcrn, and he waa prodigal of gold, and em-
broidery, and rich furs, and trappings, with that martlul co-
quetry which has been charaoCeristio of so many great soldiers.
from Sulia to Michael Skobeleif.

With his regiment in the field, and without it in many ad-
ventures in the wilder parts of the Austrian Empire aod on
the Turkish border, his name had become a synonymo for
heroism throughout the Imperial army, whilst in his manner
«nd mode of life no more magnificent noblo ever came from
the dim romantic solitudes of Hungary to the court and (he
capital. He had great personal beauty; ho had unrivalled
traditions of valor; he was the head of hia family, and his
3wn master. Gallant, courageous, and generoua, lie was muah
beloved in his rogiiucnt and on hie estates. From his youth
he had had an aiLichmont that was almoHt a religion with
him, 80 great and unswerving was his love for Wanda vou
Ssalras. Their union had always been projected by both the
houses of Szalras and Vilufiriiely ; there had beeu only one
dissentient voice in the matter, but that an important one, —

Buluro Bela's death, and before aho becann her own mi«-

150 WAM)A,

trcsS) she had always urged that her own sisterly affection for
Egou made any thought of marriage with him out of the
question.

'* I am fond of him, as I was of Gela and Victor/* she said
often to those who pressed the alliance upon her ; " but that
is not love. I will not marry a man whom I do not love.
There are so many women who would Ibten to him and adore
him. Why must he come to me ?"

When she became absolutely her own mistress he was for
some time silent, fearing to importune her, or to seem meroe-
nary. She had become by Bela's death one of the greatest
alliances in Europe. But at length, confident that his own
position exempted him from any possible appearance of oov-
etousncss, he gently reminded her of her father's and her
broth er*s wishes, but to no effect. She gave him the same
answer. " You are sure of my affection, but I will not do you
so bad a service as to become your wife. I have no love for
you." From that he had no power to move or change her.
He had made her many appeals in his frequent visits to Ho-
henszalras, but none with any success in inducing her to de-
part from the frank and placid regard of close relationship.
She liked him well, and held him in high esteem ; but this
was not love, nor, had she consented to call it love, would it
ever have contented the impetuous, ardent, and passionate
spirit of Egon Vks^rhely.

They could not be lovers, but they still remained friends,
partly through consanguinity, partly because he could bear to
see her thus so long as no other was nearer to her than he.
They greeted each other now cordially and simply, and talked
of the many cares and duties and interests that sprang up
daily in the administration of such vast properties as theirs.

Prince Vks^rhely, though a brilliant soldier and a magnifi-
cent noble, was simple in his tastes, and occupied himself
largely with the welfare of his people.

The princess yawned discreetly behind her fan many timeb
during this conversation, to her utterly uninteresting, upon
villages, vines, harvests, bridges swept away by floods, stewards
just and unjust, and the tolls and general navigation of the
Danube. Quite tired of all these details and this disouasion
of subjects which she considered ought to be abandoned to
the men of business, she said suddenly, in a pause, —

WAS DA, 151

** ElgoQ, did you ever know a very charming person, the
Marquis de Sabran ?"

Vhsitrhely reflected a moment

" No/* he answered, slowly. " I have no recollection of
Buch a name/*

'* I thought you might have met him in Paris.*'

*' I am 80 rarely in Paris : since my father's death I havo
scarcely passed a month there.. Who is he ?'*

*' A stranger whose acquaintance we made through his be-
ing cast adrifl here in a storm,** said the Countess Wanda,
with some impatience. ** My dear aunt is devoted to him,
beoause he has painted her a St. Ottilic on a screen, with the
skill of Meissonnier. Since he lefl us he has become cele-
brated : he has broken the bank at Monte Carlo.**

Egon Vks^hely looked at her quickly.

'' It seems to anger you. Did this stranger stay hero any
time?*'

'^ Some time, yes : he had a bad accident on the Vencdigcr.
Herr Oreswold brought him to our island to pass his conva-
lescence with the monks. From the monks to Monte Carlo ! —
it is at least a leap requiring some elasticity in moral gymnas-
tics.'*

She spoke with some irritation, which did not escape the
3ar of her cousin. He said merely, —

'' Did you receive him, knowing nothing about him ?**

*< We certainly did. It was an imprudence ; but, if he
paints like Meissonnier, he plays like Liszt : who was to re-
sist such a combination of gifts ?'*

''You say that very contemptuously, Wanda,** said the
prince.

'' I am not contemptuous of the talent ; I am of the pos-
sessor of it, who comprehends his own powers so little that
he breaks the bank at Monaco."

" I envy him at least his power to anger you," said Egeu
Yilskrhelj.

" I am angered to see anything wasted,'* she answeied,
conscious of the impatience she had shown. " I was very
angry with Otto*s little daughter yesterday : she had gathered
a huge bundle of cowslips and thrown it down in the sun ; il
was ingratitude to God who made them. This friend of my
aunt*s does worse : he changes his cowslip into monkshood."

152 WA^'DA,

" Is he indeed such a favorite of yours, dear mother "^^
Mid Vils^rhely.

The princess answered, petulantly,— .

" Certainly, — ^a charming person. And our cousin Kac^ '^S^
nitz knows him well. Wauda, for once, talks foolishlX Mi^^yJ
Gkimhling is, it is true, a great sin at all times, but I do n 0=^ ^
know that it is worse at public tables than it is in your cluhcJ-^-^'^-
I myself am, of course, ignorant of these matters; but ^•'-■i^ *
have heard that privately, at cards, whole fortunes have be^^^^*®®?
lost in a night, scribbled away with a pencil on a scrap oo ^^ ^

did
we

paper.

" To lose a fortune is better than to win one," sdd h^^^ '^^
niece, as she rose from the head of her table. ^^

When the princess slept in her blue-room, Egon YhskrheT^^ .rfielj
approached his cousin, where she sat at her embroidery-fram> m:^^^'^^^

" This stranger has the power to make you angry," he aaimM.-^^^^
sadly. " I have not even that." ^

" Dear Egon," she said, tenderly, " you have done nothinc*^^*?e
in your life that I could despise. Why should you be di*i-^^ ™'
contented at that ?"

" Would you care if I did ?"

" Certainly ; I should be very sorry if my noble cousin di
anything that could belie his chivalry. But why should
suppose impossibilities?" „„

" Suppose we were not cousins, would you love me then?^ ^^

" How can I tell ? This is mere nonsense "

" No ; it is all my life. You know, Wanda, that I ha
loved you, only you, ever since I saw you as I came bacf
from France, — a child, but such a beautiful child, with youJ^^
hair braided with pearls, and a dress all stiff with gold, an» m:^-^'^
your lap full of red roses." ^ .^.Mi'}

" Oh, I remember," she said, hastily. " There was a etiX^ ^^^^
drcn's costume ball at the Ilof : I called myself Elizabeth o^^^ -
Thuringia, artd Bela, my own Bela, was my little Louis oft ^?^»»
Hungary. Oh, Egon, why will you speak of those times?" * «

"Because surely they make a kind of tie between us* ^^^^
They "

" They do make one that will last ail our lives, unless yoi^
strain it to bear a weight it is not made to bear. Dear Bgon^^^^^f'
you are very dear to me, but not dear «o. As my cousin, m;^
gallant, kind, and loyal cousin, you are very precious to me

av(

ck

oui

on

WANDA, 153

bat, Egon. if you could force me to be your wife I should not
be iudiiferent to you, I should hate you 1"

He grew white under his olive skin. He shrank a little, as
if he suffered some sharp physical pain.

*^ Hate me T' he echoed, in a stupor of surprise and suffering.

" I believe I should. I cotUd hate. It is a frightful thing
to say. Dear Egon, look elsewhere ; find some other among
the many lovely women that you see; do not waste your
brilliant life on me. I shall never say otherwise than I say
to-night, and you will compel me to lose the most trusted
friend I have."

He was still very pale. He breathed heavily. There was
a mist over his handsome dark eyes, which were oast down.
*^ Until you love any other, I shall never abandon hope."

^* That is unwise. I shall probably love no one all my life
long : I have told you so often."

'< All say so until love finds them out. I will not trouble
you ; I will be your cousin, your friend, rather than be nothing
to you. But it is hard."

" Why think of me so ? Your career has so much bril-
liancy, so many charms, so many interests "

" You do not know what it is to love. I talk to you in an
unknown tongue, and you have no pity, because you do not
understand."

She did not answer. Over her thoughts passed the mem-
ory of the spinet whose music she had said he could not
touch and waken.

He remained a week at Hohenszalras, but he did not again
speak to her of his own sufferings. He was a proud man,
though humble to her.

With a sort of contrition she noticed for the first time that
he wearied her, — that when he spoke of his departure she
was glad. He was a fine soldier, a keen huntor, rather than
a man of talents. The life he loved best was his life at home
in his great castles, amidst the immense plains and the primeval
forests of Hungary and the lonely fastnesses of the Carpa-
thians, of scouring a field of battle with his splendid troopers
behind him, all of them his kith and kin, or men of his own
aoil^ whom he ruled with a firm, high hand, in a generous
despotism.

But when he was with her she misred all the graceful tad,.

151 WANDA,

tho subtile uicaniDgs, the varied suggestions and allusionp,
that had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome to
her. Egon Vius^^rhcly was no scholar, no thinker, no satirist ;
he was only brave and generous, as lions are, and, vaguely, a
poet without words, from the wild solitudes he loved, and the
romance that lies in the nature of the Magyar. ** He knowe
nothing I" she thought, impatiently recalling the stores of
most various and recondite knowledge with which her late com
panion had played so carelessly and with such ease. It seemed
to her that never in her life had she weighed her cousin in
scales so severe and found him so utterly wanting.

And yet how many others she knew would have found
their ideal in that gallant gentleman, with his prowess, and
his hardihood, and his gallantry in war, and his winsome
temper, so full of fire to men, so full of chivalry for women !
When Prince Egon in his glittering dress, all fur and gold and
velvet, passed up the ballroom at the Burg in Vienna, no
other man in all that magnificent assembly was so watohed, so
admired, so sighed for ; and he was her cousin, and he only
wearied her I

As he was leaving, he paused a moment afler bidding her
farewell, and, after some moments of silence, said, in a low
voice, —

^* Dear, I will not trouble you again until you summon me.
Perhaps that will be many years ; but, whether we meet or not,
time will make no change in me. I am your servant ever."

Then he bowed over her hand once more, once more sa-
luted her, and in a moment or two the quick trot of the
horses that bore him away woke the echoes of the green hills.

She looked out of the huge arched entrance-door down the
grand defile that led to the outer world, and felt a pang of
self-reproach, of self-condemnation.

" If one could force one's self to love by any pilgrimage or
penance," she thought, '^ there are none I would not take
upon me to be able to love Egon."

As she stood thoughtfully there on the door-way of her
great castle, the sweet linnet-like voice of the Princess Ottilie
came on her ear. It said, a little shrilly, ** You are always
looking for a four-leaved shamrock. In that sort of sejurch
life slips away unperceived : one is very soon led alone with
one's dead leaves."

WANDA. 155

Wanda von Szalras tamed and smiled.

^' I am not afraid of being left alone/' she said. " I shall
have my people and my forests always.*'

Then, apprehensive lest she should have seemed thankless
and cold of heart, she turned caressingly to Madame Ottilie.

'^Nay, I could not bear to lose you, my sweet fairy god-
mother. Think me neither forgetful nor ungrateful."

^' You could never be one or the other to me. But I shall
not live, like a fairy godmother, forever. Before I die I
would fain see you content, like others, with the shamrocks
as nature has made them."

'' I think there are few people as content as I am," said the
Countess Wanda, and said the truth.

*' You are content with yourself, not with others. You
will pardon me if I say there is a great difference between
the two," replied the Princess Ottilie, with a little smile, that
was almost sarcastic, on her pretty small features.

" You mean that I have a great deal of vanity and no
sympathy ?"

'* You have a great deal of pride," said the princess, dis-
creetly, as she began to take her customary noontide walk up
and down the terrace, her tall cane tapping the stones, and
her little dog running before her, whilst a hood of point lace
and a sunshade of satin kept the wind from her pretty white
hair and the sun from her eyes, that were still blue as the
acres of mouse-ear that grew by the lake.

CHAPTER VIII.

The summer glided away and became autumn, and the
Countess Wanda refused obstinately to fill Hohenszalras with
house-parties. In vain her aunt spoke of the Lynau, the
Windischgratz, the Hohenlohe, and the other great families
who were their relatives or their friends. In vain she referred
continually to the fact that every Schloss in Austria and all
adjacent countries was filling with guests at this season, and
the woods around it resounding with the hunter's horn and
the hound's bay. In vain did she recapitulate tho. glories of

156 WANDA.

Hohcnszalras in an earlier time, and hint that tbe mistress of
80 vast a domain owed some duties to society.

Wanda von Szalras opposed to all these suggestions and
declarations that indifference which would have seemed ob-
stinacy had it been less mild. As for the hunting-parties,
she avowed with truth that, although a daughter of mighty
hunters, she herself regarded all pastimes founded on cruelty
with aversion and contempt: the bears and the boars,^the
wild deer and the mountain-chamois, might dwell undis-
turbed for the whole of their lives, so far as she was con-
cerned. When a bear came down and ate off the heads of an
acre or two of wheat, she recompensed the peasant who had
suffered the loss, but she would not have her jagermeistcr
track the poor beast. The j'dgermeister sighed, as Madame
Ottilie did, for the bygone times when a score of princes and
nobles had ridden out on a wolf-chase, or hundreds of peas-
ants had threshed the woods to drive the big game towards
the Kaiser's rifle ; but for poachers his place would have been
a sinecure and his days a weariness. His mistress was not to
be persuaded. She preferred her forests left to their unbroken
peace, their stillness filled with the sounds of rushing waters
and the calls of birds.

The weeks glided on one afler one, with the even meas-
ured pace of monotonous and unruffled time: her hours
were never unoccupied, for her duties were constant and
numerous.

She would go dnd visit the scnnerinn in their lofliest
cattle-huts, and would descend an ice-slope with the swiftness
and security of a practised mountaineer. In- her childhood
she and Bcla had gone almost everywhere the chamois went,
and she came of a race which, joined to high courage, had the
hereditary habits of a great eudurancc. In the throne-roona
of Vienna, with her great pearls about her, that had once
been sent by a Sultan to a Szalras who fought with Wences-
laus, she was the stateliest and proudest lady of the greatest
aristocracy of the world ; but on her own mountain-sides she
was as dauntless as an ibis, as sure-footed as a goat, and would
sit in the alpine cabins and drink a draught of milk and break
a crust of rye-bread as willingly as though she were a senncr-
inn herself; so she would take the oars and row herself un-
ftided down the lake, so she would saddle her horse and rido

WANDA. 167

it oyer the wildest oountry, so she would drive ker sledge over
many a German mile of snow, and even in the teeth of a
north wind blowing straight from the Kussian plains and the
Arctic seas.

" Fear nothing T' had been said again and again to her in
)ier childhood, and she had learned that her race transmitted
to and imposed its courage no less on its daughters than on its
sons. Cato would have admired this mountain-brood, even
though its mountain-lair was more luxurious than he would
have deemed was wise.

She knew thoroughly what all her rights, titles, and pos-
sessions were. She was never vague or uncertain as to any
of her affairs, and it would have been impossible to deceive or
to cheat her. No one tried to do so, for her lawyers were
men of old-fashioned ways and high repute, and for centurici
the vast properties of the Counts von Szalras had been ad-
ministered wisely and honestly in the same advocates' offices,
which were close underneath the Calvarienbcrg in the good
city of Salzburg. Her trustees were her uncle Cardinal
Vis^rhely and her great-uncle Prince George of Lilienhohe ;
they were old men, both devoted to her, and both fully con-
scious that her intelligence was much abler and keener than
their own. All these vast possessions gave her an infinite
variety of occupation and of interests, and she neglected none
of them. Still, all the properties and duties in the world will
not suffice to fill up the heart and mind of a woman of four-
and-twenty years of age, who enjoys the perfection of bodily
health and of j)hysical beauty. The most spiritual and the
most dutiful of characters cannot altogether resist the im-
pulse* of nature. There were times when she now began to
think .hat her life was somewhat empty and passionless.

But a certain sense of their monotony had begun for tha
first time to come upon her ; a certain vague dissatisfaction
stirred in her now and then. The discontent of Sabran
seemed to have left a shadow of itself upon her. For the
first time she seemed to be listening, as it were, to her life
and to find a great silence in it ; there was no echo in it of
voices she loved.

Why had she never perceived it before? Why did sha
become conscious of it now? She asked herself this im-
patiently as the slight but bitter flavor of dissatisfactios

14

158 WANDA.

toncbcd her, and the days for onoe seemed — ^now and then— •
over-long.

She loved her people, and her forests, and her mountains,
and she had always thought that they would be sufficient for
her, and she had honestly told the princess that of solitude
she was not afraid ; and yet a certain sense that her life was
cold and in a measure empty had of late crept upon her.
She wondered angrily why a vague and intangible melanunoly
stole on her at times, which was different from the sorrow
which still weighed on her for her brother's death. Now and
then she looked at the old painted box of the spinet, and
thought of the player who had awakened its dumb strings ;
but she did not suspect for a moment that it was in any sense
his companionship which, now that it was lost, made the even
familiar tenor of her time appear monotonous and without
much interest. In the long evenings, whilst the prinoesB
slumbered and she hei'self sat alone watching the twilight give
way to the night over the broad and solemn landscape, she felt
a lassitude which did net trouble her in the open air, in the
daylight, or when she was busied in-doors over the reports and
requirements of her estates. Unacknowledged, indeed, un-
known to her, she missed the coming of the little boat from
the Holy Isle, and missed the prayer and praise of the great
tone-poets rolling to her ear from the organ within. If any
ine had told her that her late guest had possessed any such
power to make her days look gray and pass tediously, she
would have denied it, and been quite sincere in her denial.
But as he had called out the long-mute music from the spinet,
so he had touched, if only faintly, certain chords in her nature
that until then had been dumb.

" I am not like you, my dear Olga," she wrote to her relative,
Uie Countess Brancka. *'I am not easily amused. That
course effrinSe of the great world carries you honestly away
with it ; all those incessant balls, those endless visits, those
interminable conferences on your toilets, that continual circling
of human butterflies round you, those perpetual courtships of
half a score of young men, — it all diverts you. You are
never tired of it ; you cannot understand any life outside its
pale. All your days, whether they pass in Paris or Peters-
burg, at Trouville, at Biarritz, or at Vienna or Scheveningon,
are modelled on the same lines ; you must have cxcitementi

WANDA. 159

yon have your cnp of chocolate when you wake. What I
envy yon is that the excitement excites yea. When I was
amidst it, I was not excited ; I was seldom even diverted.
See the misfortune that it is to be born with a grsive natnrc 1
I am as serious as Marcus Antoninus. You will say that it
comes of having learned Latin and Greek. I do not think
80 ; I fear I was bom unamusable. I only truly care about
horses and trees, and they are both grave things, though a
horse can be playful enough sometimes when he is allowed to
forget his servitude. Your friends the famous tailors send me
admirably-chosen costumes, which please that sense in me
which Titians and Vandycks do (I do not mean to be pro-
fane) ; but I only put them on as the monks do their frocks.
Perhaps I am very unworthy of them ; at least I cannot talk
toilet as you can with ardor a whole morning and every whole
morning of your life. You will think I am laughing at you ;
but indeed I am not. I envy your faculty of sitting, as I am
sure you are sitting now, in a straw cLair on the shore, with
a group of bovlevardiers around you, and a crowd making a
double hedge to look at you when it is your pleasure to pace
the planks. My language is involved. I do not envy you
the faculty of doing it, of course ; I could do it myself to-
morrow. I envy you the faculty of finding amusement in
doing it, and finding flattery in the double hedge.*'

A few days afterwards the Countess Brancka wrote back
in reply, —

" The world is like wine ; ga se mousse et ga monte. There
are heads it does not affect ; there are palates that do not like it,
yours among them. But there is so much too in habit. Liv-
ing alone amidst your mountains, you have lost all taste for
the brauhdha of society, which grows noisier, it must be said,
every year. Yes, we are noisy : we have lost our dignity.
Yon alone keep yours : you are the chd.telaine of the Middle
Ages. Perceforest or Parsifal should come riding to your
gates of granite. By the way, I hear you have been enter-
taining one of our houlevardiers, B4n6 de Sabran is charming,
and the handsomest man in Paris ; but he is not Parsifal or
Perceforest. Between ourselves, he has an indifferent reputa-
tion ; but perhaps he has repented on your Holy Isle. They
say he is changed, — that he has quarrelled with Gochonette
and that he is about to be made deputy for his dcpartmeut|

160 WANDA.

whose representative has just died. Pardon me for naming
Cochonette ; it is part of our decadence that we laugh about
all tViese naughty things and naughty people, who are, after
all, not so very much worse than we are ourselves. But yon
do not laugh, whether at these or at anything else. You are
too good, my beautiful Wanda ; it is your sole defect Yon
Lave even inoculated this poor marquis, who, after a few weeks
upon the Szalrassee, surrenders Cochonette for the Chambers 1
My term of service comes round next month: if you will
have me, I will take the Tauern on my road to GodoUo. I
long to embrace you."

" Olga will take pity on our solitude," said Wanda von
Szuilras to her aunt. ** I have not seen her for years, but I
imagine she is little changed."

The princess read the letter, frowning sund pursing her lipa
together in pretty rebuke as she came to the name of Cocho-
nette.

^* They have indeed lost all dignity," she said, with a sigh ;
" and something more than dignity also. Olga was always
frivolous."

" All her moncle is ; not she more than another."

" You were very unjust, you see, to M. de Sabran ; he pays
you the compliment of following your counsels."

Wanda von Szalras rose a little impatiently. " He had bet-
ter have followed them before he broke the bank at Monaco.
It is an odd sort of notoriety with which to attract the pious
and taciturn Bretons ; and when he was here he had no con-
victions. I suppose he picked them up with the gold pieoei
at the tables !"

Olga, Countess Brancka, nSe Countess Seriatine, of a noble
Russian family, had been married at sixteen to the young Gela
von Szalras, who, a few months after his bridal, had been shot
dead on the battle-field of Solferino.

After scarce a year of mourning she had fascinated the
bi-othcr of Egon V5;S^rhcly, a mere youth, who bore the title
of Count Brancka. There had been long and bitter opposition
made to the new alliance on the part of both families, on
account of the consanguinity between Stefan Brancka and lior
young dead lord. But opposition had only increased the ardor
of the young man and the young widow ; they had borne down
all resistance, procured all dispensations, had bicn wedded.

WANDA. 161

and in a year*s time had both wislicd tho deed undone
Both were extravagant, capricious, self-indulgent, and unrea-
sonable ; their two egotisms were in a perpetual collisioo.
They met but seldom, and never mot without quariQlling vio<
lently. The only issue of their union was two little, fantastic,
artificial fairies, who were called respectively Mila and Marie.

At the time of the marriage of the Branckas, Wanda had
been too young to take action upon it ; but the infidelity to
her brother's memory had offended and wounded her deeply,
and in her inmost heart she had never pardoned it, though the
wife of Stefan Brancka had been a passing guest at Hohen-
Bzalras, where, had Count Gela lived, she would have reigned
as sovereign mistress. That his sister reigned there in her
stead the Countess Olga resented keenly and persistently.
Her own portion of the wealth of the Szalras had been for-
feited under her first marriage-contract by her subsequent
alliance. But she never failed to persuade herself that her
exclusion from every share in that magnificent fortune was a
deep wrong done to herself, and she looked upon Wanda von
Szalras as the doer of that wrong.

In appearance, however, she was always cordial, caressing,
affectionate, and if Wanda chose to mistrust her affection it
was, she reflected, only because a life of unwise solitude had
made a character naturally grave become severe and suspicious.

The Countess Brancka arrived there a week later. She was
a small, slender, lovely woman, with fair skin, auburn hair,
wondrous black eyes, and a fragile frame that never knew
fatigue. She held a high office at the Imperial court, but when
she was not on service she spent, under the plea of health, all
her time at Paris or les eaux. She came with her numer-
ous attendants, her two tiny children, and a great number of
huge /oiir^ons full of all the newest marvels of combination
in costume. She was seductive and caressing, but she was
eapricious, malicious, and could be even violent; in general
she was gayly given up to amusement and intrigue, but she
had moments of rage that were uncontrollable. She had had
many indiscretions and some passions, but the world liked
her none the less for that ; she was a great lady, and in a sense
a happy woman, for she had nerves of steel despite all her
maladies, and brought to the pleasures of life an unflagging
and even ravenous zest.

I 14*

162 WANDA.

When, with her perfume of Paris, her restless aDimation
her children like little figures from a fashion-plate, Her rapid
voice that was shrill yet sweet, like a silver whistle, and her
eyes that sparkled alike with mirth and with malice, she came
on to the stately terraces of Hohenszalras, she seemed curi-
ously discordant with it and its old-world peace and gravitj.
She was like a pen-and-ink sketch of Cham thrust between tht
illuminated miniatures of a missal.

She felt it herself.

*' It is the Roman de la Rose in stone,'* she said, as hei
eyes roved over the building, which she had not visited foi
four years. " And you, Wanda, you look like Yseulte of the
White Hand or the Marguerite des Marguerites : you must be
sorry you did not live in those times."

** Yes ; if only for one reason. One could make the impress
of one's own personality so much more strongly on the time."

" And now the times mould us. We are all horribly alike.
There is only yourself who retain any individuality amidst all
the women that I know. * La meule du pressoir de Vahrut-
is^emenf might have been written of our world. After all,
you are wise to keep out of it. My straw chair at Trouvillo
looks trumpery beside that ivory chair in your Rittersaal. I
read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled
pheasant and a sack of bonbons. That is the sort of dinner
we make all the year round, morally — metaphorically — ^how
do you say it? It makes us thirsty, and perhaps — I am not
sure — perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we nibble the
sweetmeats and don't know it."

" Your dinner must lack two things, — bread and water."

^' Yes : we never see cither. It is all trufScs and caramelfl
and vins frappis,^''

" There is your bread."

She glanced at the little children, — two pretty graoefbl
little maids of six and seven years.

" Ou/r said Countess Brancka. " They are only little bita
of puff-paste, a couple o^ petits /ours baked on the boule-
vards. If they be chic^ and marry well, I for one shall ask no
more of them. If ever you have children, I suppose you will
rear them on science and the Antonines."

" Perhaps on the open air and Homer," said Wanda, with
A smile.

WANDA. 163

The Countress Branoka was silent a momcnti then said,
abruptly, —

" You dismissed Egon again ?"

'* Has he made you his ambassadress ?*'

" No ; oh, no ; he is too proud ; only we all are aware of his
wishes. Wanda, do you know that you have some cruelty in
you, some sternness ?"

" I think not. The cruelty would be to grant the wishes.
With a loveless wife Egon would bo much more unhappy than
Le is now."

" Oh, after a few months he would not care, you know :
they never do. To unite your fortunes is the great thing .
you could lead your lives as you liked."

" Our fortunes do very well apart," said the Countess von
Szalras, with a patience which cost her some effort.

'' Yours is immense," said Madame Brancka, with a sigh,
for her own and her husband's wealth had been seriously in-
Tolved by extravagance and that high play in which they both
indulged. '^ And it must accumulate in your hands. You
cannot spend much. I do not see how you could spend much.
You never receive; yOu never go to your palaces; you never
leave Hohenszalras ; and you are so wise a woman that you
never commit any follies."

Wanda was silent. It did not appear to her that she was
called on to discuss her expenditure.

Pinner was announced; their attendants took away the
children ; the princess woke up from a little doze, and said,
suddenly, " Olga, is M. de Sabran elected ?"

" Aunt Ottilie," said her niece, hastily, " has lost her affec-
tions to that gentleman, because he painted her saint on a
screen, and had all old Haydn at his fingers* ends.'*

*' The election does not take place until next month ' said
the countess. " He will certainly be returned, because of the
blind fidelity of the department to his name. The odd thing
is that ho should wish to be so."

" Wanda told him it was his duty," said Madame Ottilie,
with innocent malice.

The less innocent malice of the Countess Brancka^s eyes
fell for a passing moment with inquiry and curiosity on the
fiioo of her hostess, which, however, told her nothing.

" Then he vxu Parsifal or Pcrceforest !" she cried, " and

164 WANDA.

he has ridden away to find the emerald cup of tradition.
What a pity that he paused on his way to break the bank aft
Monte Carlo 1 The two do not accord. I fear ho is but
Lancelot."

*' There is no reason why he should not pursue an bonor-
able ambition/' said the princess, with some offence.

*' No reason at all, even if it be not an honorable one," said
Madame Brancka, with a curious intonation. ^^ He always
wins at baccara; he has done some inimitable oaricatureB
which hang at the Mirliton ; he is an amateur Rubinstein, and
he has been the lover of Cochonette. These are his qualifica-
tions for the Chambers ; and if they be not as valiant ones as
those of leg Pretix, they are at least more amusing."

'' My dear Olga," said the princess, with a certain dignity
of reproof, " you are not on your straw chair at Trouville.
There are subjects, expressions, suggestions, which are not
agreeable to my ears or on your lips."

" Cochonette 1" murmured the offender, with a graceful
little courtesy of obedience and oontrition. '^ Oh, madame,
if you knew 1 A year ago we talked of nothing else 1"

The Countess Brancka wished to talk still of nothing else,
and, though she encountered a chillness and silence that
would have daunted a less bold spirit, she contrived to excite
in the princess a worldly and almost unholy curiosity con-
cerning that heroine of profane history who had begun life in
a little lake-house of the Batii;nolles, and had achieved the
success of putting her name (or her nickname) upon the lips
of all Paris.

Throughout dinner she spoke of little save of Cochonette,
that goddess of houffe, and of Parsifal, as she persisted in
baptizing the one lover to whom alone the goddess had ever
been faithful. With ill-concealed impatience her hostess
bore awhile with the subject, then dismissed it somewhat
peremptorily.

" We are provincials, my dear Olga," she said, with a very
cold inflection of contempt in her voice. *' We are very anti-
quated in our ways and our views. Bear with our preju
dices, and do not scare our decorum. We keep it by us as
we keep kingfishers' skins among our furs in summer against
moth, — a mere superstition, I dare say, but we are only rustic
people."

WANDA. IGS

" How you say that, Wanda," said her guest, with a drol!
little laugh, ^* and you look like Marie Antoinette all the
while! Why will you bury yourself! You would only
need to be seen in Paris a week, and all the world would
turn after you and go hack to tradition and ermine instead
of chien and plush. If you live another ten years as you
live now, you will turn Hohenszalras into a religious house ;
and even Madame Ottilie would regret that. You will in«
stitute a Carmelite order, because white becomes you ho.
Poor Egon ! he would sooner have you laugh about Cocho-
nette."

The evening was chill, but beautifully calm and free of
mist. Wanda von Szalras walked out on to the terrace, whilst
her cousin and guest, missing the stimulus of her usual band
of lovers and friends, curled herself up on a deep chair and
fell sound asleep like a dormouse.

There was no sound on the night, except the ripple of the
lake-water below, and the splash of torrents falling down the
clifi^ around. A sense of irritation and of pleasure moved
her both in the same moment. What was a French courte-
san, a singer of lewd songs, an interpreter of base passions, to
her ? Nothing, except a creature to be loathed and pitied, as
men in health feel a disgusted compassion for disease. Yet
she felt a certain anger stir in her as she recalled all this
frivolous, trivial, ill-flavored chatter of her cousin's. And
what was it to her if one of the many lovers of this woman
had cast her spells from about him and left her for a manlier
and a worthier arena? Yet she could not resist a sense of
delicate distant homage to herself in the act, in the mute
obedience to her counsels such as a knight might rcndei even
Lancelot with stained honor and darkened soul.

The silence of it touched her.

He had said nothing; only by mere chance, in the idle
drcling of giddy rumor, she learned that he had remember(!<l
her words and followed her suggestion. There was a subtile
and flattering reverence in it which pleased the taste of a
woman who was always proud but never vain. And to any
noble temperament there is a singularly pure and honest joy
in the consciousness of having been in any measure the moans
of raising higher instincts and loftier desires in any humao
ioul that was not dead but sleeping.

166 WANDA.

The shrill voice of Olga Brancka startled her as it broke
in on her musings.

" I have been asleep 1" she cried, as she rose out of hex
deep chair and came forth into the moonlight. '' Pray
forgive me, Wanda. You will have all that drowsy water
running and tumbling all over the place. It makes one think
of the voices in the Sistine in Passion Week : there are the
gloom, the hush, the sigh, the shriek, the eternal appeal, the
eternal accusation. That water would drive me into hysteria.
Could you not drain it, divert it, send it under ground, —
silence it somehow ?"

" When you can keep the Neva flowing at New-Tear, per-
haps I shall be able. But I would not if I could. I have
had all that water about me from babyhood : when I am away
from the sound of it I feel as if some hand had woolled up
my ears."

" That is what I feel when I am away from the noiso of
the streets. Oh, Wanda ! to think that you can do utterly
as you like, and yet do not like to have the sea of light of the
Champs- Ely s6es or the Grabcn before your eyes, rather thaim
that gliding, dusky water I"

*^ The water is a mirror. I can see my own soul in it, and
nature's : perhaps one hopes even sometimes to see Ood's.**

** That is not living, my dear : it is dreaming."

** Oh, no ; my life is very real ; it is as real as light to
darkness ; it is absolute prose."

" Make it poetry, then : that is very easy."

*^ Poetry is to the poetical : I am by no means poetical.
My stud-book, my stewards' ledgers, my bankers' accounts,
form the chief of my literature. You know I am a practical-
farmer."

" I know you are one of the most beautiful and one of the
richest women in Europe, and you live as if you were fifly
years old, ugly, and divote. All this will grow on you. In
a few years' time you will be a hermit, a prude, an ascetic
You will found a new order, and be canonized after death."

*' My aunt is afraid that I shall die a free-thinker. It is
hard to please every one," replied the Countess Wanda, with
unruffled good-humor. "It is poetical people who found
religious orders, enthusiasts, visionaries : I wish I were one
of them. But I am not. The utmotf I can do is to follow

WANDA, it)7

George Herbert's precept, and sweep my own little chambers,
BO that this sweeping may be in some sort a duty done."

" You are a good woman, Wanda, and I dare say a grand
one, but you are too grave for me."

" You mean that I am dull ? People always grow dull who
live much alone."

" But you could have the whole world at your feet if you
only raised a finger."

*^ That would not amuse me at all."

Her guest gave an impatient movement of her shoulders.
After a little she said, '* Did K^n6 de Sabran amuse you ?"

Wanda von Szalras hesitated a moment.

" In a measure he interested me," she answered, being a
perfectly truthful woman. " He is a man who has the ca-
pacity of great things, but he seems to me to be his own worst
enemy : if he had fewer gifls he might probably have more
achievement. A waste of power is always a melancholy
Bight." ^

" He is only a hovlevardtery you know."

" No doubt your Paris asphsdte is the modern embodiment
of Circe."

" But he is leaving Circe."

** So much the better for him if he be. But I do not know
why you speak of him so much. He is a stranger to me, and
will never, most likely, cross my path again."

" Oh, Parsifal will come back," said Madame Brancka, with
a little smile. " Hohenszalras is his Holy Grail."

" He can scarcely come uninvited ; and who will invite him
hero ?" said the mistress of Hohenszalras, with cold literal-
ness.

" Destiny will, — the great master of the ceremonies who
disposes of us all," said her cousin.

'• Destiny I" said Wanda, with some contempt. " Ah, you
are superstitious : irreligious people always are. You believe
in mesmerism and disbelieve in God."

" Oh, most holy mother, cannot you make Wanda a little
like other people?" said the Countess Brancka, when her
hostess had left her alone with Princess Ottilie. ^' She is as
much a fourteenth-century figure as any one of those knights
in the Rittersaal."

*^ Wanda ia a gentlewoman," said the princess, dryly. ^* Y on

168 WANDA,

great kidics are not always that, my dear Olga. You nro aU
very piquaiUe and provoguante, no doubt, but you have for-
gotten what dignity is like, and perhaps you have forgotten,
too, what self-respect is like. It is but another old-fashioned
word."

CHAPTER IX,

The late summer passed on into full autumn, and he ncvor
returned to the little isle under the birches and willows. The
monks spoke of him often with the wondering admiration of
rustic rceluses for one who had seemed to them the very in-
carnation of that world which to them was only a vague name.
His talents were remembered, his return was longed for ; a
silver reliquary and an antique book of plain-song which he
had sent them were all that remained to them of his sojourn
there. As they angled for trout under the drooping boughs,
or sat and dozed in the cloister as the rain fell, they talked
together of that marvellous visitant with regret. Sometimes
they said to one another that they had fancied once upon a
time he would have become lord there where the spires and
pinnacles and shining sloping roofs of the great Schloss rose
amidst the woods across the Szalrassee. When their grand
prior heard them say so, he rebuked them.

" Our lady is a true daughter of the Holy Church," ho
said : " all the lands and all the wealth she has will come to
the Church. You will see, should we outlive her, — which the
saints send we may not do, — that the burg will be bequeathed
by her to form a convent of Ursulines. It is the order she
most loves."

She overheard him say so once when sho sat in her boat
beneath the willows drifting by under the island, and she
sighed impatiently.

" No, I shall not do that," sho thought. " The religious
foundations did a great work in their time, but that time is
over. They can no more resist the pressure of the change of
thought and habit than I can set sail like St. Ursula with
eleven thousand virgins. Hohenszalras shall go to the Crown :

WANDA. 169

fchcy will &> what seems best with it. But I may live filly
years and more."

A. certain sadness came over her as she thought so : a long
life, a lonely life, appalled her, even though it was cradled in
all luxury and strengthened with all power.

" If only my Bela were living !" she said, half aloud ; and
the water grew dim to her sight as it flowed away green and
sparkling into the deep long shadows of its pine-clothed shores,
shadows stretching darkly across its western side, whilst tho
eastern extremity was still warm in the aflemoon light.

The great pile of Hohenszalras seemed to tower up into the
very clouds ; the evening sun, not yet sunk behind the Vene-
diger range, shone ruddily on all its towers and its gothio
spires, and the grim sculptures and the glistening metal, with
which it was so lavishly ornamented, were illumined till it
looked like some colossal and enchanted citadel, where soon
the magic ivory horn of Childe Roland might sound and wake
tlie spell -bound warders.

If only Bela, lord of all, had lived I

But her regret was not only for her brother.

In the October of that year her solitude was broken. Her
sovereigns signified their desire to see Hohenszalras again.
They were about to visit Salzburg, and expressed their desire
to pass three days in the Iselthal. There was nothing to be
done but to express gratitude for the honor and make the
necessary preparations. The Von Szalras had been always
'oyal allies rather than subjects, and their devotion to the
Hapsburg house had been proved in many ways and with con-
stancy. She felt that she would rather have to collect and
ec|uip a regiment of horse, as her fathers had done, than fill
her home with the tapage inevitable to an Imperial reception ;
but she was not insensible to the friendship that dictated this
mark of honor.

" Fate conspires to make me break my resolutions," she
said to the princess, who answered, witL scant sympathy, —

" There are some resolutions much more wisely broken than
rersevered in : your vows of solitude are among them."

" Three days will not long affect my solitude."

" Who knows ? At all events, Hohenszalras for those three
days will be worthy of its traditions, — if only it will not

rain."

16

170 WANDA,

" We will hope that it may not Let us prepare the list of
invitations/'

When she had addressed all the invitations to some fifty of
the greatest families of the Empire for the house-party, she
took one of the cards engraved *^ To meet their Imperial
Majesties," and hesitated some moments, then wrote across it
the name of Sahran.

" You will like to see your friend,'* she said, as she passed
it to her aunt.

'^ Certainly I should like to do so, hut I am quite sure he
will not come."

'• Not come ?'

'^ I think he will not. You will never understand, my dear
Wanda, that men may love you."

'* I certainly saw nothing of love in the conversation of M.
dc Sabran," she answered, with some irritation.

'^ In his conversation ? Very likely not : he is a proud
man and poor."

"Since he has ceased to visit Monte Carlo."

" You are ungenerous, Wanda."

" I ?"

The accusation fell on her with a shock of surprise, under
which some sense of error stirred. Was it possible she could
bo ungenerous, — she, whose character had always, even in its
faults, been cast on lines so broad ? She let his invitation go
away with the rest in the post-bag to Matrey.

In a week his answer came with others. He was very
sensible, very grateful, but the political aspect of the time for-
bade him to leave Franco ; his election had entailed on him
many obligations ; the Chambers would meet next month,
etc., etc. He laid his homage and regrets at the feet of the
ladies of Hohenszalras.

" I was sure he would say so," the princess observed. It
did not lie within her Christian obligations to spare the "/e
%ovL& V avals bien dit,^^

" It is very natural that he should not jeopardize his public
prospects," answered Wanda, herself angrily conscious of a
disappointment, with which there was mingled also a sense of
greater respect for him than she had ever before felt.

" He cares nothing at all about those," said the princess,
sharply. " If he had the position of Egon he would comoi

WANDA. 171

#

Ris political prospects I Do you pretend to be igDorant that
ho only went to the Chambers as he went to Romaris, becauso
yoa recommended ambition and activity ?''

*' Tf that be the case, he is most wise not to come/^ an-
swered, with some coldness, the chS>telaine of Hohenszalras ;
and she went to visit the stables, which would be more im-
portant in the eyes of her Imperial mistress than any other
part of the castle.

" She will like Gadiga," she thought, as she stroked the
graceful throat of an Arab mare which she had had over from
Africa three months before, a pure-bred daughter of the desert,
" shod with lightning."

She conversed long with her siaUmeUter Ulrich, and gave
him various directions.

" We are all grown very rustic and old-fashioned here," she
said, with a smile. " But the horses at least will not disgrace
us."

Ulrich asked his most high countess if the Markgraf von
Sabran would be of the house-party, and when she answered,
" No," said, with regret, that no one had ever looked so well
on Siegfried as he had done.

" He did ride very well," she said, and turned to the stall
where the sorrel Siegfried stood. She sighed unconsciously
as she drew the tufted hair hanging over the horse's forehead
through her fingers with tenderness. What if she were to
make Siegfried and all else his, if it were true that he loved
her ? She thrust the thought away almost before it took any
real shape.

" I do not even believe it," she said, half aloud ; and yet
in her innermost heart she did believe it.

The Imperial visit was made, and became a thing of the

The state apartments were opened, the servants wore their
itate liveries, the lake had its banners and flags, its decorated
landing-stairs and velvet-cushioned boats ; the stately and
BJlcnt place was full for three days and nights of animated
and brilliant life, and great hunting-parties rejoiced the soul
of old Otto and made the forests ring with sound of horn and
rifle. The culverins on the keep fired their salutes, the chimes
of the island monastery echoed the bells of the clock-tower
of the Schloss, the schools sang with clear fresh voices the

172 WANDA.

Kaiser^s Hymn, the sun shone, the jagers were in full glory,
the castle was filled with guests and their servants, the long^
unused theatre had a troop of Viennese to play comedies on
its bijou stage, the ball-room, lined with its Venetian mirrors
and its Kiesencr gilding, was lit up once more after many
years of gloom, the nobles of the provinces came from far and
wide at the summons of the lady of Hohenssalras, and the
greater nobles who formed the house-party were well amused
and well content, whilst the Imperial guests were frankly
charmed with all things and honestly reluctant to depart.

When she accompanied them to the foot of the terrace-
stairs, and there took leave of them, she could feel that their
visit had bten one of unfeigned enjoyment, and her farewell
gift to h*er Kaiserinn was Cadiga. They had left early on
the morning of the fourth day, and the remainder of the day
was filled till sunset by the departure of the other guests : it
was fatiguing and crowded. When tbe last visitor had gone,
she dropped down on a great chair in the Kittersaal and gave
a long-drawn sigh of relief.

" What a long strain on one's powers of courtesy !" she
murmured. *' It is more exhausting than to climb Gross
Glockner 1"

" It has been perfectly successful !'' said the princess, whose
cheeks were warm and whose eyes were bright with triumph.

" It has been only a matter of money," said the Countess
von Szalras, with some contempt. ^^ Nothing makes one feel
so honrgeoise as a thing like this. Any merchant or banker
could do the same. It is impossible to put any originality
into it. It is like diamonds. Any one only heard of yester-
day could do as much, if they had only the money to do H
with. You do not seem to see what I mean ?"

** I see that, as usual, you are discontented when any othof
woman would be in paradise," answered the abbess, a little
tartly. ^* I^iay, could the hourgeoise have a residence tea
centuries old ?"

" I am afraid she could buy one easily."

" Would that be the same thing?"

*''' Certainly not ; but it would enable her to do all I hav9
done for the last three days if she had only money enough :
she could even give away Cadiga."

'* She could not get Cadiga accepted," said Princess Ottilie,

WANDA. 173

dry'y. *' Ton aro tired, my love, and so do not appreciate
yoar own triamphs. It has been a very great success/'

" They were very kind ; they are always so kind. But all
the time I could not help thinking, ^ Are they not horribly
fatigued V It wearied me so myself, I could not believe that
they were otherwise than weary too/'

" It has been a great success," repeated the princesa.
^ But you are always discontented."

Wanda did not reply ; she leaned back against the Cordo-
van leather back of the chair, crushing her chestnut hair
against the emblazoned scutcheon of her house. She waf
very fatigued, and her face was pale. For three whole days
and evenings to preserve an incessant vigilance of courtesy, a
^ntinoal assumption of interest, an unremitting appearance
of enjoyment, a perpetual smile of welcome, is very tedious
work : those in love with social successes are sustained by the
consciousness of them, but she was not. An imperial visit
more or less could add not one hair's breadth to the greatness
of the house of Szalras.

And there was a dull, half-conscious pain at the bottom of
her heart. She was thinking of Egon Viisiirhely, who had
said he could not leave his regiment ; of R^n6 de Sabrau, who
had said he could not leave his country. Even to those who
care nothing for society, and dislike the stir and noise of the
world about them, there is still alwa3's a vague sense of de-
pression in the dispersion of a great party ; the house seems
so strangely silent, the rooms seem so strangely empty ; ser-
vants flitting noiselessly here and there, a dropped flower, a
fallen jewel, an oppressive scent from multitudes of fading
blossoms, a broken vase perhaps, or perhaps a snapped fan, —
these are all that are left of the teeming life crowded here one
little moment ago. Though one may be glad they are all
gone, yet there is a certain sadness in it. ^^ Le lendemain de
lajete^' keeps its pathos, even though the f)§te itself has pos-
sessed no poetry and no power to amuse.

The princess, who was very fatigued too, though she would
not confess that social duties could ever exhaust any one, went
soflly away to her own room, and Wanda sat alone in the
great Rittersaal, with the afternoon light pouring through the
painted casements on to the damascened armor, and the Flemish
tapestries, and the great dais at the end of the hall, with its

16*

174 WANDA.

two-headed eagle that Dante cursed, its draperies of gold-
colored velvet, its great escutcheons in beaten and enamelled
metal.

Discontented! The princess had left that truthful word
behind her like a little asp creeping upon a marble floor. It
Rtung her conscience with a certain reproach, her pride with a
certain impatience. Discontented I — she who had always been
so equable of temper, so enamored of solitude, so honestly
loyal to her people and her duties, so entirely grateful to the
placid days that came and went as calmly as the breathing of
her breast 1

Was it possible she was discontented ?

How all the great world that had just lefl her would have
laughed at her, and asked what doubled rose-leaf made hek*
misery I

Hardly any one on earth could be more entirely free thaL
she was, more covered with all good gifts of fortune and of
circumstances ; and she had always been so grateful to her life
until now. Would she never cease to miss the coming of the
little boat across from the Holy Isle ? She was angry that
this memory should have so much power to pursue her thought
and spoil the present hours. Had he but been there, she
knew very well that the pageantry oF the past three days would
not have been the mere empty formalities, the mere gilded
tedium, that they had appeared to be to her.

On natures thoughtful and profound silence has sometimes
a much greater power than speech. Now and then she sur-
prised herself in the act of thinking how artificial human life
had become, when the mere accident of a greater or lessw
fortune determined whether a man who respected himself
could declare his feeling for a woman he loved. It seemed
lamentably conventional and unreal ; and yet had he not boon
fettered by silence he would have been no gentleman.

Life resumed its placid even tenor at Hohenszalras after this
momentary disturbance. Autumn comes early in the Glock-
ner and Yenediger groups. Madame Ottilie with a shiver
heard the north winds sweep through the yellowing forests,
and watched the white mantle descend lower and lower down
the mountain-sides. Another winter was approaching, a win-
ter in which she would see nO one, hear nothing, sit all day
by her wood fire, half asleep for sheer want of interest to

WANDA. 175

keep her awake : the very post-boy was sometimes detained by
the snowfall for whole days together in his passage to and from
Matrey.

" It is all very well for you," she said pettishly to her niece.
" You have youth, you have strength, you like to have four
mad horses put in your sleigh and drive them like demoniacs
through howling deserts of frozen pine forests, and come home
when the great stars are all out, with your eyes shining like
the planets, and the beasts all white with foam and icicles.
You like that ; you can do it ; you prefer it before anything.
But I — what have I to do ? One cannot eat nougats forever,
nor yet read one's missal. Even you will allow that the even-
ings are horribly long. Your horses cannot help you there.
You embroider very artistically, but they would do that all
for you at any convent ; and to be sure you write your letters
and audit your accounts, but you might just as well leave it
all to your lawyers. Olga Brancka is quite right, though I
do not approve of her mode of expression, but she is quite
right : you should be in the world."

But she failed to move the Countess Wanda by a hair's
breadth, and soon the hush of winter settled down on Hohen-
Bzalras, and when the first frost had hardened the ground the
four black horses were brought out in the sleigh, and their
mistress, wrapped in furs to the eyes, began those headlong
gallops through the silent forests which stirred her to a greater
exhilaration than any pleasures of the world could have raised
in her. To guide those high-mettled, half-broken, high-bred
creatures, fresh from freedom on the plains of the Danube,
was like holding the reins of the winds.

One day at dusk as she returned from one of these drives,
and went to see the Princess Ottilie before changing her dress,
the princess received her with a little smile and a demure aii
of triumph, — of smiling triumph. In her hand was an open
letter, which she held out to her niece.

" Read I" she said, with much self-satisfaction. " See what
miracles you and the Holy Isle can work."

Wanda took the letter, which she saw at a glance was m
the writing of Sabran. After some graceful phrases of hom-
age to the princess, he proceeded in it to say that he had made
his first speech in the French Chamber, as deputy for his de-
partment.

176 WANDA.

" I do not deceive myself,** he continued. " The trust ii
placed in me for the sake of the memories of the dead Sa-
bran, not because I am anything in the sight of these people ;
but I will endeavor to be worthy of it. I am a sorry idler,
and of little purpose and strength in life, but I will endeavor
to make my future more serious and more deserving of the
goodness which was showered on me at Hohenszalras. It
grieved me to be unable to profit by the permission so gra-
ciously extended to me at the time of their Imperial Majesties'
sojourn with you, but it was impossible for me to come. Mj
thoughts were with you, as they are indeed every hour. Offer
my homage to the Countess von Szalras, with the renewal of
my thanks."

Then, with some more phrases of reverence and compliment,
blent in one to the venerable lady whom he addressed, he
ended an epistle which brought as much pleasure to the
recipient as though she had been seventeen instead of seventy.

She watched the face of Wanda during the perusal of these
lines, but kihe did not learn anything from its expression.

^^ He writes admirably," she said, when she had read it
through ; ^^ and I think he is well fitted for a political career.
They say that it is always best in politics not to be burdened
with convictions; and he will be singularly free from such
impediments, for he has none."

" You are very harsh and unjust," said the princess, angrily.
'^ No person can pay you a more delicate compliment than
lies in following your counsels, and yet you have nothing
better to say about it than to insinuate an unscrupulous immor-
ality."

" Politics are always immoral," said Wanda.

" Why did you recommend them to him, then ?" said the
princess, sharply.

" They are better than some other things, — than rott^e-et'
notr, for instance ; but I did not perhaps do right in advising
a mere man of pleasure to use the nation as his larger gaming-
table."

" You are beyond my comprehension I Your wire-drawing
is too fine for my dull eyesight. One thing is certainly quite
clear to me, dull as I am : you live alone until you grow dis-
satisfied with everything. There is no possibility of plcaaiiig
a woman who disapproves of the wV.olc living world I '

WAl^DA, 177

"The world sees few unmixed motives," said Wanda, to
which the princess replied by an impatient movement.

" The post has brought fifty letters for you. I have been
looking over the journals," she answered. " There is some-
thing you may also perhaps deign to read."

She held out a French newspaper and pointed to a column
in it

Wanda took it and read it, standing. It was a report of a
debate in the French Chamber.

She read in silence and attentively, leaning against the great
carved chimney-piece. ^^ I was not aware he was so good an
orator," she said, simply, when she had finished reading.

"You grant that it is a very fine speech, a very noble
speech ?" said Madame Ottilie, eagerly and with impatience.
*' You perceive the sensation it caused : it is evidently the
first time he has spoken. You will sec in another portion of
the print how they praise him."

" He has acquired his convictions with rapidity. He was
a Socialist when here."

" The idea I A man of his descent has always the instincts
of his order: he may pretend to resist them, but they are
always stronger than he. You might at least commend him,
Wanda, since your words turned him towards public life."

" He is no doubt eloquent," she answered, with some
reluctance. "That we could see here. If he be equally
sincere, he will be a great gain to the nobility of France."

" Why should you doubt his sincerity ?"

" Is mere ambition ever sincere ?"

" I really cannot understand you. You censured his waste
of ability and opportunity ; you seem equally disposed to cavil
at his exertions and use of his talent. Your prejudices are
njDst cruelly tenacious."

" How can I applaud your fricnd^s action until I am sure
of his motive ?"

" His motive is to please you," thought the princess, but
she was too wary to say so.

She merely replied, —

" No motive is ever altogether unmixed, as you cruelly
observed ; but I should say that his must be, on the whole,
Bnfficiently pure. He wishes to relieve the inaction and trivi-
ality of a useless life."
m

178 WANDA.

" To embrace a hopeless cause is always in a manner noble/
assented her niece. '^ And I grant you that he has spokes
very well."

Then she went to her own room to dress for dinner.

In the evening she read the reported speech again, with
closer attention. It was eloquent, ironical, stately, closely
reasoned, and rose in its peroration to a caustic and withering
eloquence of retort and invective. It was the speech of t
born orator, but it was also the speech of a strongly conserva-
tive partisan.

" IIow much of what he says does he believe ?" she
thought, with a doubt that saddened her and made her won-
der why it came to her. And whether he believed or not,
whether he were true or false in his political warfare, whether
he were selfish or unselfish in his ambitions, what did it
matter to her ?

He had stayed there a few weeks, and he had played so
well that the echoes of his music still seemed to linger afler
him ; and that was all. It was not likely they would ever
meet again.

CHAPTER X.

With the New Year Madame Ottilie received another
letter from him. It was brief, grateful, and touching. It
concluded with a message of ceremonious homage to the
chdtelaine of Hohenszalras. Of his entrance into political
life it said nothing. With the letter came a screen of gilded
leather which he had painted himself, with passages from the
history of St. Julian Hospitada.

" It will seem worthless," he said, " where every chambei
is a museum of art ; but accept it as a sign of my grateful
and imperishable remembrance."

The princess was deeply touched and sensibly flattered.

*^ You will admit, at least," she said, with innocent triumph,
'' that he knows how to make gratitude graceful."

"It is an ex voto^ and you are his patron saint, dear
mother," said the Countess Wanda, with a smile; but the
Bmile was one of approval. She thought his silence on h.tf

WANDA, 179

own sacoesses and on her name was in good taste. And the
Bcreen was so admirably painted that the Venetian masters
might have signed it without discredit.

'* May I give him no message from you ?" asked the princess,
as she was about to write her reply.

Her niece hesitated.

" Say we have read his first speech, and are glad of his
success/* she said, after a few moments' reflection.

" Nothing more ?"

"What else should I say?" replied Wanda, with some
irritation.

The princess was too honorable a woman to depart from
the text of the congratulation, but she contrived to throw a
little more warmth into the spirit of it ; and she did not show
her letter to the mistress of Hohenszalras. She set the screen
near her &vorite chair in the blue-room.

" If only there were any one to appreciate it !*' she said,
with a sigh. " Like everything else in this house, it might as
well be packed up in a chest, for aught people see of it. This
place is not a museum ; the world goes to a museum ; it b a
crypt I"

" Would it be improved by a crowd of sight-seers at ten
kreutzers a head ?"

" No ; but it would be very much brightened by a house-
arty at Easter, and now and then at midsummer and autumn.
n your mother's time the October parties for the bear-hunts,
the wolf-hunts, the boar-hunts, were magnificent. No, I do
not think the chase contrary to God's will : man has power
over the beasts of the field and the forest. The archdukes
never missed an autumn here : they found the sport finer than
in.iStyria."

Her niece kissed her hand and went out to where her four
black horses were fretting and champing before the great
doors, and the winter sun was lighting up the gilded scroll-
work and the purple velvet and the brown sables of her sleigh,
that had been built in Russia and been a gifl to her from
Egon V^h.rhely. She felt a little impatience of the Princess
Ottilie, well as she loved her ; the complacent narrowness of
mind, the unconscious cruelty, the innocent egotism, the con-
ventional religion which clipped and fitted the ways of Deity
to suit its own habits and wishes, those fretted her, chafed

t

180 WANJM.

her, oppressed her with a sense of their utter vanity,
princess would not herself have harmed a sparrow or a
yet it seemed to her that Providence had created all the ai
mal world only to furnish pastime for princes and their j'&gci
She saw no contradiction in this view of the matter. Tl
Rmall conventional mind of her had heen cast in that mou
and would never expand : it was perfectly pure and truthfi
but it was contracted and filled with formula.

Wanda von Szalras, who loved her tenderly, could not he&
a certain impatience of this the sole companionship she ht
A deep affection may exist side by side with a mental

parity that creates an unwilling but irresistible sense of tedii

and discordance. A clear and broad intelligence is iDfinitOB^ ^^Bj
patient of inferiority ; but its very patience has its reaction ^^n

its own fatigue and silent irritation.

This lassitude came on her most in the long evenings whi'
the princess slumbered and she herself sat alone. She
not haunted by it when she was in the open air, or in the
brary, occupied with the reports or the requirements of
estates. But the evenings were lonely and tedious : they h
not seemed so when the little boat had come away from t.
monastery, and the prayer and praise of Handel and Hay<
and the new-born glory of the Nibclungen tone-poems b
filled the quiet twilight hours. It was in no way probal
that the musician and she would ever meet again. She
derstood that his own delicacy and pride must perforce kct^
him out of Austria, and she, however much the prinoeiss
sired it, could never invite him there alone, and would nei
gather such a house-party at Ilohenszalras as might
warrant her doing so.

Nothing was more unlikely, she supposed, than that af- -^i,
would ever hear again the touch that had awakened the duiT"^''*'
chords of the old painted spinet.

But circumstance, that master of the ceremonies, as Madai
Brancka termed it, who directs the vietmei de la cour of li
and who often diverts himself by letting it degenerate intc^ J?
dance of death, willed it otherwise. There was a dear frie '^^^
of hers who was a dethroned and exiled queen. Their fneC ^'
ship was strong, tender, and born in childish days. On t^l* ^
part of Wanda it had been deepened by the august adveresA^
which impresses and attaches all noble natures. Herself boT^

WANDA. 181

tif a great raco, and with the iDstincts of a ruling class horcdi*
tary in her, there was something sacred and awful in the fall
of majesty. Her friend, stripped of all appanages of her rank,
and deserted by nearly all who had so late sworn her alio*
giance, became more than ever dear ; she became holy to her,
and she would sooner have denied the request of a reigning
sovereign than of one powerless tc command or to rebuke.
When this friend, who had been so hardly smitten by fate,
sent her word that she was ill and would fain sec her, she,
therefore, never even hesitated as to obedience before the
summons. It troubled and annoyed her; it came to her ill
timed and unexpected ; and it was above all disagreeable to
her because it would take her to Paris. But it never occurred
to her to send an excuse to this friend, who had no longer
any power to say, " I will," but could only say, like common
humanity, " I hope."

Within two hours of her reception of the summons she
was on her way to Windisch-Matrey. The princess did not
accompany her ; she intended to make as rapid a journey as
possible without pausing on the way, and her great-aunt was
too old and too delicate in health for such exertion as that.
" Though I would fain go and see that great Parisian aurist,"
bIic said, plaintively. '* My hearing is not what it used to
be."

" The great aurist shall come to you, dear mother," said
Wanda. ** I will bring him back with me."

She travelled with a certain state, since she did not think
that the moment of a visit to a dethroned sovereign wab a fit
time to lay ceremony aside. She took several of her servants
and some of her horses with her, and journeyed by way if
Munich and Strasburg.

Madame Ottilie was too glad she should go anywhere to
offer opposition ; and in her heart of hearts she thought jf
her favorite. He was in Paris : who knew what might
happen ?

It was mid-winter, and the snow was deep on all the coun-
try, whether of mountain or of plain, which stretched between
the Tauern and the French capital. But there was no great
delay of the express, and in some forty hours the 'yountess
Yon Ssalras, with her attendants, and her horses wi^h theirs,

arrived at the H6tel Bristol.

16

I

182 WANDA.

The DoisCj the movement, the brilliancy of the 8treeta|
Bcemed a strange spectacle, after four years spent without
leaving the woodland quiet and mountain-solitudes of Hohen-
szairas.

She was angry with herself that, as she stood at the windows
of her apartment, she almost unconsciously watched the faoeti
of the crowd passing below and felt a vague expectancy of
seeing among them the &ce of Sabran.

She went that evening to the modest hired house whore
the young and beautiful sovereign she came to visit had
found a sorry refuge. It was a meeting full of pain to both.
When they had last parted at the Hofburg of Vienna, the
young queen had been in all the triumph and hope of brilliant
nuptials, and at Hohenszalras phe people's Heilige Bela had
been living, a happy boy, in all his fair promise.

Meanwhile, the news-sheets informed all their readers that
the Countess von Szalras was in Paris. Ambassadors and
ambassadresses, princes and princesses, and a vast number of
very great people, hastened to write their names at the Uotel
Bristol.

Among the cards left was that of Sabran. But he sent it ;
ho did not go in person.

She refused all invitations, and declined almost all visits.
She had come there only to see her friend the Queen of
Natalia. Paris, which loves anything new, talked a great
deal about her ; and its street-crowds, which admire what is
beautiful, began to gather before the doors at the hours when
her black horses, driven Russian fashion, came fretting and
flashing like meteors over the asphalte.

" Why did you bring your horses for so short a time ?"
said Madame Kaulnitz to her. '* You could, of course, have
had any of ours."

" 1 always like to have some of my horses with me," she
answered. *' I would have brought them all, only it would
kav3 looked so ostentatious. You know they are my chil-
dren."

" I do not see why you should not have other children,"
said Madame Kaulnitz. ^* It is quite inhuman that you will
not marry."

*' I have never said that I will not. But I do nrt think it
likely."

y.-

WAUDA, 183

Two days after her arrival, a* she was driving down the
Avenue de rimp^ratrice, she saw Sabran ou foot. She was
driving slowly. She would have stopped her carriage if he
iiad paused in his walk ; but he did not ; he only bowed low
and passed on. It was almost rude, after the hospitality of
Hohenszalras, but the rudeness pleased her. It spoke both
of pride and of sensitiveness. It seemed scarcely natural,
after their long hours of intercourse, that they should pass
each other thus as strangers ; yet it seemed impossible they
should any more be friends. She did not ask herself why it
seemed so, but she felt it rather by instinct than by reasoning.

She was annoyed to feel that the sight of him had caused
a momentary emotion in her of mingled trouble and pleasure.

No one mentioned his name to her, and she asked no one
concerning him. She spent almost all her time with the
Queen of Natalia, and there were other eminent foreign per-
sonages in Paris at that period whose amiability she could
not altogether reject, and she had only allowed herself fifteen
days as the length of her sojourn, as Madame Ottilie waa
alone amidst the snow-covered mountains of the Taucrn.

On the fifth day after her meeting with Sabran he sent
another card of his to the hotel, and sent with it an immense
basket of gilded osier filled with white lilac. She remem-
bered having once said to him at Hohenszalras that lilac was
lier flower of preference. Her rooms were crowded with
bouquets, sent her by all sorts of great people, and made of
all kinds of rare blossoms, but the white lilac, coming in the
January snows, pleased her more than all those. She knew
that his poverty was no fiction, and that great clusters of
white lilac in mid-winter in Paris means much money.

She wrote a line or two in German, which thanked him for
his recollection of her taste, and sent it to the Chamber. She
did not know where he lived.

That evening she mentioned his name to her godfather, the
Due de Noira, and asked him if he knew it. The duke, a
Legitimist, a redluse, and a man of strong prejudices, answered
at once.

'^ Of course I know it ; he is one of us, and he has made
a political position for himself within the last year.**

" Do you know him personally ?"

'^ No, I do not. I see no one, as you are aware ; 1 1 ve in

184 WANDA.

greater retirement than ever. Bat he bears an honorable
name, and though I believe that, until lately, he was but %
Jldneur, he has taken a decided part this session, and he is a
very great acauisition to the true oause."

" It is surely very sudden, his change of front?"

" What change? He took no part in politics that ever I
heard of: it is taken for granted that a Marquis de Sabrac b
loyal to his sole legitimate sovereign. I believe he never
thought of public life ; but they tell me that he returned
fipm some long absence last autumn, an altered and much
graver man. Then one of the deputies for his department
died, and he was elected for the vacancy with no opposition.*'

The Duo de Noira proceeded to speak of the political aspects
of the time, and said no more of Sabran.

Involuntarily, as she drove through the avenues of the Bois
de Boulogne, she thought of the intuitive comprehension, tho
half-uttered sympathy, the interchange of ideas d demi-mots^
which had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome t<^
her in the previous summer. They had not always agreed ^
she oflen bad not even approved him ; but they had alwayf^
understood each other; they had never needed to explain..
She was startled to realize how much and how vividly sh^
regretted Lim.

" If one could only be sure of his sincerity," she thought^
" there would be few men living who would equal him.'*

She did not know why she doubted his sincerity. Some^
natures have keen instincts like dogs. She regretted to doubts
it ; but the change in him seemed to her too rapid to be on^
of conviction. Yet the homage in it to herself was delicate^
and subtile. She would not have been a woman had it notir
touched her, and she was too honest with herself not to admits
frankly in her own thoughts that she might very well have^-
inspired a sentiment which would go far to change a natur^P
which it entered and subdued. Many men had loved her j^
why not he?

She drew the whip over the flanks of her horses as she felit-
that mingled impatience and sadness with which sovereigns
remember that they can never be certain they are loved for"
themselves, and not for all which environs them and lifls thcnv
up out of the multitude.

She was angry with herself when she felt that what inter'

WANDA. 185

estcd her moat during her Ptrrisian sojonrD was the report of
the debates of the French Chamber in the French journals.

One night at the court the Baron Kaulnitz spoke of Sabran
in her hearing.

" He is the most eloquent of the Legitimist party/' he said
GO some one in her hearing. *^ No one supposed that he had
it in him ; he was a mere idler, a mere man of pleasure, and,
it was at times said, of something worse ; but he has of late
manifested great talent ; it is displayed for a lost cause, but it
is none the less admirable as talent goes.*'

She heard what he said with pleasure.

Advantage was taken of her momentary return to the
world to press on her the choice of a great alliance. Names
as mighty as her own were suggested to her, and more than
one great prince, of a rank even higher than hers, humbly
solicited the honor of the hand which gave no caress except
to a horse's neck, a dog's head, a child's curls. But she did
not even pause to allow these proposals any consideration ;
she refused them all curtly and with a sense of irritation.

' Have you sworn never to marry ?" said the Due de Noira,
with much chagrin, receiving her answer for a candidate of
his own, to whom he was much attached.

" I never swear anything," she answered. " Oaths arc
necessary for people who do not know their own minds. I do
know my own."

" You know that you will never marry ?"

" I hardly say that ; but I shall never contract a mere alli-
ance. It is horrible, — that union eternal of two bodies and
■ools without sympathy, without fitness, without esteem,
merely for the sake of additional position or additional
wealth."

" It is not eternal," said the duke, with a smile ; " and I
can assure you that my friend adores you for yourself. You
will never understand, Wanda, that you are a woman to in-
spire great love ; that you would be sought for your face, for
your form, for your mind, if you had nothing else."

" I do not believe it."

** Can you doubt at least that your cousin Egon "

"Oh, pray spare me the name of Egon 1" she said, wkh
tiQwontcd irritation. '^ I may surely be allowed to have lefH
that behind me at homo I"

186 WANDA.

it was a tiiuo of irritation and turbulcDce in PartB. The
muttcriDg of the brooding storm was visible to fine ^ars
through the false stillness of an apparently serene atmosphere.
She, who knew keen and brilliant politicians who were not
French, saw the danger that was at hand for France which
Fmnce did not see.

" They will throw down the glove to Prussia, and they wiD
repent of it as long as the earth lasts/* she thought, and she
was oppressed by her prescience, for war had cost her race
dear ; and she said to herself, ^^ When that liquid fire is set
flowing, who shall say where it will pause?"

She felt an extreme desire to converse with Sabran as she
had done at home, — to warn him, to persuade him, to hear
his views and express to him her own ; but she did not sum-
mon him, and he did not come. She did justice to the motive
which kept him away, but she was not as yet prepared to go
so far as to invite him to lay his scruples aside and visit her
with the old frank intimacy which had brightened both their
lives at the Szalrasburg. It had been so different there ; he
liad been a wanderer glad of rest, and she had had about her
the defence of the princess's presence and the excuse of the
obligations of hospitality. She reproached herself at times for
hardness, for unkinduess ; she had not said a syllable to com-
mend him for that abandonment of a frivolous life which was
in itself so delicate and lofly a compliment to herself. He
had obeyed her quite as loyally as knight ever did his lady,
and she did not even say to him, *^ It is well done."

Wanda von Szalras — a daughter of brave men, and herself
the bravest of women — was conscious that she was for onee a
coward. She was afraid of looking into her own heart.

She said to her cousin, when he paid his respects to her, " I
should like to hear a debate at the Chamber. Arrange it for
me.

He replied, " At your service in that as in all things."

The next day as she was about to drive out, about four
o'clock, he met her at the entrance of her hotel.

" If you could come with me," he said, " you might hear
something of interest to-day ; there will be a strong discussion.
Will you accept my carriage, or shall I enter yours ?"

What she heard when she reached the Chamber did noi
interest her greatly. There was a great deal of noise, ok

WANDA. 187

dRclamnlion, of pcrsoual vltupuration, of votboae mocor ; it diJ
nut Becin to her to bo eloqucnuc. Slie hail heard much mure
ilutely oratory in botli the Upper and the Lower Kuicherutli,
and muoh more fiery and aoble eloqucnoc at Bada-Peath.
This seemed to her poor, shrill iiiouthing, wliich led to very
]iCtlo,and the disorder of the Assembly filled her with contempt.

" I thought it was the count ry of St. Louis 1" she said, with
1 disdaiofui sigh, to Kauloits, who answered, —

" Cromwell b perliapa moro wanted hero tiian St. Louis."

" Their Cromwell will always be a lawyer or a jourualiat
Ktn» U iou !" retorted the chitelaiac of UolieoHzalras.

When she had been there an hour or more she saw Sabraa
enter the hall and take his place. His height, his carriage,
and bis distioction of appearance made bim couspiouous in a
multitude, while the extreme fuirouss and beauty of his faue
were uncommon and striking.

" Here is St. Louis," said the arabassitdor, with a little
smile, "or a eon of St. Louis's Crusaders at any rate. He is
sure lo apeak, I think he speaks very well : ouo would sup-
pose he had done nothing else all his life."

After a time, when some speakers, virulent, over-eager, and
hot in argument, had had tlieir say, and a tumult had risen
and been quelled, and the little bell hud rung riolently for
oiaiiy minutes, Sabran entered the tribune. Ue had seen the
Auatrian minister and his oompnnion.

His voice, at all times melodious, had a compass which
CDuId fill with ease the large hnll iu which he was. He ap-
peared to use DO more effort than if he were conversing in
ordinary tones, yet no one there present lost, a syllable that he
Said. His gesture was slight, calm, and graueful ; his luuguage
Rdmirably chosen, and full of dignity.

His mission of the moment was to attack the ministry upon
their foreign policy, and ho did so with exceeding skill, wit,
(Touy, and precision. His eloquence was true eloquence, and
ivns Dot indebted in any way to trickery, artifice, cr over-
OrDameDt. He spoke with fire, force, and courage, hut his
tranquillity never gave way for a moment. His speech was
t>t-i]liant and serene, in utter contrast to the turbulent and
9orid declamation which had preceded him. There was great
'~ ^prolonged applause when he had closed with a peroration

tely and persuasive ; and when Eniile OUivicr rose to re-

i

188 WANDA.

ply, that optimistic statesman was ptainlj disturbed and at nr
io»s.

Sabran resumed bis seat without raising his eyes to wbet«
the Countess von Szalras sat. She remained there during ^^
spe^h of the minbter, which was a lame and labored one, ^
he had been pierced between the joints of his armor. T^^^
she rose and went away with her escort.

" What do you think of St. Louis?" said he, jestingly ^

'^ I think he is very eloquent and very convincing, but
not think he is at all like a Frenchman."

" Well, he is a Breton hretonnarU" rejoined the ambi
dor. '^ They are always more in earnest and more patricii

" If he be sincere, if he be only sincere," she thon^^ -n^^;
That doubt pursued her. She had a vague sense th
was all only a magnificent comedy after all. Gould a[
and irony change all so suddenly to conviction and devoti
Gould the scoffer become so immediately the devotee ? G
he care, really care, for those faiths of throne and altar w
he defended with so much eloquence, so much earnestn
And, yet, why not ? These faiths were inherited things
him; their altars must have been always an instinct
him : for their sake his fathers had lived and died,
great wonder, then, that they should have been awakenec^^ " '**
him after a torpor which had been but the outcome of t^^ -^'^
drugs with which the world is always so ready to lay asET .^l<**Jp
the soul ?

They had now got out into the corridors, and as they tva^^Bntoi
the corner of one they came straight upon Sabran.

" I congratulate you," said Wanda, as she stretched ^er

hand out to him with a smile.

As he took it and bowed over it, he grew very pale.

"I have obeyed you," he murmured, "with less sacr-^^est
than I could desire."

" Do not be too modest. You are a great orator. You k^^ow
how to remain calm whilst you exalt, excite, at d influence otne i* "

He listened in silence, then inquired for the health of htt
kind friend the Princess Ottilie.

" She is well," answered Wanda, " and loses nothing of ler
interest in you. She reads all your speeches with approval
and pleasure, — not the less approval and pleasure because h« 1^^
political creed has become yours." ■

i

WANDA. 139

Ho coloffld 9li;;ht!y.

" What did jou tell me ?" he said. " That if I had no
convictions I could do uo bettci thao abide hy the Iraditiona
of the Sabrans 7 ir their eauao were the sufe and reigiiiDg oafl
I would not support it for mere eipedioncy ; but as it is "

" Your motives oanoot be selfish ones," she anawerod, a lit-
tle coldly. " Selfishness would have led 3-ou to profess Bakouiii-
ism : it is the popular profession, and a sociaiisiic aristocnii is
ilways attractive and flattering to the plcOt,"

" You are ueveie," he said, with u flush ou hia cheek. " T
have no iutentiou of playing I'liJIippc Kgaht6, now or lu any

She did not reply: she was ooDseious of unkindneaa and
want of encouruf;euieDt in her owu words. She hesitated a
little, and then said, —

" Perhaps you will have time tfl come and see me. I shall
remain here a. few days more."

The ambassador joined them at that moment, and wnti I'lo
well bred to display any sign of the supreme astonish mont he
felt at finding the Countess von Sialras and the new d(!puty
already known to each other.

" He is a favorite of Aunt Ottilie's,*' she explained to him,
M, leaving Sabran, they passed down the corridor. " Did I
tint tell JOU ? He had au accident on the Umbal glacier last
Humoier, and ia his convalescence wu saw hira oflen."

" I recollect that your aunt asked me about him. Kxcuao
me ; I hud quite for)(utten," said the ambassador, understand-
ing now why she had wanted to go to the Chamber.

The next day Sabran called upop her. There were with
licr three or four great ladies. He did not stay long, and wub
never alone with her. She felt an impaticnee of her friends'
prt'senco, which irritated her as it awoke in her. He sent her
t second basket of white lilac in the following forenoon. She
nw no more of him.

She found herself wondering about the manner of his life.
She did Dol even know in what street ho lived : she paspcd
almost all her ume with the Queen of Natalia, who did not
know him, and wliu was still so unwell that she received no ono.

She was irritated with herself because it compromised her
eoDsietenoy to doKiro to stay on in Paris, and hIio did so dcsiie ;
uid she was one of those tu whom a euusciuusncss of iheii

190 WANDA.

own consistency is absolutely necessary as a qualification fof
Beif-respcct. There are natures that fly contentedly from
caprice to caprice, as humming-birds from blossom to bad ;
but if she had once become changeable she would have become
contemptible to herself, she would hardly have been herself
any longer. With some anger at her own inclinations, she
resisted them, and when her self-allotted twenty days were
over she did not prolong them by so much as a dozen hoars.
There was an impatience in her which was wholly strange to
her serene and even temper. She felt a vague dissatisfaction
with herself; she had been scarcely generous, scarcely cordial
to him ; she failed to approve her own conduct, and yet she
scarcely saw where she had been at fault.

The Kaulnitz and many other high persons were at the
station in the chill, snowy, misty day, to say their last fare-
wells. She was wrapped in silver-fox fur from head to foot ;
she was somewhat pale ; she felt an absurd reluctance to go
away from a city which was nothing to her. But her exiled
friend was recovering health, and Madame Ottilie was all
alone ; and though she was utterly her own mistress, far more
80 than most women, there were some things she could not
do. To stay on in Paris seemed to her to be one of them.

The little knot of high personages said their last words ;
the train began slowly to move upon its way ; a hand passed
through the window of the carriage and laid a bouquet of
lilies of the valley on her knee.

" Adieu r' said Sabran, very gently, as his eyes met hen
once more.

Then the express-train rolled faster on its road, and passed
out by the northeast, and in a few momente had left Parii
far behind it.

CHAPTER XL

On her return she spoke of her royal friends, of her coaa-
ins, of society, of her fears for the peace of Europe and her
doubts as to the strength of the Empire ; but she did doI
speak of the one person of whom, beyond all others, Madame
Ottilie was desirous to hear. When some hours had passed^
and still she had never alluded to the existence of SabraOi

WANDA. 191

the princess oonld bear silence no longer, and, casting pnio
donee 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 egg-shell china."

She was angered with herself as she spoke, but the fra-
grance of the white lilac and the remembrance of its donor
pursued her, — angered with herself, too, because Hoheu*
szalras 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 suf-
fered from occasionally was due to cold.

** Of course 1" 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 unin-
jured 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 penal-
ties 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 additionsd 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,
uid, except for the post, the tea-cups, and the kind of ditihei

192 WAJNDA.

served at dinner, hardly differed from what life had been them
in the sixteenth century, sare that there were no sauoy pagef
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 loaves of one of
the Hours," thought the princess ; and though her consoieDoe
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 /roii-/rou of the world to break
its solemn silence.

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

*^ 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 mouths. It is, perhaps,
time I should be seen at court."

" It is a very sudden decision 1" said Madame Ottilie, doubt-
ing that she could hear aright.

" It is the fruit of your persuasions, dear mother mine I
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 Kaiserinn thinks
so too. I will endeavor 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 bad
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
fiolitude filled with grave duties, careful labors, high desires
and endeavors, but perhaps, she thought, the world for a
while, even in its folly, might be healthier, might preserve hur
from the undue share which the memory of a stranger bad in
her musings.

WANDA. 193

Her people, her lands, her animals, would none of them
suffer by a brief absence ; and perhaps there were duties due
sts well to her position as to her order. She was the only
jr-epresentative of the great Counts of Szalras. With the whim-
isioal ingratitude to fate common to human nature, she thought
i^he would sooner have been obscure, unnoticed, free. Her
arank began to drag on her with something like the sense of a
<3haiQ. She felt that she was growing irritable, fanciful, thank-
: BO she ordered the huge old palace in the Herrengasse to be
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
attended a great establishment in the most aristocratic city of
SSurope, and she made her first appearance at a ball at the
G.esidenz, covered with jewels from head to foot, — the wonder-
ful old jewels that for many seasons had lain unseen in their iroB
coffers, — opals given by Kurik, 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 splendor. 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
lefl 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
qtti*^e as monotonous."

" If you only appreciated the homage that you receive "

'* Surely one's mind is something like one's conscience : if
Mr «ui be not too utterly discontented with what it says, one
id* not need the verdict of others."
* *liat is only a more sublime form of vanity. Really, my

n 17

e

194 WANDA.

love, with your extraordinary and unnecessary humility '•^
some things, and your overweening arrogance in otheis, y ^^^
would perplex wiser heads than the one I possess.''

" No ; I am sure it is not vanity or arrogance at all ; it nc:»- ^7
he pride, — the sort of pride of the * Rohan je suis.* BaC> y
is surely better than making one's barometer of the smiles ^^*
simpletons."

" They are not all simpletons."

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

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

The spring was opening in the Tauem, slow^5oming, veil
in rain, and parting reluctantly with winter, but yet
spring, flinging primroses broadcast through all the w<
and filling the shores of the lakes with hepatica and genti
the loosened snows were plunging with a hollow thunder i
the ravines and the rivers, and the grass was growing
and long on the alps between the glaciers. A pale sweet s
shine was gleaming on the grand old walls of Hohenszalr
and turning to silver and gold all its innumerable casements,
she returned, and Donau and Neva leaped in rapture on he^

''It is well to be at home," she said, with a smile, to
Greswold, as she passed through the smiling and delights
household down the Rittcrsaal, which was filled with pla
from the hothouses, gardenias and gloxinias, palms and pa
inias, azaleas and camellias glowing between the stern armor'
figures of the knights and the time-darkened oak of their stal

" This came from Paris this morning for Her Excellency^
said Hubert, as he showed his mistress a gilded boat-shap^
basket filled with tea-roses and orchids : a small card was tie<
to its handle, with " WilkommerC^ written on it

She colored a little as she recognized the handwriting of
the single word.

How could he have known, she wondered, that she wonU

^r

WANDA, 195

return home that day? And for tho flowers to be so fresh, a
messenger must have been sent all tho way with thorn by ex-
press speed ; and Sabran was poor.

"That is the dove-orohid/' said Hcrr Greswold, toaching
one with reverent fingers. ** There is nothing else so rare.
I was not aware that any one had ever succoeded in growing
it yet in Europe. 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 soflened emotion.
" Who brought it?"

"The Marquis de Sabran, by eoctra-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
tokay or let his horses stay for a feed of corn."

** What knight-errantry 1'* said the princess, well pleased.

" What folly 1" said Wanda ; but she had tho 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 oflen; 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 tho orchids.

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

" Parsifal b doing wonders in the Chambers ; 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
ghe would have been accessible, this entire alteration in the
current of a man^s whole life, this change in habit, tnclina-
tion, 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

1 96 WANDA.

old ways, his adoption of a sterner and worthier career, mcTcd
her with it€i marked, mute homage of herself.

When she read hia discourses in the French papers, she felt
a glow of triumph as if she had achieved some personal suc-
cess ; 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 bad said,
render tangible, practical victory possible 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 ?"

" Dear 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 suid
something ill timed or ill advised.

Time passed on, and brought beautiful weather in the
month of June, which here in the High Taucrn means what
April does in the south. Millions of song-birds were shoutiug
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 gray 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 Linz. Having opened it, she approached her aunt,
and said, with an unsteady voice, —

" War is declared between France and Prussia I"

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

*^ It is a terrible calamity for the world," said Wanda, av
her face was very pale.

WANDA 197

Tho thonght whioh was prosent to her was tliat Sabran
would bo foremost amidst voluotcers. She did not hear a
word of all the political exultation with whioh Princess
Ottilio continued to make her militant prophecies. She
9hi rered 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. Vour race
has been always martial. You should be the last to breathe
a syllable against what has been the especial glory and dis-
tinction 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 whioh will per-
haps 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, hei'self, 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 cam-
paign of Austria. Quite recently Sadowa and Koniggriiti
had made her heart bleed, beholding her relatives and friends
opposed in mortal conflict, and the empire she adored hum-
bled and prostrated. Now she became conscious of a suffer-
ing as personal and almost keener. She had at the first, now
and then, a hurried line from Sabran, written from the saddle,
from tho ambulance, beside the bivouao-firo, or in the shelter

17*

188 WANDA

of a barn. He had offered his services, and had been pi^^^
the command of a volunteer cavalry regiment, all civilia
mounted on their own horses, and fighting principally in t
Orl6annais. His command was congenial to him ; he wr
cheerfully of himself, though hopelessly of his cause. T
Prussians were gaining ground every day. Occasionally^
printed correspondence from the scene of war, she saw
same mentioned in the account of some courageous aotioa
some brilliant skirmish. That was all.

The autumn began to deepen into winter, and compl. ^^ ^
silence covered all his life. She thought, with a great 'MT^
morse — if he were dead ? Perhaps he was dead. Why Brm aad

she been always so cold to him ? She suffered intensely, ^^

the more intensely because it was a sorrow which she co'^-*-^"
not confess even to herself. When she ceased altogether" *o
hear anything of or from him, she realized the hold which. ^^^
had taken on her life. ^

These months of suspense did more to attach her to 1*^^
than years of assiduous and ardent homage could Lave do*^*^*
She, a daughter of soldiers, had always felt any man ala:**-^^
unmanly who had not received the baptism of fire.

Madame Ottilie talked of him constantly, wondered 'S^^^
quently if he were wounded, slain, or in prison ; she ne'^'*'
spoke his name, and dreaded to hear it.

Greswold, who perceived an anxiety in hor that he did *-*J^
dare to allude to, ransacked every journal that was publisl*^ ^^
in German to find some trace of Sabran's name. At the fi * ^
he saw often some mention of the Cuirassiers d*0rl6ans, tf-*^"
of their intrepid colonel commandant, — some raid, skirmi^ '
or charge in which they had been conspicuous for reckl^^
gallantry. But after the month of November ho could fi ^
nothing. The whole regiment seemed to have been oblitcr^
from existence.

Winter settled down on Central Austria with cold sileO^^*
with roads blocked and mountains impassable. The dumbu^^?*
the solitude around her, which she had always loved so V^^^"* '
DOW grew to her intolerable. It seemed like death.

Paris capitulated. The news reached her at the hour <y^
violent snow-storm ; the postilion of the post-sledge brin
it had his feet frozen.

'Ihough her ouusins of Lilicnhohe were among those

WANDA 199

entered the city as conquerors, the fate of Paris smote her
with a heavy blow. She feit as if the cold of the outer world
had chilled her very bones, her very soul. The princess,
looking at her, was draid to rejoice.

On the following day she vrrote to her cousin Hugo of
Lilienhohe, who was in Paris with the Imperial Guard. She
asked him to inquire for and tell her the fate of a friend, the
Marqub 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 fort-
ress, I think Ehrenbreitstein, but I will inquire more particu-
larly. 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. Bava-
rian cavalry, outnumbering us four to one, attacked us almost
ero 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 dis-
patched 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
Bend me back to Paris, the frontier. My beautiful Paris!
"What a fate 1 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 Romans you will be merciful, and show me that you do not
utterly despise a lost cause and a vanquished soldier."

200 WANDA.

She wrote to him at Romans, and the paper she wrote
felt her tears. In conclusion she said, —

'* Whenever you will, come and make sure for yourself that
both the Princess Ottilie and I honor 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, hia
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 ho never came to heax
that?

CHAPTER XII.

Tub little hamtet 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
eows were driven through the heather and broom ; out on the
sea some fishing-boats with rough, red sails went rocking to
and fro. All was melancholy, silent, poor ; life was hard at
Romari^ for all. The weather-beaten church looked gray 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
ehange in the weather, a marriage, a birth, or a death. There-
fore the women and children who were knitting had lifled 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
was young and handsome, and a welcome sight, since a travel-
ler to Romaris always needed a sailing-boat or a rowing-boat,
a guide over the moors, or a diive in an ox-wagon through
tbo deep-cut lanes of the country.

WANDA, 201

But they bad ceased to think of such things as these when
the curate, with his hands extended as when he blessed them,
bad. said, in has Breton, as he stood beside them, —

** My children, this is the last of the Sabrans of E.omaris,
oome back to ns from the far west that lies in the setting of
the sun. Salute him, and show him that in Brittany we do
not fbrget, — nay, not in a hundred years."

IVlany years had gone by since then, and of the last of the

old i-sice 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,

iQ 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

^as left of what had once been the manoir of his race. Now

and then they saw him, chiefly when he had heard that there

^as wild weather on the western coast, and at such times he

^ould 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

■®w> and all that Bomaris really knew of the last marquis was

that be was a gay gentleman away there in distant Paris.

He had been a mere name to them. Now and then he had
*®^t fifty napoleons, or a hundred, to the old priest for such as
^^re poor or sick among them. That was all. Now after the
^^r be came hither. Paris had become hateful to him ; his
P9Htical career was ended, at all events for the time ; the whole
^Untry groaned in anguish ; the vices and follies that had ao-
^^lapanied his past life disgusted him in remembrance. He
bad been wounded and a prisoner ; he had suffered betrayal at
l^n Worthy hands; Cochonette had sold him to the Prussians,
*•» revenge of his desertion of her.

He was further removed from the Countess von Szalras than
®ver. In the crash with which the Second Empire had fallou
*^d sunk out of sight for evermore, his own hopes had gone
Jown like a ship that sinks suddenly in a dark night. All
his old associations were broken, half his old friends were dead
^^ ruined ; gay chateaux that he had ever been welcome at
j^*"© smoking ruins or melancholy hospitals ; the past had
"®^^ felled to" the ground, like the poor avenues of the Boifl,

^02 WANDA.

«

It affected him profoundly. As far as ho was capable of an im-
personal 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 altogethei
selBsh, 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 Romans, 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, do
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 f aire T^ 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 opporta-
nity 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, bar-
ring 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.

Komaris was not a place to cheer a disappointed and de-
jected 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 ho[)0 or
his sinews to ambition. In those cold, bleak, windy days of
a dreary and joyless spring-time, the dusky moors and the
grewsomc sea were desolate, without compensating grandeur.
The people around him were all taciturn, dull, stupid \ they

WANDA, 203

had not' suffered by the war, but they understood that, poor
as they were, they would have to bear their share in the bur-
den 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 ftot 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 Annie Terrible,

But, though his character had been purified and strength-
ened by the baptism of fire, and though his egotism had been
destroyed by the endless soencs 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 honor redeemed. He was deeply and rest-
lessly miserable. He knew not whither 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
Btrand woven, but they will never be the same thing again.

Romaris, with its few wind-tortured trees and its Icadcn-hued
dangerous seas, seemed to him, indeed, a cluimp des trdjfassh,
as it was called, — a field of death. The naked, ugly, half-
mined towers, which no ivy shrouded and no broken marble
ennobled, as one or the other would have done had it been in
Ifingland 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

i>04 WASDA.

morniorr a paalel of La Toar had smited al him, tom
windows had made even a gray sky smile. Withoi
had been the sound of wheels going down the gay B.
Uaussmann. All Paris had passed by, trippiug and
careless and mirthful, beneath his gilded bulcoiiics brij
oanariensis and volubilis ; and on a little lablc, heaped
hundreds, had been cards that bade him to all the 1
most agreeable hoaacs, whilst betwixt tbem slipped
many an amorous note, many an unlooked-for doc
many an eagerly- deal red appoinlmert,

" Quel beau tempi!" he tboUf;ht, as he awoke in t
bare, unlovely chamber of the old tower by the sei
seemed to him that he must be dreaming ; that all the
of the war had been a nightmare ; ihat if be fully a
he would find himself once more with llie April :
shining through the rose glass, and the carria<iei
beneath over the asphalte road. But it was no ui^
it was a terrible, ghostly reality t'l him, as to so ma
Bands. There were thescaraon bis breast and his loii
the Pmaiiian steel had hacked and the Prnsaian t
pierced him; tliere was his sword in a comer all
notched, stained; there was a crowd of hideous ine
tumultuous memories ; . it was all true enough, only
and he was alone at Romaris, with all his dreams a
tions faded iuto thin air, vanished like the blown bi
btea of a child's sport.

In time to come he might recover power and nci
commooee his struggle for distinction, but at present i
to him that all was over. His imprisonment had fhn
as nothing else in the trials of war Co
He had been shat up for months alone with
desperation. To a man of liigh courage and impatit
tite for action there is no injury so great and in its
lasting as captivity. Joined to this he had tlie fe
Strong and now perfectly Jiopeless passion.

Pacing to and fro the brick floor of the tower looki
on the sands and rocks of the coast, his thoaghts wt
sautly with Wanda von Sznirua in her stately ancien
built so high up amidst the mountains and walled i
great forests and the ice-slopes of the glaciers. In
tad stench of carnage he had longed for a breath of thg

WANDA. 206

i- Isreezc, for a glaneo from those scrcnoeycs: lie longed for
tHeiM still.

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

was near noonday ; there was no sun ; a heavy wrack of
was sweeping up from the west ; on the air the odor of
Tot^t^ing fish and of fish-oil, and of sewage trickling uncovered
to t\^^ beach, was too strong to be driven away by the pun*
gen 03^ of the sea.

^He sea was high and moaning loud ; the dusk was full of
rain - the wind-tormented trees groaned and seemed to sigh -,
* tVieir boughs were still scarce in bud, though May had come.
He felt cold, weary, hopeless. His walk brought no warmth
*^o His veins, and his thoughts none to his heart. The moisture
o^ t;lie air seemed to chill him to the bone, and he went within
and. mounted the broken granite stairs to his solitary cham-
*^^Ty Hare of all save the simplest necessaries, gloomy and cheer-
less, '^ith the winds and the bats together beating at the high
iron-l^arred casement. He wearily lighted a little oil lamp,
**^<i threw a log or two of drift-wood on the hearth and set fire
*^ them with a fagot of dried ling.
He dreaded his long lonely evening.
He had set the lamp on a table while he had set fire to the
^ood 5 its light fell palely on a small white square thing. It
Was a letter. He took it up eagerly, — he, who in Paris had
oiT^eii tossed aside, with a passing glance, the social invitations
of the highest personages and the flattering words of the love-
liest vromen.

Here, any letter seemed a friend, and as he took up this

^^ pulse quickened : he saw that it was sealed with armorial

bearings which he knew, — a shield bearinoj three vultures

^*^h two knights as supporters, and with the motto *^ Gott

••**^ rnein Schtoert ;" the same arms, the same motto, as were

borne upon the great red-and-gold banner floating from the

k-eep on the north winds at the Hohenszalrasburg. He opened

**• with a hand which shook a little, and a quick throb of

pi^ure at his heart. He had scarcely hoped that she would

"wnto again to him. The sight of her writing filled him with

» hotindless joy, the purest he had over known called forth by

"^e band of woman.

18

206 WANDA.

The letter was brief, brave, kind. As he read, ho seeinei
to hear the calm harmonioas voice of the lady of Hohensialrafl
speaking to him in her mellowed and softened German tongue.

Sh3 sent him words of consolation, of sympathy, of oongratu*
lation on the course of action he had taken in a time of tribu-
lation, which had been the touchstone of character to so many.

" Tell me something of Eomaris," 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 pres-
ent life, and remember that we at Hohenszalras know how to
honor courage and heroic misfortune."

He laid the letter down afler twice reading it. Life seemed
no longer all over for him. He had earned her praise and
her sympathy. It is 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 es-
teem. 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 de-
tails 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 Ro-
mans he said little, save that, had Dante ever been upon thdr
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
f!ontemptuousness of which she was ashamed as soon as she
felt it.

Having once written to her, however, he thought hiiz!seif
privileged to write again, and did so several times. He wrota
with ease, grace, and elegance ; he wrote as he spoke, which
gives this charm to correspondence, that while the letter is
read it makes the writer seem close at hand to the reader io

WANDA. 207

mtitnate communion. The high culture of his mind dis-
p\aye<i itself without eflPort, and he hud 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,
t>^t she let him see that they were agreeable to her. There
was in them the note of a profound depression, of an unutter-
able but suggested hopelessness, which touched her. If he
had expressed it in plain words, it would not have appealed to
'^er half so forcibly.

7hey remained only the letters of a man of culture to a
^^^Han capable of comprehending the intellectual movement
^ ^lie time, but it was because of this limitation that she allowed
^**ein. Any show of tenderness would have both alarmed
•'J^ alienated her. There was no reason, after all, she thought,
^*^y a frank friendship ishould not exist between them.

Sometimes she was surprised at herself for having conceded
8^ :X2!uch, and angry that she had done so. Happily, he had
tii^ good taste to take no advantage of it. Interesting as his
letters were, they might have been read from the house-tops.
^ ith that inconsistency of her sex from which hitherto she
ha.€i always flattered herself she had been free, she occasionally
felt a passing disappointment that they were not more personal
VA regarded himself. Keticence is a fine quality : it is the
mai-ble of human nature. But sometimes it provokes the im-
pLtience that the marble awoke in Pygmalion.

Once only he spoke of his own aims. Then he wrote, —

^^ You bade me do good at Komaris. Candidly, I see no

^ay to do it except in saving a crew off a wreck, which is not

au occasibn 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.

Tliey are God-fearing, infinitely patient, faithful in their daily

lives, and they reproach no one for their hard lot, cast on an

™ shore and forced to win their scanty bread at the risk of

^Jr ijLves. They do not murmur either at duty or mankind.

"flat should I say to them ? — I, whose whole life is one rest-

•^ impatience, one petulant mutiny against circumstance ?

* L ^t with them I only take them what the world always

*®8 ioto solitude, — discontent. It would be a cruel gift;

^ oiy iii^n^ jg incapable of holding out any other. It is a

208 WANDA,

homely saying that no blood comes out of a stono : 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 vibruni, 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 con-
comitants and outcome ; but as yet it is not honest cuough 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 greatneai
to be achieved, like any other greatness, by courage, self-denial,
and purity of purpose, — a reward allotted to the just. This is
fanciful, maybe, but it is not illogical. And without being
cither 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 vm
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
mJyrion or the heir to immortality, the bundle of carbon or
the care of angels, one fact is indisputable : he suffers agont6t|

WANDA, 209

mcDtal and physical, that are wholly out of proportion to the
brevity of his life, while he is too often weighted from infancy
with Jiereditary maladies, hoth of hody 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 I how far would her pity reach ? How great of-
fences 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 honor and purity and
surveys the world with beautiful but serene compassion. If
the mud of its miry labyrinth 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'estt tout pardomier. 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
snow 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 thougii
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. More-
over, straight and open ways were not natural to him, though
he was physically brave to folly. There was a subtlety and a
reticence in him which were the enemies of candor.

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 ia
much a habit, and he had never acquired its habit. Whea
he was most sincere there was always some reserve lying be*
o 18*

210 WANDA.

hind it. This was perhaps ono of the causes of the atti
tioD he exercised on all women. All women are allured ^^J
the shadows and the suggestions of what is lut imperfect C=^ ^J
revealed. Even on the clear, strong nature of Wanda -v^in^n
Szalras it had its unconscious and intangible charm. SK^e
herself was like daylight, but the subtile vague charm of tMr:2e
shadows had their seduction for her. Night holds drea.i^'^
and passions that fade and flee before the lucid noon ; aKi^d
who at noonday wishes not for night ?

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

The betrayal of him by a base and mercenary woman
hurt him more than it was worthy to do : it had stung b- ^
pride and saddened him in this period of adversity witb ^
sense of degradation. He had been sold by a court^isan ; ^^
seemed to him to make him ridiculous as Samson was rxdic^'*^*
lous, and he had no temple to pull down upon himself aK^<*
her. He could only be idle and stare at an unoccupied av^^
valueless future. The summer went on, and he remained ^'
llomaris. An old servant had sent him word that all rK ^
possessions were safe in Paris, and his apartments unhamie^=^)
but he felt no inclination to go there; he felt no sympatS'^J
with Communists or Versaillists, with Oambetta or Qallif^^^
He stayed on at the old storm-beaten sea- washed tower, cou*^ ^
ing his days chiefly by the coming to him of any line fro*^
the castle by the lake.

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

At midsummer she wrote him word that she was about ^^
bo honored again by a two days' visit of her Imperial frien^J**

"We shall have, perforce, a large house-party," she sa*^:
" Will you be inclined this time to join it ? It is nato^^
chat you should sorrow without hope for your country, b^^
the fault of her disasters lies not with you. It is, perhaps
time that you should enter the world again : will you co"*^'
mence with what for two days only will be worldly, — Jf^
henszalras ? Your old friends the monks will welcome y^^
willingly and lovingly on the Holy Isle."

He replied with gratitude, but he refused. He did ^^
make any plea or excuse: he thought it best to let t^^^
simple refusal stand by itself. She would understand it

WANDA. 211

" Do not think, however," he wrote, ** that I am the leai
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 diffi-
cult to make them entertaining. The weather was fortu-
nately 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 Madame 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 com-
menced 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 color rise to his face.

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

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

The hoarse sound of the sea surging among the rooks at
the base of the tower was all that stirred the stillness ; evening
was spreading over all the monotonous inland country ; a west

212 WANDA.

wind was blowing and rustling amidst the gone ; a woman led
a cow between the dolmens, stopping for it to crop grass here
and there ; the fishing-boats were far out to sea, hidden undet
the vapors and the shadows. It was all melancholy, sad-
colored, 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-hucd 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 I'' 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 honor, 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 wind-blown, 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 tie do here? What
chance had he to be remembered by her ? He chafed at hig
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-
gray 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 w&l

WAlfDA, 213

cynical and restless before many things that most men reverence;
but at the thonglit 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
w^ll of his memory, than to live in her love through any base-
QC88 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 ephemeral, sporting their small hours,
i^caving their frail webs, and swept away by the great broom
of destiny as spiders by the housewife. In the spineless doc-
trine of altruism he had had too robust a temperament, too
clear a reason, to seek a guide for conduct. He had lived for
Limself, 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 al-
loyed it, reached a moral height which he had never touched
before. Between her and him a great gulf yawned. He
abstained from any eifort 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 honor.

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 bhisphemy. lie 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
it so well, how his fierce young soul and his ignorant yearn-
ing child's heart had gone out in a half conscious supplica-
tion, how It had seemed to him that if he only knelt long

214 WANDA.

enough, prayed well enough, she would come down to hL to
and lay her hands on him. It was all so long ago, yet, wh-^:L3D
he thought of Wanda von Szalras, something of that sair^e
emotion rose up in him, something of the old instinctive w^^-^f'
ship awoke in him. In thought he prostrated himself orm. ce
more whenever the memory of her came to him. He had v<>
religion : she became one to him.

Meanwhile, he was constantly thinking restlessly to hims^^I^f
« Did I do ill not to go ?"

His bodily life was at Eomaris, but his mental life waB ^
Hohenszalras. He was always thinking of her as she wo«-»W
look in those days of the Imperial visit; he could see ^ ^*®
stately ceremonies of welcome, the long magnificence oF ^ ^®
banquets, the great Eittersaal with crescents of light bias* ^g
on its pointed emblazoned roofs; he could see her as ^"O
would move down the first quadrille, which she wo«-»ld
dance with her Kaiser; she would wear her favorite ivo'^^y'
white velvet most probably, and her wonderful old je^v^^^**>
and all her orders. She would look as if she had steplF^^"
down off" a canvas of Velasquez or Vandyck, and she wo«-*l^
be a little tired, a little contemptuous, a little indiffer^^*>
despite her loyalty ; she would be glad, he knew, when *^ J®
brilliant gathering was broken up, and the old house and t-J*^
yew terrace and the green lake were all once more <1^^'
beneath the rays of the watery moon. She was so udI**®
other women. She would not care about a greatness, a co *^"
pliment, a success more or less. Such triumphs were for ^*®
people risen yesterday, not for a Countess von Szalras.

He knew the simplicity of her life and the pride of 1^^'
temper, and they moved him to the stronger admiration '^
cause he knew also that those mere externals which she V»^ "
in contempt had for him an exaggerated value. He "^^^
scarcely conscious himself of how great a share the splendo*' ^
her position, united to her creat indifference to it, had in ^L^
hold she had taken on his imagination and his passions. -'^^^
did know that there were so much greater nobilities in »^
that he was vaguely ashamed of the ascendency which **
mere rank took in his thoughts of her. Yet he could '^ i
divest her of it, and it seemed to enhance both her bodily ^^\-
her spiritual beauty, as the golden ca!yx of the lily make^ ^
whiteness seem the whiter by its nei^jhborhood.

WAKOA. 215

CHAPTER Xlli.

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

Their mistress, for once, did not 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 in-
terest 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 the Human-
ities must outweigh the Sciences at all times, and he is un-
questionably true, if it were only for the reason that in the
sweet wise lore of ages every human heart in pain and per-
plexity 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 wbtful, inquisitive eyes,
but dared not name the person of whom they both thought
most. Wanda was herself intolerant of the sense of impa-
tience 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
Romans did not more anxiously await her letters than did
the chS.telaine 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 earnest-
ness with which he had striven to amend his ways of life,
only to have his whole career shattered by an insensate and un-
looked-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 ex
hausted.
There were moments when she was inclined to scud him

216 WANVA.

some invitation moro cordial , some bidding more clear ; bn
she hesitated to take a step which would bind her in her ow
honor to so much more. She knew that she ought not
suggest a hope to him to which she was not prepared to g^"^ *
full fruition. And, again, how could he respond ? It wou^ ^
be impossible for him to accept. She was one of the gre-^»t
alliances of Europe, and he was without fortune, witho^^t
career, without a future. Even friendship was only possil^^®
whilst they were far asunder.

Two years had gone by since he had come across from t^»o
monastery in the green and gold of a summer aflernoon. T^^*-®
monks had not forgotten him : throughout the French 'vr ^^
they had prayed for him. When their prior saw her, he s^^^^
anxiously, sometimes, "And the Markgraf von-Sabran, w»ll
he never come to us again? Were we too dull for hiDcm ?
Will your Excellency remember us to him, if ever you carm "^
And she had answered, with a strange emotion at her he*»^**^>
"His country is in trouble, holy father: a good son can«»^^*
leave his land in her adversity. No, I do not think he "V*^ ^*
dull with you ; he was quite happy, I believe. Perhaps '^r^e
may come again some day, who knows? He shall be t*:i^^^
what you say."

Then a vision would rise up to her of herself and him. ^
they would be perhaps when they should be quite old. ^^^^'
haps he would retire into this holy retreat of the Augustirv ^^^>
and she would be a grave sombre woman, not gay and pr^*^ ^
and witty, as the princess was. The picture was gloomy: ^
chased it away, and galloped her horse long and far throi^
the forests.

The summer had been so brilliant that the autumn wh ^
followed was cold and severe, earlier than usual, and heev-
dtorius swept over the Tauern, almost ere the wheat-hanr
could be reaped. Many days were cheerless and filled ot
with the sound of incessant rains. In the Pinzgau and t>^
Salzkammergut floods were frequent. The Ache and t^^
Salzach, with all their tributary streams and wide and lon^^.^^
lakes, were carrying desolation and terror into many parts o
the land which in summer they made beautiful. Almo£^
every day brought her tidings of some misfortune in tb
villages on the farms belonging to her in the more distant^
parts of Austria : a mill washed away, a bridge down, a dam

WANDA. 217

burst, a road destroyed, a harvest swept into the water, some
damage or other done by the swollen rivers 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 thai
surrounds him. We pay heavily for the glory of our moun-
tain-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 I" 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 Sanct Johann im Wald for a
special train to be got in readiness for her, and told one of her
women and a trusted 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 in-
formed 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 ?"

K 19

218 WANDA.

•* Sc ; but lives are often lost because poor people lose th«i^
BODses in fright. I shall be calmer than any one there. Be- —
Bides, the place belongs to us : we are bound to share ita dan-— i
ger. If only Egon were not away from Hungary I"

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

" Do not dissuade me, dearest mother. It would bo cow- — '
ardice not to go."

" What can women do in such extremities ?"

" But we of Ilohenszalras must not be mere women whcB.^V£:3ci
we are wanted in any danger. Kemcmber Luitgarde voo ex <:3)i
8zalras^ the kntengeiery

The princess sighed, prayed, even wept, but Wanda waasB^s 'aj
gently inflexible. The princess could not see why a pr6ciouuEi.flLriu
life should be endangered for the sake of a little, half-barbaric,^ o xic
half- Jewish town, which was remarkable for nothing excepLS'«:x «p(
for shipping timber and selling saiblitig. The population wntrr #t ''as
scarcely Christian, so many Hebrews were there, and so bo — dxjo-
nigh ted were the Sclavonian poor, who between them rnade^^ t^de
up the two thousand odd souls that peopled Idrac. To seudL^ m. aid
a special messenger there, and to give any quantity of monej^^^i^ey
that the distress of the moment might demand, would be all M. .^bsall
right and proper, — indeed, an obligation on the owner of th<E>^1ie
little feudal river-side town. But to go! — a Countess voiL:w<=^^on
Szalras to go in person where not one out of a hundred of thc^ M^Wh^
citizens had been properly baptized or confirmed I The prin--^* ^\
cess could not view this quixotism in any other light thairx-^^^
that of an absolute insanity.

" Bcla lost his life in just such a foolish manner!" she
pleaded.

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

The princess colored and coughed.

" Of course I am aware that many holy lives have boen-
have been — what appears to our finite senses wasted," 8h(
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 migh^
DO better, though less magnificent, than so much heroism foi
Idrac."

" It pains me that you should put it in that light,
mother," said W^anda, with inexhaustible patience. *'
you in any danger, I would stay by you first, of course ; butyoi

WANDA, 219

ire in none. Those poor, forlorn, ignorant, cowardly creat-
ures are in the very greatest. I draw large revenues from
the place : I am in honor bpund 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 popu-
lation 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 I" 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 heath-
enish 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 iu the
wettest of weather, while she leaves a man like Egon and a
man like Sabran wretched for want of a word I I must say,"
thought the princess, ** false sentiment is almost worse than
none at all 1"

The rains were pouring down from leaden skies, hiding all
the sides of the mountains and filling the valleys with masses
of vapor. 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 hoi*ses shook the frail
swaying galleries and hurled the loosened stones over the
precipice with loud resounding noise. The drive to Matrey
Bud thence with post-horses to Sanct 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 Lins
and for Vienna, running through the low portions of the Pinz-
gau, which were for the most part under water.

All the way was dim and watery and full of the sound of

220 WAX DA.

running or of falHnj; water. The Ache and the Salzach, 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 mid-
night ; 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
recognized among the throng, and she felt the color 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 gray ; 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-vapors. 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 colors 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 Salzach where Hohensalzburg seems to tower as thougb
Friedcrick Barbarossa did indeed sleep there. With a sigh
ehe sank backward among her furs and cushions, and saw the
soaring fortress pass into the clouds.

The night had now closed in ; the rain fell heavily. As thu
little train, oscillating greatly from its lightness, swung ovet
the iron rails, there was a continual sound of splashing water
audible above the noise of the wheels ana the throb of the
engine. She had oflen travelled at night and had alwayf

WANDA. 221

slept soundly: this evonint; she could not sleep. She re>
mained wide awake, watching the swaying of the lamp, listen-
ing to the shrill shriek of the wheels as they rushed through
water where some hill-side 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 gray and ochre-colored
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 oflen watched the baby-stream rippling
over the stones, and felt the charm, as of some magical trans-
formation, as she thought of the same stream stretch in<
broadly under the monastic walls of Klostcrucuberg, rolling
in tempest by the Iron Gates, and gathering its mighty volume
higher and deeper to burst at last into the suulight 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 Tamer*-
lane 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 Chriemhild and her pilgrimage to the land of the
Uuns.

The little train swung on steadily through the water abovts
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 one of the greatest joys of

19*

n

r
n

222 WANDA.

here and of Bcln's childhood ; they had read on deck alter
oatcly the " Nibeluncreulied" and the " Arabian Nights,^'
clinging together in delighted awe as they passed through the
darkness of the defile of Kasan.

The little town of Idrao 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 seignory 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 Idrao 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 Saalras
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 Blocksberg, 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 machineiy
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
tUbawUza^ to distribute to the half-drowned people among
whom she was about to go. It was noonday before the yawl
got under way and left the twin-towns behind them in the
shelter of the Blocksberg. A little way farther down the
stream they passed a great castle, standing amidst beech
woods on a rock that rose up from fields covered with the
Carlowits vine. She looked at it with a sigh : it was the
fortress of Kohacs, one of the many possessions of li^on
Vkskrhcly.

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

WANDA. 22S

bonrs longier than nsnnl. When tho light of tho next day
Lroke, they had come in Bi»ht of the flooded districts on their
right : the immense fiat fields thut bear the flux and grain
which make the TOmmerce of Bnja, of Nousatl, and of other
rivcrioe towns were all changed to shallow estuaries. Tha
Theisa, the Drave, and many minor sireams, swolleD ly the
long- autumnal rains, had burst their boundaries and laid all
the oouiitry under water for hundreds of square tcoguui.
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 Bhapeless, dismat^ted vessels.
Timber and the thatched roofs of the one-storied houses were
in mnny places drifting too, like the flotsam and the hulls of
wrecked ships.

There arc few scenes more dreary, more sad, more monoto-
nous, than those of a flat country swamped by fiood ; the sky
nbovo ihcm was leaden and heavy, the Danube beneath them
was turgid and discolored ; the shrill winds whistled through
the bribes of willow, the water-birds, frightened, flow from
their osier-beds on the islands, the bells of churches and
"^i^h-iowcra tolled disraally.

It Was late in the afternoon when she came within sight of
"W little town on the Selavonian shore, which Hugo von
Slalvaa had fired on August 29, 1526, to save it Crnm the
sharoe of violation by the Turks. Though he hiid perished,
^''"1 most of the soldiers and townsfolk with him, tho fortress,
'he tei^ du pout, and the old water-gates and walls had been
J*^ strong for the flames to devour, and tho town had been
'"'•It up again by the Turks and subsequently by the Hunga-

riQQg

.The slender minarets of the Ottomans' two mosques still
™'s^ themselves amidst the old Gothic architecture of the
™'^<iiB!Yal buildings and the straw-cOTered roofs and thewhiio-
P'^atered walls of the modern houseiS. As they steamed near
|.' ^lio minareta and the castle towers rose above what looked
"-■^ a world of waters; all else seemed swallowed in the flood ,

v^ orchards, which had surrounded all save the river-side of
Jl^ town, were immersed almost to the summits of their trees.

."« larger vessels could never approach Idrao in ordinary
UtOog, ihe creek being too shallow on which it stood ; but now

Ih^i yjjj,f ^^ g^ ]j[y|, iij^f^ iliuugh it would he imprudi;nl to

224 WANDA,

anchor there, the yacht easily passed in, and hove-to under*
neath the water- walls, a pilot taking careful soundings as they
8teered. It was about three in the afbernoon. The short,
gray day was near its end \ a shout of welcome rose from some
people on the walls as they recognized the build and the en-
sign of the yawl. Some crowded boats were pulling away
from the town, laden with fugitives and their goods.

^^ How soon people run away I 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
throw themselves down at her feet and kissed her skirts with
abject servility. They were half mad with terror, and among
the popiilation there were many hundreds of Jews, the moot
cowardly people in all the world. The boats were quite in-
adequate 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 tlie right shore
of the river each separate village and township was busy with
its own case and had no help for neighbors : the only aid came
from those on the opposite shore, but that was scanty and un-
wisely 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 ofl^ 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 story. In the outlying flax-furms it was supposed that
whole households had perished. In the town itself there was
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 unable to escape, and had climbed upon the
roofs, clinging to the chimneys for bare life.

Her mere presence broufzht reviving hope and energy to
the primitive population. Their Lady had a romantic legen-
dary reputation among them, and they were ready to clinc;
round the pennon of the yacht as their ancestors had rallied
round the standard of Hugo von SzalraA.

WANDA. 225

She ascended to the Hittersaal of the fortress, and asscmhled
a few of the men ahout her who had the most influence and
energy in the little place. She soon introduced some kind of
system and method into the efTurts made, promised largesse to
those who should he the most active, and had the provisions
she had brought distributed among 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 castl# for shelter. Houses were con-
stantly 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 ha4 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 warn-
ing to the present generation.

She passed a fatiguing and anxious night. It was impos-
sible to think of sleep with so much misery aruund. 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 endeavor to inspire the paralyzed people with some
courage and animation. A little wine, a little bread were all
she took : food was very scarce. The victuals of the yf^cht's
provisioning did not last long among so many famishing souls.
She ordered her skipper at dawn to go down as far as Ncusatz
and purchase largely. There were five thousand people,
counting those of the neighborhood, 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 o;athered and broke, the re-
newed rains added their quota to the inundation, and theii'
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
Groswold with her. She was indifferent to danger, indefati-
gable in exertion, and strong as Libussa, brave as Chriemhild.
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 mi bad wrought miracles of deliverance. Unless

226 WANDA.

the stories told her were greatly exaggerated, this foreign ^2*
had shown a courage and devotion quite unequalled. He b^^d
thrown himself into the work at once on his arrival there ^^
a boat from Neusatz, and had toiled night and day, enduriv.^g
extreme fatigue and running almost every hour some dire p^^cil
of his life. He had saved whole families of the poorest a"K=>d
most wretched quarter ; he had sprung on to roofs that wce^ '^^
splitting and sinking, on to walls that were trembling and t^i^it-
tering, and had borne away inHafety men, women, and cl^ "•!-
dren, the old, and the sick, and the very animals ; he had ^ °-
fused some of his own daring an4 devotedness into the selfi-^^
and paralyzed Hebrew population ; priests and rabbi -w^^^
alike unanimous in his praise, and she, as she heard, felt th^m at
Jie who had fought for France had been here for her sal^^*
They told her that he was now out among tTie more distc»-»t
orchards and fields, amidst the flooded farms, where the dsM, d-
ger was even greater than in the town itself. Some Czec^Tis
said that he was St. John of Nepomuc himself. She bflr*^^
them bring him to her, that she might thank him, wheae'^'^r
he should enter the town again, and then thought of him ^^
more.

Her whole mind and feeling were engrossed by the sp^^
tacle of a misery that even all her wealth could not do very
much to alleviate. The waters as yet showed no sign ^^
abatement. The crash of falling houses sounded heavily eV'^
and again through the gloom. The melancholy sight ^^
humble household things, of drowned cattle, of dead dog^
borne down the discolored flood out to the Danube rene^^
itself every hour. The lamentations of the ruined peop*^
Wint up in an almost continuous wail, like the moaning of *
winter wind. There was nothing grand, nothing picturesq^^*
nothing exciting, to redeem the dreariness and the desolati^^''*
It was all ugly, miserable, dull. It was more trying than viri*'^
which even in its hideous senselessness lends a kind of brut*^
intoxication to all whom it surrounds.

She was incessantly occupied and greatly fatigued, so tfi^
the time passed without her counting it. She sent a messa^^
each day to the princess at home, and promised to return ^*^
soon as the waters had subsided and the peril passed. F^^^
the first time in her life, she experienced real disoomfoft, r^^^^-
privation : she h^d surrc|)46re4 nearly all the rooms in tl^

WANDA. 227

burg to tbe sick people, and food ran short, and there waa
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
beard the good tidings, she was looking out inland over the
waste of gray and yellow flood ; a Jewish rabbi was beside
her, speaking of the exertions of the stranger, in whom the
superstitions 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 oame by one of the big steamers that go to Turkey.
He palled 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 Rath wand 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 Ave
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 I will see and thank him, if he come again."

But no one that day saw the stranger in Idrao.

The rains fell again, and the waters again rose. The mala-
dies which come of damp and of bad exhalations spread
among the people : they could not all be taken U) other vil«
lages or towns, for there was no room for them. She had

228 WANDA.

quinine, wines, good food, ordered by the great steamers, but
they were not yet arrived. What could be got at Neusatz oi
Peterwardein the yacht brought, but it was not enough for so
many sick and starving people. The air began to grow fetid
from the many carcases of animals, though as they floated the
vultures from the hills fed on them. She had the yawl tuined
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 kick-bed to another. She had never been
80 near to hopeless human misery before. At Ilohenszalras
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 Idrao ; 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 Bos-
phorus 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 sedu-
lously avoiding her, and doing so much for the people of Idrao
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 rSle,
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 oflen of him.
The fair stranger, as the people called him, was always con-

WAlVDA. 229

spicuoiis wherever the greatest clanger was to be encountered.

Ther^ was always peril in almost every movement where the

under laiined houses, the tottering walls, the stagnant water,

the r^e^ver-reeking marshes presented at every turn a perpetual

menacse to life. ** He is not vainly un Jils des prevx,** she

thoupriit^ ^jth a thrill flf personal pride, as if some one near

and cl^ar to her were praised, as she listened to the stories of

his in trepidity and his endurance. Whole nights spent in

soakod. clothes, in half-swamped boats ; whole days lost in im-

poterk ti conflict with the ignorance or the poltroonery of an

obstiriote populace; continual risk encountered without count-

mp; it:« cost to rescue some poor man*s sick beast, or- pull u

cripple from beneath falling beams, or a lad from clioking

™^^ 9 hour on hour of steady laborious rowing, of passage to

and fVo the sullen river with a freight of moaning, screaming

peasantry, — this was not child's play, nor had it any of tlie

aniTxiat^ion and excitation which in war or in adventure make

or danger a strong wine that goes merrily and voluptuously

to t.tie head. It was all dull, stupid, unlovely; and he had

com© to it for her sake. For her sake certainly, though he

ncvor approached her; though when Anton at last found and

toolc h^j. message to him he excused himself from obedience

J^ ^^ ^y * P^ea 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

atraid than he of that contagion. She admired him the more

^or his isolation : in these gray, rainy, tedious, melancholy

aays l^jg figrure seemed to grow into a luminous heroic shape,

like One of the heroes of the olden time. If he had once

BeetDod to seek a guerdon for it, the spell would have been

lu . ^- ^^^ ^^^ never did. She began to believe that such

a fcni<>r|j|. deserved any recompense which she could give.

*2gon himself could have done no more," she said, in her

own tHoughts, and it was the highest praise that she could

8J7^ to any man, for her Magyar cousin was the embodiment

y ^*1 KQartial daring, of all chivalrous ardor, and had led his

^'^^^rtug hussars down on to the French bayonets, as on to

. ® ^X'ussian Krupp guns, with a fury that bore all before it,

inipetiious and inesistible as a stream of fired naphtha.

, ^*^ the twelfth morning the river had sunk so much lower

*^ tUc yacht, arriving with medicines and stores of food from

20

230 WA NDA,

Neusats, signalled tbat she could not enter the crock 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 distanttWallachian woods, and
the scene had lost nothing of its melancholy. A man was
Btanding on the water-stairs as she descended thorn, and
turned rapidly away, but she had seen him, and stretched out
her long stafif and touched him lightly.

" Why do you avoid me ?'* she said, as he uncovered his
head. . '* Mv 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 sil3nt : 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."

Ho 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 soldier-
like, 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 hoar,"
she said, afler a pause. " You should have come to the
monastery to be cured of your wounds. Why were you ao
mistrustiiil of our friendship ?"

WANDA, 231

lie colored and wa^ silent

<< Indeed/' she said, gravely, " we can honor brave men in
the Tauem and in Idrac too. You are very brave. 1 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
880 yon 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," ho 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 leaned your band 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 cousins' soldiers stripped
me in their ambulance, they took it from me."

His voice faltered. She listened and was moved to a pro-
found 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 dishonored 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 inun-
dations of Idrac and the lower Danubian plains. I remem-

232 WAiXDA.

hered the name of tlic town ; I remembered it was yours. 1
remembered your saying once that where you had feudal
rights you had feudal duties: so I camia on the' chance of
Leing of service.**

" You have been most devoted to the people."

" The people I What should I care though the whole
town perished 1 Bo 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 offci* 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 Iiad 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 as-
cended 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 all dull, practical matters that
claimed careful attention and thought. She sat in the little
cabin, that was brave with marquetry-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 do-
tails, lie wrote, and calculated, and drew up reports for her.
No more tender or personal word was spoken between theci,
but there was a certain charm for them both in this intimate
intercourse, even though it took no other shape than the etady

WANDA. 233

"friow many boat-loads of wheat were Deeded for so many

"^^Kfc^red people, of how many florins a day might be passed

^he head of each family, of how many of the flooded

would still be serviceable with restoration, of how

had been entirely destroyed, of how the town would

be rebuilt, and of how the inland rivers could best be

''^^^®t^»*ained in the future.

0 rebuild it she calculated that she would have to surren-
for five years the revenues from her Galician and Hunga-

mines, and she resolved to do it altogether at her own

She had no wish to see the town figure in public prints

le object of public subscription.

* * I am sure all my women friends," she said, " would kindly

^fe« it occasion for a fancy fair or a lottery (with .new cos-

••^^^es) in Vienna, but I do not care for that sort of thing,

1 can very well do what is needed alone."
e was silent. He had always known that her riches weri
;, but he had never realized them so fully as he now diw

she spoke of rebuilding an entire town as she miglit
"^e spoken of building a carriage.
** You would make a good prime minister," she said, smil-
*^52; ; «« you have the knowled";e of a specialist on so many
"Object/" ^

jA.t noon they served her a little plain breakfast of Danubian
J^^^^/w^, with Carlowitz wine and fruit sent by the steward of
^^oVi^ics. She bade him join her in it.

** Had Egon himself been here, he could not have done
^*^ore for Idrao than you have done," she said.
, *' Is this Prince Egon's wine?" he said, abruptly, and, on
"^^ring that it was so, he set the glass down untasted.

She looked surprised, but she did not ask him his reason,
^^ she divined it. There was an exaggeration in the un-
^P^ton hostility more like the days of Arthui and Lancelot
^*iao their own, but it did not displease her.

Tliey were both little disposed to converse daring their

^^1- After dreary and terrible scenes such as they had Doea

Witness of, the atmasphere of life seems grave and dark even

^ those whom the calamity has not touched. The most care-

» V^ spirit is oppressed by a sense of the precariousness and

I *■"« cruelty of existence.

L When they ascended to the deck, the skies were li^htftt

* 20*

234 WANDA.

than they had been for many weeks ; the fog had cleared, 80
that, in the distance, the towers of Neusatz and the fortress
of Peterwardein were visible ; vapor still hung over the vast
Hungarian plain, but the Danube was clear, and the affluenta
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 mo to stay ; the town is safe, and
jou are well, you say. If there be anything I can still do,
command me."

She smiled a little, and let her eyes 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. '

lie colored with a mingled emotion.

" You could ask me nothing that I would not do," ho 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 kartoffehi and
saihling ; 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 comf jrt to me to

WANDA. 235

know that yon aro hero. The poor people already love you,
and yoti will write to me and tell me all that may need to be
done. I will leave yon 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
G^reat admiration for you, though he wishes thalf you hud 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 cli/T
corvered with alpenroses. I may write to you?"

" You must write to me I 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.

" Look how the sun has come out. I can see the sparkle
of the brass on the cannon down yonder at Ncusiitz. We had
better go now. I must see my sick people, and then leave as
soon as I can. The yacht must take me to Mohacs ; from
there I will send her back to you." .

" Do as you will. I can have no greater happiness than to
obey you."

" I am sure that I thank you in the way that you like best,
when I say that I believe you."

She said the words in a very low tone, but so calmly that
the calmness of them checked any other words he might have
uttered. It was a royal acceptance of a loyal service ; nothing
more. The boat took them back to the fortrc^. Whilst she
was occupied in her farewell to the sick people and her in-
structions to those who attended on them, he, Icfl to himself
in the apartment she had made her own, instinctively went to
an old harpsichord that stood there and touched the keys. It
had a beautiful case, rich with the arabesques of Hiesener.
He played with it awhile for its external beauty, and then let
his fingers stray over its limited keyboard. It had still sweet-
ness in it, like the spinet of Hohenszalras. It suited certain
pathetic quaint old German airs he knew, and which he half

236 WANDA,

unconsciously reproduced upon it, singing them, as he did 80^
in a low tone. The melody, very soft and subdued, suited to
the place where death had been so busy and nature so an*-
sparing, and where a resigned exhaustion had now succeeded
to the madness of terror, reached the ears of the sick women
in the RitteTsaal and of Wanda von Szalras seated beside
their beds.

" It is like the saints in heaven sighing in pity for us here,"
said one of the women, who was very feeble and old, and she
smiled as she heard. The notes, tremulous from age but pen-
etrating in their sweetness, came in slow calm movements of
harmony through the stillness of the chamber ; his voice,
very low also, but clear, ascended with them. Wanda sat
quite still, and listened with a strange pleasure. " He alone/*
she thought, " can make the dumb strings speak."

It was almost dusk when she descended to the room which
she had made her own. In the passages of the castle oil
wicks were lighted in the iron lamps and wall-sconces, but here
it was without any light, and in the gloom she saw the dim
outline of his form as he sat by the harpsichord. He had
ceased playing ; his head was bent down and rested on the
instrument ; he was lost in thought, and his whole attitude
was dejected. He did not hear her approach, and she looked
at him some moments, herself unseen. A great tenderness
came over her ; he was unhappy, and he had been very bravo,
very generous, very loyal : she felt almost ashamed. She went
nearer, and he raised himself abruptly.

" I am going," she said to him. " Will you come with me
to the yacht?"

He rose, and, though it was dusk, and in this chamber so
dark that his face was indistinct to her, she was sure that
tears had been in his eyes.

" Your old harpsichord is Iliesener*s and Vernis Martin's
work," he said, with effort. " You should not leave it bulled
here. It has a melody in it too, faint and simple and full of
the past, like the smell of dead rose-leaves. Yes, I will have
the honor to come with you. I wish there were a full moon.
It will be a dark nigh* on the Danube."

" My men know the soundings of the river well. As for
the harpsichord, you alone have found its voice. It shall go
to your rooms in Paris."

Wt. NDA. 237

*' Yon arc too good, but I would not take iL J^ct it go to
Uohenszalras.*'

" Why would you not take it ?**

*' I would take nothing from you."

Ho spoke abruptly, and with some sternness.

*^ I think there is such a thing as being too proud ?" she
said, with hesitation.

" Your ancestors would not say so," he answered, with an
effort : she understood the meaning that underlay the words.
He turned away and closed the lid of the harpsichord, where
YerniB Martinis little painted cupids wantoned in a border of
metal scroll-work.

All the men and women well enough to stand crowded on
the water-stairs to see her departure ; little children were held
up in their mothers* arms and bidden remember her for ever-
more ; all feeble creatures lifted up their voices to praise her ;
Jew and Christian blessed her ; the water-gate was cumbered
with sobbing people, trying to see her face, to kiss her skirt
for the last time. She could not be wholly unmoved before
that unaffected, irrepressible emotion. Their poor lives were
not worth much, but, such as they were, she, under heaven,
had saved them.

" I will return and see you again," she said to them, as she
made a slow way through the eager crowd. " Thank heaven,
my people, — not me. And I leave my friend with you, who
did much more for you than I. llespect him and obey
him."

They raised with their thin trembling voices a loud Eljeti !
of homage and promise, and she passed away from their sight
into the evening shadows on the wide river.

Sabran accompanied her to the vessel, which was to take
her to the town of Mohacs, thence to make her journey home
by railway.

" I shall not leave until you bid me, even though you
eliould forget to call me all my life 1" he said, as the boat
slipped through the dark water.

" Such oblivion would be a poor reward."

" I have had reward enough. You have called me your
friend."

She was silent. The boat ran through the dusk and the
rippling rays of light streaming from the sides of the yacht.

238 WANDA.

«nd they went on board. He stood a moment with uncovered
head before her on the deck, and she gave him her hand.

^^ You will come to the Holy Isle ?" she said, as she did so.

^^ If you bid me," he said, as he bowed and kissed her
hand. His lips trembled as he did so, and by the lamplight
she saw that he was very pale.

" I shall bid you," she said, very softly, " by and by.
Farewell 1"

He bowed very low once more, then he dropped over the
yacht's side into the boat waiting below ; the splash of the
oars told her he was gone back to Idrao. The yawl weighed
anchor and began to go up the river, — a troublesome and
tedious passage at all seasons. She sat on deck watching the
strong current of the Danube as it rolled on under the bow
of the schooner. For more than a league she could see the
beacon that burned by the water-gate of the fortress. When
the curve of the stream hid it from her eyes she felt a pang
of painful separation, of wistful attachment to the old dreary
walls where she had seen so much suffering and so much
courage, and where she had learned to read her own heart
without any possibility of ignoring its secrets. A smile came
on her mouth and a moisture in her eyes as she sat alone in
the dark autumn night, while the schooner made her slow
ascent through the swell that accompanies the influx of the
Drave,

CHAPTER XIV.

In two days' time Hohenszalras received its mistress home.

She was not in any way harmed by the perils she had en-
eountered and the chills and fever to which she had been
exposed. On the contrary, her eyes had a light and her fiice
had a bloom which for many months had not been there.

The princess heard a brief bkctch of what bad passed in
almost total silence. She had disapproved strongly, and she
said that her disapproval could not change, though a merciful
heavenly host had spared her the realization of her worst fears.

The name of Sabran was not spoken. Wanda was of a

WANDA. 239

truthful temper, but she cou)<l not bring herself to speak
of h is presence at Idrac : the facts would reveal themselves
ioe^vitably soon enough.

Slie sent Greswold to the Danube laden with stores and

Dnociicines. She received a letter every morning from hei

delegate, but he wrote briefly, and with scrupulous care, the

Btat^ments of facts connected with the town and reports of

^"^^a-ti had been done. Her engineer had arrived from the

i*imos by Kremnitz, and the builders estimated that the waters

^^oiild have subsided and settled enough, if no fresh rising

^^^W place, for them to begin the reconstruction of the town

^^tVi. the beginning of the new month. Ague and fever were

still -very common, and fresh cases were brought in every hour

^ "thxe hospital in the fortress. He wrote on the arrival of

H^erx* Greswold, that, with her permission, he himself would

Btill stay on, for the people had grown used to him, and, having

®^^*xe knowledge of hydraulics, he would be interested to see

^^ plans proposed by her engineers for preserving the town

*^*>m similar calamities.

. Tliree weeks passed. All that time she spoke but little
®itlior of him or of any other subject. She took endless rides,
^■^<i she sat many hours doing nothing in the white-room, ab-
®^^l>ed in thought. The princess, who had learned what had
P*^sed, with admirable excuses of tact and self-restraint made
^ei tiler suggestion nor innuendo, and accepted the presence of
* -^irench marquis at a little obscure town in Sclavonia as if it
^^^^Q the most natural circumstance in the world.

** -All the Szalras have been imperious, arrogant, and of
^^^^ plicated character," she thought ; " she has the same tera-
^^> though it is mitigated in her by great natural nobility
^J^ disposition and strong purity of motives. She will do as
^e ohooses, let all the world do what it may to change her.
I say a word either way, it may take effect in some wholly

^ foreseen manner that I should regret. It is better to ab-

^■^^. * In doubt do nothing,' is the soundest of axioms."
- ^ -^md Princess Ottilie, who on occasion had the wisdom of

-^^ Serpent with the sweetness of the dove, preserved a discreet
1 ^*ice, and devoured her really absorbing curiosity in her own

-^t the end of the fourth week she heard that all was well
Xdrac, so far as it could be so in a place almost wholly de-

210 WANDA.

stroycd. There was no Bign of renewed rising of the inland
Btreiims. The illness was diminished, almost conquered ; tha
people hud begun to take heart and hope, and, being aided,
wished to aid themselves. The works for new cmbankmcoU,
water-gates, and streets were already planned, though tbej
could not be begun until the spring. Meanwhile, strong
wooden houses were being erected on dry places, which could
shelter ad interim many hundreds of families ; and the farmed
were gradually venturing to return to tlioir flooded land?*
The town had suffered grievously and in much- irreparabAji
but it began to resume its trade and its normal life.

She hesitated a whole day when she heard this. Thou[^^
Sabran did not hint at any desire of his own to leave the pli^c^
she knew it was impossible to bid him remain longer, and tAiat
a moment of irrevocable decision was come. She hesic-s^^
all the day, slept little all the night, then sent him a l>xici
telegram : " Come to the Island."

Obey the summons as rapidly as he might, he could ^^
travel by Vienna and Salzburg more quickly than in ^^di®
thirty houra or more. The time passed to her in a cur"^oua
confusion and anxiety. Outwardly she was calm enoi9-i(^j
she visited the schools, wrote some letters, and took her xm-^^
lontj' ride in the now leafless woods, but at heart she wa9 ^'
quiet and ill at ease, troubled more than by anything el^^® *'
the force of the desire she felt to meet him once more. y
was but a month since they had parted on the deck, ^xm- ^ ^
seemed ten years. She had known what he had meant ^^^"^
he had said that he would come if she bade him ; she ^
known that she would only do the sheerest cruelty and tr^-^^"'
ery if she called him thither only to dismiss him. It haA ^^
been a visit of the moment, but all his life that she had ^^1;
sented to take, when she had written, " Come to the Islai^^

She would never have written it unless she had been p^
pared to fulfil all to which it tacitly pledged her. She "^^
incapable of wantonly playing with any passion that mo^^
another, least of all with his. The very difference of the''
position would have made indecision or coyness in her seem
cruelty, humiliation. The decision hurt her curiously with i
sense of abdication, mortification, and almost shame. To i
very proud woman in whom the senses have never asserted
their empire, there is inevitably an emotion of almost shame,

WANDA, 241

sflf-surrcnder, of loss of self-rcspoct, in the first imj^ulsea
of love. It made her abashed and humiliated to feel the
excitation that the mere touch of his hand, the uiore (^aze of
liis eyes, had power to cause her. " If this be love," she
thought, ** no wonder the world is lost for it."

I/O what she would, the time seemed very long ; the two
evenings that passed were very tedious and oppressive. The
2>nncess seemed to observe nothing of what she was perfectly
csoniscious of, and her flute-like voice murmured on in an t;n-
«ndidg stream of commonplaces, to which her niece replied
macti at random.

In tho aflernoon of the third day she stood on the terrace,
looking down the lake and towards the Holy Isle, with an
impatience of which she was in turn impatient. She was
dressed in white woollen stuff with silver threads in it ; she
liad about her throat an old necklace of the Golden Fleece,
of golden shells enamelled, which had been a gifl from Charles
the Fifth to one of her house ; over her shoulders, for the
approach of evening was cold, she had thrown a cloak of
black Russian sables. She made a figure beautiful, stately,
patrician, in keeping with the background of the groat don-
jon tower, and the pinnacled roofs, and the bronze warriors in
their Gothic niches.

When she had stood there a few minutes looking down the
lake towards the willows of the monastery island, a boat came
out from the willow thickets, and came over the mile and a
half of green shadowy water. There was only one person in
it She recognized him whilst he was still far off, and a smile
came on her mouth that it was a pity he could not see.

He was a bold man,H}ut his heart stood still with awe of
her, and his soul trembled within him at this supreme moment
of his fate. For he believed that she would not have bidden
him there unless her hand were ready to hold out destiny to
him, — the destiny of his maddest, of his sweetest, dreams.

She came forward a few paces to meet him ; her face was
grave and pale, but her eyes had a soft suppressed light.

" I have much for which to thank you," she said, as she held

out her hand to him. Her voice was temulous, though calm.

He kissed her hand, then stood silent. It seemed to him

that there was nothing to say. She knew what he would

have said if he had been king, or hero, or meet mate for her

L q 21

242 WANDA.

His pulses were beating feverishly, his self-pos^essicr.: WdM
gone, his eyes did not dare to meet hers. He felt as if tbo
green woods, the shining waters, the rain-burdened skies, were
wheeling round him. That dumbness, that weakness, in a
man so facile of eloquence, so hardy and even cynical in cour-
age, touched her to a wondering pitifulness.

" After all," she thought, once more, " if we love each
other, what is it to any one else ? We are both free."

If the gift she would give would be so great that the world
would blame him for accepting it, what would that matter, so
long as she knew him blameless ?

They were both mute : he did not even look at her, and
she might' have heard the beating of his heart. She looked
at him, and the color came back into her face, the smile back
upon her mouth.

" jMy friend, * she said, very gently, " did never you think
that I also "

She paused : it was very hard to her to say what she must
say, and heeould not help her, dared not help her, to utter it.

They stood thus another moment mute, with the sunset-
glow upon the shining water and upon the feudal majesty of
the great castle.

Then she looked at him with a straight, clear, noble glance,
and, with the rich blood mounting in her face, stretched out
her hand to him with a royal gesture.

" They robbed you of your ivy leaf, my cruel Prussian
cousins. Will you — take — this — instead ?"

Then heaven itself opened to his eyes. lie did not take
her hand. He fell at her feet and kissed them.

" Is it wisest, after all, to be very unwise, dear mothei
mine ?" she said, a little later, with a smile that was tender
and happy.

The princess looked up quickly, and so looking, under*
stood.

"Oh, my beloved, is it indeed so ? Yes, you are wise to
listen to your heart : Qod speaks in it !"

With tears in her eyes she stretched out her pretty hand*
in solemn benediction.

" Be His spirit forever with you," she said, with great emo-
tion. " I shall be so content to know that I leave you not
alone when our Father calls me, for I think your very great-

WAS DA, 243

ness and dominion, my dear, but make you the more lonely,
as sovereigns are, and it is not well to be alone, Wanda ; it
is well to have human love close about us."

" It is to lean on a reed, perhaps," murmured Wanda, in
that persistent misgiving which possessed her. " And when
the reed breaks, though it has been so weak before, it becomes
of iron, barbed and poisoned."

" What gloomy thoughts I And you have made me so
happy, and surely you are happy yourself?"

" Yes. My reed is in full flower, but — ^but — ^ycs, I am
happy ; I hope that Bela knows."

The princess kissed her once again.

" Ah I he loves you so well."

" That I am sure of; jet I might never have known it but
for you."

" I did it for the best."

" I will send him to you. I want to be alone a little.
Bear mother, he cares for you as tenderly as though he were
your son."

" I have been his friend always," said the princess, with a
smile, whilst the tears still stood in her eyes. " You cannot
say so much, Wanda : you were very harsh."

" I know it. I will atone to him."

The eyes of the princess followed her tenderly.

"And she will make her atonement generously, grandly,"
she thought. " She is a woman of few protestations, but of
fine impulses and of unerring magnanimity. She will be in-
capable of reminding him that their kingdom is hers. I have
done this thing ; may heaven be with it I If she had loved
DO one, life would have grown so pale, so chill, so monotonous
to her ; she would have tired of herself, having nothing but
herself for contemplation. Solitude has been only grand to
her hitherto because she has been young, but as the years
rolled on she would have died without ever having lived ; now
she will live. She may have to bear pains, griefs, infidelities,
calamities that she would have escaped ; but, even so, how
much better the summer day, even with the summer storm,
than the dull, gray, quiet, windless weather ! Of course, if

ihe could have found sanctuary in the Church But her

faith is not absolute and unwavering enough for that *, she
has read too many philosophies ; she requires, too, open air

344 WANDA.

and vigorous life; the cloister would have been to her a
prison. She is one of those whose religion lies in activity ;
ehe will worship God through her children."

Sabran entered as she mused, and knelt down before her.

" You have been my good angel always," he murmured.
'^ How can I thank you ? I think she would never have let
her eyes rest on me but for you,"

The princess smUed.

" My friend, you are one of those on whom the eyes of
women willingly rest, perhaps too willingly. But you — you
will have no eyes for any other now ? You must deserve my
faith in you. Is it not so ?"

"Ah, madame," he answered, with deep emotion, " all words
seem so trite and empty ; any fool can make phrases, but when
I say that my life shall be consecrated to her I mean it, in
the uttermost loyalty, the uttermost gratitude."

" I believe you," said the princess, as she laid her hand
lightly on his bent head. " Perhaps no man can understand
entirely all that she surrenders in admitting that she loves
you ; ibr a proud woman to confess so much of weakness is
very hard ; but I think you will comprehend her better than
any other would. I think you will not force her to pass the
door of disillusion ; and remember that though she will leave
you free as air — for she is not made of that poor stuif which
would enslave what it loves — she would not soon forgive too
great abuse of freedom. I mean if you were ever — ever un-
faithful "

** For what do you take me ?" he cried, with indignant pas-
sion. " Is there another woman in the world who could sit
beside her, and not be dwarfed, paled, killed, as a candle by
the sun ?"

" You are only her betrothed," said the princess, with a
little sigh. ** Men see their wives with different eyes : so I
have been told, at least. Familiarity is no courtier, and time
is always cruel."

" Nay, time shall be our dearest friend," said Sabran, with
a tenderness in his voice that spoke more constancy than a
thousand oaths. " She will be beautiful when she is old, as
you are ; age will neither alarm nor steal from her ; her bod-
ily beauty is like her spiritual, it is cast in lines too pure and
dear not to defy the years. Oh, mother mine (let me call

WANDA. 245

you that), fear nothing ; T will love her so well that, all un-
worthy now, I will grow worthy of her, and cause her no mo
ment's pain that human love can spare her."

" Her people shall be your people, and her God your CU)d, *
murmured the princess, with her hand still lying lightly on
his head, obediently bent.

When late that night he went across the lake, the monks
were at their midnight orisons ; their voices murmured as one
man's the Latin words of praise and prayer, and made a sound
like that of a great sea rolling slowly on a lonely shore.

He believed naught that they believed. Deity was but a
phrase to him ; faith and a future life were empty syllables to
him. Yet, in the fulness of his joy and the humiliation of his
spirit, he felt his heart swell, his pride sink subdued. He knelt
down in the hush and twilight of that humble place of prayer,
and for the first moment in many years he also praised God.

No one heeded him ; he knelt behind them in the gloom
unnoticed ; he rose refreshed as men in barren lands in drought
are soothed by hearing the glad fall of welcome rain. He had
no place there, and in another hour would have smiled at his
own weakness ; but now he remembered nothing except that
he, utterly beyond his deserts, was blessed. As the monks
rose to their feet and their loud chanting began to vibrate in
the air, he went out unheard as he had entered, and stood on
the narrow strip of land that parted the chapel from the lake.
The green waters were rolling freshly in under a strong wind,
the shadows of coming night were stealing on ; in the south-
west a pale yellow moonlight stretched broadly in a light serene
as dawn, and against it there rose squarely and darkly with
its many turrets the great keep of Hohenszalras.

He looked, but it was not of that great pile and all which
h represented and symbolized that he thought now.

It was of the woman he loved as a woman, not as a great
possessor of wealth and lands.

*^ Almost I wish that she were poor as the saints she resem-
bles r' he thought, with a tender passion that for the hour was
true. It seemed to him that had he seen her standing in her
shift in the snow, like Our Lady of Hungary, discrowned and
homeless, he would have been glad. He was honest with the
honesty of passion. It was not the mistress of Hohenszalras
that he loved, but his own wife.

21*

240 WANDA.

CHAPTER XV.

Sucu a marriage could not do otherwise than aronse by its
aDDOuncement the most angry amazement, the most indignant
protests from all the mighty houses with which for so many
centuries the house of Szalras had allied itself. In a few
tranquil sentences she made known her intentions to those of
her relations whom she felt bound thus to honor ; but she gave
them clearly to- understand that it was a formula of respect,
not an act of consultation. When they received her letters they
knew that her marriage was already as irrevocable as thougli
it had actually taken place in the IIof-Kapello of Vienna.

All her relatives and all her order were opposed to her
betrothal ; a cold sufferance was the uttermost which any of
them extended to Sabran. A foreigner and poor, and with a
troubled and uncertain past behind him, he was bitterly un-
welcome to the haughty Prussian, Austrian, and Hungarian
nobilities to which she belonged ; neither his ancient name
nor his recent political brilliancy and military service could
place him on an equality with them in their eyes. Her trus-
tees, the Grand Duke of Lilienhohe and the Cardinal Viis^r-
hely, with her cousin Kaulnitz, hurried in person as swiflly as
special trains could bring them to the Iselthal, but they were
too late to avert the blow.

'^ It is not a marriage for her," said Kaulnitz, angrily.

" Why not ? It is a very old family," said the princess,
with no less irritation.

" But quite decayed, long ruined," he returned. " This
man was himself born in exile.**

" As they exile everybody twice in every ten years in
France ! "

" And there have been stories-

}*

" Of whom are there not stories ? Calumny is the parasite
of character ; the stronger the character the closer to it dings
the strangler."

" I never heard him accused of any strength, except of the
wrist in Vesci^inie /*'

WAKDA. 247

X)o you know anytliing dishonorable of him ? If jou do,
are bound to say it."
' JDishonorablo is a grave word. No, I cannot say that 1
do ; t:he society he frequents is a guarantee against that ; but
hid life has been indifferent, complicated, uncertain, not a life
to oe allied with that of such a wonan as Wanda. My dear
priQocss, it has been a life dans Ic milieu parUien : what more
wo*il<J you have me say ?"

"* IMnce Arcbambaud's has been that. Yet three years
Bin -^^ you earnestly pressed his suit on Wanda."

""* ^rchambaud 1 He is one of the first alliances in Europe ;
"® AS of blood royal, and ho has not been more vicious than
ocliep men."

''^ Xt would be better he should have been less so, since he
"V€s« SO near *the fierce light that beats upon the throne,'
" — ^Mx eleotrio light which blackens while it illumes 1 My
gocKi Kaulnitz, you wander very far afield. If you know
^^^"<cliiDg serious against M. de Sabrau, it is your duty to

*ay ct."

* He is a gambler."

^ Ele has renounced gambling."

*• He is a duellist"

^"^ Society was of a much better constitution when the duel
^aa its habitual phlebotomy."

** fle has been the lover of many women."
^ C am afraid that is nothing singular."

** Be is hardly more than an adventurer."
. ' Ge counts his ancestry in unbroken succession from the
^^:y« of Dagobert"

^ -Be has nothing but a pignon sur rue in Paris, and a league
^'^ ^>ro of rocks and sand in Brittany ; yet, though so poor, he
"■^a^vi money enough by cards and speculation to bo for three
y^5Xrt, the amant en litre of Cochonette."

■^I*«dame Ottilie rose with a little frown.

* X ihink we will say no more, my dear baron ; the matter
> aftor all, not yours or mine to decide. W^anda will aw-

^^^edly do as she likes."

But you have so much influence with her."

* I have none ; no one has any ; and I think you do not
^^erstand her in the least. It may cost her very much to
^^W to him that she loves him, but, once having done that,

248 WANDA,

it will cost her nolhiog at all to avow it to the world. She ia
luueh too proud a woman to care for tlie world."

" He is gentithomme de race, I grant," admitted with re-
luctance the Grand Duke of Lilienhohe.

"When has a noble of Brittany been otherwise?" asked
the Princess Ottilie.

" I know," said the prince ; " but you will admit that he
occupies a difficult position, — an invidious one."

" And he carries himself well through it. It is a difficult
position which is the test of breeding,'' said the princess, tri-
umphantly ; ^< and I deny entirely that it is what you call an
invidious one. It is you who have the idea of the crowd
when you lay so much stress on the mere absence of money."

" It is the idea of the crowd that dominates in this age."

" The more reason for us to resist it, if it be so."

" I think you are in love with him yourself, my sister 1"

" I should be were I forty years younger."

The Countess Brancka alone wrote with any sort of sym-
pathy and pleasure to congratulate them both.

" I was sure that Parsifal would win soon or late," she
said. •* Only remember that he is a Parsifal double by b De
Morny."

Wanda read that line with contracted brows. It angered
her more than the outspoken remonstrances of the Vkskrhely,
of the Lilienhohe, of the Kaulnitz, of the many great fami-
lies to whom she was allied. De Morny I — a bastardy an
intriguer, a speculator, a debaucher ! The comparison had
an evil insinuation, and displeased her.

She was not a woman, however, likely either for insinuation
or remonstrance to change her decisions or abandon her
wishes. She had so much of the " iteniel fimmirH^ in her
that she was only the more resolved in her own course because
others, by evil prophecy and exaggerated fears, sought to turn
her from it. What they said was natural, she granted, but it
was unjust and would be unjustified. All the expostulation,
diplomatically hinted or stoutly outspoken, of those who con-
sidered that they had the right to make such remonstrances,
produced not the smallest effect upon the mind of the woman
whom, as Baron Kaulnitz angrily expressed it, Sabran had
magnetized. Once again Love was a magician, against whom
wisdom, prudence, and friendship had no power of persuasioit

WANDA, 21J

TliG melancholy that she observed in him seemed to her
ot^ly the more graceful; there was no vulgar triumph in his
O'^vn victory, such as might have suggested that the material
aci -vantages of that triumph were present to him. That he
lo^vcd her greatly she could not doubt, and that he had striven
to conceal it from her she could not doubt either. The sad-
iic^i38 which at times overcame him was but natural in a proud
n whose fortunes were unequal to his birth, and who was
sensible of many brilliant gifts, intellectual, that he had
''''^Lsted, which, had they been fully utilized, would have justi-
fi<^^ his aspiration to her hand.

**Try and persuade him," she said to Madame Ottilie, " to
5*^ i^ik less of this mere, accident of difference between us. If
^^ "^vere difference of birth, it might be insurmountable or in-
^1 drably painful ; but a mere difference of riches matters no
'^ o*e than the color of one's eyes or the inches of one's
^^•^tiure."

^Ihe princess shook her head.

* • If he did not feel it as he does, he would not be the man
'^^^t be is. A marriage-contract to which the lover brings

'^^^^liing must always be humiliating to himself. Besides, it
®^^^s to him that the world at large must condemn him as a
^*e fortune-hunter."

* • Since I am convinced of the honesty and purity of his
^^tiives, what matters the opinion of others?"

*How can he tell that the world may not some day induce
to doubt those motives ?"
ArVanda did not reply.
• * * But he will cease to think of any disparity when all that
,^^ ^Xaine has been his a year or two," she thought. " All the
*^^^^J)le shall look to him as their lord, since he will be mine ;
^^^^ if I think differently from him on any matter I will not
y*^^ it, lest I should remind him that the power lies with me ;
^ shall be no prince consort, he shall be king."
^ -As the generous resolve passed dreamily through her mind,
,^^ was listening to the Coronation Mass of Liszt, as he played
}! ^n the organ within. It sounded to her like the hymn of
^^ future, — a chorus of grave and glorious voices shouting
^^eome to the serene and joyous years to come.

W^hen she was next alone with him she said to him, very
^^derly,—

250 WAXDA.

** i want you to promise mo one thing."

" I promise you all things. What is this one?"

*' It is this : you are troubled at the thought that I h«
one of those great fortunes which form the acte (racciiscUu
)f socialists against society, and that you have lost all exce
the rocks and salt beach of Romans. Now, I want you
promise me never to think of this fact. It is beneath j»
Fortune is so precarious a thing, so easily destroyed by war
revolution, that it is not worth contemplation as a serio
barrier between human beings. A treachery, a sin, even
lie, any one of those may be a wall of adamant ; but a mc
fortune I — Promise me that you will never think of
except inasmuch, my beloved, as it may enhance my happi
by ministering to yours."

He had grown very pale as she spoke, and his lips h.
twice parted to speak without words coming from the
When she had cotuscd he still remained silent.

*^ I do not like the world to come between us, even i
memory : it is too much flattery to it," she ooutinu
*' Surely it is treason against me to be troubled by what a
silly persons will or will not say in a few salons? You
U)o little vanity, I think, where others have too much."

lie stooped and kissed her hand.

^^ Could any man live and fail to be humble before yo^ _

he said, with passionate tenderness. "Yes, the world ^^"^^^
say, and say rightly, that I have done a base thing, anc3. ^
cannot forget that the world will be right; yet, since yon
honor me with your divine pity, can I turn away from i^ ^
Could a dying man refuse a draught of the water of life?**^

A great agitation mastered him for the moment He 1^^^
his face upon her hands as he held them clasped in his.

" We will drink that water together, and as long as '^^
are together it will never be bitter, I think," she said, V^^'J
■oftly.

Her voice seemed to sink into his very soul, so muoto *^
said of faith, so much it aroused of remorse.

Then the great joy which had entered his life, like a gc*"^
dazzling flood of light suddenly let loose into a dark&<^^'
chamber, so blinded, consumed, and intoxicated him that; '
forgot all else ; all else save this one fact, — she would be ^
Dody and soul, night and day, in life and in death, for^*^

WAXDA. 25i

his cbildron borne by her, his life spent with her, her whole
existence surrendered to him.

For some days after that she mused upon the possibility of
rendering him entirely independent of herself without insult-
ing him by a direct offer of a share in her possessions. At
last a solution occurred to her. The whole of the fiefs )f
Idrao constituted a considerable appanage apart ; its title went
with it. When it had come into the Szalras family by
marriage, as far back as the fifteenth century, it had been a
principality ; it was still a seignory, and many curious feudal
privileges and distinctions went with it.

It was Idrac now that she determined to abandon to her
lover.

" He will be seigneur of Idrac," she thought, " and I shall
be so glad for him to bear an Austrian name."

She herself would always retain her own name, and would
take no other.

" We will go and revisit it together," she thought, and,
though she was all alone at that moment, a soft warnitli
came into her face, and a throb of emotion to her heart, as she
remembered all that would lie in that one word ^^ together,"
all the tender and intimate union of the years to come.

Her trustees were furious, and sought the aid of the men
of law to enable them to step in and arrest her in what they
deemed a course of self-destruction ; but the law could not
give them so much power ; she was her own mistress, and as
sole inheritrix had received her possessions singularly untram-
melled by restrictions. In vain Prince Lilienhohe spent his
Revere and chilly anger, Kaulnitz his fine sarcasm and delicate
insinuations, and the cardinal his stately and authoritative
wrath. She was not to be altered in her decision.

Austrian law allowed her to give away an estate to her
husband if she chose, and there was nothing in the private
settlements of her property to prevent her availing hei*sclf of
the law.

Strenuous opposition was encountered by her to this pro-
ject, by every one of her relatives, hardly excluding the
Princess Ottilie ; " for," said that sagacious recluse, " your
horses may show you, my dear, the dangers of a rein toe
loose."

" I want no rein at all," said Wanda. ^' You forget that,

25^ WAX DA,

to my thinking, marriage should never be bondage; two i
pie with independent wills, tastes, and habita should mutus
concede a perfect independence of action to each other. Wl
one must yield, it must be the woman."

" Those are very fine theories," the princess rcmarkeo, ^
caution.

" I hope we shall put them in practice,*' said Wanda, v
unruffled good-humor. "Dear mother, I am sure you
understand that I want him to feel he is wholly indepeno
of me. To what I love best on earth shall I dole out a i
gard largesse from my wealth ? If I were capable of dc
BO, he would grow in time to hate me, and his hatred wc
be justified."

" I never should have supposed you would booome
romantic," said the princess.

" It will make him independent of you," objected Pr
Lilienhbhe.

" That is what, beyond all, I desire him to bo,"
answered.

" It is an infatuation," sighed Cardinal Vhrsh-rhely, oa^
her heaving, " when Kgon would have brought to her a fort
as large as her own."

" You think water should always run to the sea,"
Princess Ottilie : " surely that is great waste sometimes?'

" I think you are as infatuated as she is," murmured
cardinal. " You forget that had she not been inspired ^
this unhappy sentiment she would have most probably
Hohenszalras to the Church."

" She would have done nothing of the kind. Your I
nence mistakes," answered Madame Ottilie, sharply. " Hoi
£zalras and everything else, had she died unmarried, w<
have certainly gone to the Hapsburgs."

" That would have been better than to an adventurer.**

** How can you call a Breton noble an adventurer? I
one of the purest aristocracies of the world, if poor."

" Ce que femme veuty^* sighed his Eminence, who k
how often even the Church had been worsted by women.

The Countess von Szalras had her way, and although ^
the marriage-deeds were drawn up they all set aside complc
any possibility of authority or of interference on the paH
her husband, and maintained in the cleai*est and firmest t^

WA NDA, 253

ner her entire liberty of action and enjoyment of inalienable
properties and powers, she had the deed of gift of Jdrao
locked up in her cabinet, and thought to herself, as the long
dreary preamble and provisions of the law were read aloud to
her, '* So will he be always his own master. What pleasure
that your hawk stays by you if you chain him to your wrist ?
If he love you, he will sail back uncalled from the longest
flight. I think mine always will. If not — if not — well, he
must go r*

One morning she came to him with a great roll of yellow
parchment emblazoned and with huge seals bearing heraldic
arms and crowns. She spread it out before him as they stood
alone in the Rittersaal. He looked scarcely at it, always at
^r. She wore a gown of old gold plush that gleamed and
glowed as she moved, and she had a knot of yellow tea-roses
at her breast, fastened in with a little dagger of sapphires.
She had never looked more truly a great lady, more like a
chatelaine of the Renaissance, as she spread out the great
^^1 of parchment before him on one of the tables of tho
lights' hall.

" Look 1" she said to him. " I had the lawyers bring this
over for you to see. It is the deed by which Stephen, first
Christian King of Hungary, confirmed to the Counts of Idrac
iQ tile year 1001 all their feudal rights to that town and dis-
tnct, as a fief. They had been lords there long before. Look
*^' ^t ; here, farther down, you see, is the reconfirmation of the
^**rter under the Hapsburg seal, when Hungary passed to
wieni. But you do not attend. Where are your eyes?"

" On you I Carolus Duran must paint you in that dead
8oU with those roses."

*' They are only hot-house roses : who cares for them ? I

^e no. forced flowers, either in nature or humanity. Come,
•^^ay this old parchment. It must have some interest for
y^tt- It is what makes you lord of Idrac."
, " What have I to do with Idrac ? It is one of the many
jewels of your coronet, to which I can add none 1"

But to please her he bent over the crabbed black-letter and
•he antique blazonings of the great roll to which the great
dead men had set their sign and seal. She watched him as
*e read it, then after a little time she put her hand with a
^wcfising movement on his shoulder.

*J2

254 WANDA.

" My love, I can do just as I will with Idrac. The lawyew
are agreed on that, and the Kaiser will confirm whatever I do.
Now, I want to give you Idrac, make you wholly lord of it j
indeed, the thing is already done. I have signed all the
documents needful, and, as I say, the Emperor will confirm
any part of them that needs his assent. My Ren^, you are a
very proud man, but you will not be too proud to take Idrao
and its title from your wife. But for that town, who can say
that our lives might not have been passed forever apart ? Why
do you look so grave ? The Kaiser and I both want you to
be Austrian. When I transfer to you the fief of Idrac, you
are its Count for evermore."

He drew a quick deep breath as if he had been struck a

blow, and stood gazing at her. He did not speak ; his eyes

'darkened as with pain. For the moment she was afraid that

she had wounded him. With exquisite softness of tone and

touch she took his hand, and said to him, tenderly, —

" Why will you be so proud ? After all, what are these
things ? Since we love each other, what is mine is yours ; a
formula more or less is no offence. It is my fancy that you
should have the title and the fief. The people know you
there, and your heroic courage will be forever among their
best traditions. Dear, once I read that it needs a greater soul
to take generously than to give. Be great so, now, for my
sake !"

" Great T* He echoed the word hoarsely, and a smile of
bitter irony passed for a moment over his features. But he
controlled the passionate self-contempt that rose in him. He
knew that, whatever else he was, he was her lover, and her
hero in her sight. If the magnitude and magnanimity of
her gifts overwhelmed and oppressed him, he was recalled to
self-control by the sense of her absolute faith in him. . He
pressed her hands against his heavily-beating heart.

" All the greatness is with you, my beloved," he said, with
effort. " Since you delight to honor me, I can but strive my
utmost to deserve your honor. It is like your beautiful and
lavish nature to be prodigal of gifts. But when you give
yourself, what need is there for aught else ?**

" But Idrac is my caprice. You must gratify it."

'^ I will take the title gladly at your hands, then. The
revenues — No."

WANDA. 255

'* Ton most take it all, the town and the title, and all they
bring/* she insisted. " In truth, but for yon there would
possibly be no town at all. Nay, my dear, you must do me
this little pleasure : it will become you so well, that Count-
ship of Idrao : it is as old a place as Vindobona itself."

*< Do you not understand ?" she added, with a flush on hei
face. *' I want you to feel that it is wholly yours, that if I
die, or if you leave me, it remains yours still. Oh, I do not
doubt you, — not for one moment. But liberty is always good.
And Idrao will make you an Austrian noble in your own
right. If you persist in refusing it, I will assign it to the
Crown : you will pain me and mortify me."

** That is enough ! Never wittingly in my life will I hurt
you. But if you wish me to be lord of Idrac, invest me with
the title, my Empress. I will take it and be proud of it ;
and as for the revenues — well, we will not quarrel for them.
They shall go to make new dikes and new bastions for the
town, Qr pile themselves one on another in waiting for your
childreo."

She smiled, and her face grew warm, as she turned aside
and took up one of the great swords with jewelled hilts and
damascened scabbards, which were ranged along the wall of
the Kittersaal with other stands of arms.

She drew the sword, and, as he fell on his knee before her,
smote him lightly on the shoulder with its blade.

" Rise, Oraf von Idrac T' she said, stooping and touching
his forehead with the rose that she wore at her breast. He
loosened one of the roses and held it to his lips.

" On this rose I swear my fealty now and forever," he said,
with emotion, and his face was paler and his tone was graver
than the playfulness of the moment seemed to call for in him.

<* Would to heaven I had had no other name than this one
you give mo !" he murmured, as he rose. " Oh, my love, my
lady, my guardian angel I forget that ever I lived before, -for-
got all my life when I was unworthy you ; let me live only
from the aay that will make me your vassal and your *'

*^ That will make you my lord I" she said, softly ; then she
stooped, and for the first time kissed him.

What caused her the only pain that disturbed the tranquil-
lity of these cloudless days was the refusal of her cousin E<:;()n
to bo present at her marriage. Uo sent her, with some

256 WANDA.

great jcwcIf that had oomc from Persia, a few words of sal
aud wistful affcctioQ.

*^ My presence/' he added, in coDclusioD, " is do more needed
fur your happiness than are these poor diamonds and pearls
needed in your crowded jewel-cases. You will spare me*
trial which it could be of no benefit to you for me to suffer.
I pray that the Marquis de Sabran may all his life be worthy
of the immense trust and honor which you have seen fit to
give to him. For myself, I have been very little always io
your life. Henceforth I shall be nothing. But if ever yo^
call on me for any service — which it is most unlikely you e^C
will do — I entreat you to remember that there is no one living
who will more gladly or more humbly do your bidding at >"
cost than I, your cousin Kgon."

The short letter brought tears to her eyes. She said noth-
ing of it to Sabran. He had understood from Madame Ottilw
that Prince V^s^rhely had loved his cousin hopelessly for nJi^ny
years, and that he could not be expected to be present at ^^^
marriage.

In a week from that time their nuptials were celebrated ^^
the court chapel of the Hof burg at Vienna, with all the poO^P
and splendor that a brilliant and ceremonious court could Icn^L
to the espousal of one of the greatest ladies of the old Duchy
of Austria.

Immediately after the ceremony they left the capital ^^^
Ilohenszalras.

At the signing of the contract on the previous night, ^^^*J
he had taken up the pen he had grown very pale ; he ^*.^?
hesitated a moment, and glanced around him on the magu*''''
cent crowd, headed by the P]mperor and Empress, with a glca****
of fear and of anxiety in his eye, which Baron Kaulnitz, W***'
was intently watching him, had alone perceived.

" There is something. What is it ?*' had mused the asti**-^
German.

It was too late to seek to know. Sabran had bent ^€>*
over the parchment, and with a firm hand had signed his d^^
and title.

WAIXDA. 267

CHAPTER XVL

It was midsummor onoe more in the Iselthal, five years and
% half afler the celebration at the Imperial palace of those
nuptials which had been so splendid that their magnificence
had been noticeable even at that magnificent court. The time
had seemed to her like one long, happy, cloudless day, and if
to him there had come any fatigue, auy satiety, any unrest,
such as almost always come to the man in the fruition of his
passion, he suffered her to see none of them.

It was one of those rare marriages in which no gall of a
chain b felt, but a quick and perfect sympathy insures that
harmony which passion alone is insufficient to sustain. He
devoted himself with ardor to the care of the immense prop-
erties that belonged to his wife ; he brought to their adminis-
tration a judgment and a precision that none had looked for
in a man of pleasure; he entered cordially into all her schemes
for the well-being of the people dependent on her, and carried
them out with skill and firmness. The revenues of Idrac he
never touched ; he left them to accumulate for his younger
son, or expended them on the township itself, where he was
adored.

If he was still the same man who had been the lover of
Cochonette, the terror of Monte C^lo, the hero of night-long
baccara and frontier duels, he had at least so banished the old
Adam that it appeared wholly dead. Nor was the death of
it feigned. He had fiung away the slough of his old life with
a firm hand, and the peace and dignity of his present exist-
ence were very precious to him. He was glad to steep him-
self in them, as a tired and fevered wayfarer was glad to bathe
his dusty and heated limbs in the cool, clear waters of the
Szalrassce. And he loved his wife with a great love, in which
reverence and gratitude and passion were all blent. Possession
had not dulled nor familiarity blunted it. She was still to him
a sovereign, a saint, a half-divine creature, who had stooped to
become mortal for his sake and his children's.

The roses were all aglow on the long lawns and under tha
r 22*

258 WANDA.

gray walls and terraces ; the sunbeams were dancing on the
emerald surface of the Szalrassee.

*^ What a long spell of fair weather I'* said Sabran, as they
sat beneath the great yews beside the keep.

" It is like our life," said his wife, who was doing nothing
but watching the clouds circle round the domes and peaks,
which, white as ivory, dazzling and clear, towered upward in
the blue air like a mighty amphitheatre.

She had borne him three children in these happy years, the
eldest of whom, Bela, played amidst the daisies at her feet, a
beautiful fair boy with his father's features and his father's
luminous blue eyes. The other two, Gela and the little
Ottilie, who had seen but a few months of life, were asleep
within-doors in their carved ivory cots. They were all hand-
some, vigorous, and of perfect promise.

" Have I deserved to be so happy ?'* she would often think,
she whom the world called so proud.

'^ Bela grows so like you 1" she said now to his father, who
stood near her wicker chair.

^' Does he ?" said Sabran, with a quick glance, that had
some pain in it, at the little face of his son. " Then if the
other one be more like you it will be he who will be dearest
to me."

As he spoke he bowed his head down and kissed her hand.

She smiled gravely and sweetly in his eyes.

"That will be our only difference, I think I It is time,
perhaps, that we began to have one. Do you think that there
are two other people in all the world who have passed five
years and more together without once disagreeing ?"

" In all the world there is not another Countess Wanda 1"

" Ah 1 that is your only defect : you will always avoid ar-
gument by escaping through the side-door of compliment. It
is true, to be sure, that your flattery is a very high and sub-
tile art."

" It is like all high art, then, — based on what is eternally
true."

" You will always have the last word, and it is always so
graceful a one that it is impossible to quarrel with it. But,
B6n^, I want you to speak without compliment to me for onoe.
Tell me, are you indeed never — ^never — a little weary of being
hero?"

WANDA. 259

He hesitated n moment, and a slight flush came on his face.

She observed both signs, slight as they were, and sighed :
it was the first sigh she had ever breathed since her marriage.

" Of course you are ; of course you must be," she said,
quickly. " It has been selfish and blamable of me never to
think of it before. It is paradise to me ; but no doubt to
you, used as you have been to the stir of the world, there
must be some tedium, some dulness, in this mountain isola-
tion. I ought to have remembered that before."

" You need do nothing of the kind now,'* he said. " Who
has been talking to you ? Who has brought this little snake
into our Eden?"

*' No one ; and it is not a snake at all, but a natural reflec-
tion. Hohenszalras and you are the world to me, but I can-
not expect that Hohenszalras and I can be quite as much to
yourself. It is always the difl^erence between the woman and
the man. You have great talents ; you are ambitious."

" Were I as ambitious as Alexander, surely I have gained
wherewithal to be content I"

" That is only compliment again, or, if truth, it is only a
side of the truth. Nay, love, I do not think for a moment
you are tired of me ; I am too self-satisfied for that 1 But I
think it is possible that this solitude may have grown, or may
grow, wearisome to you ; that you desire, perhaps without
knowing it, to be more amidst the strife, the movement, and
the pleasures of men. Aunt Ottilie calls this ' confinement
to a fortress ;' now, that is a mere pleasantry ; but if ever you
should feel tempted to feel what she feels, have confidence
enough in my good sense and in my affection to say so to me,
and then "

** And then ? We will suppose I have this ingratitude and
bad taste : what then ?"

" Why, then my own wishes should not stand for one in-
stant in the way of yours, or rather I would make }Ours mine.
And do not use the word ^ ingratitude,' my dearest : there can
be no question of that betwixt you and me."

" Yes," said Sabran, as he stooped towards her and touched
her hair with his lips. " When you gave me yourself you
made me your debtor for all time, — would have made me so
had you been as poor as you are rich. When I speak of
gratitude, it is of that gifl I think, not of Hohenszalras."

260 WANDA.

A warmth of ploasuro flashed her cheek for a momont, anA
Bhe smiled happily.

" You shall not beg the question so/' she said, with gentk^
insLstence, after a moment's pause. " I have not forgoUo
your eloquence in the French Chamber. You are that
thing, a born orator. You are not perhaps fitted to bo
statesman, for I doubt if you would have the application oi
bear the tedium necessary, but you have every qualificaUoi
for a diplomatist, a foreign minister."

'* I have not the first qualification. I have no country I"

She looked at him in surprise — ^he spoke with bittern
and self-contempt ; but in a moment he had added, quickly ,-

'* France is nothing to me now, and, though I am Austria
by all ties and afiections, I am not an Austrian before the law.

" That is hardly true," she answered, satisfied with the
planation. *' Since France is little to you, you could be
uralized here whenever you chose, even if Idrac have n
made you one of our nobles, as I believe- the lawyers woul
say it had : and the Emperor, who knows and admires yoc
would, I think, at once give you gladly any mission you pn
ferrcd. You would make so graceful, so perfect, so envied ai
ambassador I Diplomacy has indeed little force now, yet tai
still tells wherever it be found, and it is as rare as blue rose
in the unwecded garden of the world. I do not speak fi
myself, dear ; that you know. Hohenszalras is my belov
home, and it was enough for me before I knew you, and
where else could life ever seem to me so true, so high, so sii
pie, and so near to Qod, as here. But I do remember t
men weary even of happiness when it is unwitnessed, and
quire the press and stir of emulation and excitation ; and,
you feel that want, say so. Have confidence enough in
to believe that your welfare will be ever my highest
Promise me this."

He changed color slightly at her generous and trust
words, but he answered, without a moment's pause, —

" Whenever I am so thankless to fate I will confess
No ; the world and I never valued each other much. I
far better here in the heart of your mountains. Here o
have I known peace and rest."

He spoke with a certain effort and emotion, and he stoo;
over his little son and raised him on her knees.

WANDA, 261

** These children shall grow up at Hohenszalras," he con-

ti nucd, '^ and you shall teach them your love of the open air,

t^fie mountain-solitudes, the simple people, the forest creatures,

i^lie influences and the ways of nature. You care for all those

tHingB, and they make up true wisdom, true contentment.

s for myself, if you always love me I shall ask no more of

"If! Can you be afraid r

^* Sometimes. One always fears to lose what one has nevcf
^rited."
" Ah, my love, do not be so humble I If you saw yourself
I see you, you would be very proud."
She smiled as she spoke, and stretched her hand out to him

the golden head of her child.
He took it and held it against his heart, clasped in both
1:1. m^ own. Bcla, impatient, slipped off his mother's lap to
^ -mrm. Tsue his capture of the daisies ; the butterflies were for
L»s.<:Sden joys, and he was obedient, though in his own little
<w"^a.jr he was proud and imperious. But there was a blue
13VJB. Cterfly jjist in front of him, a lovely blue butterfly, like a
li^^^le bit of the sky come down and dancing about; he could
resist, he darted at it. As he was about to seize it, she
ght his fingers.
* * I have told you, Bela, you are never to touch anything
tlm sfe.t flies or moves. You are cruel."

Sie tried to get away, and his face grew very warm and
pa^^Msionate.

'^ Bela will be cruel if he like," he said, knitting his pretty
bro-^rs.

Though he was not more than four years old, ho knew very
well that he was the Count Bela, to whom all the people gave
liomage, crowding to kiss his tiny hand after mass on holy-
days. He was a very beautiful child, and all the prettier for
nis air of pride and resolution ; he had been early put on a
little naountain-pony, and could ride fearlessly down the fon«t
glades with Otto. All the imperiousness of the great race
which had dealt out life and death so many centuries at their
^pnco through the Ilohe Tauern seemed to have been in •
"Grited by him, coupled with a waywardness and a vanity
that Were not traits of the house of Szalras. It was impossi-
We, cvcn though those immediately about him were wise and

262 WANDA.

prudent, to wholly prevent the effects of the adulation with
which the whole household was eager to wait on every whim
9f the little heir.

^' Bela wishes it 1'* he would say, with an impatient frowii|
whenever his desire was combated or crossed : he had already
the full conviction that to be Bela was to have full right to
rule the world, including in it his brother Gela, who was of
a serious, mild, and yielding disposition and gave up to him
in all things. As compensating qualities, he was very affeo>
tionate and sensitive, and easily moved to self-reproach.

With a step Sabran reached him.

"You dare to disobey your mother?" he said, sternly.
" Ask her forgiveness at once. Do you hear ?"

Bela, who had never heard his father speak in such a tone,
was very frightened, and lost all his color ; but he was resolute,
and had been four years old on Ascension Day. He remained
silent and obstinate.

Sabran put his hand heavily on the child*s shoulder.

" Do you hear me, sir ? Ask her pardon this moment.''

Bela was now fairly stunned into obedience.

" Bela is sorry," he murmured. " Bela begs pardon."

Then he burst into tears.

" You alarmed him rather too much. He is so very young,"
she said to his father, when the child, forgiven and consoled,
had trotted off to his nurse, who came for him.

" He shall obey you, and find his law in your voice, or 1
will alarm him more," he said, with some harshness. " If I
thought he would ever give you a moment's sorrow, I should
hate him 1"

It was not the first time that Sabran had seen his own moro
evil qualities look at him from the beautiful little face of his
elder son ; and at each of those times a sort of remorse came
upon him. " I was unworthy to beget her children," he
thought, with the self-reproach that seldom left him, even
amidst the deep tranquillity of his sati66ed passions and hia
perfect peace of life. Who could tell what trials, what pains,
what shame even, might not fall on her in the years to come,
with the errors that her offspring would have in them from
his blood ?

'* It is foolish," she murmured, " he is but a baby, yet it
hurts one to see the human sin, the human wrath, look out

WANDA. 263

froxn the infant eyes. It hurts one to remember, to realize,
tha.t; one's own angel, one's own little flower, has the human
cu.rso born with it. I express myself ill : do you know what
I mean ? No, you do not, dear; you are a man. He is your
BOTky sind because he will be handsome and brave you will be
pt'oud of him ; but he is not a young angel, not a blossom
firoxi^ Eden, to you."

** You are my religion," he answered; "you shall be his.
W'lieii ho grows older he shall learn that to be born of such a
D^ot-Ker as you is to enter the kingdom of heaven by inherit-
auoe. Shall he be unworthy that inheritance because he
^^ears in him also the taint of my sorry passions, of my de-
graded humanity ?"

'' I>ear, I too am only an erring creature. I am not perfect
as you think me."

** As I know you, and as my children shall know you to be."
'' ITou love me too well," she said, again, " but it is a beau
^4/^w/, and I would not. have you lose it."

^' I shall never lose it whilst I have life," he said, with truth
and passion. " I prize it more because most unworthy it."

She looked at him surprised, and vaguely troubled at the
^tf- reproach and the self-scorn of his passionate utterance.
Seeing that surprise and trouble in her glance, he controlled
"^e emotion that for the moment mastered him.

*' Ah, love," he said, quickly and truly, " if you could but
g^ess Low gross and base a man's life seems to him contrasted
^ith the life of a pure and noble woman I Being born of
you, those children, I think, should be as faultless and as soil-
leas as those pearls that lie on your breast. But then they
are mine also; so already on that boy*s face one sees the sins
®* J^evolt of self-will, of cruelty ; being mine also, your living
pearls are dulled and stained !"

^ greater remorse than she dreamed of made his heart
ache as he said these words ; but she heard in them only the
wteranco of that extreme and unwavering devotion to her
J"'ch he had shown in all his acts and thoughts from the
*'*' Uours of their union.

'^61 WANDA,

CHAPTER XVII.

The Princess Ottilie was scarecly leas huppy than they
the realization of her dreams and prophecies. Those who k
been most bitterly opposed to her alliance with him could fi
DO fault in his actions and his affections.

^' I always said that Wanda ought to marry, since she k.
plainly no vocation for the cloister/' she said, a hundred tii
a year. " And I was certain that M. de Sabran was t^
person above all others to attract and to content her.
has much more imagination than she would be willing
allow, and he is capable at once of fascinating her fancy a. '^
'>f satisfying her intellect. No one can be dull where he
ho is one of those who make hi pluie et le beau temps by
absence or presence ; and, besides that, no commonplace
tion would have ever been enough for her. And he lo'
her like a poet, which he is at once whenever he leaves
world for Beethoven and Bach. I cannot imagine why
should have opposed the marriage merely because he had
two millions in the Bank of France."

" Not for that," answered the grand duke ; " rather boca"«-^- ^
he broke the bank of Monte Carlo, and for other sim:*-^^''
reasons. A great player of baccara is scarcely the persoi^ '^
endow with the wealth of the Szalras."

** The wealth is tied up tightly enough at the least, ^» *^.^
you will admit that he was yet more eager than you th»-'^ ^
should be so."

" Oh, yes I he behaved very well. I never denied it IX3 ***
she has placed it in his power to make away with the wl^*-^^*^
of Idrac, if he should ever choose. That was very unw5.^^ '
but we had no power to oppose."

" You may be quite sure that Idrac will go intact to "t-*^^
second son, as it has always done ; and I believe that but-
his own exertions Idrac would now be beneath the Dars
waters. Perhaps you never heard all that story of
flood?"

" I only hope that if I have detractors you will defend,
from th%m/* said Prince Lilicnhohe, giving up argument.

WANDA. 2()5

Fair weather is always especially fair in the eyes of those
who have foretold at sunset that the morrow would be 6ne ;
and so the married life of Wanda von Szalriis was especially
delightful as an object of contemplation, as a theme of ex-
ultation, to the princess, who alone had been clear-sighted
enough to foresee the future. She really also loved Sabran '
like a son, and took pride and pleasure in the filial tenderness
h^ showed her, and in his children, with the beautiful blue
eyes that had gleams of light in them like sapphires. The
children themselves adored her ; and even the bold and wilfi^l
Bela was as quiet as a startled fawn beside this lovely little
lady, with her snow-white hair and her delicate smile, whose
cascades of lace always concealed such wonderful bonbon
boxes, and gilded cosaques, and illuminated stories of the saints.

Almost all their time was spent at Hohenszalras. A few
winter months in Vienna was all they had ever passed away
from it, except one visit to Idrac and the Hungarian estates.
The children never left it for a day. He shared her aifection
for the place, and for the hardy and frank mountain-people
around them. He seemed to her to forget Romaris entirely,
and beyond the transmission of moneys to its priest, he took
DO heed of it. She hesitated to recall it to him, since to do
so might have seemed to remind him that it was she, not he,
who was suzerein in the Hohe Tauern. Komaris was but a
bleak rock, a strip of sea-swept sand : it was natural that it
should have no great hold on his affections, only recalling as
it did all that its lords had lost.

" I hate its name," he said impetuously once ; and, seeing
the surprise upon her face, he added, " I was very lonely and
wretched there ; I tried to take interest in it because you bade
me, but I failed ; all I saw, all I thought of, was yourself, and
I believed you as far and forever removed from me as though
you had dwelt in some other planet. No I perhaps I am
superstitious : I do not wish you to go to Romaris. I believe
it would bring us misfortune. The sea is full of treachery,
the sands are full of graves."

She smiled.

" Superstition is a sort of parody of faith : I am sure you

are not superstitious. I do not care to go to Romaris ; I like

to cheat myself into the belief that you were born and bred in

the Iselthal. Otto said to me the othci day, ' My lord most

M 23

266 WANDA.

be a soQ of the soil, or how could he know oui mountains so
well as he does, and how could he anywhere have learned to
shoot like that?'"

" 1 am very glad that Otto does me so much honor. When
he first met me, he would have shot me like a fox, if you had
given the word. Ah, my love ! how often I think of you that
day, in your white sergb, with your girdle of gold and green,
and your long gold-headed staff, and your little ivory horn !
You were truly a chatelaine of the old mystical German days.
You had some SchlUsselblume in your hand. They were
truly the key-flower to my soul, though, alas I treasures, I
fear, you found none on your entrance there."

" I shall not answer you, since to answer would be to flattei
you, and Aunt Ottilie already does that more than is good for
you," she said, smiling, as she passed her fingers over the
waves of his hair. ". By the way, whom shall wo invite to
meet the Lilienhoho ? Will you make out a list ?"

^^ The grand duke does not share Princess Ottilie's goodness
for me."

" What would you ? He has been made of buckram and
parchment ; besides which, nothing that is not German has,
to his mind, any right to exist. By the way, Egon wrote to
me this morning : he will be here at last."

He looked up quickly in unspoken alarm. " Your cousia
Egon ? Here ?"

" Why are you so surprised ? I was sure that sooner or
later he would conquer that feeling of being unable to meet
you. I begged him to come now: it is eight whole years
since I have seen him. When once you have met you will
be friends — for my sake."

He was silent ; a look of trouble and alarm was still upon
his face.

" Why should you suppose it any easier to him now than
then ?" he said, at length. " Men who love you do not
change. There are women who compel constancy sans le
pouloir. The meeting can but be painful to Prince V^skrhely."

" Dear R6n6," she answered, in some surprise, " my nearest
male relative and I cannot go on forever without seeing each
other. Even these years have done Egon a great deal of
harm. He has been absent from the court for fear of meeting
lis. He has lived with his hussars, or voluntarily confined ta

WANDA. 267

his estates, until ho grows morose and solitary. I am deeply
Attacliod to him. I do not wish to have the remorse upon
mo of having caused the ruin of his gallant and brilliant life.
When he has been once here, he will like you ; men who are
brave have always a certain sympathy. When he has seen
you here, he will realize that destiny is unchangeable, and
grow reconciled to the knowledge that I am your wife."

Sahran gave an impatient gesture of denial, and began to
^n:ite the list of invitations for the autumn circle of guests
who were to meet the Prince and Princess of Lilienhohe.

Once every summer and every autumn Hohcnszalras was
filled with a brilliant house-party, for she sacrificed her own
P^i^onal preferences to what she believed to be for the good
of her husband. She knew that men cannot always live alone,
— that contact with the world is needful to their minds and
oracing for it. She had a great dread lest the ghost ennui
Bnould show his pale face over her husband's shoulder, for she
'^^^Hzed that from the life of the asphalte of the Champs-
•Elys6es to the life amidst the pine forests of the Isclthal was
^^ abrupt transition that might easily bring tedium in its train.
-^^d tedium is the most temble and the most powerful foe
love ever encounters.

. Sabran completed the list, and, when he had corrected it
into due accordance with all Lilienhohe's personal and politi-
cal sympathies and antipathies, despatched the invitations, " for
?Jght days," written on cards that bore the joint arms of the
wuntB of Idrac and the Counts of Szalras. He had adopted
*ae armorial bearings of the countship of Idrac as his own, and
^^^nied disposed to abandon altogether those of the Sabrans
^* Romaris.

. When they were written, he went out by himself and rode

}?^S and fast through the mists of a chilly afternoon, througt

*^Pping forest ways and over roads where little water-courses

•prea<i in shining shallows. The coming of Egon V^krhely

Rubied him and alarmed him. He had always dreaded his

nrst meeting with the Magyar noble, and as the years had

Japped by one after another, and her cousin had failed to

Sf ^Qurage to see her again, he had begun to believe that

. ®y «ind Vkskrhely would remain always strangers. His wish

1 ^<^otten his thought. He knew that she wrote at inter-

^^ to her cousin, and he to her ; he knew that at the birth

2{\H IVAJS'DA,

of each of their children some magnificcDt gii\, with a formal
letter of felicitation, had come from the colonel of the Whit^
Hussars; but as time had gone on and Prince E^on b&A
avoided all possibility of meeting them, he had grown to sup*
pose that the wound given her rejected lover was too profoun^
ever to close. Nor did he wonder that it was so : it seeiD^
to him that any man who loved her must do so for all eterai^yt
if eternity there should be. To learn suddenly that witl^n
another month Y^s^rhely would be his guest, distressed s^^^
alarmed him in a manner she never dreamed. They had b<^^
80 happy. On their cloudless heaven there seemed to hincB. ^
rise a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but bearing witb ^^
disaster and a moonless night.

" Perhaps he will have forgotten," he thought, as he stro"^*
to shake off his forebodings. " We were so young then. J^®
was not even as old as 1 1"

And he rode fast and furiously homewards as the daydir^^
in, and the lighted windows of the great castle scemeJ.
smile at him as he saw it high up above the darkness of ^'^^
woods and of the evening mists, his home, beloved, sac*"^^ ^
infinitely dear to him, — dear as the soil of the mother-couiB *- ^^
which the wrecked mariner reaches afler facing death on
deep sea.

" God save her from suffering by me I" he said, in
unconscious prayer, as he drew rein before the terrace
Hohenszalras. Almost he believed in God through her.

When, after dressing, he went into the Saxo room,
peace and beauty of the scene had never struck him so strong
as it did now, coming out of the shadows of the wet w<
and the gloom of his own anxieties, — anxieties the heav
and the more wearing because they could be shared by no o
The soft, full light of the wax candles fell on the Louis S»
embroideries, and the white wood-work of the panelling, i
the china borders of the mirrors. The Princess Ottilie
making silk-netting for the children's balls ; his wife was u
ing. and Bela and Gela, who were there for their privil<
half-hour before dinner, were sitting together on a white b^
skin, playing with the colored balls of the game of solitaL
The soft light from the chandeliers and sconces of the
Royale china fell on the golden heads and the velvet frocks
the children, on the old lace and the tawny colored plush

WANDA. 2G9

H^At mother's skirts, on the great masses of flowers in the Saxe
btwrls, and on the sleeping forms of the big dogs Donau and
Nora. It was an interior that would have charmed Chardiu,
thttC would have been worthy of Vandyck.

As he looked at it, he thought, with a sort of ecstasy, '^ All
thac 18 mine;'* and then his heart-strings tightened as he
thought again, " If she knew "

bhe looked up at his entrance with a welcome on her face
that needed no words.

' '' iVhere have you been in the rain all this long aflernoon ?
l!ou see we have a fire, even though it is midsummer. Bela,
ri>^, and make your obeisance, and push that chair nearer the
hearin."

The two little boys stood up and kissed his hand, one aft<er
arotht^r, with the pretty formality of greeting on which she
always insisted ; then they went back to their colored ghtss
balls, and he sank into a low chair beside his wife with a sigh
half of fatigue, half of content.

" Yes, I have been riding all the time," he said to her. " I
am not sure that Siegfried approved it. But it does one good
•sometimes; and after the blackness and the wetness of .that
forest huw charming it is to come home I"

She looked at him with wistfulness.

" I winh you were not vexed that Egon is coming I I am
sure you have been thinking of it as you rode."

'' Yes, I have ; but I am ashamed of doing so. He is your
cousin ; that shall be enough for me. I will do my best to
make him welcome. Only there is this difficulty : a welcome
from me to him will seem in itself an insult."

" An insult 1 when you are my husband ? One would
think you were my jdgermeister. Dear mother mine, help
me to scold him."

" I am a stranger," he said, under his breath.

She smiled a little, but she said, with a certain hauteur,-^

" You are master of Hohenszalras, as your son will be when
our places shall know us no more. Do not let the phantom
of Egon come between us, I beseech you. His real presence
never will do so, that is certain."

" Nothing shall come between us," said Sabran, as his hand
took and closed upon hers. " Forgive me if I have brought
some gloomy nix out of the dark woods with me : he will flee

23*

270 WANDA.

away in the light of this beloved white-room. No evil spii
could dare stay by your hearth."

" There are nix in the forests," said Bela in a whisper^ ^

his brother.

" Ja 1" said Gela, Dot comprehending.

" We will kill them all when we aro big," said Bela«

"Ja! jar said Gela.

Bela knew very well what nix were. Otto had told him
about them as his pony trotted down the drives.

" Or we will t^ike them prisoners," he added, remombei
that his mother never allowed anything to be killed, not ei
butterflies.

" Ja !" said Qela again, rolling the pretty blue and pink
amber balls about in the white fur of the bearskin.

Gela's views of life were simplified by the disciple's law
imitation ; they were restricted to doing whatever Bela
when that was possible ; when it was not possible he remaic:^
still, adoring Bela, with his little serious face as calm as a goc^ ^ &

She used to think that when they should grow up B^^s^^*
would be a great soldier like Wallenstein or Cond6, and (3^^^ ■*
would stay at homo and take care of his people here in -t^^^rm^
green, lone, happy Ischhal.

Time ran on, and the later summer made the blooming Fm^^J
grow brown on all the alpine-meadows, and made the gani^^°
of Hohenszalras blossom with a million autumnal glories ^ _ ''^
brought also the season of the first house-party. Egon ~ ^

hely was to arrive one day before the Lilienhohe and the ot'
guests.

" I want Egon so much to see Bela I" she said, with -t:^^^
thoughtless cruelty of a happy mother forgetful of the p^^*"
of a rejected lover.

" I fear Bela will find little favor in your cousin's e]
since he is mine too," said Sabran.

" Oh, Egon is content to be only our cousin by thia-

" You think so ? You do not know yourself if you im
that."

" Egon is very loyal. lie would not come here if he oo*** *
not greet you honestly." ^^

Sabran*s face flushed a little, and he turned away, 'm^ ®
vaguely dreaded the advent of Egon Vh«2irhely, and th^
were so many innocent words uttered in the carelessness of '

WANDA 271

timate intercoiirso which stabbed him to the quick : she had
80 wounded him all unconscious of her act.

'* Shall we have a game of billiards ?" he asked her, as they
stood in the Kittersasd, whilst the rain fell fast without She
played billiards well, and could hold her own against him,
though his game was one that had often been watched by a
crowded galMe in Paris with eager speculation and heavy
wager. An hour afterwards they were still playing, when the
clang of a great bell announced the approach of the carriage
which had been sent to Windisch-Matrey.

'* Come !' ' she said, joyously, as she put back her cue in its
rest ; but Sabran drew back.

" Receive your cousin first alone," he said. " He must re-
sent my presence here. I will not force it on him on the
threshold of your house."

** Of our house I Why will you use wrong pronouns ?
Believe me, dear, Egon is too generous to bear you the ani>
mosity you think."

" Then he never loved you," said Sabran, somewhat impa-
tiently, as he sent one ball against another with a sharp colli-
sion. " I will come if you wish it," ho added ; " but I think
it is not in the best taste to so assert tnyself."

" Egon is only my cousin and your guest. You are the
master of Hohenszalras. Come I you were not so difficult
when you received the Emperor."

" I had done the Emperor no wrong," said Sabran, control-
ling the impatience and reluctance he still felt.

*' You have done Egon none. I should not have been his
wife had I never been yours."

" Who knows ?" murmured Sabran, as he followed her into
the entrance-hall. The stately figure of Egon V5fl5,rhely, en-
veloped in furs, was just passing through the arched door- way.

She went towards him with a glad welcome 'ind both hands
outstretched.

Prince Egon bowed to the ground, then took both her
hands in his and kissed her on the cheek.

Sabran, who grew very pale, advanced and greeted him with
ceremonious grace.

" My wife has bidden me welcome you, prince, but it would
be presumptuous in me, a stranger, to do that. All het
kindred must be dear and sacred here."

272 WANDA.

Egon Yilsllrliely, with an effort to which he had for yean
heen vainly schooling himself, stretched out his hand to take
her husband's ; but, as he did so, and his glance for the first
time dwelt on Sabran, a look surprised and indefinitely per-
plexed came on his own features. Unconsciously he hesitated
a moment; then, controlling himself, he replied with a few
fitting words of courtesy and friendship. That there should
be some embarrassment, some constraint, was almost inevitable,
and did not surprise her : she saw both, but she also saw that
both were hidden under the serenity of high breeding and
worldly habit. The most difficult moment had passed : they
went together into the Rittersaal, talked together a little on a
few indifferent topics, and in a little space Prince Egon with-
drew to his own apartments to change his travelling-clothes.
8abran left him on the threshold of his chamber.

Yksitrhely locked the doors, locking out even his servant,
threw off his furs, and sat down, leaning his head on his hands.
The meeting had cost him even more than he had feared that
it would do. For five years he had dreaded this moment, and
its pain was as sharp and as fresh to him as though it had
been unforeseen. To sleep under the same roof with the
husbpnd of Wanda von Szalras 1 He had overrated his power
of self-control, underrated his power of suffering, when to
please her he had consented after five years to visit Hohens-
zalras. What were five years? — half a century would not
have changed him.

Under the plea of fatigue, he, who had sat in his saddle
eighteen hours at a stretch and was braced to every form of
endurance in the forest chase and in the tented field, sent ex-
cuses to his host for remaining in his own rooms until the
Ave Maria rung. When he at length went down to the blue-
room where she was, he had recovered, outwardly at least,
his tranquillity and his self-possession, though here, in this
familiar, once beloved chamber, where every object had been
dear to him from his boyhood, a keener trial than any he had
passed through awaited him, as she led forward to meet him
a little boy clad in white velvet, with a cloud of light golden
hair above deep blue luminous eyes, and said to him, —

" Egon, this is my Bela. You will love him a little for my
sake ?'^

Yiish,rhely felt a chill run through him like the cold of

WANDA. 273

death as he stooped towards the child; but ho smiled and
touched the boy's forehead with his lips.

" May the spirit of our lost Bela be with him and dwell
in his heart 1" he murmured : " better I cannot wish him."

With an effort he turned to Sabran.

" Your little son is a noble child : you may with reason be
proud of him. fie is very like you in feature. I see no trace
of the Szalras."

"The other boy is more like Wanda," replied Sabran,
sensible of a certain tenacity of observation with which V^-
slirhely was gazing at him. " As for my daughter, she is
too young for any one to say whom she will resemble. All I
desire is that she should be like her mother, physically and
spiritually."

" Of course," said the prince, absently, still looking from
Sabran to the child, as if in the endeavor to follow some re-
membrance that eluded him. The little face of Bela was &
miniature of his father's, they were as alike as it is possible
for a child and a man to be so, and Egon VJisarhely per-
plexedly mused and wondered at vague memories which rose
up to him as he gazed on each.

" And what do you like best to do, my little one ?" he
asked of Bela, who was regarding him with curious and hostile
eyes.

" To ride," answered Bela, at once, in his pretty uncertain
German.

" There you are a true Szalras at least. And your brother
Gela, can he ride yet ? Where is Gela, by the way ?"

" He is asleep," said Bela, with some contempt. " He is a
little thing. Yes, he rides, but it is in a chair-saddle. I is
not real riding."

" I see. Well, when you come and see me you shall have
some real riding, on wild horses if you like." And he told the
child stories of the great Magyar steppes, and the herds of
young horses, and the infinite delight of the unending gallop
over the wide hushed plain ; and all the while his heart ached
bitterly, and the sight of the child — who was her child, yet
had that stranger's face — was to him like a jagged steel being
turned and twisted inside a bleeding wound. Bela, however,
was captivated by the new visions that rose before him.

" Bela will come to Hungary," be said, with condescension^

274 WANDA,

And then, with an added thought, continued, " I think Be'
has great lauds there. Otto said so."

"Bela has nothing at all,*' said Sahran, sternly. *<Be--^
talks great nousonso souictinies, and it will bo better he sho
go to sleep with his brother."

Bcia looked up shyly under his golden oload of hu
** Folko is Bela's," ho said, under hb breath. Folko was
pony.

" No," said Sabran, " Folko belongs to your mother. S

only allows you to have him so long as you are good to bim—

" Bela is always good to him," he said, decidedly.

" Bela is faultless in his own estimation," said his mothg- w

with a smile. '< He is too little to be wise enough to see hi^ ii

self as he is."

This view made Bela's blue eyes open very wide and
very sorrowfully. It was humiliating. He longed to get ba^
to Gcla, who always listened to him dutifully, and never
anything in answer except an entirely acquiescent *' Ja I Jf
which was indeed about the limitation of 6ela*s linjnial pow<
In a few moments, indeed, his governess came for him f
took him away« a little dainty figure in his ivory velvet t
his blue silk stockings, with his long golden curls hanging
his waist.

*' It is so difficult to keep him from being spoiled," ^^Kne
said, as the door closed on him. '' The people make a li ^ ^= ^^
prince, a little god, of him. He believes himself to be boicxm^ ^
thing wonderful. Gela, who is so gentle and quiet, is 1^^^
quite in the shade."

" I suppose Gela takes your title ?" said V^is^trhely to t» m
host. " It is usual with the Austrian families for the secc^""
son to have some distant appellation."

" They are babies," said Sabran, impatiently. " It will ^
tipje enough to settle those matters when they are old enoi^^"
to be court- pages or cadets. They are Bela and Qela at pT^^
ent. The only real republic is childhood."

" I am afraid Bela is the tyrannus to which all reput^l * ^
succumb," said Wanda, with a smile. " He is extreoo^y
autocratic in his notions, and in his family. In all ^^
* make-believe' games he is crowned."

*' He is a beautiful child," said her cousin, and she ^^
swered, still smiling, —

WANDA, 275

" Oh, yes : he is so like R6n6 1"

Egon V5flh.rhely turned his face from her. The dinner
was somewhat dull, and the evening seemed tedious, despite
the efforts of Sabran to promote conyersation, and the ScartS
which he and his guest played together. They were all sen-
sible that some chord was out of tune, and glad that on the
morrow a large house-party would be there to spare them a
^ntiuuation of this difficult intercourse.

" Your cousin will never forgive me," said Sabran to her
when they were alone. ^* I think, besides his feeling that I
stand forever between you and him, there is an impatience
of me as a stranger and one unworthy you."

" You do yourself and him injustice," she answered. " I
shall be unhappy if you and he be not friends.'*

** Then unhappy you will be, my beloved. We both adore
you."

" Do not say that. He would not be here if it were so."

'' Ah ! look at him when he looks at Bcla I"

She sighed : she had felt a strong emotion on the sight of
her cousin, for Egon Y^^rhely was much changed by these
years of pain. His grand carriage and his martial beauty
were unaltered, but all the fire and the light of earlier years
were gone out of his face, and a certain gloom and austerity
had come there. To all other women he would have been
the more attractive for the melancholy which was in such apt
contrast with the heroic adventures of his life ; but to her
the change in him was a mute reproach which filled her with
remorse though she had done no wrong.

Meantime, Prince Egon, throwing open his window, leaned
out into the cold rainy night, as though a hand were at his
throat and suffocating him. And amidst all the tumult of
his pain and revolt one dim thought was incessantly intrude
ing itself: he was always thinking, as he recalled the face of
Sabran and of Sabran 's little son, ^' Where have I seen those
blue eyes, those level brows, those delicate curved lips ?"

They were so familiar, yet so strange to him. When he
would have given a name to them, they receded into the
shadows of some far-away past of his own, — so far away that
he could not follow them. He sat up half the night, letting
the wind beat and the rain fall on him. He could not sleep
under the same roof with Sabran.

276 WANDA.

CHAPTER XVin.

On the morrow thirty or forty people arrived, among tli«»
Baron Kaulnitz, en cong6 from his embassy.

V What think you of Sabran ?" he asked of Egon YhB^^'
hely, who answered, —

*^ He is a perfect gentleman. He is a charming com'pani^'i'
He plays admirably at icarU^

" EcarU ! I spoke of his moral worth. What is your i*'*'
prcssion of that?"

*^ If he had not satisfied her as to that, Wanda would 0^^
be his wife," answered the prince, gravely. ** He has gvr^^
her beautiful children, and it seems to me that he renders l^ '
perfectly happy. We should all be grateful to him."

" The children are certainly very beautiful,*' said Bai
Kaulnitz, and said no more. ,,

'^ The people all around are unfeignedly attached to hinB 9
VhisJlrhely continued, with generous effort. " I hear nothir»^
but his praise. Nor do I think it the conventional comp^^^
ment which loyalty leads them to pay the husband of th^*^
countess: it is very genuine attachment. The men of tl^^
old Archduchy are not easily won: it is only qualities c^*
daring and manliness which appeal to their sympathies. Th^^
he has gained their affections is as great testimony to ^^^
character in one way as that he has gained Wanda's is ^^
another. At Idrac also the people adore him, and Sclar
nians are usually slow to see merit in strangers."

*^ In short, he is a paragon," said the ambassador, with
dubious little smile. '* So much the better, since he is irrev
oably connected with us."

Sabran was at no time seen to greater advantage than whc^
he was required to receive and entertain a large house-part, ^
Always graceful, easily witty, endowed with that winning
which is to society as cream is to the palate, the charm
possessed for women and the ascendency he oould at tii
exercise over men — even men who were opposed to hi
were never more admirably displayed than when he was th
master of Hohenszalras, with crowned heads, and princes,

WA^DA. 277

^plonaatibCs, and beauties gathered beneath his roof. His
mastery, moreover, of all field-sports, and his skill at ail games
that demanded either intelligence or audacity, made him popu-
lar i^ith a hardy and brilliant nobility : his daring in a boar-
hunt at noon was equalled by his science at whist in the even-
iDpC- Strongly prejudiced against him at the onset, the great
nobles who were his guests had long ceased to feel anything
for him except respect and r^ard ; whilst the women admired
him none the less for that unwavering devotion to his wife
vUicli made even the conventionalities of ordinary flirtation
vholl^ impossible to him. With all his easy gallantry and
his elcxjuent homage to them, they all knew that at heart he
was as cold as the rocks to all women save one.

^' It is really the knight's love for his lady,*' said the
Countess Brancka once, and Sabran, overhearing, said, " Yes ;
and I think, countess, that if there were more like my
lady on earth, knighthood might revive on other scenes than
Wagner^s.''

Between him and the Countess Brancka there was a vague
mtan^ble enmity, veiled under the protection of courtesy.
They could ill have told why they disliked each other ; but
^^^ cLid so. Beneath their polite or trivial or careless speech
*"®y often aimed at each other's feelings or foibles with accu-
^^y and malice. She had stayed at Hohenszalras more or
less time each year in the course of her flight between France
*?^ Vienna, and was there now. He^dmired his wife's equa-
nimity and patience under the trial of Madame Olga's frivoli-
^^} but he did not himself forbear from as much sarcasm as
^*s possible in a man of the world to one who was his guest
and by marriage his relative, and he was sensible of her en-
^^^y to himself, though she paid him many compliments and
*?'^® times too assiduously sought his companionship. " ElU
jau ieranron, mais gave d, &es])attesr he said once to bi«
wife Concerning her.
oabyan appraised her indeed with unflattering accuracy.
® "^Oew by heart all the wiles and wisdom of such a woman
bHq y[2A, Her affectations did not blind him to her real
ih '^?^'' ^^^ ^^^ exterior frivolity did not conceal from him
• jf '^^en and subtle self-interest and the strong passions which
^^•'^d beneath it.

^**^ felt that she had an enemy in him, and, partly in self-

24

278 WANDA.

protection, partly in malice, she set herself to convert a
into a friend, — perhaps, without altogether coufossing it
herself, into a lover as well.

The happiness that prevailed at Hohenszalrashurg annoj^^^ -^
her, for no other reason than that it wearied her to witness* it.

8he did not envy it, because she did not want happiness at

all ; she wanted perpetual change, distraction, temptation, |^
B.on, triumph, — in a word, excitement, which becomes
drug most unobtainable to those who have early exhau^
all the experiences and varieties of pleasure.

Madame Brancka had always an unacknowledged res^
ment s^inst her sister-in-law for being the owner of all
vast possessions of the Szalras. *^ If Gela had lived !"
thought, constantly. ** If I had only had a son by him
fore he died, this woman would have had her dower
nothing more." That his sister should possess all, whilst
had by her later marriage lost her right even to a share
that vast' wealth, was a perpetual bitterness to her.

Stefan Brancka was indeed rich, but he was an insentP^QB. Ae
gambler. She was extravagant to the last degree, with ^"-^^
the costly caprices of a cocodette who reigned in the two
brilliant capitals of the world. They were often troubled
their own folly, and again and again the generosity of ^^ ^
elder brother had rescued them from humiliating embarr:
mentiS. At such moments she had almost hated Wanda
Szalras for these large possessions, of which, according to
own views, her sister-in-law made no use whatever,
time, she wished Egon VJls5.rhely to die childless, and ^
that end had not been unwilling for the woman he loved. ^
marry any one else. She had reasoned that the Szalras
tates would go to the Crown or the Church if Wanda

not marry ; whilst all the power and possessions of

Viisiirhely must, if he had no sons, pass in due course to ^ ^
brother. She hud the subtle acutoness of her race, and ^••®
had the double power of being able at once to wait very tS^
tiently and to spring with swift rage on what she needed. ^^
her sister-in-law she always appeared a mere flutterer on
breath of fashion. The grave and candid nature of the
could not follow or perceive the intricacies of the other.

^* She is a cruel woman, and a perilous one," Sabrao
one day, to his wife's surprise.

le

WANDA. 279

She answered him that Olga Brancka had always socuied
(o her a mere frivoluus mondainey like so many others o^
their world.

*' No,*' he persicted. " You i»jre wrong ; she is not a but-
terfly. She has too much energy. She is a profoundly
immoral woman, also. Look at her eyes.'*

" That is Stefan's affair," she answered, " not ours. He is
indifferent."

" Or unsuspicious ? Did your brother care for her ?"

'* He was madly in love with her. She was only sixteen
when he married her. He fell at Solferino half a year later.
When she married my cousin it shocked and dbgusted me.
Perhaps I was foolish to take it thus, but it seemed such a sin
against Gela. To die to, and not to be even remembered I"

" Did your cousin Egon approve this second marriage?"

'* No : he opposed it ; he had our fecliog about it. But
Stefan, though very young, was beyond any control. He had
the fortune as ho had the title of his mother, the Countesd
Branoka, and Olga bewitched him as she had done my
brother."

*' She is a witch, a wicked witch," said Sabran.

The great autumn party was brilliant and agreeable. All
things went well, and the days were never monotonous. The
people were well assorted, and the social talent of their host
made their out-door sports and their in-door pastimes constantly
varied, whilst Hungarian musicians and Viennese comedians
played waltzes that would have made a statue dance, and
represented the little comedies for which he himself had been
famous at the Mirlitons.

He was not conscious of it, but he was passionately eager
for Egon V2is5.rhely to be witness not only of his entire happi>
ness, but of his social powers. To V^^rhely he seemed to
put forward the perfection of his life with almost insolence,
with almost exaggeration to exhibit the joys and the gifts
with which nature and chance had so liberally dowered him.
The stately Ms^ar soldier, sitting silent and melancholy
apart, watched him with a curious pang, that in a lesser nature
would have been a consuming envy. Now and then, though
Sabran and his wife spoke rarely to each other in the presence
of others, a glance, a smile, a word passed between them that
told of absolute unuttered tenderness, profound and iucxhausti-

SJ80 WANDA.

bie as the deep seas ; in the very sound of their laughter,
the mere accent of their voices, in a careless caress to one
their children, in a light touch of the hand to each other as
rode, or as they met in a room, there was the expression a
perfect joy . of a perfect faith between them, which pierced
heart of the watcher of it. Yet would he not have had
otherwise at her cost.

*' Since she has chosen him as the companion of her life,
is well that he should be what she can take pride in, a
what all men can praise," he thought ; and yet the happin
of this man seemed to him an audacity, an insolence. W
human lover could merit her?

Between himself and Sabran there was the most perf(
courtesy, but no intimacy. They both knew that if for fi
years they met continually they would never be friends,
her endeavors to produce sympathy between them fail
Sabran was conscious of a constant observation of him by
cousin, which seemed to him to have a hostile motive, a
which irritated him extremely, though he did not allow 1
irritation any visible vent. Olga Brancka perceived, and, w
the objectless malice of women of her temperament, amu
herself with fanning, the slumbering enmity, as children pl-
at fire.

" You cannot expect Egon to love you,'* she said once
her host. ^^ You know he was the betrothed of Wanda fi
her childhood, — at least in his own hopes, and in the fut
sketched for them by their families."

" I was quite aware of that before I married," he answer^
her, indififerently. '* But those family arrangements are tn:*
quil disposals of destiny, which, if they be disturbed, 1
no great trace of trouble. The prince is young still, an
famous soldier as well as a great noble. He has no lack
consolation if he need it, and I cannot believe that he do<

Madame Olga laughed. ^

'^ You know as well as I do that Egon adores the very SO-S
rup your wife's foot touches."

** I know he is her much-beloved cousin," said Sabran, i
tone which admitted of no reply.

To ViisJirhely his sister-in-law said, confidentially, —

** Dear Egon, why did you not stay on the steppes or
main with your hussars ? You make le beau Sibran jealo

r6

WANDA. 281

*' Jealous !*' said YhsJlrhely, with a bitter smile. *' lie has
muoh cause, when she has neither eye nor ear, neither memory
nor thought of any kind, for any living thing except himself
and thosQ children who are all his very portraits 1 Why do
YOU saj these follies, Olga ? You know that my cousin
Wanda chose her lord out of all the world, and loves him as
no one would have supposed she had it in her to love any
mortal creature.*'

He spoke imperiously, harshly, and she was silenced.

« What do you think of him ?" she said, with hesitation.

'< Every one asks me that question. I am not his keeper."

^' But you must form some opinion. He is virtual lord of
Hohensaalras, and I believe she has made over to him all the
appanages of Idrao, and his children will have everything."

" Are they not her natural heirs ? Who should inherit
from her, if not her sons ?'*

" Of course ; of course they will inherit, only they inherit
nothing from him. It was certainly a great stroke of fortune
for a landless gentleman to make. Why does the geiitUJwmme
pauvre always so captivate women ?"

" What do you mean to insinuate, Olga ?" he asked her,
with a stem glance of his great black eyes.

" Oh, nothing ; only his history was peculiar. I remember
his arrival in France, his first appearance in society : it is
many years ago now. All the Faubourg received him, but
some said at the time that it was too romantic to be true, —
those Mexican forests, that long exile of the Sabran, the sud-
den appearance of this beautiful young marquis: you will
grant it was romantic. I suppose it was the romance that
made even Wanda^s clear head turn a little. It is a mn capi-
*eux for many women. And then such a life in Paris afler
it, — duels, baccara^ bonnes fortunes^ clever comedies, a touch
like l<iszt*s, a sudden success in the Chamber, — it was all so
romantic ; it was bound to bring him at last to his haven, the
Prince Charmant of an enchauted castle ! Only enchanted
castles sometimes grow dull, and Princes Charmants are not
always am usable by the same ch^ltelaiue 1"

Kgon VJls5,rhely, with his eyes sombre under their long
black lashes, listened to the easy bantering phrases with the
vague suspicion of an honest and slow-witted man that a
woman is trying to drop poison into his ear which she wishes

24*

t82 WANDA,

to pa88 as eau 8ucr4, He did Dot altogether follow her
UQuatioD, but he understood something; of her drift. Th<
were alone in a corner of the ball-room, whilst the cotilk
was at its height, conducted by Sabran, who had been
mous for its leadership in Paris and Vienna. He stooped
head and looked her full in her eyes.

'* Look here, Olga. I am not sure what you mean, but
believe you are tired of seeing my cousin^s happiness, meui ■■ >i

because it is something with which you cannot interfere,
myself, I would protect her happiness as I would her hoi
if I thought either endangered. Whether you or I like tr
Marquis de Sabran is wholly beyond the question. She loi^'^^^^'Gs
him, and she has made him one of us. His honor is nc --^^

ours. For myself, I would defend him in his absence **

though Jie were my own brother. Not for his sake at aI31B- i;
for hers. I do not express myself very well, but you kumadz^^w
what I mean. Here is Max returning to claim you."

Silenced, and a little alarmed, the Countess Brancka rcr^^'se
and went off to her place in the cotillon.

V^^rhcly, sitting where she had left him, watched fc>"M^e
mazes of the cotillon, the rhythm of the tzigane musicii
coming to his ear freighted with a thousand familiar
orics of the czardas danced madly in the long Hangar^ ^i-*^
nights. Time had been when the throb of the tsigane strii
had stirred all his pulses like magic, but now all his
bright life seemed numb and frozen in him.

His eyes rested on his cousin, where she stood oonvenil
with a crown-prince, who was her chief guest, and passed
her to follow the movements of Sabran, who with supreme
and elegance was leading a new intricate measure down
ball-room.

She was happy, that he could not doubt. Every actioi»?
every word, every glance, said so with a meaning not to ^^
doubted. He thought she had never looked so handsome ^^
she did to-night since that far-away day in her childhood wh^"?
he had seen her with the red and white roses in her lap ^"^
the crown upon her curls. She had the look of her ehildboo^
in* her eyes, that serene and glad light which had been dimffl^"^
by her brothers' death, but which now shone there again tra*^"
quil, radiant, and pure as sunlight is. She wore white velvc^^*
and white bro'*ade; her breast was hidden in white roues; ali^-^

WAIWA. 283

wore her famous pearls and the ribbons of the Starred Cr^ss
of Anstria and of the Prussian Order of Merit ; she held in
ber hand a large painted fan which had belonged to Maria
Theresa. Every now and then, as she talked with her royal
guest, her glance strayed down the room to where her bus*
band was, and lingered there a moment with a little smile.

V^Lslirhely watched her for a while, then rose abruptly, and
made his way out of the ball-room and the state apartments
down the con'idors of the old house he knew so well towards
his own chamber. He thout^ht he would write to her and
leave upon the morrow. What need was there for him to
stay on in this perpetual pain ? He had done enough for the
world, which had seen him under the roof of Hohcnszalras.

As he took his way through the long passages, tapestry-
hung or oak-panelled, which led across the great building to
his own set of rooms in the clock tower, he passed an open
door out of which a light was streaming. As lie glanced
within, he saw it was the children *s sleeping-apartment, of
which the door was open because the night was warm, un-
usually wrirm for the heart of the Gross Glockner mountains.
An impulse he could not have explained made him pause and
enter. The three little white beds of carved Indian work,
with curtains of lace, looked very snowy and peaceful in the
pale light from a hanging lamp. The children were all asleep :
the one nearest the door was Bela.

y5£5.rhely stood and looked at him. His head was thrown
back on his pillow, and his arms were above his head. His
golden hair, which was cut straight and low over his forehead,
had been punhed back in his slumber ; he looked more like
his father than in his waking hours, for as he dreamed there
was a look of coldness and of scorn upon bis childish face,
which made him so resemble Sabran that the man who looked
an him drew his breath hard with pain.

The night-nurse rose from her seat, reeogniziug Prince
Ggon, whom she had known from his childhood.

"The little count is so like the marquis,** she said, ap-
proaching ; " so is Herr Gela. Ah, my prince, you remem-
ber the noble gentlemen whose names they bear ? God send
they may be like them in their lives and not in their deaths I'*

"An early death is good," said Vh^^rhely, as he stood be-
tide the child's bed. He thought how good it would have been

5284 WANDA.

if he had fallen at Sadowa or Koniggr'dtz, or earlier by t1
side of Qela and Victor, chargiDg^ith his White Hussars.

The old Durse rambled on, full of praise and stories of tl
children's beauty, and strength, and activity, and intelligen<
ViLs^rhely did not hear her : he stood lost in thought, lool
ing down on the sleeping figure of Bela, who, as if coosoioi^^ u

of strange eyes upon him, moved uneasily in his slumber, ai
ruffled lib golden hair with his hands, and thrust off
coverings from his beautiful round white limbs.

** Count Bela is not like our saint who died,'* said the
nurse. '* He is always masterful, and love& his own wi
My lady is strict with him, and wisely so, for he is a proi
rebellious child. But he is very generous, and has no!
ways. Count Gela is a little angel: he will be like
Heilige Graf."

V^^rhcly did not hear anything she said. His gaze
bent on the sleeping child, studying the lines of the dcli<
brows, of the curving lips, of the long black lashes. It
so familiar, so familiar I Suddenly as he gazed a light
to leap out of the darkness of long-forgotten years, and
memory which had haunted him stood out clear before bin

*' He is like Vassia Kaz&n 1" he cried, half aloud. ~
face of the child had recalled what in the face of the
had forever eluded his remembrance. He thrust a gold coin
the nurse's hand, and hurried from the chamber. A Bud(
inconceivable, impossible suspicion had leaped up before hin».
he had gazed on the sleeping loveliness of Sabran's little

The old woman saw his sudden pallor, his uncertain g
ture, and thought, *^ Poor gallant gentleman 1 He wishes th
pretty boys were his own. Well, it might have been better^
he had been master here ; though there is nothing to
against the one who is so. Still, a stranger ifi alwayi^
stranger, and foreign blood is bad."

Then she drew the coverings over Bela's naked little lin:_
and passed on to make sure that the little Ottilie, who ¥^ ** ^
been born when the primroses were first out in the Iselc-l^^
woods, was sleeping soundly and wanted nothing.

Vks^rhely made his way to his own chamber, and there
down heavily, mechanically, like a man waking out frooca
bad dream.

His memory went back to twenty years before, when he*

WANDA, 285

little lad, had accompanied his father on a sammer visit to the
hoase of a Russian, Prince Paul Zabaroff. It was a house
gay, magnificent, full of idle men and women of facile charm ;
it was not a house for youth, but both the Prince V^^rhely
and the Prince Zabaroff were men of easy morals, mixiurif
gamesters, and philosophers, who at fifteen years old them-
Dclves had been lovers and men of the world. At that house
had been present a youth, some years older than he was, who
was known as Vassia Kaz&n, — a youth whose beauty and wit
made him the delight of the women there, and whose skill at
games and daring in sports won him the admiration of the
men. It was understood without ever being said openly that
Vassia Kaz4n was a natural son of the Prince Zabaroff. The
little Hungarian prince, child as he was, had wit enough and
enough knowledge of life to understand that this brilliant
companion of his was base-born. His kind heart moved him
to pity, but his intense pride curbed his pity with contempt.
Vassia Kazdn had resented the latter too bitterly to be even
conscious of the first. The gentlemen assembled had diverted
themselves by the unspoken feud that had soon risen between
the boys, and the natural intelligence of the little Magyar
noble had been no match for the subtle and cultured brain of
the Parisian Lyc^n.

One day one of the lovely ladies there, who plundered
Zabaroff and caressed his son, amused herself with a war of
words between the lads, and so heated, stung, spurred, and
tormented the Hungarian boy that, exasperated by the sallies
and satires of his foe and by the presence of this lovely god-
dess of discord, he so far forgot his chivalry that he turned on
Vassia with a taunt. " You would be a serf if you were in
Russia !*' he said, with his great black eyes flashing the scorn
of the noble on the bastard. Without a word, Vassia, who
had come in from riding and had his whip in his hand, sprang
on him, held him in a grip of steel, and thrashed him. The
fiery Magyar, writhing under the blows of one who to him
was as a slave, as a hound, freed his right arm, snatched from
a table near an Oriental dagger, lying there with other things
of value, and plunged it into the shoulder of his foe. The
eries of the lady, alarmed at her own work, brought the men
in from the adjoining room ; the boys wore forced apart and
uirritid to their chambers.

286 WANDA.

Prince Vi\82irhclj <6f\ the house that evening with his
Btill furious and unappcascd. Vassia Kas4u remained,
a hero of and nursed by the lovely woman who had thro
the apple uf strife. His wound was healed in three wee
time ; soon after his father^s house*party was scattered, and
himself returned to his college. Not a syllable passed betw<
him and Zabaroff as to his quarrel with the little Hun
magnate. To the woman who had wrought the mischief
baroff said, ^^ Almost I wish he were my lawful son. He i
true wolf of the steppes. Paris has only combed his hide
given him a silken coat : he is still a wolf, like all true B
sians."

Looking on the sleeping child of Sabran, all that balf-i
gotten scene had risen up before the eyes of Egon Yks&rhc^
He seemed to see the beautiful fair face of Vassia Kas&n, w~~
the anger on the knitted brows, and the ferocity on the delic
stern lips, as he had raised his arm to strike. Twenty y&
had gone by ; he himself, whenever he had remembered
scene, had long grown ashamed of the taunt he had oast,
of the blow he had given, for the sole reproof his father
ever made him was to say, '^ A noble only insults his equ.
To insult an inferior is ungenerous, it b derogatory : wlft-
you offend you raise for the hour to a level with Yoar^<
Kemember to choose your foes not less carefully than
choose your friends."

Why, with the regard, the voice, the air of Sabran, Im^M
some vague intangible remembrance always come before hL'KSCY r

Why, as ho had gazed on the sleeping child, had the va,^^*^®
uncertainty suddenly resolved itself into distinct revelatiocm ?

" He is Vassia Kazdn ! He is Vassia Kaz&n T' he said ^
himself a score of times stupidly, persistently, as one sp^s* »
in a dream. Yet he knew he must be a prey to delusiom.* ^
fantasy, to accidental resemblance. He told himself so. l^^
resisted his own folly, and all the while a subtler inner 00*2*
Bciousness seemed to be speaking in him, and saying to hinOf — ^

*'* That man is Vassia Kazdn. Surely he is Vassia KaisSr* *

And then the loyal soul of him strengthened itself, ac^^
made him think, —

" Even if he be Vassia Kaz&n, he is her husband. Ho ^
what she loves : he Lb the father of those children that
hers."

WANDA. 281

He never went to his bed that night. When the mnsio
eeased at an hour before dawn, and the great house grew l'I-
lent, he still sat there by the open casement, glad of the cold
air that blew in from over the Szalrassec, as with daybreak a
fine film of rain began to come down the mountain-sides.

Onoo he heard the voice of Sabran, who passed the door
on his way to his own apartment Sabran was saying, in
German, with a little laugh, —

" My lady I I am jealous of your crown-prince. When I
left him now in his chamber, I was disposed to immortalize
myself by regioide. He adores you T*

Then he heard Wanda laugh in answer, with some words
that did not reach his ear as they passed on farther down the
corridor. V5a5,rhely shivered, and instinctively rose to his feet.
He felt as if he must seek him out and cry out to him, —

'' Am I mad, or is it true ? Let me see your shoulder ;
have you the mark of the wound that I gave ? Your little
child has the face of Vassia Kaz&n. Are you Vassia Kaziin ?
Are you the bastard of Zabaroff ? Are you the wolf of the
steppes ?"

He had desired to go from Hohenszalras, where every hour
was pain to him, but now he felt an irresistible fascination in
the vicinity of Sabran. His mind was in that dual state
which at once rejects a fact as incredible and believes in it
absolutely. His reason told him that his suspicion was a
folly ; his instinct told him that it was a truth.

When in the forenoon the castle again became animated,
and the guests met to the mid-day breakfast in the hall of the
knights, he descended, moved by an eagerness that made him
for the first time in his life nervous. When Sabran addressed
him he felt himself grow pale ; he followed the movements,
he watched the features, he studied the tones, of his success-
ful rival| with an intense absorption in them. Through tha
hunting breakfast, at which only men were present, he was
conscious of nothing that was addressed to him; he only
seemed to hear a voice in his*ear saying perpetually, " Yonder
is Vassia Kaz&n."

The day was spent in sport, sport rough and real, that gave
fail play to the beasts and perilous exposure to the hunters.
For the first time in his life, Egon V5.s^rhcly let a hinck bear
go by him untouched, and missed more than one roebuck.

288 WANDA.

His cje» ware continaally seeking his host ; a mile off down
B forest glade the figure of Sabran seemed to fill his visioii, a
figure full of grace and dignity, clad in a hnnting-^lress of
russet velvet, with a hunting-hum slung at his side on a broad
chain of gold, the gift of his wife in memory of the fateful
day when he had aimed at the kuteiigeier in her woods.

Sabran of necessity devoted himself to the crown-priooe
throughout the day's sport ; only in the twilight as they re-
turned he spoke to Vas^rhely.

" Wanda is so full of r^ret that yon wish to loavo us,** he
said, with graceful cordiality ; " if only I can persuade yoa
to remain, I shall take her the most welcome of all tidings
from the forest. Stay at the least another week. The
weather has cleared."

As he spoke, he thought that V^iirhely looked at him
strangely ; but he knew that he could not be much loved by
his wife's cousin, and continued with good humor to persist
in his request. Abruptly, the other answered him at last :

" Wanda wishes me to stay ? Well, I will stay, then. It
seems strange to hear a stranger invito me to Hohenszairas."

Sabran colored ; he said, with hauteur^ —

" That I am a stranger to Prince Viistirhely is not my
fault. That I have the right to invito him to Hohenssalru
is my happiness, due to his cousin's goodness, which has been
far beyond my merit."

Viisiirhely's eyes dwelt on him gloomily ; he was sensible
of the dignity, the self-command, and the delicacy of reproof
which were blent in the answer he had received ; he felt
humbled and convicted of ill-breeding. He said, after a
pause, —

" I should ask your pardon. My cousin would be the fini
to condemn my words ; they sounded ill, but I meant them
literally. Hohenszalras has been one of my homes from boy-
hood ; it will be your son's when we are both dead. How
Uke he is to you I he has nothing of his mother."

Sabran, somewhat surprised, smiled as he answered,—

^^ He is very like me. I regret it ; but you know the
poets and the physiologists are for once agreed as to the eanae
of that. It is a truth proved a million times : Ven/anl d»
r amour ressemble toujour^ au phre^

Egon Vas^rhely grew white under the olivo hue of hii

WANDA, 289

min-bronzed check. The riposte had been made with a thrust
chat went home. The j'agermeistcr at that moment ap-
proached his master for orders f jr the morrow. They were
no more alone. They entered the house ; the long and cere-
monious dinner succeeded. Vilsilrhely was silent and stern.
Sabran was the most brilliant of hosts, the happiest of men ;
all the women present were in love with him^ his wife the
most of all.

" ]l^n6 tells me you will stay, Egon. I am so very glad,"
his cousin said to him during the evening, and she added,
with a little hesitation, " If you would take time to know
him well, you would find him so worthy of your regard ; he
has all the qualities that most men esteem in each other. It
would make me so happy if you were friends at heart, not
only in mere courtesy."

" You know that can never be," said VilsJirhely, almost
rudely. " Even you cannot work miracles. He is your hus-
band. It is a reasou that I should respect him, but it is also
a reason why I shall forever hate him."

He said the last words in a tone scarcely audible, but, low
as it was, there was a force in it that aifected her painfully.

" What you say there is quite unworthy of you," she said,
with gentleness but coldness. " He has done you no wrong.
Long ere I met him I told you that what you wished was not
what I wished, never would be so. You are too great a gen-
tleman, Egon, to nourish an injustice in your heart."

He looked down ; every fibre in him thrilled and burned
under the sound of her voice, the sense of her presence.

" I saw your children asleep last night," he said, abruptly ;
" they have nothing of you in them ; they are his image."

" Is it so unusual for children to resemble their father ?"
she said, with a smile, whilst vaguely disquieted by his tone.

" No, I suppose not; but the Szalras have always been of
one type. How came your husband by that face ? I have
Been it among the Circassians, the 1 ersiaus, the Greorgians ;
but you say he is a Breton."

" The Sabrans are Bretons ; you have only to consult his-
tory. Very beautiful faces like his have seldom much impress
of nationality : they always seem as though they followed the
old Greek laws and were cast in the divine heroic mould of

ftncther time than ours,*'

¥ t 2fi

290 WANDA.

** Who was his mother ?"

* A Spanish Mexican."

Yasarhely was silent.

His cousin Icfl him and went among her guests. A vi
icnse of uneasiness went with her at her conscipusness oF
hostility to Sabran. She wished she had not asked him ^^
remain.

" You have never offended Egon ?" she asked Sabran, ^"^T
iously, that night. " You have always been forbearing »na
patient with him ?'*

" I have obeyed you in that as in all things, my angel/* ^®
answered her, lightly. ** What would you ? He is in love
with you still, and I have married you ! It is even a crio^*'
in his eyes that my children resemble me I One can nov^
argue with a passion that is unhappy. It is a kind of freaky-

She heard with some impatience.

" He has no right to cherish such a resentment. He koojifl
it alive by brooding on it. I had hoped that when he saw 3^^^
here, saw how happy you render me, saw your children too, "J^
would grow calmer, wiser, more reconciled to the inevitable-

" You did not know men, my love," said Sabran, witb- *
smile.

To him the unhappiness and the ill will of Egon V2ls5,rl» <^ v
were matters of supreme indifference ; in a manner they g'^^f'
ified him, they even supplied that stimulant of rivalry wt»*^"
a man's passion needs to keep at its height in the calm of 3»0
possession. That Egon V5,s^rhely saw his perfect happi^*^^
lent it pungency and a keener sense of victory. Wheo *f
kissed his wife's hand in the sight of her cousin, the sense J^'
the pain it dealt to the spectator gave the trivial action to l^*"
all the sweetness and the ardor of the first caresses of **^
accepted passion.

Of that she knew nothing. It would have seemed to ^^'
ignoble, as so much that makes up men*s desire always do^
seem to a woman of her temperament, even whilst it doD^^'
nates and solicits her and forces her to share something of ^^
own intoxication.

" Egon is very unreasonable," said Madame Ottilie. ** B*
believes that if you had not met K6n6 you would in ^^^\
have loved himself. It is foolish. Love is a destiny. ^^^
you married him you would not have loved him. He WW***

WANDA, 291

Boon have perceived that and been miserable, much more
miserable than he is now, for he would have been unable to
release you. I think he should not have come here at all if
he could not have met M. deSabran with at least equanimity."

" I think 80 too/' said Wanda, and an impatience against
her cousin began to grow into anger ; without being conscious
of it, she had placed Sabran so high in her own esteem that
she could forgive none who did not adore her own idol. It
was a weakness in her that was lovely and touching in a
character that had had before hardly enough of the usual
foibles of humanity. Every error of love is lovable.

y^Ls^rhely could not dismiss from his mind the impression
which haunted him.

"I conclude you knew the Marquis de Suoran well in
France ?" he said one day to Baron Kaulnitz, who was still
there.

Kaulnitz demurred.

" No, I cannot say that I did. I knew him by repute ;
that was not very pure. However, the Faubourg always re-
ceived and sustained him ; the Comte de Chambord did the
same : they were the most interested. One cannot presume
to think they could be deceived."

" Deceived !" echoed Prince Egon. " What a singular word
to use! Bo you mean to imply the possibility of — of any
fiilsity on his part — any intrigue to appear what he is not ?"

"No," said Kaulnitz, with hesitation. " Honestly, I cannot
say so much. An impression was given me at the moment
of his signing his marriage contract that he concealed some-
thing ; but it was a mere suspicion. As I told you, the whole
Legitimist world, the most difficult to enter, the most incredu-
lous of assumption^ received him with open arms. All his
papers were of unimpeachable regularity. There was never a
doubt hinted by any one ; and yet I will confess to you, my
dear Egon, since we are speaking in confidence, that I have
had always my own doubts as to his marquisate of Sabran."

" Grosser Gott .'" exclaimed V5,s5,rhely, as he started from
his seat. " Why did you not stop the marriage?"

" One does not stop a marriage by a mere baseless suspicion,"
replied Kaulnitz. " I have not one shadow of reason for my
probably quite unwarranted conjecture. It merely came into
my mind also at the signing of the contracts. I had alread^^

292 WAKDA,

done all I could to oppose the marriage, bat Wanda was in-
flexible,— you are witness of the charm ho still possesses for
her, — and even the princess was scarcely less infatuated. Be-
sides, it must be granted that few men are more attractive in
every way, and, as he ts one of us, whatever else he be, his
honor is now our honor, as you said yourself the other day.''

" One could always kill him," muttered V^^hely, '* and
set her free so, if one were sure."

" Sure of what ?'' said Kaulnitz, rather alarmed at the cflect
of his own words. ^^ You Magyar gentlemen always think
that every knot can be cut with a sword. If he were a moro
adventurer (which is hardly possible), it would not mend
matters for you to run him through the heart ; there arc his
children."

^^ Would the marriage be legal if his name were assumed ?**

" Oh, no I She could have it annulled, of course, both by
Church and by law. All those pretty children would have
no rights and no name. But we are talking very wildly and
in a theatrical fashion. He is as certainly Marquis de Sabran
as I am Karl von Kaulnitz."

Vils5,rhely said nothing ; his mind was in tumult, his heart
oppressed by a sense of secrecy and of a hope that was guilty
and mean.

He did not speak to his companion of Yassia Kazdn, but
his conjecture seemed to hover before his sight like a black
cloud which grew bigger every hour.

He remained at Hohcnszalras throughout the autumnal
festivities. He felt as if he could not go away with that doubt
still unsolved, without that suspicion either confirmed or up-
rooted. His cousin grew as uneasy at his presence there aa
she had before been uneasy at his absence. Her instinct told
her that he was the foe of the one dearest to her on earth.
She felt that the gallant and generous temper of him had
changed and grown morose ; he was taciturn, moody, solitary.

He spent almost all his time out of doors, and devoted him-
self to the hardy sport of the mountains and forests with a
sort of rage. Guests came and went at the castle ; some were
imperial, some royal people ; there was always a brilliant cir-
cle of notable persons there, and Sabran played his part aa
their host with admirable tact, talent, and good humor. Hu
wit, his amiability, his many accomplishments, and his social

WANDA. 2113

obarm wero in sirikiDg contrast to the sombre indifference of
^2ts5.rhely, whom men had no power to amuse and women no
power to interest. Prince E^n was like a magnificent picture
by Rembrandt, as he sat in his superb uniform in a coroer of
a ball-room, with the collars of his orders blazing with jewels,
and his hands crossed on the diamond-studded hilt of his
sword; but he was so mute, so gloomy, so austere, that the
vainest coquette there ceased to hope to please him, and his
most cordial friends found his curt contemptuous replies de-
stroy their desire for his companionship.

Wanda, who was frankly and fondly attached to him, began
to long for his departure. The gaze of his black eyes, fixed
in their fire and gloom on the little gay figures of her children,
filled her with a vague apprehension.

" If he would only find some one and be happy,*' she thought,
with anger at this undesired and criminal love which clung to
her so persistently.

" Am I made of wax?" he said to her, with scorn, when
she ventured to hint at her wishes.

" How I wish I had not asked him to remain here !" she
said to herself many times. It was not possible for her to
dismiss her cousin, who had been from his infancy accustomed
to look on the Hohenszalrasburg as his second home. But as
circle after circle of guests came, went, and were replaced by
others, and Egon Vh^sirhely still retained the rooms in the
west tower that had been his from boyhood, his continual
presence grew irksome and irritating to her.

*' He forgets that it is now my husband's house!" sho
thought.

There was only one living creature in all the place to whom
Yksh^rhely unbent from his sullen and haughty reserve, and
that one was the child Bel a.

Bela was as beautiful as the morning with his shower of
golden hair, and his eyes like sapphires, and his skin like a
lily. With curious self-torture Visarhely would attract the
child to him by tales of daring and of sport, and would watch
with intent eyes every line of the small face, trying therein to
read the secret of the man by whom this child had been be-
gotten. Bela, all unconscious, was proud of this interest dis-
played in him by this mighty soldier, of whose deeds in war
Ulrich and blubert and Otto told such Homeric talcs.

25*

294 WANDA.

•* Bela will fij^ht with you when he is bi^;," he would e
trying to enclose the jewelled hilt of Vksiirhely^s sword in
tiny fingers or trotting after him through the silence of
tapestried corridors. When she saw them thus together,
felt that she could understand the superstitous fear of Ori
tal women when their children are looked at fixedly.

" You are very good to my boy," she said once to Viislirh^
when he had let the child chatter by his side for hours.

VJlsilrhely turned away abruptly.

*^ There arc times when I could kill your son, because W
his/' he muttered, ^^ and there are times when I oonld wor»
him, because he is yours.''

" Do not talk so, Egon,** she said, gravely. " If you
feel so, it is best — I must say it — it is best that you 8hot^»^<^
see neither my child nor me."

He took no notice of her words.

" The children would always be yours," he muttered. " "5?^^^"
would never leave him, never disgrace him for their satl^^i
even if one knew — it would be of no use."

"Dear Egon," she said, in real distress, "what BtrsLirm^
things are you saying ? Are you mad ? Whose disgrace? ^®
you mean ?"

"Let us suppose an extreme case," he said, with a H^**^
laugh. " Suppose their father were base, or vile, or faithl^»^*'>
would you hate the children ? Surely you would.** ^^

" I have not imagination enough to suppose any such thiri^'^^
she said, very coldly. " And you do not know what a motlm^*" *
love is, my cousin."

He walked away, leaving her abruptly.

" How strange he grows I" she thought. " Surely his mi^"
must be touched ; jealousy is a sort of madness."

She bade the children's attendants keep Count Bela noo*^
in the nurseries; she told them that the child teased ^*^
guests, and must not be allowed to run so oflen at his will a<>^
whim over the house. She never seriously feared that Eg^^
would harm the child ; his noble and chivalrous nature coul^
not have changed so cruelly as that ; but it hurt her to see i'^
eyes fixed on the sou of Sabran with such persistent interro^^'
tion and so strange an intensity of observation. It made )i^^
think of old Italian tales of the evil eye.

She did not know that Vks5.rhely had come thither with ^

WANDA. 295

81^ .uia and devout intention to conquei his jealous Latrod of
her ausband and to habituate himself to the sight of her in
the new relations of her life. She did not know that he
would probably have honestly tried to do his duty, and
honestly striven to feel at least esteem for one so near to her,
if the suspicion which had become almost certainty in his
own mind had not made him believe that he saw in Sabran a
traitor, a bastard, and a criminal, whose offences were the
deepest of all possible offences, and whose degradation was
the lowest of all possible degradation, in the sight of the
haughty magnate of Hungary, steeped to the lips in all the
traditions and the convictions of an unsullied nobility. If
what he believed were indeed the truth, he would hold Sabran
lower than any beggar crouching at the gate of his palace in
Buda, than any gypsy wandering in the woods of his moun-
tain-fortress of Tar6c. If what he believed were the truth,
DO leper would seem to him so loathsome as this brilliant and
courtly gentleman to whom his cousin had given her hand, her
honor, and her life.

'* Doubt, like a raging tooth," gnawed at his heart, and a
hope, which he knew was dishonorable to his chivalry, sprang
up in him, vague, timid, and ashamed. If indeed it were as
he believed, would not such crime, proven on the sinner, part
him forever from the pure, proud life of Wanda von Szalras ?
And then, as he thought thus, he groaned in spirit, remem-
bering the children, — the children with their father's face and
their father's taint in them, forever living witnesses of their
mother's surrender to a lying hound.

" Your cousin cannot be said to contribute to the gayety
of your house-parties, my love," Sabran observed with a smile
one day when they received the announcement of an intended
visit from one of the archdukes. Egon Vksirhely was still
there, and even his cousin, much as she longed for his de-
parture, coi^ld not openly urge it upon him : relationship and
hospitality alike forbade.

" He is sadly changed," she answered. " He was always
silent, but he is now morose. Perhaps he lives too much at
Tar5c, where all is very wild and solitary."

" He lives too much in your memory," said Sabran, with
DO compassion. " Could he determine to forgive my marriage
with you, there would be a chance for him tc recover hig

Z^Q WANDA.

peace of mind. Only, my Wanda, it is not possible for any
man to be consoled for the loss of you."

** But that is nothing new," she answered, with impatience.
"If he felt so strongly against you, why did he come here ?
It was not like his high, chivalrous honor."

*^ Perhaps he came with the frank will to be reconciled to
his fate," said Sabran, not-knowing how closely he struck the
truth, " and at the sight of you, of all that he lost and that I
gained, he cannot keep his resolution.*'

" Then he should go away," she said, with that indifference
to al others save the one beloved which all l<»ve begets.

" I think he should. But who can tell him so ?"

" I did myself, the other day. I shall tell him so more
plainly, if needful. Who cannot honor you shall be no friend
of mine, no guest of ours."

" Oh, my love," said Sabran, whose conscience was touched,
" do not have feud with your relatives for my sake. They
are worthier than I."

The archduke, with his wife, arrived there on the following
day, and Hohenszalras was gorgeous in the September sun,
with all the pomp with which the lords of it had always wel-
comed their Imperial friends. V^silirhely looked on as a spec-
tator at a play when he watched the present master receive
the Imperial prince with that supreme ease, grace, and dignity
which were so admirably blent in him.

" Can he be but a marvellous comedian ?" wondered the
man, to whom a bastard was less even than a peasant.

There was nothing of vanity, of effort, of assumption, vis-
ible in the perfect manner of his host. He seemed to the
backbone, in all the difficult subtilties of society, as in the
simple frank intercourse of man and man, that which even
Kaulnitz had conceded that he was, gentilhomme de race*
Could he have been born a serf, — bred from the hour's caprice
of a voluptuary for a serving- woman ?

Vasiirhely sat mute, sunk so deeply in his own thoughts
that all the festivities round him went by like a pageantry on
a stage, in which he had no part.

" He looks like the statue of the Commendatore," said
Olga Brancka, who had returned from the archducal visit, as
she glanced at the sombre, stately figure of her brother-in-law
Sabran, to whom she spoke, laughed with a little uneasiness

X

WANDA. 297

Would the hand of Egon VJisi-rhcly ever seize him and drag
him down ward, like the hand of the statue in ^^ Don Gio-
vanni" ?

** What a pity that Wanda did not marry him/and that I
did not marry you !" said Madame Brancka, saucily, but with
a certain significance of meaning.

" You do me infinite honor I" he answered. " But/ at the
risk of seeming most ungallant, I must confess the truth. I am
grateful that the gods arranged matters as they are. You aro
enchanting^ Madame Olga, as a guest ; but as a wife — alas t
who can drink kiimmel every day ?"

She smiled enchantingly, showing her pretty teeth, but she
was bitterly angered. She had wished for a compliment at
the least. '^ What can these men see in Wanda?" she
thought, savagely. " She is handsome it is true, but slie has
no coquetry,, no animation, no passion. She is dressed by
Worth, and has a marvellous quantity of old jewels ; but for that,
no one would say aily thing of her except that she was much
too tall and had a German face !" And she persuaded her-
self that it was so. If the Venus de' Medici could be ani-
mated into life, women would only remark that her waist was
large.

Madame Olga was still a very lovely woman, and took care
to be never seen except at her loveliest. She always treated
Sabran with a great familiarity, which his wife was annoyed
by, though she did not display her annoyance. Madame
Brancka always called him nion coimn^ or heau cousin, in the
language she usually used, and affected much more previous
knowledge of him than their acquaintance warranted, since it
had been merely such slight intimacy as results from moving
in the same society. She was a small woman, but of great
spirit ; she shot, fished, rode, and played billiards with equal
flkill ; she affected an adoration of the most dangerous sports,
and even made a point of sharing the bear- and the boar-hunt.
Wanda, who, though a person of much greater real courage,
abhorred all the cruelties and ferocities that perforce accom-
pany sport, saw her with some irritation go out with Sabran
on these expeditions.

" Women are utterly out of place in such sport as that,
Olga," she urged to her, " and indeed are very apt to bring
the men into peril ; for of course no man can take care of

298 WANDA.

himself whilst he has the safety of a woman to attend to :
must of necessity distract and trouble him.*'

But the Countess Stefan only laughed, and slipped with a
tation her jewelled huntinjij-knife into its place in her girdL

Throughout the archduke's visit, and after the prince's
parture, V^silrhcly continued to stay on, whilst a succes£^
of other guests came and went, and the summer deepened i
autumn. He felt that he could not leave his cousin's ho*
with that doubt unsolved ; yet he knew that he might a
on forever with no more certainty to reward him and con
his suspicions than he possessed now. His presence anno_
liis host, but Sabran was too polished a gentleman to beU
his irritation ; sometimes Viish^rhely shunned his presence
his conversation for days together, at other times he soul
them, and rode with him, shot with him, and played
with him, in the vain hope of gathering from some eh
admission or allusion some clue to Sabran 's early days.
a perfectly happy man is not given at any time to retros
tion, and Sabran less than most men loved his past,
would gladly have forgotten everything that he had ever A
or said before his marriage at the H of burg.

The intellectual powers and accomplishments of
dazzled Vils^rhely with a saddened sense of inferiority. JI-^xl^o
most great soldiers, he had a genuine humility in his
urcment of himself. He knew that he had no talents
cept as a leader of cavalry. ^*It is natural that she n<
looked at me," he thought, "when she had once seen "tfcw
man, with his wit, his grace, his facility." He could not ^'^^^
regard the skill of Sabran in the arts, in the salouj in *'",^
theatre, with the contempt which the " Wild Boar of Ta*"^^
might have felt for a mere maker of music, a squire of daxici^
a writer of sparkling little comedies, a painter of screens, ^^
cause he knew that both at Idrac and in France Sabran li^d
shown himself the possessor of those martial and virile q%M^*^'
ties by the presence or the absence of which the Hunga-r^^J?
noble measured all men. He himself could only love 'V^^
and live well : he reflected sadly that honesty and honor ^'^
not alone enough to draw love in return.

As the weeks passed on, his host grew so accustomed ^
his presence there that it ceased to give him offence or cai*^*
him anxiety.

WANDA. 299

'' He is not amasing, and he is not always polite,** he said
to his wife, " but if he likes to consume his soul in gazing at
you, I am not jealous, my Wanda ; and so taciturn a rival
would hardly ever be a dangerous one.'*

*' Do not jest about it/' she answered him, with some real
pain. ^^ I should be very vexed at his remaining here, were
it not that I feel sure he will in time learn to live down his
regrets and to esteem and appreciate you.'*

'* Who knows but his estimation of me may not be the right
one ?** said Sabran, with a pang of sad self-knowledge. And,
although he did not attach any significance to the prolonged
sojourn of the lord of Tar6c and Kohacs, he began to desire
once more that his guest would return to the solitudes of the
Garlowitz vineyards, or of the Carpathian mountains and woods.

When over seven weeks had passed by, he began to think
that to stay in Iselthal was useless and impossible, and he had
heard from Tar6c tidings which annoyed him, — that his
brother Stefan and his wife, availing themselves of his gen-
eral permission to visit any one of his places when they chose,
had so strained the meaning of the permission that they had
gone to his castle in the Carpathians, with a score of their
Parisian friends, and were there keeping high holiday and
festival, to the scandal of his grave old stewards, and their
own exceeding diversion. Hospitable to excess as he was, the
liberty displeased him, especially as his men wrote him word
that his favorite horses were being ruined by over-driving,
and in the list of the guests which they sent him were the
names of more than one too notorious lady, against whose
acquaintance he had repeatedly counselled Olga Brancka.
He would not have cared much what they had done at any
other of his houses, but at Tar5o his mother, whom he had
adored, had lived and died, and the place was sacred to him.

He determined to tear himself away from Hohenszalras
and go and scatter these gay unbidden revellers in the dusky
Carpathian forests. " I cannot stay here forever," he thought,
'^ and I might be here for years without acquiring any more
certainty than my own conviction. Either I am wrong, or he
has nothing to conceal, or if I be right he is too wary to be-
tray himself. If only I could see his shoulder where I struck
the dagger ; but I cannot go into his bath-room and say to
him, ^ You arc Vassia Kaz^n 1' **

300 IVAyVA.

lie resolved to leave on the day after the niLrrow. For *-Ti«
Dext day there was organized on a large soale a bear-huntc* ^
which the nobility of the Tauern had been bidden. TH
were only some half-dozen men then staying in the burg, co-
of them Austrian soldiers. The delay gave him the chsJtK^sce
he longed for, which but for an accident he might never lis:»-vo
had, though . he had tarried there half a century. Earl3r in
the morning there was a great breakfast in the Kittersaal, at
which Wanda did not appear. Sabran received the nofc^^^
and gentry of the province, and did the honors of' his ta-lble
with his habitual courtliness and grace. He wa^ not ho^;i)i-
table in Vasi^rhely's sense of the word: he was too ea^iily
wearied by others, and too contemptuous of ordinary hum «»n-
ity ; but he was alive to the pleasure of being lord of Holi^^^w-
zalras, and sensible of the favor with which he was look-ed
upon by a nobility commonly so exclusive and intolerant; of
foreign invasion.

Breakfast over, the whole party went out and up into ^^e
high woods. The sport at Hohenszalras always gave fair I>^*J
to beast and bird. In deference to the wishes of his "W i fe,
Sabran would have none of those battues which make oF t^he
covert or the forest a slaughter-house. He himself disdai'^cd
that sort of sport, and liked danger and adventure to mingle
with his out-of-door pastimes. Game fairly found by *'"®
spaniel or the pointer, the boar, thfe wolf, the bear, hoatJS^J
started and given its fair chance of escape or revenge, ^"®
Steinbeck stalked in a long hard day with peril and eff<^^
these were all delightful to him on occasion; but for **®
crowded drive, the horde of beaters, the terrified bewiW©''^
troop of forest denizens driven with sticks on to the v^^
barrels of the gunners, for this he had the boundless oonte09F|
of a man who had chased the buffalo over the prairie, *'^
lassoed the wild horse and the wild bull leaning down frovi
the saddle of his mustang. The day passed off well, and i^^
guests were all content ; he alone was not, because a laT^
brown bear which he had sighted and fired at twice 1»^
escaped him, and roused that blood-lust in him which ifl ^^
the hearts of all men.

" Will you come out alone with me to-morrow and try ^^^^
that grand brute ?" he said to Vas^rhely, as the last of h^
guests took their departure.

WA^'DA. 301

Vks&rhcly hesitated.

" 1 intended to leave to-morrow ; T lia 'e been here too
long. But, Binco you are so good, I will stay twcuty-four hours
longer."

He was ashamed in his own heart of the willingness with
which he caught at the excuse to remain within sight of his
cousin and within watch of Sabran.

*' I am charmed," said his host, in himself regretful taat he
had suggested a reason for delay : he had not known that the
other had intended to leave so soon. They remained together
on the terrace, giving directions to the j'dgermeisteis for the
bear-hunt the next day.

V^sh,rhely looked at his successful rival and said to himself,
<* It is impossible. I must be mad to dream it. I am misled by
B mere chance resemblance, and even my own memory may
have deceived me ; I was but a child."

In the forenoon they both went out into the hi^h hills
again, where the wild creatures had their lairs and were but
seldom troubled by a rifle-shot. They brought down some
black grouse and hazel grouse and mountain partridges on
their upward way. The jiigers were scattered in the woods ;
the day was still and cloudy, a true sportsman's day, with no
gleam of sun to shine in their eyes and on the barrels of their
rifles. Sabran shooting to the right, V^^sii-rhcly to the left, they
went through the grassy drives that climbed upward and upward,
and many a mountain h&re was rolled over in their path, and many
B ptarmigan and capercailzie. But when they reached the
high pine forests where the big game harbored, they ceased to
shoot, and advanced silently, waiting and reserving their Are
for any large beast the jiigers might start and drive towards
them from above. Tn the grayness of tLt, day the upper
woods were almost dusky, so thickly stood the cembras and the
Siberian pines. There was everywhere the sound of rushing
waters, some above, some underground.

" The first beast to you, the second to me,** said Sabran in
a whisper to his companion, who demurred and declared that
the first fire should be his host's.

'* No," said Sabran. ^* I am at home. Permit me so small
a courtesy to my guest."

Vkskrhely* flushed darkly. In his very politeness this man
seemed to him to contrive to sting and wound him.

26

302 WANDA.

Sabran, however, who had meant nothing more than
had said, did not observe the displeasure he had caused,
paused at the spot agreed upon with Otto, a grassy
where four drives met. There they both in absolute sile
waited and watched for what the hunter's patron, good
Hubert, might vouchsafe to send them. They had so wa.:
about a quarter of an hour, when down one of the dr:
made dusky by the low hanging aroUa boughs there
towards them a great dark beast, and would have goni
them had not V^5.rhely fired twice as it approached,
bear rolled over, shot through the head and heart.

" Well done !" cried Sab ran, but scarcely were the wox*<i«
off his lips when another bear burst through the boiK^^lis
ahead of him by fifty yards. He levelled his rifle and x^
reived its approach with two bullets in rapid succession, -fc^ ^^
neither had entered a vital part, and the animal, only x"<3n-
dered furious by pain, reared and came towards him ^^\^^
deadliest intent, its great fangs grinning. He fired a^^^^^
and this shot struck home. The poor brute fell with a- cr J»^^>
the blood pouring from its mouth. It was not dead, and. ^^
agony was great.

" I will give it the coup de grdce^^ said Sabran, who, ^'
his wife's sake, was as humane as any hunter ever can l>^ ^
the beasts he slew.

" Take care,*' said VJis5.rhely. " It is dangerous to to^*^"
a wounded bear. I have known one that looked stone di^^
rise up and kill a man."

Sabran did not heed. He went up to the poor, pant>i0|^»
groaning mass of fur and flesh, and drew his huntiug-k.ol*®
to give it the only mercy that it was now possible for it- ^
receive. But as he stooped to plunge the knife into ^^
heart the bear verified the warning he had been give'*'
Gathering all its oozing strength in one dying effort to aveo^
its murder, it leaped on him, dashed him to the earthy »^ ^
clung to him with claw and tooth fast in his flesh. He fte^
his right arm from its ponderous weight, its horrible ff^P*
and stabbed it with his knife as it clung to and lacerated hi^
where he lay upon the grass. In an instant, V^rSb^rhely VXM^
the jager who was with them were by his side, ireed hi***
from the animal, and raised him from the ground. He w^^
deluged with its blood and his own. VtiSiirhely for one in(P^

WANDA. 303

ment of temble joy, for which he loathed hiinscli afterwards,
thought, " Is he dead ?" Men had died of lesser things than
this.

He stood erect and smiled, and said that it was nothing,
but eveu as he spoke a faintness came over him, and his lipM
turned gray.

The jager supported him tenderly, and would have had
him sit down upon a boulder of rock, but he resisted.

" Let me get to that water,'' he said, feebly, looking to a
spot a few yards off, where one of the many torrents of the
Hohe Tauern tumbled from the wooded cliff above through
birch and beechwood, and, rushing underground, Icfl a clear
round brown pool among the ferns. He took a draught from
the flask of brandy tendered him by the lad, and, leaning on
the youth and struggling against the sinking swoon that was
coming on him, walked to the edge of the pool, and dropped
down there on one of the mossy stones which served as a
rough chair.

"Strip me, and wash the blood away," he said to the
huntsman, whilst the green wood, and the daylight, and the
face of the man grew dim to him, and seemed to recede
farther and farther in a misty darkness. The youth obeyed,
and cut away the velvet coat, the cambric shirt, till he was
naked to his waist ; then, making sponges of handkerchiefs,
the jager began to wash the blood away and stanch it as best
he could.

EgoQ y^s^rhely stood by, without offering any aid; his
eyes were fastened on the magnificent bust of Sabran, as the
sunlight fell on the fair blue-veined flesh, the firm muscles,
the symmetrical throat, the slender yet sinewy arms, round
one of which was clasped a bracelet of fair hair. He had
the chance he needed.

He approached and told the lad roughly to leave the marquis
to him, he was doing him more harm than good ; he himself
had seen many battle-fields, and many men bleeding to death
upon their mother earth. By this time Sabran's eyes were
elosed ; he was hardly conscious of anything, a great dumb-
ness and infinite exhaustion had fallen upon him ; his lipa
moved feebly. " Wanda !" he said once or twice ; " Wanda I"

The face of the man who leaned above him grew dark &
night ; he gnashed his teeth as he began his errand of mdc^

304 WANDA,

*' Leave me with your lord," he said to the young jftg^
" So you to the castle. Find Herr Greswold, bring him ; -*
not alarm the countess, and say nothing to the household."

The huntsman went, fleet as a roc. Yks^rhely remain^
alone with Sabran, who only heard the sound of the rushfc
water magnified a million times on his dulled ear.

y^s5.rhely tore the shirt in shreds, and laved and bathd
the wounds, and then began to bind them with the skill of
soldier who had oflen aided his own wounded troopers. Bu
first of all, when he had washed the blood away, he sottrcKc
with keen and eager eyes for a scar on the white skin,-
found it.

On the right shoulder was a small triangular mark,-
mark of what, to a soldier's ey&s, told of an old woud»
When he saw it, he smiled a cruel smile, and wont oo wiH
his work of healing.

Sabran leaned against the rock behind him ; his eyes W(^
still closed, the pulsations of his heart were irregular. E==
had lost a great quantity of blood, and the pool at hia f^
was red. They were but flesh-wounds, and there was ^
danger in them themselves, but great veins had been severe
and the blood had hurried forth in torrents. Yks^rhe^
thrust the flask between his lips, but he could not swallow.

All had been done that could be for the immediate momec^
The stillness of the deep woods was around them ; the bo^-
of the black bear lay on the blood-soaked grass; vulturC^
scenting death, were circling above against the blue sky. Ov^ '
the mind of his foe swept at the sight of them one of tho^
hideous temptations which assail the noblest natures in ^
hour of hatred. If he tore the bandages he had placed th» ^
off" the rent veins of the unconscious man whom he watcbe ^
the blood would leap out again in floods, and so weaken ti^
laboring heart that in ten minutes more its powers would fall ^
low that all aid would be useless. Never more would the lips c^
Sabran meet those of his wife ! Never more would his drean^
be dreamed upon her breast ! For the moment the temptatic^
seemed to curl about him like a flame ; he shuddered, 9J0
crossed himself. Was he a soldier, to slay in cold blood \^
treachery a powerless foe ?

He leaned over his foe again, and again tried to force tt^
mouth-piece of his wine-flask through his teeth. A few drop

WANDA. 305

2>a8sed them, and he revived a little, and swallowed a few drops
xnore. The blood was arrested in its escape, and the pulsa*
tions of the heart were returning to their normal measure ;
sifter a while Sabran unclosed his eyes, and looked up at the
£^een leaves, at the blue slcy.

" Do not alarm Wanda," he said, feebly. " It is a scratch :
it will be nothing. Take me home."

With his left hand he felt for the hair bracelet on his right
mtrm, between the shoulder and the wrist. It was sti£f with
bis own blood.

Then Vilskrhely leaned over him and met his upward gaze,
^nd said in his ear, that seemed still filled with the rushinis
oi many waters, " You are Vassia Kazdn I"

When a little later the huntsman returned, bringing the
hysician, whom he had met a mile nearer the house in the

oods, and some peasants bearing a litter made out of pine
Taoches and wood moss, they found Sabran stretched insensi-

e beside the water-pool ; and Egon V5.s^rhely, who stood

ect beside him, said, in a strange tone, —

*' I have stanched the blood, and he has swooned, you see.

commit him to your hands. I am not needed."

And, to their surprise, he turned and walked away with

ill steps into the green gloom of the dense forest.

CHAPTER XIX.

Sabran was still insensible when he was carried to the

When ho regained consciousness he was on his own bed,
Mid bis wife was bending over him. A convulsion of grief
croiBed his face as he lifted his eyelids and looked at her.

" Wanda," he murmured, feebly, " Wanda, you will f 3r-
give "

She kissed him passionately, while her tears fell like rain
^on his forehead. She did not hear his words distinctly ;
™e was only alive to the intense joy of his recovered con-
Kiousness, of the sound of his voice, of the sense of his
*"®ty. giie kneeled by his bed, covering his hands with
» 20*

I

306 WANDA.

caresses, prodigal of a thousaDd names of love, giVen up to
an abandoDment of terror and of hope which broke down all
the serenity and self-command of her habitual tamper. She
was not even aware of the presence of others. The over-
mastering emotions of anguish and of joy filled her soul, and
made her seem deaf, indifferent, to all living tilings save one.

Sabran lay motionless. He felt her lips, he heard her
voice ; he did not look up again, nor did he speak again. Ho
shut his eyes, and slowly remembered all that had passed.
Greswold approached him and held his fingers on his wrist,
and held a little glass to his mouth. Sabran put it away.
" It is an opiate," he said, feebly ; " I will not have it."

He was resolute ; he closed his teeth, he thrust the calming
draught away.

He was thinking to himself, '^ Sometimes in unconscious-
ness one speaks."

'^ You are not in great pain ?" asked the physician. He
made a negative movement of his head. What were the fire
and the smart of his lacerated flesh, of his torn muscles, to
the torments of his fears, to the agony of his long-stifiod am-
science ?

" Do not torment him ; let him be still," she said to the
physician ; she held his hand in both her own and pressed it to
her heart. His languid eyes thanked her, then closed again.

Herr Greswold withdrew to a little distance and waited,
[t seemed to him strange that a man of the high courage and
strong constitution of Sabran should be thus utterly broken
down by any wound that was not mortal, — should be thus
sunk into dejection and apathy, making no effort to raise hiui-
self, even to console and reassure his wife. It was not like
his careless and gallant temper, his virile and healthful strengUi.

It was true, the doctor reflected, that he had lost a groat
amount of blood. Such a loss he knew sometimes affects the
heart and shatters the nervous system in many unlookcd-foi
ways. Yet, he thought, there was something beyond this.
The attitude and regard of Egon V5,sJlrhely had been un-
natural at such an hour of peril. ^' When he said, just now,
' forgive,' what did lie mean ?" reflected the old man, whose
ear had caught the word which had escaped that of Wanda,
who had been only alive to the voice sho adored.

The next four days wore anxious and terrible. Sabran did

wa:sda, 307

not recovOT as the physician expected that he would, Bceing
the nature of his wounds and the naturally elastic and san-
^ine temperament he possessed. He slept little, had con-
siderable fever, woke from the little rest he had startled,
alarmed, bathed in cold sweats ; at other times he lay still in
itn apathy almost comatose, from which all the caresses and
entreaties of his wife failed to rouse him. They began to
:fear that the discharge from the arteries had in some subtle
snd dangerous manner affected the action of the heart, the
composition of the blood, and produced aneurism or pyaemia.
•* The hero of Idrac to be prostrated by a mere flesh-wound !'*
thought Herr Greswold, in sore perplexity. He sent for a
^eat man of science from Vienna, who, when he came, de-
dared the treatment admirable, the wounds healthy, the heart
in a normal state, but added that it was evident the nervous
system had received a severe shock, the effects of which stiL
remained.

*' But it is that which I cannot understand," said the old
man, in despair. " If you only knew the Marquis de Sabran
as I know him, — the most courageous, the most gay, the most
S'esolute of men I A man to laugh at death in its face 1 A
man absolutely without fear 1"

The other assented.

" Every one knows what he did in the floods at Tdrac," he
answered ; '^ but he has a sensitive temperament for all that.
If you did not tell me it is impossible, I should say that ho
lad had some mental shock, some great grief. The prostra-
tion seems to me more of the mind than of the body. But
^ou have assured me it is impossible."

*'*' Impossible ! There does not live on earth a man so happy,
«o fortunate, so blessed in all the world, as he."

*'*' Men have a past that troubles them sometimes," said the
'Vienna physician. " Nay, I mean nothing, but I believe that
M. de Sabran was a man of pleasure. The cup of pleasure
igometimes has dregs that one must drink long aflerwards. I
^o not mean anything ; I merely suggest. The prostration
Suis, to my view, its most probable origin in mental trouble ;
\yaX it would do him more harm than good to excite him by
mny effort to certify this. To the Countess von Szalras I have
Knerely said that his state is the result of the large loas of
Uood ; and indeed, afler all, it may be so."

308 WANDA,

On the fifth day, Sabran, still lying in that almost oomatosa
silence which had been scarcely broken since his aocident,
said in a scarce audible voice to his wife, —

" Is your cousin here ?'*

She stooped towards him and answered, —

" Yes ; he is here, love. All the others went immediately,
but Egon remained. I suppose he thought it looked kinder
to do so. I have scarcely seen him, of course."

The pallor of his face grew grayer ; he turned his head
away restlessly.

" Why does he not go ?" he muttered in his throat " Does
He wait for my death ?"

'^ Oh, E4n6 1 hush, hush 1" she said, with horror and amazo.
" My love, how can you say such things ? You are in no
danger ; the doctor assures me so. In a week or two you will
be well, you will be yourself."

" Send your cousin away."

She hesitated, troubled by his unreasoning, restless jealousy,
which seemed to be the only consciousness of life remaining
with him. " I will obey you, love ; you are lord here," she
said, softly, ^^ but will it not look strange ? No guest can well
be told to go."

" A guest 1 — he is an enemy 1"

She sighed, knowing how hopelessly reason can struggle
against the delusions of a sick-bed. I will tell him to go to-
morrow," she said, to soothe him. " To-night it is too late."

" Write to him : do not leave me."

There was a childlike appeal in his voice, that from a man
so strong had a piteous pathos.

Her eyes swam with tears as she heard.

" Oh, my dearest, I will not leave you I" she said, passion-
ately, " not for one moment whilst I live ; and oh, my beloved,
what could death ever change in me f Have you so little
faith ?"

" You do not know," he said, so low that his breath scarcely
stirred the air.

She thought that he was tormented by a doubt that she would
not be faithful to him if he died. She stooped and kissed him.

" My own, I would sooner be faithless to you in your life
than afber death. Surely you know me well enough to know
that at the least?"

WANDA. 309

He was silent. A pjeat sigh struggled from his hreast aud
escaped his pale lips like a parting breath.

" Kiss me again," he murmured ; " kiss me again, whilst

That gives me life,'' he said, as he drew her head down upon
his bosom, where his heart throbbed laboredly. A little while
later he fell asleep. He slept some hours. When he awoke^
he was consumed by a nameless fear.

" Is your cousin gone ?" he asked.

She told him that it was one o'clock in the same night ;
she had not written yet.

'* Let him stay," he said, feverishly. '* He shall not think
I fear him. Do you hear me ? Let him stay.*'

The words seemed to her the causeless caprice of a jealousy
magnified and distorted by the weakness of fever. She strove
to answer him calmly. " He shall go or stay as you please,"
she assured him. *^ What does it matter, dear, what Egon
does ? You always speak of Egon. You have never spoken
of the children once."

She wanted to distract his thoughts. She was pained to
think how deep, though unspoken, his antagonism to her cousin
must have been, that now in his feebleness it was the one
paramount absorbing thought.

A great sadness came upon his face as she spoke ; his lips
trembled a little.

" Ah 1 the children," he repeated. " Yes, bring them to
me to-morrow. Bela is too like me. Poor Bela 1 it will be
bis curse."

" It is my joy of joys," she murmured, afraid to see how
bis mind seemed astray.

A shudder that was almost a spasm passed over him. He
did not reply. He turned his face away from her and seemed
to sleep.

The day following he was somewhat calmer, somewhat
stronger, though his fever was high.

The species of paralysis that had seemed to fall on all his
faculties had in a great measure left him. " You wish me to
recover," he said to her. " I will do so, though perhaps it
wore better not."

*^ He says strange things," snc said to Greswold. '^ I can-
Dot think why he has such thoughts."

*^ It is not M«, himself, th?t has them ; it is his fever," an

310 WAXDA.

•
Bwored the doctor. " Why, ia fever, do people often hate
what they most adore when they are in health ?"

She was reassured, hut not contented.

The children were hrought to see him. Bela had with hi w
an ivory air-gun, with which he was accustomed to blow down
his metal soldiers ; he looked at his father with awed, dilated
eyes, and said that he would go out with the gun and kill the
brothers of the bear that had done the harm.

" The bear was quite right," said Sabran. " It was I who
was wrong to take a life not my own."

" That is beyond Bela," said his wife. " But I will trans-
late it to him into language he shall understand, though I fear
very much, say what I will, he will be a hunter and a soldier
one day."

Bela looked from one to the other, knitting hb fair brows
as he sat on the edge of the bed.

" Bela will be like Egon," he said, " with all gold and fur
to dress up in, and a big jewelled sword, and ten hundrad
men and horses, and Bela will be a great killer of things !''

Sabran smiled languidly, but she saw that he flinched at
her cousin's name.

" I shall not love you, Bela, if you are a killer of things
that are God's dear creatures," she said, as she sent the child
away.

His blue eyes grew dark with auger.

" God only cares about Bela," he said, in innocent profan-
ity, with a profound sense of his own vastness in the sight of
heaven, " and Gela," he added, with the condescending ten-
derness wherewith he always associated his brother and him-
self.

" Where could he get all that overwhelming pride ?" she
said, as he was led away. " I have tried to rear him so sim-
ply. Do what I may, he will grow arrogant and selfish."

" My dear," said Sabran, very bitterly, " what avails that
he was born in your bosom ? He is my son 1"

" Gela is your son, and he is so different," she answered,
not seeking to combat the self-ccnsurc to which she was ac-
customed in him, and which she attributed to faults or follies
of a past life, magnified by a conscience too sensitive.

" He is all yours, then," he said, with a wan smile. * Yon
have prevailed over evil."

WANDA. 311

In a few days later his recovery had progressed so far thai
tie had regained his usual tone and look ; his wouuds were
hoaling and his strength was returning. He seemed to the
keen eyes of Greswold to have made a supreme effort to con-
quer the moral depression into which he had sunk, and to have
thrust away his malady almost hy force of will. As he grew
better he never spoke of Egon V?is5,rhely.

On the fifteenth day from his accident he was restored
r Dough to health for apprehension to cease. He passed some
1a ours seated at an open window in his own room. He never
a»lcecl if V^Jlrhely were still there or not.

^Vanda, who never left him, wondered at that silence, but
sHe forbore to bring forward a name which had had such
po^^^r to agitate him. She was troubled at the nervousness
^^t^ioli still remained to him. The opening of a door, the
sotiFid of a step, the entrance of a servant, made him start
^^<i turn pale. When she spoke of it with anxiety to H err
** c>^oliim, he uttered vague sentences as to the nervousness
3^"ioli was consequent on great loss of blood, and brought
'^^"'^^ard instances of soldiers who had lost their nerve from
ttiQ f3ame cause. It did not satisfy her. She was the de-
80eix<iant of a long line of warriors ; she could not easily be-
^^'^^ that her husband's intrepid and careless courage could
been shattered by a flesh-wound.
** I>id you really mean," he said abruptly to her that after-
1 , as he sat for the first time beside the open panes of the
^^^^1, — " did you really mean that were I to die you would
'^^'Ver forget me for any other ?"

^ She rose quickly as if she had been stung, and her face
*^shed.

**' X>o I merit that doubt from you ?'' she said. " I think
not:.»>

, ^be spoke rather in sadness than in anger. He had hurt
^*' I he oould not anger her. He felt the rebuke.

* £ven if I were dead, should I have all your life ?" he
^^I'rmired, in wonder at that priceless gift.

You and your children,*' she said, gravely. " Ah I what

** ^eath do against great love ? Make its bands stronger,

^^^''^aps, its power purer. Nothing else."

^ ' I thank you," he said, very low, with great hutaoility,

^*^ intense emotion. For a moment he thought — should he

312 WANDA.

tell her, should he trust this de«p tenderness which c<
brave death, and which might brave even shame unble
ing ? He looked at her from under his drooped eyelids,
then — he dared not. He knew the pride which was in
better than she did, — her pride, which was inherited by
first-born and had been the sign-manual of all her impeirJ.
race.

He looked at her where she stood with the light fallin:
her through the amber hues of painted glass : worn, wan,
tired by so many days and nights of anxious vigil, she
looked a woman whom a nation might salute with the
amur pro rege nostro ! that Maria Theresa heard. All t> ^Miat
a great race possesses and rejoices in of valor, of traditiorm^ of
dignity, of high honor, and of blameless truth was expross-^^ed
in her; in her every movement, attitude, and gesture '^he
Eupatrid spoke. All that potent and subtile sense of patric^^^n
descent which had most allured and intoxicated him in cpt^ Mner
days now awed and daunted him. He dared not tell her" of
his treason. He dared not. He was as a false conspii.^" ^^
before a great queen he has betrayed.

** Are you faint, my love ?" she asked him, alarmed to ^^
the change upon his face and the exhaustion with whicb. ^^
sunk backward against the cushions of his chair.

" Mere weakness ; it will pass," he said, smiling as bes*' "®
might, to reassure her. He felt like a man who slides Ac^^^J^
a crevasse and has time and consciousness enough to se0 *^^
treacherous ice go by him, the black abyss yawning b^^^^
him, the cold, dark death awaiting him beyond, whilst on *>ue
heights the sun is shining.

That night he entreated her to leave him and rest. ^^^
assured her he felt well ; he feigned a need of sleep. £• <^'
fifteen nights she had not herself lain down. To please ht ^»
she obeyed, and the deep slumber of tired nature soon f^^
upon her. When he thought she slept, he rose noiselea^ V
and threw on a long velvet coat, sable-lined, that was by t*- "*
bedside, and looked at his watch. It was midnight. ^

He crossed the threshold of the rpen door into his wif^ ^
chamber and stood beside her bed for a moment, gazing af h^^
as she slept. She seemed like the marble statue of son^ "^
sleeping saint ; she lay in the attitude of St. Cecilia on hcF —

WANDA. 313

bier at Home. The faint lamplight made her fair skin white
as snow. Round her arm was a bracelet of his hair like the
one which he wore of hers. He stood and gazed on her, then
slowly turned away. Great tears fell down his cheeks as he
left her chamber. He opened the door of his own room, the
outer one which led into the corridor, and walked down the
long tapestry-hung gallery leading to the guest-chambers. It
was the first time that he had walked without assistance ;
his limbs felt strange and broken, but he held on, leaning
now and then to rest against the arras. The whole house was
still;

He took his way straight to the apartments set aside for
guests. All was dark! The little lamp he carried shed a cir-
cle of light about his steps, but none beyond him. When he
reached the chamber which he knew was Egon V^^rhely's,
he did not pause. He struck on its panels with a firm hand.

The voice of V^krhely asked from within, " Who b there ?
Is there anything wrong ?"

" It is 1 1 Open," answered Sabran.

In a moment more the door unclosed. y5^5.rhely stood
within it ; he was not undressed. There were a dozen wax
candles burning in silver sconces on the table within. The
tapestried figures on the walls grew pale and colossal in their
light. He did not speak, but waited.

Sabran entered and closed the door behind him. His face
was bloodless, but he carried himself erect, despite the sense
of faintness which assailed him.

" You know who I am ?" he said, simply, without preface
or supplication.

Vis5,rhely gave a gesture of assent.

" How did you know it ?"

" I remembered," answered the other.

There was a moment's silence. If Vksh-rhely could have
withered to the earth by a gaze of scorn the man before him,
Sabran would have fallen dead. As it was, his eyes dropped
beneath the look, but the courage and the dignity of his attitude
did not alter. He had played his part of a great noble for so
long that it had ceased to be assumption and had become his
nature.

" You will tell her?" he said, and his voice did not tremble,
though his very soul seemed to swoon within him.
o 27

3U WA^DA.

" I flliall not toll her I"

y^5,rliely spoke with effort ; his words were hoanie &nd
stern.

"You will not r

An immense joj, unlooked for, undreamed of, sprang up in
him, checked as it rose by incredulity.

" But you loved her T' he said, on an impulse which he re-
gretted even as the exclamation escaped him. V5.Siirhely
threw his head back with a gesture of fine anger.

" If I loved her, what is that to you ?" he said, with a re-
strained violence vibrating in his words. " It is perhaps te*
cause I once loved her that your foul secret is safe with me
now. I shall not tell her. I waited to say this to you. I
could not write it, lest it should meet her eyes. You came to
ask me this ? Be satisffied, and go."

" I came to ask you this because, had you said otherwise,
I would have shot myself ere she could have heard."

Vh,sarhely said nothing ; a great scorn was still set like the
grimness of death upon his face. He looked far away at tlie
dim figures on the tapestries ; he shrunk from the sight of
his boyhood's enemy as from some loathly unclean thing he
must not kill.

" Suicide 1" he thought, — " the Sclav's courage, the serf's
refuge I"

Before the sight of Sabran the room went round, the lights
grew dull, the figures on the walls became fantastic and un-
real. His heart beat with painful effort, yet his ears, his
throat, his brain seemed full of blood. The nerves of his
whole body seemed to shrink and thrill and quiver, but the
force of habit kept him composed and erect before this man
who was his foe, yet who did for him what few friends would
have done.

" I do not thank you," he said, at last. " I understand ;
yau spare me for her sake, not mine."

" But for her, I would treat you so."

As he spoke, he broke in two a slender agate ruler which
lay on the writing-table at his elbow.

" Go," he added ; " you have got my word ; though we live
fifty years, you are safe from me, because — because — Qod
forgive you 1 you are hers."

Hearing this, there fell away from him the arrotcance that

WANDA. 315

had been his mask, the courage that had been his shield.
He paw himself for the first time as this man saw him, as all
ihc world would see him if once it knew his secret. For the
drst time his past offences rose up like ghosts naked from their
graves. The calmness, the indifference, the cynicism, the
pride which had been so long in his manner and in his na-
ture deserted him. He felt base-born before a noble, a liar
before a gentleman, a coward before a man of honor.

Yksiirhely made a gesture towards the door. Sabran shiv-
ered under the insult which his conscience could not resent,
his hand dared not avenge. Where he stood, leaning on a
high caned chair to support himself against the sickly weak-
ness which still came on him from his scarce healed wounds,
he felt for the first time to cower and shrink before this man
who was his judge, and who might become his accuser did
he choose. Something in the last words of Egon Viis^rhely
suddenly brought home to him the enormity of his own sin,
the immensity of the other's forbearance. Ho suddenly real-
ized all the offence to honor, all the outrage to . pride, all the
ineffaceable indignity which he had brought upon a great
race, all that he had done, never to be undone by any expia-
tion of his own, in making Wanda von Szalrus the mother of
his sons. Submissive, he turned without a word of gesture
or of pleading, and felt his way out of the chamber through
the dusky mists of the faintness stealing on him.

CHAPTER XX.

He reached his own room unseen, feeling his way with his
hands against the tapestry of the wall, and had presence of
mind enough to fling his clothes off him and stagger to his
bed, where he sank down insensible.

She was still asleep.

When dawn broke, they found him ill, exhausted, with a
return of fever. He had once a fit of weeping like a child.
He could not bear his wife a moment from his sight. She
reproached herself for having acceded to his desire and left
him unattended whilst she slept.

316 WANDA.

But of that midnight interview she guessed nothing.

Her eousin Egon sent her a few lines, saying that he
been summoned to represent his monarch at the autumn
noeuvres of Prussia, and had left at daybreak without b
able to make his farewell in person, as he had previously t.
to his castle of Tar6c. She attached no importance ti
When Sabran was told of his departure, he said nothing,
had recovered his power of self-control, — the Oriental ium
sibility under emotion which was in his blood from his Pei
mother. If he betrayed himself, he knew that it wouU
of little use to have been spared by his enemy. The de^>^^*8-
sion upon him his wife attributed to his incapacity to nciftO^^o
and lead his usual life, — a trial always so heavy to a stxr^i^Dg
man. As little by little his strength returned, he became
like himself. In addressing her he had a gentleness al
timid ; and now and then she caught his gaze fastened
her with a strange appeal.

One day, when he had persuaded her to ride in the for^^^
and he was certain to be alone for two or three hours^ **^
wrote the following words to his foe and his judge :

"Sir, — You will perhaps refuse to read anything writ*>^"
by me. Yet I send you this letter, because I desire to say *^
you what the physical weakness which was upon me fc**^
other night prevented my having time or strength to expl^r^o.
I desire also to put in your hands a proof absolute agai^^^
myself, with which you can do as you please, so that the f^^"
bearance which you exercised, if it be your pleasure to co^**
tinue it, shall not be surprised from you by any moment2*^^'7
generosity, but shall be your deliberate choice and decisi*^?*
I have another course of action to propose to you, to whi^^**
I will come later. For the present, permit me to give you t>^^^
outline of all the circumstances which have governed my a<? ^^^
I am not coward enough to throw the blame on fate or chanc?^^ '
1 am well aware that good men and igreat men combat ar "■
govern both. Yet something of course there lies in these, c
if not excuse, at least explanation. You knew me (wh^^
you were a boy) as Vassia Kazdn, the natural son of th'^
Prince Paul Ivanovitch ZabarofF. Up to nine years old
dwelt with my grandmother, a Persian woman, on the
plain between the Volga water and the Ural range. Thence
was taken t«) the Lyc^e Clovis, a famous college. Prince Zabs

WANDA, 317

off I never saw but one day in my Volga village until, when I
was fifteen years old, I was sent to his house, Fleur de Roi,
near Villerville, where I remained two months, and where
you insulted me and I chastised you, and you gave me the
wound that I have the mark of to this day. I then returned
to the Lyc6e, and stayed there two years unnoticed by him.
One day I was summoned by the principal and told abruptly
that the Prince Zabaroff was dead, — my protector, as they
termed him, — and that I was penniless, with the world before
me. I could not hope to make you understand the passions
that raged in me. You, who have always been in the light
of fortune and always the head of a mighty family, could com-
prehend nothing of the sombre hatreds, the futile revolts, the
bitter wrath against heaven and humanity, which consumed
me then, thus left alone without even the remembrance of a word
from my father. I should have returned straightway to the
Volga plains, and buried my fevered griefs under their snows,
had not I known that my grandmother Maritza, the only living
being I had ever loved, had died half a year aft^r I had been
taken from her to be sent to the school in Paris. You see,
had I been left there I should have been a hunter of wild
things, or a raftsman on the Volga, all my years, and have
done no harm. I had a great passion in my childhood for an
open-air free life ; my vices, like my artificial tastes, were all
learned in Paris. They, and the love of pleasure they created,
checked in me that socialistic spirit which is the usual outcome
of such a social anomaly as they had made of me. I might
have been a Nihilist but for that, and for the instinctive tend-
ency towards aristocratic and absolutist theories which were
in my blood. I was a true Russian noble, though a bastard
one ; and those three months which I had passed at Fleur de
Roi had intoxicated me with the thirst for pleasure and ener-
vated me with the longing to be rich and idle. An actress
whom I knew intimately also at that time did me much harm.
When Paul Zabaroff died he left me nothing, not even a word.
It is true that he died suddenly. I quitted the Lyc6e Clovis
with my clothes and my books ; I had nothing else in the
world. I sold some of these and got to Havre. There I took
a passage on a barque going to Mexico with wine. The craft
was unseaworthy ; she went down with all hands off the Pinos
Island, and I, swimming for miles, alone reached the shore

27*

318 WANDA,

Women there were gCfod to me. I /^ot away in a canoe, and
rowed many miles and many days ; the sea was calm, and I
had bread, fruit, and water enough to last two weeks. At the
end of ten days I ueured a brig, which took me to Yucatan.
My adventurous voyage madfr me popular there. I gave a
false name, of coui-se, for I hated the name of Vassia Kazan.
War was going on at the time in Mexico, and I went there
and offered myself to the military adventurer who was at the
moment uppermost. I saw a good deal of guerilla warfare
for a year. I liked it : I fear I was cruel. The ruler of the
hour, who was scarcely more than a brigand, was defeated and
assassinated. At the time of his fall I was at the head of a
few troopers far away in the interior. Bands of Indians fell
on us in great numbers. I was shot down and lefl for dead..
A stranger found me on the morning after, carried me to his
hut, and saved my life by his skill and care. This stranger
was the Marquis Xavier de Sabran, who had dwelt for nearly
seventy years in the solitude of those virgin forests, whiok
nothing ever disturbed except the hiss of an Indian's arrow
or the roar of woods on fire. How he lived there, and why,
is all told in the monograph I have published of him. He
was a great and a good man. His life, lost under the shadows
of those virgin forests, was the life of a saint and of a philos-
opher in one. His influence upon me was the noblest that I
had ever been subject to ; he did me nothing but good. His
son had died early, having wedded a Spanish Mexican ere he
was twenty. His grandson had died of snake-bite : he had
been of my age. At times he almost seemed to think that
this lad lived again in me. I spent eight years of my life with
him. His profound studies attracted me ; his vast learning
awed me. The free life of the woods and sierras, the perilous
sports, the dangers from the Indian tribes, Che researches
into the lost history of the perished nation, all these in-
terested and occupied me. I was glad to forget that I had
ever lived another existence. Wholly unlike as it was io
climate, in scenery, in custom, the liberty of life on the pam-
pas and in the forests recalled to me my childhood on the
steppes of the Volga. I saw no European all those years.
The only men I came in contact with were Indians and half-
breeds ; the only woman I loved was an Indian girl ; there
was not even a Mexican ranch near, within hundreds of milesi

WANDA. 319

Tho dense oloee-woven forest was between us and the rest of
the world ; oar only highway was a river, made almost iDac-
oessible by dense fields of reeds and banks of jungle and
swamps covered with huge lilies. It was a very simple exist-
ence, but in it all the wants of nature were satisfied, all healthy
desires could be gratified, and it was elevated from brutishness
by the lofly studies which I prosecuted under the direction of
the Marquis Xavier. Eight whole yeavs passed so. I was
twenty-five years old when my protector and frieud died of
sheer old age in one burning summer, against whose heat he
had no strength. He talked long aud tenderly with me ere
he died, — told me where to find all his papers, and gave me
everything he owned. It was not much. He made me one
last request, — that I would collect his manuscripts, complete
them, and publish them in France. For some weeks after
his death I could think of nothing but his loss. I buried
him myself, with the aid of an Indian who had loved him ;
and his grave is there beside the ruins that ho revered, beneath
a grove of cypress. I carved a cross in cedar wood, and
raised it above the grave. I found all his papers where ho
had indicated, underneath one of the temple porticoes ; his
manuscripts I had already in my possession. These buried
papers were all those which had been brought with him from
France by his Jesuit tutors, and the certificates of his own and
his father's birth and marriage, and of those of his son, and of
his grandson, who had died at eighteen years of age. There
was also a paper containing directions how to find other docu-
ments, with the orders and patents of nobility of the Sabrans
of Romans, which had been hidden in the oak wood upon
their sea-shore in Morbihan. All these he had dcf ircd me to
seek and take. Now came upon me the temptation to a great
sin. The age of his grandson, the young H4n^ de Sabran,
had been mine : he also had perished from snake-bite, as I
sail, without any human being knowing of it save his grand-
father and a few natives. It seemed to me that if I assumed
his name I should do no one any wrong. It boots not to
dwell on the sophisms with which I persuaded myself that 1
had the right to repair an injustice done to me by human law
ere I was bom. Men less intelligent than I can always find a
million plausible reasons for doing that which they desire to
do f and although the years I had spent beside the Marquis

320 WANDA.

Xavier had purified my character and purged it of much cf
the vice and the cynicism I had learned in Paris, yet I had
little moral conscientiousness. I lived outside the law in many
ways, and was indiflPerent to those measures of right and wrdng
which too often appeared lo me mere puerilities. Do not sup-
pose that I ceased to be grateful to my benefactor ; I adored
his memory, but it seemed to me I should do him no wrong
ivhatever. A^ain and again he had deplored to me that I
was not his heir ; he had loved me very truly, and had given
me all he held most dear, — the fruits of his researches. To
be brief, I was sorely tempted, and I gave way to the tempta-
tion. I had no difficulty in claiming recognition in the city
of Mexico as the Marquis de Sabran. The documents
were there, and no creature knew that they were not
mine except a few wild Pucbla Indians, who spoke no
tongue but their own, and never left their forest soli-
tudes. I was recognized by all the necessary authorities of
that country. I returned to France as the Manpiis de Sabran.
On my voyage I made acquaintance with two Frenchmen of
very high station, who proved true friends to me and had
power enough to protect me from the consequences of not
having served a military term in France. Vassia Kazdn had
been numbered with the drowned men who iiad gone down
when the * Estelle' had foundered off the Finos. I had seen
that by the French journals. On my arrival in the West, I
went first to the Bay of Romaris : there I found at once all
that had been indicated to me as hidden in the oak wood
above the sea. The priest of Romaris, and the peasantry, at
the first utterance of the name welcomed me with rapture :
they had forgotten nothing. Bretons never do forget. I had
therefore no fear of recognition. I had grown and changed
80 much during my seven years' absence from Paris that I
did not suppose any one would recognize the collegian Vassia
Kazdn in the Marquis de Sabran. And I was not in error.
Even you, most probably, would never have known me again
had not your perceptions been abnormally quickened by hatred
of me as your cousin's husband ; and had you even had sus-
picions you could never have presumed to formulate them but
for that accident in the forest. It is always some such un-
foreseen trifle which breaks down the wariest schemes. I will
not linger on all the causes that made me take the name i

WANDA, 321

ii<i. I can honestly say that had there hcen any fortune
involved, or any even distant heir to he wronged, I should
not have done it. As there was nothing save some insignia
of knightly orders and some acres of utterly unproductive
sea-coast, I wronged no one. What was lefl of the old manor
I purchased with the little money I took over with me. I
repeat that I have wronged no one exoeptyour cousin, who in
my wife. The rest of my life you know. Society in Paris he-
came gracious and cordial to me. You will say that I must
have had every moral sense perverted hefore I could take such
a course. But I did not regard it as an immorality. Here was
an empty title, like an empty shell, lying ready for any occu-
pant. Its usurpation harmed no one. I intended to justify
my assumption of it by a distinguished career, and I was
aware that my education had been beyond that of most gen-
tlemen. It is true that when I was fairly launched on a Pa-
risian life pleasure governed me more than ambition ; and I
found, which had not before occurred to mo, that the aristo-
cratic creeds and the political loyalties which I had perforce
adopted with the name of the Sabrans of Romaris completely
closed all the portals of political ambition to me. Hence I be-
came almost by necessity a fainAant, and fate smiled on me
more than I merited. I discharged my duty to the dead by
the publication of all his manuscripts. In this at least I was
faithful. Paris applauded me. I became in a manner cele-
brated. I need not say more, except that I can declare to you
the position I had entered upon soon became so natural to me
that I absolutely forgot it was assumed. Nature had made
me arrogant, contemptuous, courageous ; it was quite natural
to me to act the part of a great noble. My want of fortune
often hampered and irritated me, but I had that instinct in
public events which we call flair, I made with slender means
some audacious and happy ventures on the Bourse. I was
also famous for la main heureuse in all forms of gambling. I
led a selfish and perhaps even a vicious life, but I kept always
within those lines which the usages of the world have pre-
scribed to gentlemen even in their license. I never did any-
thing that degraded the name I had taken, as men of the
world read degradation. I should not have satisfied severe
moralists, but, my one crime apart, I w£U3 a man of honor until
— I loved your cousin. J do pot j^ttempt to defend my mar-

322 WANDA.

riage with her. It was a fraud, a crime ; I am well aware of
that. If you had struck me the other night, I would not
have denied your perfect right to do so. I will say no more.
You have loved her. You know what my temptation was :
my crime is one you cannot pardon. It is a treason to your
rank, to your relatives, to all the traditions of your order.
When you were a little lad you said a hitter truth to me. I
was born a serf in Kussia. There are serfs no more in Hussia,
but Alexander, who affranchised them, cannot affranchise me.
I am base-born. I am like those cross-bred hounds cursed by
conflicting elements in their blood : I am an aristocrat in tem-
per and in taste and mind ; I am a bastard in class, the chance
child of a peasant begotten by a great lord's momentary ennut
and caprice 1 But if you will stoop so far — if you will con-
sider me ennobled by Jier enough to meet you as an equal would
do — we can find with facility some pretext of quarrel, and
under cover and semblance of a duel you can kill me. You
will only be taking the just vengeance of a race of which jou
are the only male champion, — what her brothers would surely
have taken had they been living. She will mourn for me
without shame, since you have passed me your promise never
to tell her of my past. I await your commands. That my
little sons will transmit the infamy of my blood to their de-
scendants will be disgrace to them forever in your sight. Yet
you will not utterly hate them, for children are more their
mothers' than their fathers', and she will rear them in all noble
ways."

Then he signed the letter with the name of Yassia Kaz4n,
and addressed it to Egon V^krhely at his castle of Tar6o
there to await the return of Viis^rhely from the Prussian
camp. That done, he felt more at peace with himself, more
nearly a gentleman, less heavily weighted with his own cow-
ardice and shame.

It was not until three weeks later that he received the
reply of Y^Siirhely written from the castle of Tardo. It was
very brief: —

" I have read your letter, and I have burned it. I cannoi
kill you, for she would never pardon me. Live on in suok
peace as you may find.

" (Signed) Prince VXsXrhelt."

WANDA. 323

*o Ilia cousin Y^s^rhely wroto at tho same time, and to
said, —

Forgive mo that I left you so abruptly. It was neccs-
', and I did not rebel against necessity, for so I avoided
.« pain. The world has seen me at Hohcnszalras ; let
t.l:isft.t^ suffice. Do not ask me to return. It hurts me to re-
you anything, but residence there is only a prolonged
^ei*ing to me and must cause irritation to your lord. I go
to i3Ciy soldiers in Central Hungary, among whom I make my
~ ily. If ever you need me, you well know that I am at

service ; but I hope this will never be, since it will
that some evil has befallen you. Hear your sons in
traditions of your race, and teach them to be worthy of
y 0"tjiirT3elf : being so, they will be also worthy of your name.
-i^dieu, my ever-beloved Wanda! Show what I have said
Vierein to your husband, and give me a remembrance in your
prayers.

" (Signed) Eoon.*'

ClIAPTKR XXL

Tub Countess Brancka meanwhile had been staying at

^-^I'^c for the autumn shooting when her brother-in-law had

y^turncd there unexpectedly and to her chagrin, since she

»ad filled the old castle with friends of her own, such as

^?j6on Vilsarhely little favored, and it amused her to play the

chQ,telaine there and organize all manner of extravagant and

^^entric pastimes. When he arrived she could no longer

®^joy this unchecked independence of folly, and he did not

^esitate to make it plain to her that tho sooner Tar6c should

•^ cleared of its Pturisian world the better would he be

P*cased. Indeed, she knew well that it was only his sense

^* hospitality, as the first duty of a gentleman, which re-

'^^ined him from enforcing a rough and sudden exodus

*Pon her guests. He returned, moreover, unusually silent,

!^rvcd, and what she termed ill-tempered. It was clear to

^^ that his sojourn at Hohcnszalras had been painful to

^**i i and whenever she spoke to him of it he replied to her

324 WA NBA.

in a tone which forhade further interrogation. If she feared
any one in the world it was Egon, who hi^ again and again
paid her debts to spare his brother annoyance, and who re-
ceived her and her caprices with a contemptuous unalterable
disdain.

" Wanda has ruined him I" she always thought angrily.
*' He always expects every other woman to have a soul above
chiffons and to bury herself in the country with children and
horses.''

Her quick instincts perceived that the hold upon his
thoughts which his cousin always possessed had been only
strengthened by his visit to her, and she attributed the gloom
which had settled down on him to the pain which the happi-
ness that reigned at Hohenszalras had given him. Little souls
always try to cram great ones into their own narrowed measure-
ments. As he did not absolutely dismiss her, she continued
to entertain her own people at Tar6c, ignoring his tacit dis-
approval, and was still there when the letter of Sabran reached
her brother-in-law. She had very quick eyes ; she was present
when the letters, which only came to Tar5c once a week, being
fetched over many leagues of wild forest, and hill, and torrent
and ravine, were brought to Yh^^rhely, and she noticed that
his face changed as he took out a thick envelope, which she,
standing by his shoulder, with her hand outstretched for her
own correspondence from Paris and Petersburg, could see bore
the post-mark of Matrey. He threw it among a mass of
other letters, and soon after took all his papers away with him
into the room which was called a library, being full of Hun-
garian black-letter and monkish literature, gathered in centu-
ries gone by by great priests of the race of V^iirhely.

What was in that letter?

She attended to none of her own, so absorbed was she in
the impression which gained upon her that the packet which
had brought so much surprise and even emotion upon his face
came from the hand of Wanda. ^^ If even she should be no saint
at all ?*' she thought, with a malicious amusement. She did
not see Egon V askrhely for many hours, but she did not lose her
curiosity or cease to cast about for a method of gratifying it At
the close of the day when she came back from hunting she
went into the library, which was then empty. She. did not
seriously expect to see anything that would reward her enter-

WANDA. 325

prise, but she knew he read his letters there and wrote the
few he W|is obliged to write : like most soldiers ho disliked
using pen and ink. It was dusk, and there were a few lights
burning in the old silver sconces fixed upon the horns of forest
animals against the walls. With a quick, calm touch, she
moved all the litter of papers lying on the huge table where
ho was wont to do such business as he was compelled to trans-
act. She found nothing that gratified her inquisitivencss.
She was about to leave the room in baffled impatience — impa-
tience of she knew not what — when her eyes fell upon a pile
of charred paper lying on the stove.

It was one of those monumental polychrome stoves of
fifteenth-century work in which the country houses of Cen-
tral Europe are so rich, — a grand pile of fretted pottery,
towering half-way to the ceiling, with the crown and arms of*
the yks5.rhely princes on its summit. There was no fire in
it, for the weather was not cold, and yh,s5>rhely, who alone
used the room^ was an ascetic in such matters ; but upon its
jutting step, which was guarded by lions of gilded bronze,
there had been some paper burned : the ashes lay there in a
little heap. Almost all of it was ash, but a few torn pieces
were only blackened and colored. With the eager curiosity
of a woman who is longing to find another woman at fault, she
kneeled down by the stove and patiently examined these pieces.
Only one was so little burned that it had a word or two legi-
ble upon it ; two of those, words were Vassia Kazdn. Noth-
ing else was traceable ; she recognized the handwriting of
Sabran. She attached no importance to it, yet she slipped
the little scrap, burnt and black as it was, within one of her
gauntlets ; then, as quickly as she had come there, she re-
treated, and in another half-hour, smiling and radiant, covered
with jewels, and with no trace of fatigue or of weather, Fhe
descended the great banqueting-hall, clad as though the heart
of the Greater Carpathians was the centre of the Boulevard
St. Germain.

Who was Vassia Kazdn ?

The question floated above all her thoughts all that even*
ing. Who was he, she, or it ? and what could Sabran liave
to say of him, or her, or it to Egon Viis^rhcly ? A less wise
woman might have asked straightway what the unknown
name might moan, but straight ways are not those which com*

2S

326 WANDA,

mend themselves to temperaments like hers. The pleasure
and the purpose of her life was intrigue. In great things she
deemed it necessity ; in trifles it was an amusement ; without
it life was flavorless.

The next day her brother-in-law abandoned Tar6c, to join
his hussars and prepare for the autumn manoeuvres in the
plains, and lefl her and Stefan in possession of the great
place half palace, half fortress, which had withstood more
than one siege of Ottoman armies, where it stood across a
deep gorge with the water foaming black below. But she kept
the charred, torn, triangular scrap of paper; and she treasured
in her memory the two words Yassia Kazdn ; and she said
again and again and again to herself, " Why should he write
to Egon ? Why should Egon burn what he writes ?" Deep
down in her mind there was always at work a bitter jealousy
of Wanda von Szalras, — jealousy of her regular and perfect
beauty, of her vast possessions, of her influence at the court,
of her serene and unspotted repute, and now of her ascend-
ency over the lives of Sabran and of V^sj\rhely.

" Why should they both love that woman so much ?" she
thought, very often. " She is always alike. She has no
temptations. She goes over life as if it were frozen snow.
She did one senseless thing, but then she was rich enough to
do it with impunity. She is so habitually fortunate that she
is utterly uninteresting ; and yet they are both her slaves l"

She went home and wrote a short letter to a cousin of her
own, who had been a member of the famous Third Section at
Petersburg. She said in her letter, " Is there any one known
in Russia as Yassia Kazdn ? I want you to learn for me to
what or to whom this name belongs. It is certainly Russian,
and appears to me to have been taken by some one who has
been named more ebreo from the city of Kazdn. You, who
know everything past, present, and to come, will be able to
know this?"

In a few days* time she received an answer from Peters-
burg. Her cousin wrote, " I cannot give you the information
you desire. It must be a thing of the past. But I will keep
it in mind, and sooner or later you shall have the knowledge
you wish. You will do ua the justice to admit that we aie
not easily baffled."

Sht) was not satisfied, but knew how to be patient To dis-

WANDA. 327

iraot herself whilst waiting, she sent a line anonymously to
Uohenszalras.

What did it matter to her ? Nothing, indeed. But the sense
of a secret withheld from her was to Madame Olga like the slot
of the fox to a young hound. She might have a thousand se«
crets of her own if it pleased har, but she could not endure any
one else to guard one. Besides, in a vague, feverish, angry
way she was almost in love with the man who was so faithful
to his wife that he had looked away from her as from some
unclean thing when she had wished to dazzle him. She liad
no perception that the secret could concern himself very nearly^
but she thought it was probably one which he and Egon Y^
shirhely, for reasons of their own, chose to share and keep hid-
den. And if it were a secret that prevented Sabran from
going to the court of llussia ? Then, surely, it was one worth
knowing. And if she gained a knowledge of it and his wife
had none? — what a superiority would be hers, what a weapon
always to hand !

She did not intend any especial cruelty or compass any es-
pecial end : she was actuated by a vague desire to interrupt a
current of happiness that flowed on smoothly without her, to
interfere where she had no earthly title or reason to do so,
merely because she was disregarded by persons content with
each other. It is not always definite motives that have the
most influence ; the subtlest poisons arc those which enter the
system we know not how, and penetrate it ere we are aware.
The only thing which had ever held her back from any ex-
tremes of evil had been the mere habit of good-breeding and
an absolute egotism which had saved her from all strong pas-
sions. Now something that was like passion had touched her
ander the sting of Sabran's indifference, and with it she be-
came tenacious, malignant, and unsparing: adroit she had
always been. Instinct is seldom at fault when we are con-
Bcious of an enemy, and Sabran 's had not erred when it hud
Warned him against the wife of Stefan Brancka as the serpent
who would. bring woe and disaster to his paradise.

In some three months' time she received a more explicit
answer from her cousin in Petei'sburg. Giving the precise
dates, he told her that Vassia Kazan was the name given to the
Bon of Count Paul Ivanovitch ZabarofF by a wayside amour
with one of his own serfs at a village neur the bordor-liuc of

328 WANDA.

Astrachan. IIo narrated the history of the boy as a boy, aod
Baid that he had been among the passengers on board a Havre
ship, which had foundered with all hands. So far the brief
record of Vassia Kazdn was elear and complete. But it told
her nothing. She was unreasonably enraged, and looked at
the little piece of burnt paper as though she would wrench
the secret out of it.

*' There must be so much more to know,*' she thought.
'* What would a mere drowned boy be to either of those men,
— a boy dead, too, all these years before ?"

She wrote insolently to her cousin that the Third Section
with its eyes of Argus and its limbs of Vishnoo had always
been but an overgrown imbecile, and set her woman's wits to
accomplish what the Third Section had failed to do for her.
So much she thought of it that the name seemed forced into
her very brain ; she seemed to hear every one saying, "Vassia
Kaz4n." It was a word to conjure with, at least ; she could
at the least try the effect of its utterance any day upon either
of those who had made it the key of their correspondence.
Russia had written down Vassia Kaz4n as dead, and the mys-
tery which enveloped the name would not open to her. She
knew her country too well not to know that this bold state-
ment might cover some political secret, some story whoilv
unlike that which was given her. V^assia Kaz4n might hava
lived and have incurred the suspicions of the police, and bo
dwelling far away in the death-in-life of Siberian mines, or
deep sunk in some fortress, like a stone at the bottom of %
well. The reply not only did not beget her belief in it, bul
gave her range for the widest and wildest conjectures of im-
agination. " It is some fault, some folly, some crime, — who
can tell ? And Vassia Kazdn is the victim, or the associate^
or the confidant of it. But what is it? And how doet
Egon know of it?"

She passed the winter in pleasures of all kinds, now in
Vienna, now in Paris, but the subject did not lose its powei
over her, nor did she forget the face of Sabran as he had
torned it away from her in the ball-room of the Hof burg.

\

WAADA 329

CHAPTER XXII.

Stbanqelt enough, the consciousness that one person
Mved who knew his secret unnerved him. He had said truly
that 80 much were all his instincts and temper those of an
aristocrat that he had long ceased to remember that he was
not the true Marquis de Sabran. The admiration men frankly
gave him, and the ascendency he exercised over women, had
alike concurred in fostering his self-delusion. Since his recog-
nition by the foe of his boyhood a vivid sense of his own
shamefulness, however, had come upon him ; a morbid con-
sciousness that he was not what he seemed, and what all the
world believed him, had returned to him. Egon would never
speak, but he himself could never forget. He said to him
self in his solitude, *^ I am Vassia Kazdn I" and what he had
done appeared to him intolerable, infamous, beyond all expia-
tion.

It was like an impalpable but impassable wall built up
between himself and her. Nothing was changed except that
one man knew his secret, but this one fact seemed to change
the face of the world. For the first time, all the deference,
all Uie homage with which the people of the Tauern treated
him seemed to him a derision. Naturally of proud temper
and of an intellect which gave him an ascendency over others,
lie had from the first moment he had assumed the marquisate
4>f Sabran received all the acknowledgments of his rank with
an honest unconsciousness of imposture. Afler all, he had in
bis veins blood as patrician as that of the Sabrans. But now
that Egon Yks^rhely knew the truth he was perpetually con-
scious of not being what he seemed. The mere sense that in
the world there was another living being who knew what he
I new shook down all the self-possession and philosophy which
had so long made him assure himself that the assumption of
a name was an immaterial circumstance, which, harming no
one, could concern no one. Egon y5,s5,rhely seemed to have
seised his sophisms in a rude grasp and shaken them down as
blo»!oms fall in wind. He thought with bitter sclf-con-
tcmpt how true the cynic was who said that no sin exists so

28*

330 WANDA,

long as it is cot found ont,— that discovery is the sole fomi
which remorse takes.

At times his remorse made him almost afraid of Wanda
almost shrink from her, almost tremble at her regard ; at othei
times it intensified his passion and infused into his embrace!
a kind of ferocity of triumph. He would show an almost
brutal ardor in his caresses, and would think, with an almost
cruel exultation, " I was born a serf, and I am her lover, her
lord r* Strangely enough, she began to lose something of her
high influence upon him, of her spiritual superiority in his
sight. She was so entirely, so perpetually his, that she became
in a manner tainted with his own degradation. She could no
longer check him with a word, calm him with a gesture of
restraint. She was conscious of a change in him which she
could not explain to herself. His sweetness of temper waa
broken by occasional irritability that she had never seen before.
He was at times melancholy and absorbed ; at times he dis-
played a jealousy which appeared unworthy of herself and
him ; at other moments he adored her, submitted to her with too
great a humility. They were still happy, but their happiness
was more uncertain, more disturbed by passing shadows. She
told herself that it was always so in marriage, that, in the old
trite phrase, nothing mortal was ever perfect long. But this
philosophy failed to reconcile her. She found herself contin-
ually pondering on the alteration that she perceived in. him,
without being able to explain it to herself in any satisfactory
manner.

One day he announced to her without preface that he had
decided to become a naturalized Austrian, — that he preferred
to any other the title which she had given him in the Count-
ship of Idrac. She was astonished, but on reflection only
saw, in his choice, devotion and deference to herself. Per-
haps, too, she reflected with a pang, he desired some foreign
mi.ssion such as she had once proposed to him ; perhaps the
life at Hohenszalras was monotonous and too quiet for a man
80 long used to the movement and excitation of Paris. She
suggested the invitation of a circle of guests more often, but
he rejected the idea with some impatience. He, who had
previously amused himself so well with the part of host to a
brilliant society, now professed that he saw nothing but trouble
and ennui in a house full of people who changed every week,

WA WD A, 331

ind of royal personages who exacted ceremonious observances
that were tedious and burdensome. So they remained alone,
for even the Princess Ottilie had gone away to Lilienslust.
For her own part, she asked nothing better. Her people,
hor lands, her occupations, her responsibilities, were always
interest enough. ' She loved the stately, serene tread of Time
in these mountain-solitudes. Life always seemed to her a
purer, graver, more august thing when no echo of the world
without jarred on the solemnity of the woods and hills. She
wanted her children to grow up to love Hohenszalras, as she
had always done, far above all pomps and pleasures of courts
and cities.

The winter went by, and he spent most of the days out of
doors in violent exercise, sledging, skating, wolf-hunting. In
the evenings he made music for her in the white-room, —
beautiful, dreamy music, that carried her soul from earth.
He played for hours and hours far into the night ; he seemed
more willing to do anything than to converse. When jie
talked to her, she was sensible of an effort of constraint ; it
was no longer the careless, happy, spontaneous conversation
of a man certain of receiving sympathy in all his opinions,
indulgence in all his errors, comprehension in even his vaguest
or most eccentric ideas : a certain charm was gone out of their
intercourse. She thought sometimes, humbly enough, was it
because a man always wearies of a woman ? Yet she could
scarcely think that; for his reverential deference to her alter-
nated with a passion that had lost nothing of its voluptuous
intensity.

So the winter passed away. Madame Ottilie was in the
south for her health, with her relatives of Lilicnhohe : they
invited no one, and so no one could approach them. The
children grew and throve. Bela and his brother had a little
elodge of their own, drawn by two Spanish donkeys, white as
the snows that wrapped the Iselthal in their serenity and
silence. In their little sable coats and their sable-lined hoods
the two little boys looked like rose-buds wrapped in brown
moss. They were a pretty spectacle upon the ice, with their
stately Heiduck, wrapped in his scarlet-and-black cloak, walk-
ing by the gilded shell-shaped sledge.

" Bela loves the ice best. Bela wishes the summer never
WSLB I" said the little heir of the Counts of Szalras one day, a^i

332 WANDA.

he leaped out from under the bear-skin of his 8now-carriage«
His father heard him, and smiled a little bitterly.

" You have the snow in your blood," he thought. ** I, too,
know how I loved the winter with all its privations, how I
skimmed like a swallow down the frozen Volga, how 1 breasted
the win3 of the North Sea, sad with the dying cries of the
swans I But I had an empty stomach and naked limbs under
my rough goat-skin, and you ride there in your sables and
velvets, a proud little prince, and yet you are my son 1"

Was he almost angered against his own child for the great
heirship to which he was born, as kings are often at their
dauphins? Bela looked up at him a little timidly, alwaj-a
being in a certain awe of his father.

" May Bela go with you some day with the big black hor3Cfl.
one day when you go very far ?"

" Ask your mother," said Sabran.

" She will like it," said the child. " Yesterday she said
you never do think of Bela. She did not say it to Bela, but
hfe heard."

^* I will think of him," said Sabran, with some emotion :
he had a certain antagonism to the child, of which he was
vaguely ashamed ; he was sorry that she should have noticed
it. He disliked him because Bela so visibly resembled him-
self that he was a perpetual reproach, — a living sign of how
the blood of a Russian lord and of a Persian peasant had been
infused into the blood of the Austrian nobles.

The next day he took the child with him on a drive of many
leagues, through the frozen highways winding through th#
frosted forests under the huge snow-covered range of the Glock-
ner mountains. Bela was in raptures : the grand black Rus-
sian horses, whose speed was as the wind, were much more tc
his taste than the sedate and solemn Spanish asses. Wheo
they returned, and Sabran lifted him out of the sledge in the
twilight, the child kissed his hand.

" Bela loves you," he said, timidly.

" Why do you ?" said his father, surprised and to*iched.
" Because you are your mother's child ?"

Bela did not understand. He said, aft^r a moment of re-
flection,—

" Bela is afraid when you are angry ; very afraid. But
Bela does love you."

WANDA. 333

Sabran laid his hand on the chihjs shoulder: '^I shall
never be angry if Bela obey his mother, and never pain her.
Bemember that"

" He will remember/* said Bela. '^ And may he go with
ih3 big black horses very soon again ?"

" Your mother's horses are just as big, and just as black.
Is it not the same thing to go with her ?"

<* No Because she takes Bela often ; you never."

'^ You are ungrateful/' said Sabran, in the tone which
always alarmed and awed the bold, bright spirit of his child.
^ Your mother's love beside mine is like the great mountain
beside the speck of dust. Can you understand ? You will
when you are a man. Obey her and adore her. So you will
best please me."

Bela looked at him with troubled suffused eyes ; he went
within-doors a little sadly, led away by Hubert, and when he
reached his nursery and had his furs taken from off him he
was still serious, and for once he did not tell his thoughts to
Q^la, for they were too many for him to be able to master
them in words. His father was a beautiful, august, terrible,
magnificent figure in his eyes ; with the confused fancies of a
ehild*s scarce-opened mind he blended together in his admira-
tion Sabran and the great marble form of Sanct Johann of
Prague, which stretched its arm towards the lake from the
doors of the great entrance, and, as Bela always understood,
controlled the waters and the storms at will. Bela feared no
one else in all the world, but he feared his father, and for that
reason loved him as he loved nothing else in his somewhat
selfish and imperious little life.

" It is so good of you to have given Bela that pleasure,"
his wife said to him when he entered the white- room. ^^ I
know you cannot care to hear a child chatter as I do. It can
only be tiresome to you."

" I will drive him every day if it please yoit," said Sabran.

" No, no ; that would be too much to exact from you. Be-
isides, he would soon despise his donkeys and desert poor Gela.
I take him but seldom myself for that reason. He has an idea
that he is immeasurably older than Gela. It is true, a year
at their ages is more difference than are ten years at ours."

*' The child said something to me, as if he had heard jou
pay I do not care for him ?"

334 WANDA.

<< Ton do not, very mucH. Surely you aro indiaed to be
harsh to him ?"

^^ If I be so, It is only because I see so much of myself in
him."

He looked at her, assailed once more by the longing which
at times came over him to tell her the truth of- liimself, to
risk everything rather than deceive her longer, to throw him^
self upon her mercy and cut short this life which had so much
of duplicity, so much of concealment, that every year added to
it was a stone added to the mountain of his sins. But when
he looked at her he dared not. The very grace and serenity of
her daunted him ; all the signs of nobility in her, from the
repose of her manner to the very beauty of her hands, with
their great rings gleaming on the long and slender fingers,
seemed to awe him in silence. She was so proud a woman, so
great a lady, so patrician in all her prejudices, her habits, her
hereditary qualities, he dared not tell her that he had betrayed
her thus. An infidelity, a folly, even any other crime, he
thought, he could have summoned courage to confess to her ;
but to say to her, the daughter of a line of princes, " I, who
have made you the mother of my children, I was born a
bastard and a serf 1" How could he dare say that ? Anything
else she might forgive, he thought, since love is great, but
never that. Nay, a cold sickness stole over him as he thought
again that she came of great lords who had meted justice out
over whole provinces for a thousand years ; and he had wronged
her so deeply that the human tongue scarcely held any word
of infamy enough to name his crime. The law would set her
free, if she chose, from a man who had so betrayed her, and
his children would be bastards like himself.

He had stretched himself on a great couch covered with
white bear-skins. He was in shadow ; she was in the light
that came from the fire on the wide hearth, and from the oriel
window near, a red warm dusky light, that fell on the jewels
on her hands, the furs on her skirts, the very pearls about her
throat.

She glanced at him anxiously, seeing how motionless he lay
there, with his head turned backward on the cushions.

'^ I am afraid you are weak still from that wound," she said,
as she rose and approached him. " Greswold assures me it has
left no trace ; but I am always afraid. And you look ^fleo

WANDA. 335

00 pale. Perhaps you exert yourself too much? Let the
wolves be. Perhaps it is too cold for you ? Would you like
to go to the south ? Do not think of me ; my only happiuesa
is to do whatever you wish."

He kissed her hand with deep unfeigned emotion. '^ I be-
lieve in angels since I knew you," he murmured. ^^ No ; I
will not take you away from the winter and the people that
you love. I am well enough. Grcswold is right. I could
not master those horses if I were not strong ; be sure of that."

" But I always fear that it is dull here for you ?"

" Dull I with you ? * Custom cannot stale her infinite
▼ariely.' That was written in prophecy of your charm for
me.

*' You will always flatter me ! And I am not ' various* at
all ; I am too grave to be entertaining. I am just the German
house-mother who cares for the children and for you."

He laughed.

" Is that your portrait of yourself? I think Carolus Du-
ran's is truer, my grand ch3,telaine. When you are at court,
the whole circle seems to fade to nothing before your presence.
Though there are so many women high-born and beautiful
there, you eclipse them all."

" Only in your eyes 1 And you know I care nothing for
courts. What I like is the life here, where one quiet day is
the pattern of all the other days. If I were sure that you
were content in it "

" Why should you think of that ?"

" My love, tell me honestly, <2o you never miss the world ?"

He rose and walked to the hearth. He, whose life was a
long lie, never, lied to her if he could avoid it ; and he knew
very well that he did miss the world, with all its folly, stimu-
lant, and sin. Sometimes the moral air here seemed to him
too pure, too clear.

" Did I do so I should be thankless indeed, — thankless as
madmen are, who do not know the good done to them. I
am like a ship that has anchored iu a fair haven after stress
of weather. I infinitely prefer to see none but yourself:
when others are here we are of necessity so much apart. If
the weather," he added, more lightly, " did not so very often
wear Milton's gray sandals, there would be nothing one could
ever wish changed in the life here. For such great riders

336 WANDA.

as we arc, that is a matter of regret. Wet oaddlcs are too
often our fate ; but in compensatioD our forests are so greeu."

She did not press the question.

But the next day she wrote a letter to a relative who waa
a great minister and had preponderating influence in the
council-chamber of the Austrian Empire. She did not speak
to Sabran of the letter that she sent.

She had not known any of that disillusion which beiallB
most women in their love. Her husband had remained her
lover, passionately, ardently, jealously ; and the sincerity of
his devotion to her had spared her all tbat teirible conscious-
ness of the man^s satiety which usually confronts a woman
in the earliest years of union. She shrank now with horror
from the fear which came to her that this passion might, like
so many others, alter and fade under the dulness of habit.
She had high courage and clear vision : she mot half-way
the evil that she dreaded.

In the spring a Foreign Office dispatch from Vienna came
to him and surprised and moved him strongly. With it ia
his hand he sought her at once.

" You did this 1" he said, quickly. " They offer me the
Kussian mission."

She grew a little pale, but had courage to smile. She had
seen by a glance at his face the pleasure the offer gave him.

^' I only told my cousin Kunst that I thought you might
be persuaded to try public life, if he proposed it to you."

" When did you say that ?"

*^ One day in the winter, when I asked you if you did not
miss the world."

" I never thought I betrayed that I did so." -

" You were only over-eager to deny it. And I know youf
generosity, my love. You miss the world ; we will go back
to it for a little. It will only make our life here doarer, I
hope."

He was silent ; emotion mastered him. " You have the
most unselfish nature that ever was 1" he said, brokenly. " It will
be a cruel sacrifice to you, and yet you urge it for my sake."

" Dear, will you not understand ? What is for your sake
is what is most for mine. I see you long, despite yourself, to
b'^ amidst men once more and use your rare talents as you can-
not use them hero. It is only right that you should have the

WANDA. 337

fDwer to do so. If our life hero has taken the hold on your
eart, then, I think, you will come back to it all the more
gladly. And then I too have my vanity ; I shall be proud
for the world to see how you can fill a groat station, con-
<luct a difficult negotiation, distinguish yourself in every way.
IVhen they praise you, I shall be repaid a thousand times for
MBj sacrifice of my own tastes that there may be."

He heard her with many conflicting emotions, of which a
passionate gratitude was the first and highest.

" You make me ashamed," he said, in a low voice. " No

jcnan can be worthy of such goodness as yours ; and I '*

Once more the avowal of the truth rose to his lips, but
stayed unuttered. His want of courage took refuge in pro-
c^rasti nation.

" We need not decide for a day or two/* he added : " they
^ive me time. We wilt think well. When do you think I
must reply?"

** Surely soon; your delay would seem disrespect. You
l^now we Austrians are very ceremonious."

** And if I accept, it will not make you unhappy?"
'^ My love, no, a thousand times no ; your choice is always
mine."

Irle stooped and kissed her hand.

** Your are ever the same," he murmured, — "the noblest,

tlio most generous "

She smiled bravely. " I am quite sure you have decided
*^i*osidy. €ro to my table yonder, and write a graceful accept-
Hooo to my cousin Kunst. You will be happier when it is
routed."

** No ; I will think a little. It is not a thing to bo done in
nii8t:«. It will be irrevocable."

* * Irrevocable ? A diplomatic mission ? You can throw it
^P '^hen you please. You are not bound to serve longer than
yoix choose."

He was silent: what he had thought himself had been of
the Irrevocable insult he would be held to have offered to the
<i^l>eror, the nation, and the world, if ever they knew.

** It will not be liked if I accept for a mere caprice. One
in^Bt never treat a State as Bc'.a treats his playthings," he
Bft^'i, as he rang, and when the servant answered the summons
ottered them to saddle his horse.

to 29

I

338 WANDA.

" No ; there is no haste. Qlcarcmborg is not definiU— •^l
recalled, I think."

But as she spoke she knew very well that, unknown ^

himself, he had already decided, — that the joy and trium^ci^apa
the oflPer had brought to him were both too great for him eve^^s^^^
ually to resist them. He sat down and re-read the letter.

She had said the truth to him, but she had not said all r ^
truth. She had a certain desire that he should justify her
riage in the eyes of the world by some political career brilliai
followed ; but this was not her chief motive in wishing
to return to the life of cities. She had seen that he w
in a manner disquieted, discontented, and attributed it to a
content at the even routine of their lives. The change in
moods and temper, the arbitrary violence of his love for b
vaguely alarmed and troubled her ; she seemed to see the
of much that might render their lives far less happy,
realized that she had given herself to one who had the
city of becoming a tyrannical possessor, and retained, (
afler six years of marriage, the irritable ardor of a lover,
knew that it was better for them both that the distraction
-the restraint of the life of the world should occupy some
his thoughts and check the over-indulgence of a passion
in solitude grew feverish and morbid. She had not the i
of the change in him, of which the result alone was appas
to her, and she could only act according to her light. If^ *^
grew morose, tyrannical, violent, all the joy of their life wo^ ^W
be gone. She knew that men alter curiously under the se^'^Be
of possession. She felt that her influence, though stro^^i
was not paramount as it had been, and she perceived that^ "^
no longer took much interest in the administration of ^"^
estates, in which he had shown great ability in the first y4^^
of their marriage. She had been forced to resume her old
governance of all those matters, and she knew that it was i^^
good for him to live without occupation. She feared that t^^
sameness of the days, to her so delightful, to him grew ti^p-
some. To ride constantly, to hunt sometimes, to make music
in the evenings, — this was scarcely enough to fill up the life
of a man who had been a viveur on the bitumen of the boulfl-
fards for so long.

A woman of & lesser nature would have been too vain to
doubt the all-su£Bcicncy of her own presence to enthrall anil

WANDA, 339

to content him ; but she was without vanity, and had more
wisdom than most women. It did not even once occur to her, as
it would have done incessantly to most, that the magnificence
of all her gifts to him was a title-deed to his content for life.

Public life would be her enemy, would take her from the
fiolitudes she loved, would change her plans for her children's
education, would bring the world continually betwixt herself
tnd her husband ; but, since he wished it, that was all she
thought of, all her law.

'^ Surely he will accept ?" said Madame Ottilie, when she
heard he had not returned from his ride.

*' Yes, he will accept," said his wifa '^ He does not know
it, but he will."

'^ I cannot imagine why he should affect to hesitate. It is
the career he is made for, with his talents, his social graces.*

'^ He does not affect : he hesitates for my sake. He knov '
I am never happy away from Hohenszalras."

" Why did you write then to Kunst ?"

" Because it will be better for him ; he is neither a poe* jy
a philosopher, to be able to live away from the world."

" Which are you ?"

" Neither ; only a woman who loves the home she w -» *'A^i
in, and the people she "

** Reigns over," added the princess. "Admit, my belcttu
that a part of your passion for Hohenszalras comes of the /ac
that you cannot be quite as omnipotent in the world ao yoctL
are here 1"

Wanda von Szalras smiled. " Perhaps ; the best motive
18 always mixed with a baser. But I adore the country and
country life. I abhor cities."

" Men are always like Horace," said the princess. " They
admire rural life, but they remain for all that with Augus-
tus."

At that moment they heard the hoofs of his horse gallop-
mg up the great avenue. A quarter of an hour went by,
for he changed his dress before coming into his wife's pres-
ence. He would no more have gone to her with the dust or
the mud of tho roads upon him than he would have gone iu
Buch disarray into the inner circle of the Kaiserinn.

When he entered, she did not speak, but the Princess Ot-
tilie said, with vivacity, —

340 WANDA.

" Well ? you accept, of course ?"

" I will neither accept nor decline. I will do what Wi^n> "^»
wishes."

The princess gave an impatient movement of her little £< ^
on the carpet.

" Wanda is a hermit," she said : " she should have d"^^^ dt
in a cave and lived on berries with St. Scholastics. W^l ^at
is the use of leaving it to her ? She will say, No. fi^She
loves her mountains."

" Then she shall stay amidst her mountains."

" And you will throw all your future away ?"

'' Dear mother, I have no future — should have had Doa<
but for her."

" All that is very pretty, but after nearly six years of
riage it is not necessary to f aire des madrigauxy

The princess sat a little more erect, angrily, and contini
to tap her foot upon the floor. His wife was silent for a li
while; then she went over to her writing-table, and wi
with a firm hand a few lines in iGlerman. She rose and
the sheet to Sabran.

" Copy that," she said, " or give it as many graces of b- ^^ylo
as you like."

His heart beat, his sight seemed dim, as he read what sho
had written.

It was an acceptance.

" See, my dear R6n6 I" said the princess, when she ur^ -^er-
Btood ; " never combat a woman on her own ground and ^^i^'th
her own weapon, — unselfishness I The man must always IO80
11 a conflict of that sort."

The tears stood in his eyes as he answered her :

" Ah, madame 1 if I say what I think, you will aoooB^ nw
again of faUart des madrlQ vaz .'"

WAN! A. 341

CHAPTEll XXIII.

A WEEK or two later, Sabran arrived aloDe at their palao«j
in Vienna, and was cordially received by the great minister
whom she called her cousin Kunst He had also an audience
of his Imperial master, who showed him great kindness and
esteem : he had been always popular and welcome at the Hof-
burg. His new career awaited him under auspices the most
engaging ; his intelligence, which was great, took pleasure at
the prospect of the field awaiting it ; and his personal pride
was gratified and flattered at the personal success which he
enjoyed. He was aware that the brain he was gifted with
would amply sustain all the demands for Jinesse and penetra-
tion that a high diplomatic mission would make upon it, and
ho knew that the immense fortune he commanded throu<;h hb
wife would enable him to fill his place with the social brilliancy
and splendor it required.

He felt happier than he had done ever since the day in the
forest when the name of Vassia Kazdn had been said in his
ear ; he had recovered his nerve, his self-command, his 1719011-
dance; he was once more capable of honestly forgetting
that he was anything besides the great gentleman he ap-
peared. There was an additional pungency for him in the
fact of his mission being to Russia. He hated the country
as a renegade hates a religion he has abandoned. The un-
dying hereditary enmity which must always exist, sub rosa^
betwixt Austria and Russia was in accordance with the antag-
onism he himself felt for every rood of the soil, for every syl-
lable of the tongue, of the Muscovite. He knew that Paul
Zabaroff, his father's legitimate son, was a mighty prince, a
keen politician, a favorite courtier at the court of Petersburg,
The prospect of himself appearing at that court as the repre-
sentative of a great nation, with the occasion and the power
to meet Paul Zabaroff as an equal and defeat his most cher-
ished intrigues, his most subtle projects, gave an intensity tc
his triumph such as no mere social honors or gratified am-
bition could alone have given him. If the minister had
■carched the whole of the Austrian empire through, in all

29*

342

WAyDA.

tho ranks of men he could have found no one so eager to
serve the purpose and tho interests of his Imperial master
against the rivalry of Russia, as he found in one who had
been born a naked movjik in the isba of a Persian peasant.

Even though this dislinctfon which was offered him would
rest like all else on a false basis, yet it intoxicated him, and
would gratify his desires to be something above and beyond
the mere prince-consort that he was. He knew that his tal-
ents were real, that his tact and perception were unerring,
that his power to analyze and influence men was great All
these qualities he felt would enable him in a public career
to conquer admiration and eminence. He was not yet old
enough to be content to regard the future as a thing belong-
ing to his sons, nor had he enough philoprogenitiveneas ever
to do so at any age.

** To return so to Russia 1" he thought, with rapture. All
the ambition that had been in him in his college days at the
Lyc6e Clovis, which had never taken definite shape, partly
from indolence and partly from circumstance, and had nut
been satisfied even by the brilliancy of his marriage, was
oflen awakened and spurred by the greatness of the social
position of all those with whom he associated. In hi
better moments he sometimes thought, " I am only the hus—
band of the Countess von Szalras ; I am only the father of
the future lords of Hohcnszalras ;'* and the reflection tha
the wqrld might regard him so made him restless and ill ai
ease.

He knew that, being what he was, he would add to hi
crime tenfold by acceptance of the honor offered to him. H
knew that the more prominent he was in the sight of men
the deeper would be his fall if ever the truth were told. Wha
gage had he that some old school-mate, dowered with as Ion
a memory as Vasilrhely's, might not confront him with th
same charge and challenge ? True, this danger had alwa^
seemed to him so remote that never since he had landed a
Romaris Bay had he been troubled by any apprehension of it
His own assured position, his own hauteur of bearing, his ow
perfect presence of mind, would have always enabled him
brave safely such an ordeal under the suspicion of any othe
than Vh/Sj\rhely ; with any other he could have relied on hi
own coolness and courage to bear him with immunity through

s ■»

WANDA. 343

any such recognition. Beside, he had always reckoned, and
reckoned justly, that no one would ever dare to insult the
Marquis de Sabran with a suspicion that could have no proof
to sustain it. So he had always reasoned, and events had
justified his expectations and deductions.

This month that he now passed in Vienna was the proudest
of hisjife ; not perhaps the happiest, for beneath his content-
ment there was a jarring remembrance that he was deceiving
a great sovereign and his ministers. But he thrust this sting
of conscience aside whenever it touched him, and abandoned
himself with almost youthful gladness to the felicitations he
received, the arrangements he had to make, and the contem-
plation of the future before him. The pleasures of the gay
aud witty city surrounded him, and he was too handsome, too
seductive, and too popular not to bo sought by women of all
rauks, who rallied him on his long devotion to his wife aud
did their best to make him ashamed of constancy.

^ What beasts we are," he thought, as he lefl Paum's at
ihb flush of dawn, after a supper there which he had given,
and which had nearly degenerated into an orgie. '^ Yet is it
unfaithfulness to her? My soul is always hers, and my love.*'

Still, his conscience smote him, and he felt ashamed as he
thought of her proud frank eyes, of her noble trust in him,
of her pure and lofly life led there under the snow summits
of hei hills.

He worshipped her, with all his life he worshipped her ; a
moment's caprice, a mere fume and fever of senses surprised
and astray, were not infidelity to her. So he told himself,
with such sophisms as men most use when most they are at
fault, as he walked home in the rose of the daybreak to her
great palaoe, which, like all else of hers, was his.

As he ascended the grand staircase, with the escutcheon of
the Ssalras repeated on the gilded bronze of its balustrade, a
ehill and a depression stole upon him. He loved her with
intensity and ardor and truth, yet he had been disloyal to
her ; . he had forgotten her, he had been unworthy of her.
Of what worth were all the women in the world beside her ?
What did they seem to him now, those Delilahs who had be-
guiled him ? He loathed the memory of them : he wondered
at himself He went through the great house slowly towards
his own rooms, pausing dow and then, as though he had never

3-14 WANDA.

Been them before, to glance at some portrait, some stand ^^^^'
arms, some banner commemorative of battle, some quiver, bo '^i
and pussikan taken from the Turk.

On his table he found a telegram sent firom Lini :

^^ I am so glad you are amused and happy. We are ^^^ ^
well here. (Signed) "Wanda."

No torrents of rebuke, no scenes of rage, no passion » ^^
reproaches, could have carried reproach to him like thcc— ^*®
simple words of trustful affection.

" An angel of God should have descended to be worthy » ^^
her !*' he thought.

The next evening there was a ball at the Hof. It was lat
in the season than such things were usually, but the visit
the court of the sovereign of a neighboring nation had c
tained their majesties and the nobility in Vienna. The b^L—Aall
was accompanied by all that pomp and magnificenoe whi^c: -icli
characterize such festivities, and Sabran, present at it, m ■^^laa
the object of universal congratulation and much observatii^ ^oo,
as the ambassador-designate to Russia.

Court dress became him, and his great height and elegai
of manner made him noticeable even in that brilliant cro
of notables. All the greatest ladies distinguished him w
their smiles, but he gave them no more than courtesy,
saw only before the "eye of memory" his wife as he
seen her at the last court ball, with the famous pearls
her throat, and her train of silver tissue sown with pearb
looped up with white lilac.

" It is the flower I like best," she had said to him. ^ ^I^
brought me your first love-message in Paris, do you rem^^°^
ber ? It said little ; it was very discreet, but it said enougi::^ '

" You are always thinking of Wanda 1" said the GounC'^^
Brancka to him now, with a tinge of impatience in her toim^

He colored a little, and said, with that hauteur with wlm ^^
he always repressed any passing jest at his love for his wif^y — ^

" When both one's duty and joy point the same way, "

easy to follow them in thought."

" I hope you follow them in action too," said
Brancka.

" K I do not, I am at least only responsible to Wanda. ^

" Who would be a lenient judge, you mean ?" said ^^LjI
wuntess, with a certain smile that displeased him. \' Bo^ ^'^

WANDA. 345

be too sure : she is a Vod Szalras. They arc not agreeable
persons when they are angered.*'

^' I have not been so unhappy as to see her so/' said Sabran,
qoldly, with a vague sense of uneasiness. As much as it is
possible for a man to dislike a woman who is very lovely, and
young enough to be still charming in the eyes of the world,
he disliked Olga Brancka. He had known her for many
years in Paris, not intimately, but by force of being in the
same society, and, like many men who do not lead very decent
lives themselves, he irankly detested cocodettes.

^' If we want these manners, we have our IwnneSy*^ he was
wont to say, at a time when Cochonette was seen every day
behind his horses by the Cascade, and it had been the height
of the Countess Olga s ambition at that time to be called like
Cochonette. A certain resemblance there was between the
great lady and the wicked one ; they had the same small deli-
cate sarcastic features, the same red gold curls, the same per-
fect colorless complexion ; but where Cochonette had eyes of
the lightest blue, the wife of Count Stefan had the luminous
piercing black eyes of the Muscovite physiognomy. Still, the
likeness was there, and it made the sight of Madame Bmneka
distasteful to him, since his memories of the other were far
from welcome. It was for Cochonette that he had broken the
bank at Monte Carlo, and into her lap that he had thrown all
the gold rouleaux, at a time when in his soul he had already
adored Wanda von Szalras and had despised himself for re-
turning to the slough of his old pleasures. It was Cochonette
who had sold his secrets to the Prussians, and brought them
down upon him in the farm-house among the orchards of the
Orl^nnais, whilst she passed safely through the German lines
and across the frontier, laden with her jewels and her valeurs of
all kinds, saying in her teeth, as she went, ^^ He will never see
that Austrian woman again 1" That hud been the end of all
he had known of Cochonette, and a presentiment of perfidy,
of danger, of animosity, always came over him whenever he
saw the joli petit niinois which in profile was so like Coclio-
Dotte's looking up from under the loose auburn curls that
Madame Olga had copied from her.

Olga Brancka now looked at him with some malice and with
more admiration : she was very pretty that night, blazing
with diamonds, and with her beautifully shaped person as bare

31G WANDA,

as court etiquette would permit. In bar red gold curb she
hud some butterflies in jewels flashing? all the colors of the
rainbow and (rlowing like sunbeams. There was such a butter-
fly, big as the great Emperor moth, between her breasts,
making their whiteness look like snow.

Instinctively Sabran glanced away from her. He felt an
itourdissement that irritated him. The movement did not
escape her. She took his arm.

** We will move about a little while," she said. " Let us
talk of Wanda, mon beau cousin, since you can think of no
one else. And so you are really going to Russia ?*'

" I believe so."

'* It will be a great sacrifice to her ; any other woman woidd
be in puradise in Petersburg, but she will be wretched.'*

" I hope not: if I thought so I would not go."

" You cannot but go now ; you have made your choice.
You will be happy enough. You will play again enormously,
and Wanda has so much money that if you lose millions it
will not ruin her."

" I shall certainly not play with my wife's money. I have
never played since my marriage."

" For all that you will play in Petersburg. It is in the air
A saint could not help doing it, and you are not a saint b]
nature, though you have become one since marriage. Bu
you know conversions by marriage do not last. They are lik<
compulsory confessions. They mean nothing."

" You are very malicious to-night, madame," said Sabran
absently : he was in no mood for banter, and was disincline?
to take up her challenge.

'^ Call me at least cousinette,'^ said Madame Olga : '* we vm
cousins, you know, thanks to Wanda. Oh 1 she will be vei
unhappy in Petersburg; she will not amuse herself; si
never does ; she is incapable of a flirtation ; she never touch
a card. When she dances, it is only because she must, aiis^l
then it is only a quadrille or a contredanse : she always r^^-
minds me of Marie Th4r6se's * In our position nothing is ^
trifle.' You remember the empress's letters to Versailles?**

Sabran was very much angered, but he was afraid to expr^5s3S
his anger, lest it should seem to make him absurd.

" Madame," he said, with ill-repressed irritation, "I kn<:^^
you speak only in jest, but I must take the liberty to tell y *^**

WANDA. 347

—however bourgeois it appear — that I do not allow a jest even
from you upon my wife. Anything she does is perf'HJt ih my
sight, and, if she be imbued with the old traditionn of gentle
blood, too many kdies desert them in these days for me not to
le grateful to her for her loyalty."

She listened, with her bright black eyes fixed on him ; then
she leaned a little more closely on his arm.

'' Do you know that you said that very well ? Most mou
are ridiculous when they are in love with their wives, but it
becomes you. Wanda is perfect, we all know that : you are
not alone in thinking so. Ask Egon 1"

The face of Sabran changed as he heard that name. As
she saw the change, she thought, ^^ Can it be possible that he
is jealous?"

Aloud shje said, with a little laugh, ^* I almost wonder Egon
did not run you thi-ough the heart before you married. Now,
of course, he is reconciled to the inevitable ; or, if not recon-
ciled, he has to submit to it, as we all have to do. He grows
yery farouche ; he lives between his troopers and his castle of
Tar6c, like a barbaric lord of the Middle Ages. Were you
ever at Tar6c ? It is worth seeing, — a huge fortress, old fxa
the days of Ottocar, in the very heart of the Carpathians.
He leads a wild, fierce life enough there. If he keep the
memory of Wanda with him, it is as some men keep an idol-
atry for what is dead."

Sabran listened with a sombre irritation. " Suppose we leave
my wife's name in peace ?" he said, coldly. " The grosser
cotillon is about to begin : may I aspire to the honor ?"

As he led her out, and the light fell on her red gold curls,
on her dazzling butterflies, her armor of diamonds, her snow-
white skin, a thousand memories of Cochonette came over him,
though the scene around him was the ball-room of the Hof burg,
and the woman whose great bouquet of Reve d' Or rosea
touched his hand was a great lady who had been the wife of
Gela von Szalras and the daughter of the Prince Elaguine.
He distrusted her, he despised her, he disliked her so strongly
that he was almost ashamed of his own antagonism ; and yet
her contact, her grace of movement, the mere scent of the
bouquet of roses, had a sort of painful and unwilling intoxi-
cation for the moment for him.

He was glad wh«n the long and gorgeous figures of the

348 WANDA.

cotilloD bad tired oat even the steel-like nerves of Olga
Brancka, and he was free to leave the palace and go home to
sleep. He looked at a miniature of his wife as he undressed :
the face of it, with its tenderness and its nobility, seemed to
him, afler the face of this other woman, like the pure high nir
of the Iseltbal after the heated and unhealthy atmosphere of
a gambling room.

The next day there was a review of troops in the Pratei.
His presence was especially desired : he rode his favorite horse
Siegfried, which had been brought up from the Tauern for
the occasion. The weather was brilliant, the spectacle was
grand ; his spirits rose, his natural gayety of temper returned.
He was addressed repeatedly by the sovereigns present. Other
men spoke of him,^me with admiration, s^me with envy,
as one who would become a power at the court .and in the
empire.

As he rode homeward, when the manoeuvres were over,
making his way slowly through the merry crowds of the good-
humored populace, through the streets thronged with glitter-
ing troops and hung with banners and odorous with flowers,
he thought to himself, with a light heart, " Afler all, I may
do her some honor before I die."

When he reached home and his horse was led away, a
servant approached him with a sealed letter lying on a gold
salver. A courier, who said that he had travelled with it
without stopping from Tar5c, had brought it from the Most
High the Prince Vhskrhely.

Sabran's heart stood still as he took the letter and jassed up
the staircase to his own apartments. Once there, he ordered
his servants away, locked the doors, and, then only, broke the
seal.

There were two lines written on the sheet inside. They
said, —

" I forbid you to serve my sovereign. If you persist, I must
relate to him, under secrecy, what I know."

They were fully signed — *'Egon Vilsh.rhely." They had
been sent by a courier, to insure delivery and avoid the pub-
licity of the telegraph. They had been written as soon as the
tidings of his appointment to the Russian mission had booomo
known at the mountain-fortress of Tar5o.

WANDA. 349

CHAPTER XXIV.

As the carriage of the Countess Olga rolled home through
the Grahen after the military spectacle, she stopped it suddenly,
and signed to an old man in the crowd who was waiting to
cross the road until a regiment of cuirassiers had rolled by.
He was eying them critically, as only an old soldier does look
at troops.

"Is it you, Georg?" said Madame Olga. "What brings
you here?"

" I came from Tar6c with a letter from the prince, my
master," answered the man, an old hussar, who had carried
Vhfljirhely in his arms oflf the field of Koniggr'dtz, after drag-
ging him from under a heap of dead men and horses.

" A letter I to whom ?" asked Olga, who always was curious
and persistent in investigation of all her brother-in-law's move-
ments and actions.

Vi\s5,rhely had not laid any injunction as to secrecy, only
as to speed, upon his faithful servant: so that Georg re-
plied, unwitting of harm, " To the Markgraf von Sabran, my
countess."

" A letter that could not go by post I — ^how strange I And
from Egon to Wanda's husband I'* she thought, with her in-
quisitive eagerness awakened. Aloud she bade the old trooper
call at hei* palace for a packet for Tar5c, to make excuse for
having stopped and questioned him, and drove onward lost in
thought.

" Perhaps it is a challenge late in the day I" she thought,
with a laugh ; but she was astonished and perplexed that any
communication should take place between these men : she
perplexed h^r mind in vain in the effort to imagine what tie
could connect them, what mystery mutually affecting them
could lie beneath the secret of Vassia Kazan.

When, on the morrow, she heard at court that the Emperor
was deeply incensed at the caprice and disrespect of the Count
von Idrac, as he was called at court, who at the eleventh hour
had declined a mission already accepted by him, and of whicb

m

350 WA WD A.

the offer had been in itself an unprecedented mark of boa.
and confidence, her Rwifl sagacity instantly associated the
tion, apparently so excuseless and inexcusable, with the letf
sent up from Tar6c. It was still as great a mystery to her
it had been before, what the contents of the letter could hi
been, but she had no doubt that in some way or another
had brought about the resignation of the appointment
awakened a still more intense curiosity in her, but she was 1
wise to whisper her suspicion to any one. To her iriendft>
the court she said, with laughter, *' A night or two aj^
chunced to tell Sabran that his wife would be wretched
rotersburg. That is sure to have been enough for him. -B — *^
18 Buch a devoted husband.''

No one, of course, believed her, but they received the m.
prcssion that she knew the real cause of his resignation, thois-
she could not be induced to say it. ^^

He himself had lefl the capital, afler affirming to the rm^ ^ '^'
ister that private reasons, which he could not enter into, Irm .^»«
induced him to entreat the Imperial pardon for so sadde v=* *
change of resolve, and to solicit permission to decline the \A^&^
honor that had been vouchsafed to him.

" What shall I say to her?'' he asked himself incessan't:-^^
as the express train swung through the grand green oouim ^ ^^7
towards Salzburg.

She was sitting on the lake terrace with the princess, win ^^
a telegram from her cousin Kunst was brought to her. 13^^^ ■"
and Gela were playing near with squadrons of painted cuiir^*-^
siers, and the great dogs were lying on the marble pavencK^*^'
at her feet. It was a golden close to a sunless but fine (l0>.^^)
the snow- peaks were growing rosy as the sun shone for ^■"
instant behind the Venediger range, and the lake was C5»l ^
and still and green, one little boat going noiselessly acro0^ '^
from the Holy Isle to the farther side.

" What a pity to leave it all l" she thought, as she to)k t,MA
telegram.

The minister's message was curt and angered f

" Your husband has resigned : ho makes himself and **J
ridiculous. Unable to guess his motive, I am troubled 0-^^
embarrassed beyond expression."

The other, from Sabran, said, simply, " I am ocming bo**^*
I give up Russia."

WANDA. 351

'^ Any bad news ?** the princess asked, seeing the scriousnosa
of her face. Her niece rose and gave her the papers.

'* Is R4n6 mad I** she exclaimed, as she read. His wife, who
was startled and dismayed at the affrout to her cousin and to
her sovereign, yet had been unable to repress a movement of
personal gladness, hastened to say, in his defence,-—

" Be sure he has some grave, good reason, dear mother.
He knows the world too well to commit a folly. Unexplained,
it looks strange, certainly ; but he will be homo to-night or in
the early morning ; then we shall know, and be sure we shall
find him right."

" Right !'* echoed the princess, lifling the little girl who was
her namesake off her knee, a child white as a snowdrop, with
golden curls, who looked as if she had come out of a band of
Corref];gio*s baby angels.

'^ He is always right," said his wife, with a gesture towards
Beta, who had paused in his play to listen, with a leaden
cuirassier of the guard suspended in the air.

" You are an admirable wife, Wanda," said the princess,
with extreme displeasure on her delicate features. " You de-
fend your lord when through him you are probably brouillie
with your sovereign for life."

She added, her voice tremulous with astonishment and anger,
'' It is a caprice, an insolence, that no sovereign and no minis-
ter could pardon. I am most truly your husband's friend,
but I can conceive no possible excuse for such a change at
the very last moment in a matter of such vast importance."

** Let us wait, dear mother," said Wanda, softly. ^^ It is
not you who would condemn 'R6u6 unheard ?"

*' But such a breach of etiquette 1 What explanation can
ever annul it ?"

" Perhaps none. I know it is a very grave offence that he
has committed, and yet I cannot help being happy," said his
wife, with a smile, as she lifled up the little Ottilie and mur-
mured over the child's fair curls, " Ah, my dear little dove I
wo are not going to Russia afler all ! You little birds will not
leave your nest I"

" Bela is not going to the snow palace ?" said he, whose
ears were very quick, and to whom his attendants had told
marvellous narratives of an utterly imaginary Russia.

" No ; are not you glad, my dear ?"

352 WANDA,

He thought very gravely for a moment.

^' Bela is not sure. Marc sa^'s Bela would have slaves it
Kussia, and might beat them."

" Bela woull be beaten himself if he did, and by my own
hand," said his mother, very gravely. " Oh, child I where did
you get your cruelty ?"

" He is not cruel 1" said the princess. *' He is only maa-
ierful."

" Alas ! it is the same thing.**

She sent the children in-doors, and remained afler the sun-
glow had all faded and Madame Ottilie had gone away to her
own rooms, and paced to and fro the length of the terrace,
troubled by an anxiety which she would have owned to no
one. What could have happened to make him so offend
alike the State and the court? She tormented herself with
wondering again and again whether she had used any incau-
tious expression in her letters which could have betrayed to
him the poignant regret the coming exile gave her. No ! sho
was sure she had not done so. She had only written twice,
preferring telegrams as quicker, and, to a man, less trouble-
some, than letters. She knew courts and cabinets too well
not to know that the step her husband had taken was one
which would wholly ruin the favor he enjoyed with the for-
mer, and wholly take away all chance of his being ever called
again to serve the latter. Personally she was indifferent to
that kind of ambition ; but her attachment to the Imperial
house was too strqng, and her loyalty to it too hereditary, for
her not to be alarmed at the idea of losing its good- will. Dis-
quieted and afraid of all kinds of formless unknown ills, she
went with a heavy heart into the Ritteraaal to a dinner for
which she could find no appetite. The princess also, so talk-
ative and vivacious at other times, was silent and preoccupied.
The evening passed tediously. He did not come.

It was past midnight, and she had given up all hope of his
arrival, when she heard the returning trot of the horses, which
had been sent over to Matrey in the evening on the chance of
his being there. She was in her own chamber, having dis-
missed her women, and was trying in vain to keep her thoughts
to nightly prayer. At the sound of the horses' feet without,
she threw on a nigligie of white satin and lace, and went out
on to the staircase to meet him. As he came up the broad

WANDA, 353

Btairs, with Donaa and Neva gladly IcapiDg on nim, he looked
up and saw her against the background of oak and tapestry
and old armor with the light of a great Persian lamp in metal
tras-/orato that swung above full on her. She had never
looked more lovely to him than as she stood so, her eyes
eagerly searching the dim shadow for him, and the loose
white folds embroidered in silk with pale roses flowing down-
ward from her throat to her feet. He drew her within her
chamber, and took her in his arms with a passionate gesture.

" Let us forget Everything," he murmured, " except that
we have been parted nearly a month !''

In the morning afler breakfast in the little Saxe room, she
said to him, with gentle firmness, " R6n6, you must tell me
now — why have you refused Russia ?'*

He had known that the question must come, and all the way
on his homeward journey he had been revolving in bis mind
the answer he would give to it. He was very pale, but other-
wise he betrayed no agitation as he turned and looked at her.

" That is what I cannot tell you," he replied.

She could not believe she heard aright.

" What do you mean ?" she asked him. " I have had a
message from Kunst: he is deeply angered. I understand
that, afler all was arranged, you abruptly resigned the Russian
mission. I ask your reasons. It is a very grave step to have
taken. I suppose your motives must be very strong ones ?"

" They are so," said Sabran ; and he continued, in the forced
and measured tone of one who recites what he has tau<^ht
himself to say,— ^

'^ It is quite natural that your cousin Kunst should be of*
fended; the Emperor also. You perhaps will be the same
when I say to you that I cannot tell you, as I cannot tell
them, the grounds of my withdrawal. Perhaps you, like
them, will not forgive it."

Her nostiils dilated and her breast heaved she was startled,
mortified, av lazed. ^' You do not choose to lell meT she said,
in stupefaction.

" I oanno'. tell you."

She gazec* at him with the first bitterness of wrath that he
had*ever sedn upon her face. She had been used to perfect
Babmisaion of others all her life. She had the blood in her
of stem prince V who had meted out rule and justice against

30*

354 WANDA.

which there had been no appeal. She was accustomed even
in him to deference, homage, consideration, to be consulted
always, deferred to of\en. Hb answer for the moment seemed
to her an unwarrantable insult.

Her influence, her relatives, her sovereign, had given him
one of the high^t honors conceivable, and he did not choose
to even say why he was thankless for it ! Passionate and
withering words rose to her lips, but she restrained their ut-
terance. Not even in that moment could she bring herself t^
speak what might seem to rebuke him with the weight of all
his debt to her. She remained silent, but he understood all
the intense indignation that held her speechless there. He
Approached her more nearly, and spoke with emotion, but
with a certain sternness in his voice :

" I know very well that I must offend and even outrage
you. But I cannot tell you my motives. It is the first time
that I have ever acted independently of you or failed to con-
sult your wishes. I only venture to remind you that mar-
riage does give to the man the right to do so, though I have
never availed myself of it. Nay, even now, I owe you too
much to be ingrate enough to take refuge in my authority as
your husband. I prefer to owe more, as I have owed so
much, to your tenderness. I prefer to ask of you, by your
love for me, not to press me for an answer that I am not in a
position to make ; to be content with what I say, — that I have
relinquished the Russian mission because I have no choice
but to do so."

He spoke firmly, because he spoke only the truth, although
not all the truth.

A great anger rose up in her, the first that she had ever
been moved to by him. All the pride of her temper and all
her dignity were outraged by this refusal to have confidence
in her. It seemed incredible to her. She sti 1 thought her-
self the prey of some dream, of some hallucination. Her
lips parted to speak, but a|2:ain she withheld the words she
was about to utter. Her strong justice compelled her to ad-
mit that he was but within his rights, and her sense of duty
was stronger than her sense of self-love.

She did not look at him, nor could she trust her vf»ioa
She turned from him without a syllable, and left the room.
8he was afraid of the violence of the anger that she folt.

WANDA. 355

" If it had been only to myself, T would pardon it," she
thought; '*but an insult to my people, to my country, to
my sovereign I — an insult without excuse, or explanation, or
apology "

She shut herself alone within her oratory and passed the
most bitter hour of her life. The imperious and violent
temper of the Szalras was dormant in her character, though
she had chastened and tamed it, and the natural sweetness
and serenity of her disposition had been a counterpoise to it
80 strong that the latter had become the only thing visible in
her. But all the wrath of her race was now aroused and in
arms against what she loved best on earth.

*' If it had been anything else," she thought ; " but a pub-
lic act like this, — an . ingratitude to the Crown itself 1 A
caprice for all the world to chatter of and blame 1"

It would have been hard enough to bear, difficult enough
to explain away to others, if he had told her his reasons,
however captious, unwise, or selfish they might be; but to
have the door of his soul thus shut up)on her, his thoughts
thus closed to her, hurt her with intolerable pain and filled
her with a deep and burning indignation.

She passed all the early morning hours alone in her little
temple of prayer, striving in vain against the bitterness of her
heart, above her the great ivory Crucifixion, the work of Anger-
mayer, beneath which so many generations of the women of
the house of Szalras had knelt in their hours of tribulation oi
bereavement

When she left the oratory she had conquered herself.
Though she could not extinguish the human passions that
smarted and throbbed within her, she knew her duty well
enough to know that it must lie in submission and in silence.

She sought for him at once. She found him in the library :
he was playing to himself a long dreamy concerto of Schu-
bert's, to soothe the irritation of his own nerves and pass
away a time of keen suspense. He rose as she came into the
room, and'awaited her approach with a timid anxiety in his
eyes, which she was too absorbed by her own emotions to ob-
serve. He had assumed a boldness that he had not, and had
used his power to dominate her rather in desperation than in
any sense of actual mastery. In his heart it was he who
feared her.

85G WANDA.

'' Yoa wcro qaite right,*' she said Bimpl j to him. ^ C *■>'
course you arc master of your own actions, and owe no acooi^^^"^^
of them to me. We will say no more about it For myso^^-dUi
you know I am content enough to escape exile to any cmbass^^ ^Sl»

He kissed her hand with an unfeigned reverence and L ^K* bu-
mility.

" You are as merciful as you are great," he murmur-TK^ red.
*' If I be silent, it is my misfortune." He paused abruptly JO .ly.

A sudden thought came over her as he spoke.

'' It is some State secret that he knows and cannot sp» ^igpeak
of, and that has made him unwilling to go. Why did I nni"~-^ crcr
think of that before ?"

An explanation that had its root in honor, a reticence Wr (hat
sprang from conscience, were so welcome to her, and to her

appeared so natural, that they now consoled her at once, and

healed the wounds to her own pride.

*' Of course, if it be so, he is right not to speak evei^ li to

mc," she mused, and her only desire was now to save him I row

the insistence and the indignation of the princess, and the

examination which these were sure to entail upon him n ^liep
he should meet her at the noon breakfast now at hand.

To that end she sought out her aunt in her own apartm^=3nf«,
taking with her the tiny Ottilie, who always disarmed all irn-
(ation in the abbess by the mere presence of her little flo "ver-
like face.

" Dear mother," she said, softly, when the child had rxiade
her morning obeisance, '^ I am come to ask of you a ^^reat
favor and kindness to me. Il^n6 returned last ni<;ht ^^6
has done what he thought right. I do not even asK nis
reasons. He has acted from Jxyi-ce majeur by dictate (pf^h'u
own honor. Will you do as I mean to do ? Will you spaw
iiim any interrogation ? I shall be so grateful to you, and so
will he."

Madame Ottilie, opening her bonbonni^re for her ntimesake,
drew up her fragile figure with a severity unusual to her.

" Do I hear you aright ? You do not even know the
reasons of the insult M. de Sabran has passod upon the Gruvn
and Cabinet, and you do not even mean to ask them ?"

" I do mean that ; and what I do not ask I feel sure job
will admit no one else has any right to ask of him."

" No one, certainly, except His Majesty."

WANDA, 357

'' I presnmo His Majesty lias had all information due to him
■8 our Imperial master. All I eutreat of you, dearest mother,
is to do as I have done, — assume, as we are bound to assume,
that R^u6 has acted wisely and rightly, and not weary him
with questions to which it will be painful to him not to rfv
spond."

*^ Questions 1 I never yet indulged in anything so vulgai
as curiosity, that you should imagine I shall ba capable of
subjecting your husband to a cross-examination. If you bn
satisfied, I can have no right to be more exacting than your-
self. The occurrence is to me lamentable, inexcusable, unin-
telligible ; but if explanation be not offered me you may rest
assured I shall not intrude my request for it."

'^ Of that I am sure ; but I am not contented only with
that. I want you to feel no dissatisfaction, no doubt, no
anger against him. You may be sure that he has acted from
conviction, because he was most desirous to go to Kussia, as
you saw when you urged him to accept the mission."

^' I have said the utmost that I can say," replied the princess,
with a chill light in her blue eyes. ^^ This little child is no
more likely to ask questions than I am, after what you have
stated. But you must not regard my silence as any condona-
tion of what must always appear to me a step disrespectful tu
the Crown, contrary to all usages of eti(}uette, and injurious
to his own future and that of his children. His scruples of
conscience came too late."

" 1 did not say they were exactly that. I believe he
learned something which made him consider that his honoi
required him to withdraw."

" That may be," said the princess, frigidly. " As I ob-
served, it came lamentably late. You will excuse me if I
breakfast in my own rooms this morning."

Wanda left her, gave the child to a nurse who waited
without, and returned to the library. She had offended and
pained Madame Ottilie, but she had saved her husband from
annoyance. She knew that, though the princess was by no
means as free from curiosity as she declared herself, she was
too high-bred and too proud to solicit a confidence withhcli^
from her.

Sabran was seated at the piano where she had lofl him,
but his forehead rested on the woodwork of it, and his whole

358 WANDA.

attitude was suggestive of sad and absorbed thought w^mr^xA
abaDdonment to regrets that were unavailiDg.

'^ It has cost him so much/' she reflected, as she look» :^^ed
at him. *^ Perhaps it has been a self-sacrifice, a herois^^^ *i8va
eveu, aud I. from mere wounded feeling, have been angers r^K^^rcd
against him and almost cruel !**

With the exaggeration in self-censure of all generooa
tures, she was full of remorse at having added any pain
the disappointment which had been his portion, — a dieai
pointment none the less poignant, as she saw, because it h.
been voluntarily, as she imagined, accepted.

As he heard her approach he started and rose, and the c^ « ei-
pressiou of his face startled her for a moment, it was so fr'lk full
of pain, of melancholy, almost (could she have believed f J it)

of despair. What could this matter be to affect him tbr ^ X-htts,
since being of the State it could be at its worst only soh* <=» ^oiue
painful and compromising secret of political life which coL^<:=>ould
have no personal meaning for him? It was surely imp*^:^ ^pos-
sible that mere disappointment — a disappointment self- -^:^f-in-
flictcd — could bring upon him such suffering? But es^ s\iq
threw these thoughts away. In her great loyalty she hrK had
told hcrHclf that she must not even think of this thing, LC lest
she should let it come between them once again and teuK-sr ^lopt
her from her duty and obedience. Uer trust in him ¥^^ was
perfect.

The abandonment of a coveted distinction was in itseL X-^S a
bitter disappointment, but it seemed to him as nothing beagr^^fi'de
the sense of submission and obedience compelled from krK^ him
to Vh.s^rhely. He felt as though an iron hand, invisiB^ -^^ible,
weighed on his life and forced it into subjection. When -^^-* lie
had almost grown secure that his enemy's knowledge w«r^ ^M •
buried harmless thing, it had risen and barred his ii*^' '^^^h
speaking with an authority which it was not possible to ^ ^^^
obey. With all his errors, he was a man of high oourca^ ag^
who had always held his own with all men. Now the ^^d

forgotten humiliation of his earliest years revived, and en-

forced from him the servile timidity of the Sclav blood wh^^^^'cA
he had abjured. He had never, for an instant, oonceive(^^ A
possible to disregard the mandate he received ; that an vg^^Pi'
rently voluntary resignation was permitted to him was, ^ i

conscience acknowledged, more mercy than he oould have ^' k

WANDA. 359

pected. That Y^^^rhely would act thus had not occurred to
Dim; but before tlie act he could not do otherwise thao
admit lis justice aud obey

But the ooDsoiousDess of that superior will compelling him
left in him a chill tremor of constant fear, of perpetual self-
abasement What was natural to him was the reckless daring
which many Russians, such as Skobeleff, have shown in a
thousand ways of peril. He was here forced only to crouch
and to submit : it was more galling, more cruel to him than
utter exposure would have been. The sense of coercion was
always upon him like a dragging chain. It produced on him
a despondency which not even the presence of his wife or the
elasticity of his own nature could dispel.

He had to play a part to her, and to do this was unfamiliar
and hateful to him. In all the years before he had concealed
a fact from her, but he had been never otherwise false. Though
there had been always between them the shadow of a secret
untold., there had never been any sense upon him of obliga-
tion to measure his words, to feign sentiments he had not, to
hide behind a carefully-constructed screen of untruth. Now,
though he had indeed not lied with his lips, he had to sustain
a concealment which was a thousand times more trying to him
than that concealment of his birth and station to which he
had boen so long accustomed that he hardly realized it as any
error. The very' nobility with which she had accepted his
silence, and given it, unasked, a worthy construction, smote
him with a deeper sense of shame than even that which galled
him when he remembered the yoke laid on him by the will of
Egon V5.s5j:hely.

He roused himself to meet her with composure. *

" If 1 do regret," he said, with a smile, " it is foolish and
thanklessi The gemfmthlidikeit you give me here is worth all
the fret and fever of the world's ambitions. You are so gretrf
and good to be so little angered with me for my reticence.
All my life, such as it is, shall be dedicated to my gratitude."

She rested her hand caressingly on his hair.

" We will never speak of it any more. I should be sorry
were the Kaiser to think you capricious or disloyal, but you
have too much ability to have incurred this risk. Let it all
ht as though there had never arisen any question of public
life for joo. I have spoken to Aunt Ottilio ; she will not

360 WANDA.

m

weary yoa with iotcrnxntioo ; she midentaiidB that yon hjiiv .^san
■cced as joar honor baiie jou. ThiU is enough for ihoee wkzfl^ ^vpiiVic
loTe 7011 as do she and I "

£Ter7 word she spoke entered hb Tery soal with thecnic:».flCP~Qcl>
lest irony, the sharpest reprowh. Bat of these he let her n^rt see
nothing. Yet he was none the less abjeelly ashamed, le^ JT lesi
paasionatety seFf-condenined, because he had to consame hr:ff hii
pain in silence, and had the self-control to answer, still with .fiT^^th a
•mile, as he touched a chord or two of mnsie, —

*' When the Israelites were free they hankered after tF.^ the
flesh-pots of Egypt. They desored eternal exile, etennrnwsmai
bondage. So do I, for having ever been iugrate enoogh M^-Jti to
dream of leaving Hohcnszalras for the world of men !"

Then he tamed wholly towards the Erard keyboard, VM^m and
with splendor and might there rolled forth, under his touo^KLVnoh,
the Coronation Mass of Lisit : he was {^ad of the majesty "^^gj o£
the music which supplanted and silencni speech.

" That is very grand," she said, when the last notes
died away. ^' One seems to hear the Eipen ! of the wh
nation in it. But play me something more tender, m»
pathetic, — some Ueder half sorrow and half gladness,
know so many of all countries."

He paused a moment; then his hands wandered liglr^'';'i tiy
across the notes, and called up the mournful folk-song? tc^ that
he had heard so long, so long, before, — songs of the Rus^^^flsian
peasants, of the maidens borne off by the Tartar in war,^^' *> of
the blue-eyed children carried away to be slaves, of the ho:' <^ome.
less villagers beholding their straw-roofed huts licked uf _3> by
the Ijungry hurrying flame lit by the Cossack or the Kun^^ — =J,—
songs of a people without joy, that he had heard in his ct — 3iid-
ish days, when the great rafb had drifted slowly down the

Volga water, and across the plains the lines of chained pri — -asoo.
era had crept as slowly through the dust, or songs thaflK^ ht
had sung to himself, not knowing why, where the winter 1^
white on all the land, and the bay of the fimished wolves •fl/«r
off had blent with the shrill sad cry of the wild swans dyin^* of
3old and of hunger and of thirst on the frozen rivers, and ^/»<»
reeds were grown hard as spears of iron, and the waves ^were
changed to stone.

The intense melancholy penetrated her very heart Sht
Kstened with the tears in her eyes, and her whole being fldmi

WANDA. 361

•nd thrilled by a pain not her own. A kind of consciousness
eame to her, borne on that melancholy melody, of some un-
spoken sorrow which lived in this heart which beat so near
her own and whose every throb she had thought she knew.
A sadden terror seized her lest all this while she who believed
his whole life hers was in truth a strangci to his deepest grief,
his dearest memories.

When the last sigh of those plaintive songs without words
had died away, she signed to him to approach her.

*' Tell me," she said, very gently, " tell me the truth. Ren^,
did you ever care for any woman, dead or lost, more than, or
as much as, you care for me ? I do not ask you if you loved
others. I know all men have many caprices ; but was any
one of them so dear to you that you regret her still ? Tell
me the truth ; I will be strong to bear it."

He, relieved beyond expression that she but asked him that
on which his conscience was clear and his answer could bo
wholly sincere, sat down at her feet and leaned his head
against her knee.

" Never, so hear me Gk)d I" ho said, simply. " I have
loved no woman as I love you."

'* And there is not one that you regret ?"

" There is not one."

" Then what is it that you do regret ? Something more
weighs on you than the mere loss of diplomatic life, which
after all, to you, is no more than the loss of a toy to Bela."

Once more an impulse to tell her all passed over him ; a
sense that he might trust her absolutely for all tenderness and
all pity came upon him ; but, with the weakness which so
constantly holds back human souls from their own deliverance,
his courage once again failed him. He once more looking at
her thought, " Nay 1 I dare not. She would never under*
stand, she would never pardon, she would never listen. At
^he first word she would abhor me."

He did not dare ; he bent his face down on her knees as any
child might have done.

" What I regret is not to be worthy of you 1" he murmured,
and the subterfuge was also a truth.

She looked down at him wistfully with doubt and confusion
mingled. She sighed, for she understood that buried in his
heart there was some pain he would not share, pcrchanoo soma

302 WANDA.

half-iavolaoiary an£udiraliie» be did not dare eonfeaB. SSIm
thnut this Uuor thoo^hc avaj qaicklj ; it hart her as ^^Jm
toacli and sourch of Lot irou hons tendier fleeh ; she wc» 'vU
not harbor ic It might well be, she knew.

She W2i silent some little time ; then she said, calmly,

** I think you worthy. Is not that enough ? NoTer
to me what you do not wish to say. But — hat — if th<
anything you think that I should blame, be sure of
love ; I am no tair-7eather friehd. Try £2e in deep wai
dark storm !"

And still he did not speak.

His evil angel held him badt, and said to him, ^
she would never forgive "

CHAPTER XXV.

One day in this winter time she sat alone in her
room wjiilst he was out driving in the teeth of a strong ^lod

blowing from the north, and frequent bursts of snow-stz^^^ono.
liapid exercise, eager movements, were necessary to hi^i^n at
once as touic and us anodyne, and the Northern blood ^at
was in him made the bitter cold, the keen and angr^^" air,
the conflict with the frantic horses tearing at their curbs^ ^el-
come and wholesome to him. Paul Zabaroff had msL ^^J a
day driven so over the hard snows of Russian plains.

She sat at home as the twilitrht drew on, her feet buri^^ Ui
the i'urs before her chair, the i'ragrance shed about her Trom
a basket of forced narcissus and bowls full of orange-flowen
and of violets, the light of the burning wood shiniDg oo ^i^
variegated and mellow hues of the tiles of the hearth. Tbn
kst poems of Copp^e were on her lap, but her thoughts iiad
wandered away from those to Sabran, to her children, io a
thousand happy trifles connected with one or the other, fhe
was dreaming idly iu that vague revery which suits the laat
hour of the reclining day in the gray still winter of a moun-
tain-land. She was almost sorry when Hubert entered and
brought her the mail-bag, which had just come through tha

WAR DA. 363

^^^my defiles and the frosted woods which stretched between
^^^^m and Matroy.

*' It grows late," she said to him. " I fear it will, be a
^Vitmy ni^^ht Have you heard the marquis return ?"

He told her that Sabran had not yet driven in, and vcn-

^^ii^ to add his hope that his master would not be out late ;

'^hen he asked if she desired the lights lit, and, on being told

^be did not, withdrew, leaving the leather bag on a table close

to one of the Saze bowls of violets. There was plenty of

light from the fire, and even from the windows, to read her

letters by. She went first to one of the casements, and looked

zi the night, which was growing very wild and dark. Though

day still lingered, she could hear the wind go screaming down

the lake, and the rush of the swollen water swirling against

the terrace-buttresses below. All beyond, woods, hills, moun

tains, were invisible under the gray mist.

** I hope he will not be late," she thought, Dut she was too
keen a mountaineer to be apprehensive. Saoran now knew
every road and path through all the Taucrn as well as she did.
8he returned to her seat and unlocked the leather bag : there
were several newspapers, two letters for the princess, three or
four for Sabran, and one only for herself. She laid his aside
for hiin, sent those of the princess to her room, and opened
her own. The writing of it she did not recognize ; it was
^mooymous and was very brief.

'' If you wish to know why the Marquis de Sabran did not
jp to Bussia, ask Egon Vh-sllrhely."
That was all : so asps are little.

She sat quite still, and felt as if a bolt had fallen on her
^rom the leaden skies without. y^s.\rhcly knew, the writer
«f the letter knew, and she — slie — did not know. That was
Iter first distinct thought.

If Sabran had entered the room at that instant she would
liave held to him this letter, and would have said, ^^ I ask
^ol^ not him." He was absent, and she sat motionless, keep-
ing the unsigned note in her hand, and staring down on it.
TThen she turned and looked at the post-mark. It was ^^ Vi-
enna." A city of a million souls 1 What clue to the writer
tras there ? She read it again and again, as even the wisest
^U read auch poisonous things, as though by repeated study
that mystery would be compelled to stand out clearly re-

3G4 WANDA,

yealed. It did not say enough to havo been the mere in
vention of the sender ; it was not worded as an insinuation,
but as a fact. For that reason it took a hold upon her mind
which would at once have rejected a fouler or a darker sug-
gestion. Although free from any baseness of suspicion,
there was yet that in the name of her cousin, in juxtaposi-
tion with her husband's, which could not do otherwise than
startle and carry with it a corroboration of the statement
made. A wave of the deep anger which had moved her on
her husband's first refusal swept over her again. Her hand
clinched, her eyes flashed, where she sat alone in the gather-
ing shadows.

There came a sound at the door of the room, and a small
golden head came from behind the tapestry.

'^ May we come in ?" said Bela : it was the children's hour.

She rose, and put him backward.

'^ Not now, my darling ; I am occupied. Oo away for a
little whUe."

The women who were with them took the children back
to their apartments. She sat down with the note still in her
hand. What could it mean ? No good thing was ever said
thus. She pondered long, and was unable to imagine any
sense or meaning it could have, though all the while memo-
ries thronged upon her of words and looks and many trifles
which had told her of the enmity that was existent between
her cousin and Sabran. ^ That she saw ; but there her knowl-
edge ceased, her vision failed. She could go no further,
conjecture nothing more.

" Ask Egon !'* Did they think she would ask him or any
living being that which Sabran had refused to confide in her ?
Whoever wrote this knew her little, she thought. Perhaps
there were women who would have done so. She was nol
one of them.

With a sudden impulse of scorn she cast the sheet ot
paper into the fire before her. Then she went to her writings
table and enclosed the envelope in another, which she ad«
dressed to her lawyers in Salzburg. She wrote with it,
'* This is the cover to an anonymous letter which I Lave re-
ceived. Try your uttermost to discover the sender."

Then she sat down again and thought long, and wearily,
and vainly. She could make nothing of it. Sho oonld

WANDA. 365

DO more than a wayfarer whom a blank wall faces as he goes.
The violets and orange-blossoms were close at her elbow ; she
never in after-time smelt their perfume without a sick mem-
ory of the stunned, stupefied bewilderment of that hour.

The door unclosed again, a voice again spoke behind as a
hand drew back the folds of the tapestry.

** What 1 are you in darkness here ? I am very cold.
Have you no tea for me?'' said Sabran, as he entered, his
eyes brilliant, his cheeks warm, from the long gallop against
the wind. He had changed his clothes, and wore a loose suit
of velvet ; the servants, entering behind him, lit the cande-
labra, and brought in the lamps ; warmth and gladness and
light seemed to come with him ; she looked up and thought,
''Ah 1 what does anything matter? He is home in safety !"

The impulse to ask of him what she had been bidden to ask
of E?on y5«5.rhely had passed with the intense surprise of
the first moment. She could not ask of him what she had
promised never to seek to know ; she could not reopen a long-
closed wound. But neither could she forget the letter lying
burnt there among the flames of the wood. He noticed that
her usual perfect calm was broken as she welcomed hiui, gave
him his letters, and bade the servants bring tea ; but he
thought it mere anxiety, and his belated drive, and, being tired
with a pleasant fatigue which made rest sweet, he stretched
his limbs out on a low couch beside the hearth, and gave
himself up to that delicious dreamy sense of bienitre which a
beautiful woman, a beautiful room, tempered warmth and light,
and welcome repose bring to any man after some hours of
effort and exposure in wild weather and intense cold and in-
(^reasing darkness.

" I almost began to think I should not see you to-night,"
he said, happily, as he took from her hand the little cup of
Frankenthal china which sparkled like a jewel in the light.
" I had fairly lost my way, and Josef knew it no better than
I : the snow fell with incredible rapidity, and it seemed to
grow night in an instant. I let the horses take their road,
and they brought us home ; but if there be any poor peddlers
or carriers on the hills to-night I fear they will go to their
last sleep."

She shuddered, and looked at him with dim, fo.nd eyes,
^' He is here ; he is mine," she thought : '^ what else matters ?*'

31*

Sf)6 WANDA.

Subran stretched out bis fingers and took somo of the
olets from the Saxe bowl and fastenud them in his ooat a» ^^
went on speaking of the weather, of the perils of the ro»-^^>
whose tracks were obliterated, and of the prowess and in ^>^'
ligenoe of his horses, who had found the way home when 1^*
and his groom, a man bom and bred in the Tanern, had b«:^^ '^
been utterly at a loss. The octagon room had never k>olc^ ^^
lovelier and gayer to him, and his wife had never looked m<
beautiful, than both did now as he came to them out of
darkness and the snow-storm and the anxiety of the last hip'

" Do not run those risks," she murmumi. '* You km.^
all that your life is to me."

The letter which lay burnt in the fire, and the dusky nigg^"»^
of ice and wind without, had made him dearer to her thm^^'^
ever. And yet the startled, shocked sense of some myste
of some evil, was heavy upon her, and did not leave her t"
evening nor for many a day after.

'^ You are not well ?" he said to her, anxiously, latcfa
they left the dinner-table.

She answered evasively, —

*^ You know I am not always quite well now. It is nothi
It will pass."

*' I was wrong to alarm you by being out so late in svx^
weather," he said, with self-reproach. " I will go out earli-^^
in future."

" Do not wear those violets," she said, with a trivial capri^*'
whoiy unlike her, as she took them from his ooat. «*rii^J
are Bonapartist emblems : Jleun de malheur.**

He smiled, but he was surprised, for he had never seen "^^
her any one of those fanciful whims and vagaries that ^^^
common to women.

" Give me any others instead," he said : " I wear but ycf^^
symbol, 0 my lady I"

She took some myrtle and lilies of the valley from one <>'
the large porcelain jars in the Rittersaal.

" These are our flowers," she said, as she gave them to b*****
" They mean love and peace."

He turned from her slightly as he fastened them where ****
others had been.

All the evening she was preoccupied and norvons. S**^
oould not forget the intimation she had received. It was ^^'

WANDA. 3G7

tolerable to her to have anything of which she could not speak
to her husband. Though they had their own affairs apart
one from the other, there had been nothing of moment in her»
that she had ever concealed from him. But here it was im-
possible for her to speak to him, since she had plediied herself
never to seek to know the reason of an action which, howevei
plausibly she explained it to herself, remained practically in-
explicable and unintelligible. It was terrible t;o her, Uk), to
feel that the lines of a coward who dared not sign them had
sunk so deeply into her mind that she did not question their
veracity. They had at once carried conviction to her that
Egon yh.s5>rhely did know what they said he did. She
could not have told why this was, but it was so. It was what
hurt her most : others knew ; she did not.

She felt that if she could have spoken to Sabran of it the
matter would have become wholly indifferent to her ; but tho
obligation of reticence, the sense of separation which it ir-
volved, oppressed her greatly. She was also haunted by the
memory of the enmity which existed between these men,
whose names were so strongly coupled in the anonymous
counsel given her.

She stayed long in her oratory that night, seeking vainly for
calmness and patience under this temptation, — seeking beyond
all things for strength to put the poison of it wholly from her
mind. She dreaded lest it should render her irritable and
suspicious. She reproached herself for having been guilty of
even so much insinuation of rebuke to him as her words with
the flower had carried in them. She had ideas of the duties
of a woman to her husband widely different from those which
prevail in the world. She allowed herself neither irritation
nor irony against him. " When the thoughts rebel, the acts
soon revolt,** she was wont to say to herself, and even in her
thoughts she would never blame him.

Prayer, even if it have no other issue or effect, rarely fails
to tranquillize and fortify the. heart which is lifted up ever so
vaguely in search of a superhuman aid. She left her oratory
strengthened and calmed, resolved in no way to allow such
partial success to their unknown foe as would be given if the
treacherous warning brought any suspicion or bitterness to her
mind. She passed through the open archway in the wfll
which divided his rooms from hers, and looked at him where

868 WANDA.

he lay already asleep upon his bed, early fatigued by the bug
cold drive from which he had returned at nightfuU. He wn
never more handsome than sleeping; calmly thus, with the
mellow light of a distant lamp reaching the fairness of his
&ce. She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes, thoQ
stooped and kissed him without awakin<; him.

" Ah I my love," she thought, " what should ever come
between us ? Hardly even death, I think ; for if I. lost yco
I flho'xld not live long without you."

CHAPTER XXVI.

The Salzburg lawyers employed all the resources of the
Viennese police to discover the sender of the envelope, hut
vainly : nothing was learned by all the efforts made. But the
letter constantly haunted her thoughts. It produced in her
an uneasiness and apprehensiveness wholly foreign to her tent-
pcr. Th . impossibility also of saying anything about it m-
crcjiced the weight of it on her memory. Yet she never
once thought of askiog Vh<s5,rhely. She wrote to him now
and then, as she had always done, to give him tidings of her
health or of her movements, but she never once alluded in the
most distant terms to the anonymous information she had re-
ceived. If he had been there beside her, she would not have
spoken of it. Of the two, she would sooner have reopened
the subject to her husband. But she never did so. She had
promised him to be silent, and to her creed a promise was in-
violate, never to be retracted, be the pressure or the desire to
do so what it would.

It was these grand lines on which her character and her
habits were cast that awed him and made him afraid to tell
her his true history. Had he revered her less he would prob-
ably have deceived her less. Had she been of a less noble
temperament she would also probably have been much lees
easy to deceive.

Her health was at this time languid, and more uncertain
thp.n usual, and the two lines of the letter wore oflen present
to her thoughts, tormenting her with idle ocnjecture, painful

WANDA, 369

doabt, Done the less painful because it could take no definite
shape. Sometimes when she was not well enougli to acoom-
.pany him out of doors or drive her owu sleigh through the
keen clear winter air, she sat doing nothing, aud thinking only
of this thing, in the same room, with the same smell of vio-
lets about her, musing on what it might by any possibility
!3iean. Any secret was safe with Egon, but then since the
anooymous writer was in possession of it the secret was not
only his. She wondered sometimes in terror whether it could
be anything that might in after-years affect her children's fu-
ture, and tLo^ as rapidly discarded the bare thought as so
much dishonor to their father. "It Is only because I am
now nervous and impressionable," she said to herself, " that this
full> takes such a hold upon me. When I am well again I
shall not think of it. Who is it says of anonymous letters
that they are like ' les tmmondices des rues : U faut boucher
le neZy toumer la tite et passer oxUr^ T^

But " les immondices^^ spoiled the odors of the New- Year
violets to her.

In the' early spring of the year she gave birth to another
son. She suffered more than she had ever done before, and
recovered loss quickly. The child was like all the others, fair,
vigorous, and full of health. She wished to give him her
husband's name, but Sabran so strenuously opposed the idea
that she yielded, and named him afler her brother Victor, who
had fallen at Magenta.

There were the usual rejoicings throughout the estates, re-
joicings that were the outcome of genuine affection and fealty
to the -race of Szalras, whoso hold on the people of the Taucrn
had resisted all the revolutionary movements of the earlier
part of the century and had fast root' in the hearts of the
stanch and conservative mountaineers. But for the first time,
as she heard the hearty " Uoch r of the assembled peasantry
echoing beneath her windows, and the salvos fired from the
old culverins on the keep, a certain fear mingled with her
maternal pride, and she thought, " Will the people love them
ds well twenty years hence, fifty years hence, 'vhen I shall be
no more ? Will my memory be any shield to them ? Will
the traditions of our race outlast the devouring changes of the

world r

Meantime, the princess, happy and smiling, showed the

370 WANDA.

little new-born noMc to the stalwart chamois-hunters, the
comely farmers and Eshermen, the clear-eyed stout-limbed
sbepherds and laborers gathered bareheaded round the Schloss.

Bela stood by, contemplating the crowd he knew so well :
he did not see why they should cheer any other child beside
himself. He stood with his little velvet cap in his hand, be-
cause he was always told to do so, but he felt very inclined to
put it on : if his father had not been present there he would
have done so.

" If I have ever so many brothers," he said at last, thought-
fully, to Greswold, who was by his side, " it will not make any
difference, will it? I shall always be the one?"

" What do you mean ?" asked the physician.

" They will none of them be like me ? They will none of
them be as great as I am ? Not if I have twenty ?"

" You will be always the eldest son, of course," said the old
man, repressing a smile. " Yes ; you will be their head, their
eldest, their leading spirit; but for that reason you will have
much more expected of you than will be expectec^ of them :
you will have to learn much more, and try to be always good.
Do you follow me, Count Bela ?"

Belays little rosy mouth shut itself up contemptuously. ^' I
shall be always the eldest, and I shall do whatever I like. I
do not see why they want any others than me."

" You will not do always what you like, Count Bela."

" Who shall prevent me ?"

" The law, which you will have to obey like every ono
else."

" I shall make the laws when I am a little older/' said
Bela. '^ And they wUl be for my brothers and all the people,
but not for me. I shall do what I like."

" That will be very ungenerous," said Greswold, quietly,
" Your mother, the countess, is very diffcient. She is stem
to herself, and indulgent to all others. That is why she is
beloved. If you will think of yourself so much when yon
are grown up, you will be hated."

Bela flushed a little guiltily and angrily.

** That will not matter," he said, sturdily. '* I shall please
myself always."

" And be unkind to your brothers ?"

" Not if they do what I tell them, I will be very kind if

WANDA, 371

Ibey are good. Gela always docs what I tell him/' he added,
after a little pause. ** I do not want any but Gela."

'^ It is natural you should be fondest of Gela, as he is
nearest your age i but you must love all the brothers you may
have, or you will distress your mother very greatly."

" Why does she want any but me ?" said Bela, clinging to
his sense of personal wrong. And he was not to be turned
from that.

" She wants others besides you," said the physician, adroitly,
"because to be happy she needs children who are tender-
hearted, unselfish, and obedient. You are none of those
things, my Count Bela : so heaven sends her consolation."

Bela opened his blue eyes very wide, and he colored with
mortification.

** She always loves me best 1" he said, haughtily. " She
always will 1"

" That will depend on yourself, my little lord," said Gres-
wold, with a significance which was not lost on the quick
intelligence of the child. But he never forgot this day when
his brother Victor was shown to the people.

'* There will be no lack of heirs to Hohenszalras," said the
princess, meanwhile, to his father.

He thought, as he heard, —

" And if ever she knew she can break her marriage like a
rotten thread ! Those boys can all be made as nameless as I
was I Would she do it? Perhaps not, for the children's
sake. God knows she might change even to them ; she might
hate them as she loves them now, because they are mine."

Even as he sat beside her couch with her hand in his, these
thoughts pursued and haunted him. Remorse and fear con-
sumed him. When she looked at the blue eyes of her new-
born son, and said to him, with a happy smile, '* He will be
just as much like you as the others are," he could only think,
with a burning sense of shame, '^ Like me I like a traitor I
like a liar 1 like a thief!" and the faces of these children
seemed to him like those of avenging angels.

He thought with irrepressible agony of the fact that her
country's laws would divorce her from him, if she chose, did
ever the truth come to her ear. He had always known
this, indeed, as he had known all the other risks he ran in
doing what he did. But it had been far away, indistinct, uq«

87'J WANDA.

asserted : whenever the memory of it had passed over him hgL ^Aia
had thrust it away. Now, when another knew hb secret, l::=^Flio
could not do so. He had a strange sensation of having fallc^^ ^ea
from some great height, of having all his life slide away liV.^£ke
melting ice out of his hands. He never onoe doubted for ^ an
instant the good faith of Egon Y^siirhely. He knew \\mrM^ .bat
his lips would no more unclose to tell his secret than t .^ the
glaciers yonder would find human voice. But the consciov ^=:»oa»
ness that one man lived, moved, breathed, rose with eaa^^^pjic)
day, and went among other men, bearing with him that faior^fata
knowledge, made it now impossible for him ever to forget ^^^t it
A dull remorse, a sharp apprehension, were forever his oc^^^^com
paniims, and never lefl him for longeron in his sweetest hoi:^'^::2)ar8,
He did justice to the magnificent generosity of the man v^r- ^\^^
spared him. Egon y5s5.rhely knew, as he knew, that i^ ^}^q
hearing the truth, could annul the marriage if she ohose. "~ '

children would have no rights, no name, if their mother c1
to separate herself from him. The law would make her
more as free as though she had never wedded him. Hek
that, and the other man who loved her knew it too. Hec*
measure the force of V^is^rhely's temptation as that simples
heroic soldier could not stoop to measure his. She estees^^iuo^
it a poor love which could not bear to be sometimes a^"' - oat
in silence.

" For a man to be manly he must be free," she thomB^^ht •
" and how can he be free if there be some one to whov^xi ^
must confess every trifle? He owes allegiance to no on^ biu
his own conscience.*'

If in their intercourse she had found his honor less scriipo.
lous, his code less fine, than her own, — if she had been^erer
pained by a certain levity and looseness of principle betrajet/
by him at times, — she always strove not to attach too much
importance to these. The creeds of a man of pleasure wore
necessarily different, she told herself, from those of a womao
reared in austere tenets and guarded by natural pride and pnritj
of disposition. Whenever the fear crossed her that he migbt
not be always faithful to her, she put it away from her
thoughts. " What I have to do," she thought, <* is to be true
to him, not to question or to doubt him : a man's faithfulness
has always such a different reading from a woman's.''

Sahran never quite understood the perfect indulgenoe to

WANDA, B73

him which she comlnncd with the greatest severity to herself.
Ue thought that the same measure as she gave she would
exact. The serenity and grandeur of her character made it
seem to him impossible that she would ever have compassion
for weakness or for falsehood. He fancied, wrongly, that a
^oman less noble than herself would be more indulgent than
>9he would be to error. He did not realize that it is only a
great nature which can wholly understand the full force of thn
words, aimer c^est pardonner. And then again, he said to
himself, she might have pardoned a fault, a crime even, of
high passion, of bold mutiny against moral law, but how could
she ever pardon a meanness, a treason, a lie ?

So he let the months slide away, and did not say to her,
whilst he still might have said it himself, ^* I am not what
you think me."

He was deeply unhappy, but he concealed it from her.
Even when his heart beat against hers it seemed to him
always that there was an invisible wall between himself and
her. He longed to tell the whole truth to her, but he was
afraid : if the whole pain and shame had been his own that
the confession would have caused, he would have dared it,
but he had not the heart to inflict on her such suffering, not '
the courage to destroy their happiness with his own hand.
Egon Yils^rhely alone knew, and he for her sake would never
epeak. As for the reproach of his own conscience, as for the
remorse that the words of his children might at any moment
call up in him, these he must bear. He was a man of cool
judgment and of ready resource, and, though he had never
foreseen the sharp repentance which his better nature now
felt, he knew that he would be able to live it down as he had
crushed out so many other scruples. He vowed to himself
that as far as in him lay he would atone for his act. The
moral influence of his wife had not been without effect on
him. Not altogether, but partially, he had grown to believe
in what she believed in, of the duty of human life to other
lives ; he had not her sympathy for others, but he had ad-
mired it, and in his own way followed it, though without b<u
faith.

S2

374 WANDA.

CHAPTER XXVn.

In the midsummer of that year, whilst they were quite
alone, they received a letter from Madame Brancka, in which
she proposed to take Hohenszalras on her way from Franco
to Tsarkoc Selo, where she was about to pay a visit which
could not be declined by her.

When in the spring he had written with formality to her
to announce the birth of his son Victor, she had answered
with a witty coquettish letter such as mi«;ht well have been
provocative of further correspondence. But he had not taken
up the invitation. Mortified and irritated, she had compared
his writing with the pieces of burnt paper, and been more
satisfied than ever that he had penned the name. But, even
were it so, what had Sabran to do with Russia? He and
Egon V5<sh;rhely were not friends so intimate that they had
any common interests one with the other. The mystery had
more mtensely interested her when her rapid intuition had
connected the resignation of Sabran*s appointment with the
' messenger sent to him from Tar6c. Whatever Yassia Kazdn
might be, she reasoned, it was by that name or by that
memory that he was now compelled to surrender the mission
which had pleased and distinguished him in no slight meas-
ure. Her impatience to be again in Sabran *s presence grew
intense. She imagined a thousand histories, to cast each
aside in derision as impossible. All her suppositions were
built upon no better basis than a fragment of charred paper ;
but her shrewd intuition bore her into the region of truth,
though the actual truth of course never suggested itself to
her, even in her most fantastic and dramatic visions. Finally
she proposed to visit Hohenszalras in the midsummer months.

" Last year you had such a crowd about you," she wrote,
" that I positively saw nothing of you, liebe Wanda. You
are alone now, and I venture to propose myself for a fortnight.
You cannot exactly be said to be in the way to anywhere, but
I shall make you so. When one is going to Russia, a matter
of another five hundred miles or so is a bagatelle."

" We must let her come," said Wanda, as she gave the
letter to Sabran, who, having read it, said, with much sincer*

WANDA. 376

Hy, ^' For heaven's sake do not. A fortnight of MadamA
Olgal — as well have a century of Madame AngotT'

" Can I prevent her ?**

''You can make some excuse. I do not like Madame
Brancka."

"Whjr

He hesitated : he could not tell her what he had felt at
the ball of the Hof burg : " She reminds me of a woman who
drew me into a thousand follies, and, to cap her good deeds, be-
trayed me to the Prussians. If you must let her come, I will
go away. I will go and see your mines, or your haras.''

" Are you serious ?"

*' Quite serious. Were I not ashamed of such a weakness,
I should use a feminine expression. I should say ' eUe me
donne des ner/s,^ "

'' I think she has a great admiration for you, and she does
not conceal it."

'' Merely because she is sensible that I do not like her.
Such women as she are discontented if only one person fail to
admit their charm. She is accustomed to admiration, and she
b not scrupulous as to how she obtains it."

'' My dear, pray remember that she is our guest, and doubly
our relative."

" I will try ,and remember it ; but, believe me, all honor is
wholly wasted upon Madame Olga. You offer her a coin of
which the image and the superscription are .alike unknown to
her."

" You are very severe," said his wife.

She looked at him, and perceived that he was not jesting,
that he was on the contrary disturbed and annoyed, and she
remembered the persistence with which Olga Brancka had
sought his companionship and accompanied him on his sport
in the summer of her visit there.

" If she had not married first my brother and then my
eousin, she would never have been an intimate friend of mine,"
she answered. " She is of a world wholly opposed to all my
tastes. For you to be absent would be too marked, I think ;
but we can both leave if you like. I am well enough for any
movement now, and I can leave the child with his nurso.
Shall we make a tour in Hungary ? The haras will interest
you There arc the mines, too, that one ought to visit."

Pfe received her assent with gratitude and dclip;ht
felt that ,he would have gooe to the uttermost ends of
earth rather than run the risk of spending long lonely
mer days in the excitation of Madame Brancka's
He detested her, he would always detest her, and yet
he shut his eves he saw her so clearly with the mali<
light in her dusky glance, and the jewelled butterfly t -rem*
bling about her breasts.

" She shall never come under Wanda's roof if I can pre-

vent it,'* he thought, remembering her as she had been th;it
night.

A few days later the Countess Brancka, much to her Ta«,'e,
received a note from Hohenszalrasburg, which said that they
were on the point of leaving for Hungary and Qalicit^^ , but
that if she would come there in thpir absence the Pri :3»iccs8
Ottilie, who remained, would be charmed to receive her. Of

course she excused herself, and did not go. A visit t- ^3 the
solitudes of the Iselthal, where she would see no one l:i:>ut a
lady of eighty years old and four little children, hacM few
attractions for the adventurous and vivacious wife of & Cefaa
Brancka.

" Wanda, with all her pride, is afraid of me," she tho-«Jght.

" It is only an excuse," she thought, and was furious, but
she looked at herself in the mirror and was almost condoled
as she thought also, ^^ He avoids me. Therefore he is etfridd
of me 1"

She went to her god, le mondcy and worshipped at all its
shrines and in all its fashions, but in the midst of the tarmoii
and the triumphs, the worries and the intoxications of ^&
life, she did not lose her hold on her purpose, or forget that
he had slighted her. His beautiful face, serene and soomful,
was always before her. He might have been at her feet, and
he chose to dwell beside his wife under those solitary foieBts,
among those solitary mountains of the High Tauem I

" With a woman he has lived with all these eight years T
she thought, with furious impatience. " With a woman Tvbo
has grafted the Lady of La Garaye on Libussa, who never
gives him a moment's jealousy, who is as flawless as an ivor
statue or a marble throne, who suckles her children and coul
spin their clothes if she wanted, who never cares to go oo
tide the hills of her own home, — the Teuton Hatui/rau to i

WANDA. 37'^

finger-tips.*' And she was all the more bitter and the inoro
angered because always, as she tried to think thus, the imago
of Wanda rose up before her as she had seen her so oflen at
Vienna or Ilohenszalras, with the great pearls on her hair
and on her breast,^-

A pinnet at whose passing, lo !
All lesser stars recede, and night
Grows clear as day thus lighted up
liy all her loveliness, which burns
With pure white flame of chastity,
And fires of fair thought.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

LlFB went on in its old pathways at Hohenszalras. Nothing
more was said by him, or to him, as to his rejection of the
Russian mission. She was niggard in nothing, and when she
offered her faith or pledged her silence gave both entirely and
ungrudgingly. Sabran to her showed an increase of devo-
tion, an absolute adoration, which would in themselves have
sufficed to console any woman ; and if the most observant
member of their household, Greswold, perceived in him a
preoccupation, a languor, a gloom, which boded ill for their
future peace, the old man was too loyal in his attachment not
to endeavor to shake off his own suspicions and discredit his
own penetration.

The princess had received a note from Olga Brancka in
which that lady wrote, " Have you discovered the nature of
his refusal of Russia ? Myself, I believe that I was to blame.
I hinted to him that he would be tempted to his old sins in
Petersburg, and that Wanda would be very miserable there.
It seems that this was enough for the tender heart of this
devoted lover, and too much for his wisdom and his judg-
ment: he rejected the mission after accepting it. I believe
the court is furious. I am not de service now, so that I have
no opportunity of endeavoring to restore him to favor, but T
imagine the Emperor will not quarrel forever with Hohcnszal-
rasburg *'

82*

378 WASDA.

Tlio letter rcbtored him at least to the favor of
Otttlie. Exaggerated aa sach a scrapie appeared, it did not

seem to her impossible in a man whose devotion to his wife sbe

daily witnessed, shown in a hnndred traits. She blamed him
still severely in her own thoughts for what she held ai^^n ia-
excosable disrespect to the Crown, but she kept her ^^^ord
scrupulously and never spoke to him on the subject.

" Where else in the wide world would any man have f( mod
such forbearance?" he thought, with gratitude, and he \ new
that nowhere would such delicate sentiment have exbtod ou^vtside
the pale of that fine patrician dignity which is as incapabUi^be of
the vulgarity of inqubitiveness and interrogation as wa^^s the
Spartan of lament

The months went by. They did not leave home ; he se^^^oied
to have lost all wish for any absence, and even repulse(SH the
idea of inviting the usual house-parties of the year. Sh^» sup-
posed that he was averse to meeting people who might rec^ "mir to
his rejection of the post he had once accepted. The sucnsaiDer
passed, and the autumn came ; he spent his time in occasional
sport, the keen and perilous sport of the Austrian moua '9:^nB,
and more often and more faithfully beguiled himself with tikose
arts of which he was a brilliant master, though he wouLcJ oaU
himself no more than a mere amateur. From the adaaiojs-
tration of the estates he had altogether withdrawn himself

^' You are so much wiser than I,'* he always said to W,
and when she would have referred to him, replied, '^ You iuiFe
your lawyers : they are all honest men. Consult them ratW
than mo."

With the affairs of Idrac only he continued to concern huh
self a little, and was persistent in setting aside all its revenaes
to accumulate for his second son.

" I wish you cared more about all these things," she said
to him one day, when she had in her hand the reports from
the mines of Galicia. He answered, angrily, *^ I have do
right to theiu. Tbey are not mine. If you chose to give
them all away to the Crown, I should say nothing."

" Not even for the children's sake ?"

" Nc , you would be entirely justified if you liked to gi
the children nothing."

'•^ 1 really do not understand you," she said, in groat f
prise.

WANDA. 371)

" Everything ia yours," he said, abruptly.

'' And the children too, surely 1" she said, with a smile-,
bat the strangeness of the remark disquieted her. " It is
oyer-sensitiveness," she thought ; " he can never altogether for-
get that he was poor. Ic is for that reason public life would
have been so good for him, — dignities which he enjoyed of his
own, honors that he arrived at through his own attainments.'*

Chagrined' to have lo^t the opportunity of winning personal
honors in a field congenial to him, the sense that everything
was hers could hardly fail to gall him sometimes constantly,
though she strove to efface any remembrance or reminder that
it was so.

When they came home from their tour amidst the mines
of Galicia and the plains of Ilungary, and from their recep-
tion among the adoring townsfolk of restored Idrac, the
autumn was far advanced, and the long rains and the wild
winds of October had risen, making of every brook a torrent.

On their return she found intelligence from Paris that a
friend of her father's and her own godfather, the Due de
Noira, had died, bequeathing her his gallery of pictures, and
his art collection of the eighteenth century, which were both
&mous. The duke had been a Legitimist and a hermit. Re
had been unmarried, and had spent all the latter years of his
life in amassing treasures of art, for which he had no heir
of his own blood to care a jot. The bequest was a very pre-
cious one, and her presence in Paris was requested. Regret-
ful for herself to leave Hohenszalras, she perceived that to
Sabran the tidings were welcome. Moved by an unselfish im-
pulse, she said at once, —

" Go alone ; go instead of me ; your presence will be the
same as mine. Paris will amuse you more if you are by
yourself, and you will be so happy among all those Lancrets
and Fragonards, those Rcisencrs and Gauthi^res. The collec-
tion is a marvel, but entirely of the Beau Si^cle. You never
saw it ? No ! I think the duke never opened his doors to
any one save to half a dozen old tried friends, and he had a
horror of turning his salons into show-rooms. If you think
well, we will leave it all as it is, buying the house if we can.
All that eighteenth-century bibeloterie would not suit thit]
place, and I should like to keep it all as he kept it: that ia
the only true respect to show to a legacy."

380 WANDA.

Sabran hesitated : he was tempted, yet he was half rehicfc-
ant to yield to the temptation. He felt that he would will<
ingly be by himself awhile, yet he loved his wife too pas*
sionately to quit lier without pain. His own conscience
made her presence at times oppress and trouble him, yet he
had never lost the half-religious adoration with which she
had first inspired him. Eie suggested a compromise : why
should they not winter in Paris?

She was about to dissent, for of all seasons in the Taucm
she loved the winter best ; but when she looked at him she
saw such eager anticipation on his face that she suppressed
her own wishes uuuttered.

" We will go, if you like/' she said, without any hesitation
or reluctance visible. " 1 dare say we can find some pretty
house. Aunt Ottilie will be pleased ;^ there is nothing here
which cannot do without us for a time, we have such trusty
stewards ; only I think it would be more change for you if
you went alone.*'

" No 1" he said ; " separation is a sort of death : do not
let us tempt fate by it. Life is so short at its longest ; it
is ingratitude to lose an hour that we can spend together."

" There was never such a lover since Petrarca," she said,
with a smile. " Nay, you eclipse him : he was never tried
by marriage."

But, though she jested at it, his great love for her seemed
like a beautiful light about her life. What did his state-
secret matter? What did it matter what cause had led him
to avoid political life? — ^he loved her so well.

The following month they were in Paris, having found an
hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great
sunny garden ; and when they were fairly installed there,
the princess and the children and the horses followed them,
and their arrival made an event of great interest and impor-
tancein the city which of all others in the world it is hardest
thus to impress.

The Countess von Saalras, a notability always, was cele-
brated just then as the inheritress of the coveted Noira col-
lection, which it had been fondly hoped would go to the
hammer; and Sabran, popular dways, and not forgotten
here, where most things and people are forgotten in a week«
was courted, flattered, and welcomed by men and by women ;

WANDA. 381

and as he rcdc dowh the A\\6e dcs Acacias, or entered the
Mirlitons, he felt himself at home. His beautiful wife, his
beautiful children, his incomparable horses, his marvellouti
good fortune, were the talk of all those who had already left
their country-houses for the winter retitriey and attained a
publicity, beginning with the great Szalras pearls and ending
with the babies' white donkeys, which was the greatest of all
possible offences to her : she abhorred and contemned pub-
licity with the sensitiveness of a delicate temper and tho
Boutempt of a scornful patrician.

To Sabran it was not so offensive : there was the Sclav in
him, which loved display and was not ill pleased by notoriety.
All this admiration around them made him feel that his life
after all had been a great success, that he had drawn prizes
in the lottery of fate which all men envied him ; it helped
him to forget Egon Vtlsilrhely. He had never so nearly felt
affection for Bela as when lines of men and women stood still
to watch the handsome child gallop on his pony down the
avenues of tlie Bois.

" Life is, after all, like baccara or billiards," he said to him-
self. ** It is of no use winning unless there be a galerie to
look on and applaud."

And then he felt ashamed of the poorness and triviality of
the thought, which was not one he would have expressed to
his wife. That very morning, when she had read a long flat-
tery of herself in a journal of fashion, she had cast the sheet
from her with disgust on every line of her face.

" We are safe from thaty at least, in the Iselthal,'* she had
said. " Cannot you make them understand that we are not
public artists to need rSclames, ndr yet sovereigns to be com-
pelled to submit to the microscope? Is this the meaning of
civilization, — to make privacy impossible, to oblige every one
to live under a lens ?'*

Ho had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not
done so. He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.

" They will put this in the papers 1" said Bela, when the
8Q0W came, and he had his sledge out for the first time with
four little Hungarian ponies.

" That is the poison of cities !" said Wanda, as she heard him.
•* Who can have been so foolish as to tell him of the pajers?"

"Your heir, my deai, will never want for reporters of any

382 WANDA.

flattery/' said his father. "It is as well he should run the
gauntlet of them early."

Bola listened, and said to his brother, a little later, '< I like
Paris. Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the
print, and then they want to see us."

" What good is that?" said Gela. " I like home. They
all of them know us; they don't want to see us. That ig
much better."

"No, it isn't," said Bela. "One drives all day long at
home, and there is nothing but the trees ; here the trees are
all people, and the people talk of us, and the people want to
be us."

" But they love us at home," said Gela.

" That does not matter," said Bela, with hcmtem^

Wanda called the children to her.

" Bela," she said, gently, " do you know thjit cnce, not so
very long ago, there was a little boy here in Paris very much
like you, with golden hair and velvet coat like yours, and he
was called the Dauphin, and when he went out with his ser-
vants, as you do, the people envied him, and talked of him,
and put in print what he did each day ? The people wanted
to he him, as you say ; but they did not love him, — ^poor little
child I — because they envied him so. And in a very little
while — a very, very little while — ^because it was envy and not
love, they put the Dauphin in prison, and they cut off his
golden hair, and gave him nothing but bread and water and
filthy straw, and locked him up all alone till he died. That
is the use of being envied in Paris, — or anywhere else. Gela
is right. It is better when people love us."

The next day, as Bela drove in his sledge down the while
avenues through the staring crowds, his little fair face was
very grave under its curls : he thought of the Dauphin.

When the weather opened, Wanda took him and his bi other
to Versailles and Trianon, and told therj more of that saddest
of all earthly histories of fallen greatnesa. Gela sot/bed aloud ;
Bela was silent and grew pale.

" I hate Paris," he said, very slowly, as they ▼ ent back to
it in the red close of the wintry afternoon.

" Do not hate Paris. Do not hate anything or any one,"
said his mother, softly ; " but love your own home and your
own people, and be grateful for them."

WANDA. 383

Bela lifted his little cap and made the sign of the Cross, sjt
he did when he saw anything holy. " I am the Dauphin at
home,*' he thought : and he felt the tears in his eyes, though
he never would cry as Oela did.

So she gave them her simples as antidotes to the city's
poison, and occupied herself with her children, with the poor
around her, with the various details of her distant estates, and
paid hut little heed to that artificial world which, when she
heeded it, offended and irritated her. To please Sabran she
went to a few great houses and to the opera, and gave many
entertainments herself, happy that he was happy in it, but not
otherwise interested in the life around her, or moved by the
homage of it.

" It is much more my jewels than it is myself that they
stare at," she assured him, when he told her of the admira-
tion which she elicited wherever she appeared. " Believe me,
if you put my pearls or my diamonds on Madame Chose or
Baroness Nicmand, they would gather and gaze quite as much."

He laughed.

'* Last night I think you wore no ornaments except a few
tea-roses, and I saw them follow you just the same. It is very
odd that you never seem to understand that you are a beauti-
ftil woman.**

" I am glad to be so in your eyes, if I never shall be in my
own. As for that popularity of society, it never commended
itself to me. It has too strong a savor of the mob.**

" When you are so proud to the world, why are you so
humble to me ?"

She was silent a moment, then said, —

" I think when one loves any other very much, one becomes
for him altogether unlike what one is to the world. As for
being proud, I have never fairly made out whether my pride
is humility or my humility pride, and none of my confessors
have ever been able to tell me. I assure you I have searched
my heart in vain.**

A shadow passed over his face : he thought that there even
would be pride enough there to send him out forever from her
side if she knew

One day she suggested to him that he should visit Romans.

" Now you are near for so long a time, surely you should
go,** she urged. " It is not well never to see your poor people

384 WANDA.

The priest is a good man, indeed, but he cannot altogUhet
make up for your absence."

He answered with some irritation that they were not hig
people. All the land had been parcelled out, and nothing re-
mained to the name of Sabran except a strip of the sea-shore
and one old half-ruined tower : he could not see that he had
any duties or obligations there. She did not insist, because
she never pursued a theme which appeared unwelcome ; but in
herself she wondered at the dislike which was in him towards
his Breton hamlet, wondered that he did not wish one of hia
sons to bear its title, wondered that he did not desire the
children to see once, at least, the sea-nest of his forefathers.
It was more effort to her than usual to restrain herself from
pressing questions upon him. But she did forbear and, as a
consolation to her conscience, sent to the cur^ of Komaris a
sum of money for the poor, which was so large that it astounded
and bewildered the holy man by the weight of responsibility
it laid on him.

The indifference shocked her the more because of the pro-
found conviction in which she had been reared of the duties
of the noble to his poorer brethren, and the ties of mutual
affection which bound together her and her people's interests.

" The weapon of our order against the Socialist is duty,"
she had once said to him.

He, more sceptical, had told her that no weapon, not eveo
that anointed one, can turn aside the devilish hate of envy.
But she hold to her creed, and strove to rear her children in
its tenets. It always seemed to her that the Cross before
which the fiend shrinks cowering in ^^ Faust" is but a symbol
of the power of a noble life to force even hatred to its knees.

She did not care for this season in Paris, but she did not let
him perceive any dissatisfaction in her. She made her own
interests out of the arts and charity ; she bought the Hdtel
Noira, and lefl everything as the duke had left it ; she found
pleasure in intercourse with her royal exiled friends, and left
her husband his own entire liberty of action.

" Are you never jealous ?" said her royal friend to her onoe.
" He is so much liked, — so much made love to, — I wonder
you are not jealous 1"

'^ I ?" she echoed ; and it seemed (o her friend as if in ihftl
one pronoun she had said volumes.

WANDA. 385

Jealous !**

She repeated the word as she drove home alone that day ,
and almost wondered what it meant Who could be to him
what she was ? Who could dethrone her from that " great
white throne** to which his adoration had raised her ? If his
senses ever strayed, his soul would never swerve from its
loyalty. When she reached home that afternoon she found a
card on which was written with a pencil, in German, —

'^ So sorry not to find you. I am in Paris to see my doctor.
Zdonka has taken my service at court. I will come to ^ou
to-morrow."

The card was Madame Brancka's.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Sabran, that same afternoon, as he had walked down the
Hue de la Paix, had been signalled and stopped by a pretty
woman wrapped to the eyes in blue-fox furs, who was being
driven in a low carriage by Hungarian horses, glorious in
silver chains and trappings.

" My dear R6n6,** had cried Madame Olga, " do you not
know me, that you compel me to flourish my parasol ? Yes :
I am come to Paris. My sister-in-law, Zdenka, will do my
waiting. -I wanted to consult my physician ; I am very un-
well, though you look so incredulous. So Wanda has all the
Noira collection? What a fortunate woman she is. The
eighteenth century is the least suited to her taste. She will
heartily despise all those shepherdesses en panter and those
smiling deities on lacquer. How could the duke leave such
frivolities to so serious a person ? What is her doubled rose-
leaf amidst all her good luck ? She must have one. I suppose
it is you? Well, you will find me at home in an hour. I am
only a stone's throw from your hdtel. Have you brought all
the homespun virtues with you from Hohenszalras ? I am
afraid they will wither in the air of the boulevards. Au
revoir I

And then she laughed again, and kissed her finger-tips to
him, and drove away wrapped up in her shining furs, and he
B 8 83

386 WANDA.

was conscious of a stinging sense of excitement, annoyanoe,
pleasure, and confusion, as if he had drunk some irritant and
heady wine.

Sabran had gone on to his clubs with an uneasy sense of
ttomcthing perilous and distasteful having come into his life,
yet also with a consciousness of a certain zest added to the
seductions of this his favorite city. He did not go to tho
H6tel Brancka in the next hour, and was sensible of haying
to exercise a certain control over himself to refrain from doing
so/

" Did you know that Olga was in Paris ?" she said, in some
surprise, to him, when they met in the evening.

" I believe she arrived this morning," he answered, with a
certain effort. " I met her an hour or two ago. She canJ<J
unexpectedly ; she had not even told her servants to open her
hotel."

" Is Stefan with her ?"

" I believe not."

*' But surely it is her term of waiting in Vienna /*'

He gave a gesture of indifference :

" I believe it is. I think it is. She will be sure to write
to you this evening, so she said. We cannot escape her, yon
see ; she is our fate."

" We can go back to Hohenszalras."

" That would be too absurd. We cannot spend our liv*
running away from Madame Brancka. We have a hundred
engagements here. Besides, your Noira affair is not one-half
settled as yet, and it is only now that Paris is really agreeable.
We will go back in May, after Chantilly."

" As you like," she said, with a smile of ready acquiescence.

She was only there for his sake. She would not spoil hw
contentment by showing that she made a sacrifice. She was
never really happy away from her mountains, but she did not
wish him to suspect that.

The H6tel Brancka was a charming little temple of luxur/f
ordered after the last mode, and as pimpant as its mistress.
It had cost enormous sums of money, and its walls had been
painted by famous artists with fantastic and voluptuottf sub-
jects, which had not been paid for at the present.

In finance, indeed, she was much like a king of recent tiiue.
who never had any money to give, but always said to hia

WANDA, 387

mistresses, " Order whatever you like : the civil list will always
pay my bills." She had never any money, but she knew that
her brother-in-laWy like the Chambers, would always pay her
bills.

" One expects to hear the * Decamerone* read here," said
Wanda, with some disdain, as she glanced around her on her
first visit.

'* At Hohenszalras one would never dare to read anything
but the ' Imitatione Christi,' " said Madame Olga, with con-
tempt of another sort.

The little hdtel was but a few streets' distance off their own
grand and spacious residence, which had undergone scarcely
any change since the days of Louis X^. They saw the
Countess Brancka very often, — coula aot choose but see her
when she chose, and that was almost perpetually.

He had honestly, and even intensely, desired not to be sub-
jected to the vicinity of Olga Braacka. But it was difficult
to resist its seduction when she lived within a. few yards of
him, when she met him at every turn, when the changing;
scenes of society were like those of a kaleidoscope, always
composed of the same pieces. The closeness of her relation-
ship to his wife made an avoidance of her, which would have
been easy with a mere acquaintance, wholly out of possibility.
She pleaded her " poverty" very prettily as a plea to borrow
their riding-horses, use their boxes at the Opera and the
Th6S,tre Frangais, and be constantly, under one pretext or
another, seeking their advice. Wanda, who knew the enor-
mous extravagance of both the Branckas, and the inroads
which their debts made on even the magnificent fortunes of
Egon V5fi5,rheiy, had not as much patience as usual in her
before these plaintive pretences.

" Wanda nie boude" said Madame Brancka, with touchia^i;
reproachfulness, and sought a refuge and a confidant in ihe
sympathy of Sabran, which was not given very cordially, yet
could not be altogether refused. Not only were they in the
same world, but she made a thousand claims on their- friend-
ship, on their relationship. Stefan Brancka was in Hungary.
She wanted Sabran's advice about her horses, about her trades-
people, about her disputes with the artists who had decorated
ner house ; she sent for him without ceremony, and, with
Insistence, made him ride with her, drive with her, dance with

a88 WANDA.

her, made him take her to see certain diversiors which were
not wholly fitted for a woman of her rank, and so rapidly and
imperceptibly gained ascendency over him that before making
any engagement he involuntarily paused to learn whether she
had any claim on his time. It caused his wife the same vague
impatience which she had felt when Olga Brancka had per-
sisted in going out with him on hunting-excursions at home.
But she thrust away her observation of it as unworthy of her.

** If she tire him/' she thought, '^ he will very soon put her
aside."

But he did not do so.

Once she said to him, with a little irony, " You do not
dislike Olga so very much now?'* and to her surprise he
colored, and answered, quickly, '< I am not sure that I do not
hate her."

^* She certainly docs not hate you/' said Wanda, a little
contemptuously.

" Who knows ?'* he said, gloomily. " Who could ever be
sure of anything with a woman like that?'*

^^ Mutability has a charm for some persons,'* said his wife,
with an irritation for which she despised herself.

" Not for me,** said Sabran, quickly. ** My opinion of
Madame Olga is precisely what it has always been.**

" Are you very sincere to her then ?" said Wanda, and, as
she spoke, regretted it. What was Olga Brancka, that she
should for a moment bring any shadow of dissension between
them?

^^ Sincere 1" he echoed, with a certain embarrassment.
*^ Whom would she expect to be so ? I told you once before
that you pay her in a coin of which she could not decipher
the superscription 1"

Wanda smiled, but she was pained by his tone. '' You
are not the first man, I suppose, who amuses himself with
what he despises," she answered. " But I do not think it is
a very noble sport, or a very healthy one. Forgive me, dear,
if I seem to preach to you."

." Preach on, forever, my beloved divine. You can ncvei
weary me," said Sabran, and he stooped and kissed her.

She did not return his caress.

That day, as she drove with the princess in the Bois, Bela
and Gela facing her, she saw him in the side-alley riding with

WANDA, 389

the Countess Brancka. A physical pain seemed to eoiitraci
her heart for a momeDt.

" Olga is very accaparante*^ said the priDoess, perceiving
them also. " Not content with borrowing your Arabs, she
must have your husband also as her cavalier.

" If she amuse him, I am her debtor," said Wanda, very
calmly.

** Amuse \ Can a man who has lived with you be amused
by her?"

" I am not amusing," said his wife, with a smile which
was not mirthful. *' Men are like Bela and Uela : they can
not always be serious."

Then she told her coachman to leave the Bois and drive
out into the country. She did not care to meet those riders
at every turn in the avenues.

*' My dear Ren6," said the princess, when she happened to
see him alone, " can you find no one in all Paris to divert
yourself with except Stefan Brancka' s wife? I thought you
disliked her."
Sabran hesitated.

" She is related to us," he said, a little feebly. " One sees
her of necessity a hundred times a week."

" For our misfortune," said the princess, sententiously.
'* But she is not altogether friendless in Paris. Can she find
no one but you to ride with her ?"

" Has Wanda been complaining to you ?"
" My dear marquis," replied Frau Ottilie, with dignity,
" your wife is not a person to complain : you must understand
h<5r singularly little, after all, if you suppose that. But I
think, if you would calculate the hours you have of late
passed in Madame Brancka's society, you would be surprised
to see how large a sum they make up of your time. It is not
for me to presume to dictate to you ; you are your own master,
of course : only I do not think that Olga Brancka, whom 1
have known from her childhood, is worth a single half-hour'a
annoyance to Wanda."

Sabran rose, and his lips parted to speak, but he hesitated
what to say, and the princess, who was not without tact, left
him to receive herself some sisters of St. Vincent de Paul.
His conscience was not wholly clear. He was conscious of a
pungent^ irresistible, even whilst undesired, attraction that

88»

390 WANDA,

this Russian woman possessed for him ; it was something of
the same potent yet detestable influence which Cochonette had
exercised over him. Olga Brancka had the secret of amusing
men and of exciting their baser natures ; she had a trick of talk
which sparkled like wine, and, without being actually wit,
illumined and diverted her companions. She was a mistress
of all the arts of provocation, and had a cruel power of
making all scruples of conscience and all honesties and gravi*
ties of purpose seem absurd. She made no disguise of her
admiration of Sabran, and conveyed the sense of it in a thou-
sand delicate and subtle modes of flattery. He read her very
accurately, and had neither esteem nor regard for her, and yet
she had an attraction for him. Her boudoir, all wadded soiliy
with golden s^tin like a jewel-box, with its perpetual odor of
roses and its faint light colored like the roses, was a littlo
temple of all the Graces, in which men were neither wise nor
calm. She had a power of turning their very souls inside out
like a glove, and after she had done so they were never worth
quite as much again. The fascination which Sabran possessed
for her was that he never gave up his soul to her as the others
did : he was always beyond her reach ; she was always con-
scious that she was shut out from his inmost thoughts.

The sort of passion she had conceived for him grew, be-
cause it was fanned by many things, — by his constancy to his
wife, by his personal beauty, by her vague enmity to Wanda,
by the sense of guilt and of indecency which would attach in
the world's sight to such a passion. Her palate in pleasure
was at once .hardened and fastidious; it required strong food,
and her audacity in search of it was not easily daunted. She
knew, too, that he had some secret which his wife did not
share ; she was resolved to penetrate it. She had tried all
other means ; there only now remained one, — to surprise or
to beguile it fipm himself. To this end, cautious and patient
as a cat, she had resumed her intimacy with them as rela*
tions, and, with all the delicate arts of which she was a prO"
ficicnt, strove to make her companionship agreeable and ne-
cessary to him. Before long he became sensible of a certain
unwholesome charm in hv,r society. He went with her to the
opera, he took her to pass hours amidst the Noira collection,
he rode with her oflen, now and then he dined with her
alone, or almost alone, in a small oval room of pure JapanesOj

WANDA. 391

ii?here great silvery birds and white lilies seemed to float on a
golden field, and the dishes were silver lotus-leaves, and the
lamps burned in pale-green translucent gourds hanging on
silver stalks.

An artificial woman is nothing without her mue en seine ;
transplanted amidst natural landscape and out-of-door life she
is apt to become cither ridiculous or tiresome. Madame
Brancka in Paris was in her own playhouse ; she looked well ;
and was in her own manner irresistible. At Hohenszalras she
had been as out of keeping with all her atmosphere as her
enamel buttons, her jewelled alpenstock, her cravat of point
d'Alenyon, and her softly- tin ted cheeks had been out of place
in the drenching rain-storms and mountain-winds of the arch-
duchy of Austria.

He knew very well that the attraction she possessed for
him was of no higher sort than that which the theatre had :
he seemed to be always present at a perfect comedy played
with exquisite grace amidst unusually perfect decorations.
But there was a certain artificial bias in his own temperament
which made him at home there. His wlK)le life, after all,
had been an actor*s. His wife had said rightly, ^' Men can-
not be always serious.'' It was just his idler, falser moods
which Olga Brancka suited, and his very fear of her gave a
thrill of greater power to his amusement. When the prin-
cess, his devoted friend, reproved him, he was unpleasantly
aroused from his unwise indulgence in a perilous pursuit.
To pain his wife would be to commit a monstrous crime, a
crime of blackest ingratitude. He knew that ; he was ever
alive to the enormity of his debt to her, he was forever dis-
satisfied with himself for being unable to become more worthy
of her.

'' She jealous I" he thought. It seemed to him impossible,
yet his vanity could not repress a throb of exultation ; it al-
most seemed to him that in making her more human it would
make her more near his level. Jealous 1 It was not a word
which was in any keeping with her : jealousy was a wild,
toarse, undisciplined, suspicious passion, far removed from the
calmness and the strength of her nature.

At that moment she entered the room, coming from a drive
ifi the forenoon. It was still cold. She had a cloak of black
sables reaching to her feet; it still rested on hei shoulders

3D2 WANDA.

Her bead w« uncovered ; she had never looked taller, fairer,
more stately ; the black furs seemed like some Northern robes
of coronation. Beneath them gleamed the great gold claspa
of a belt, and gold lions* heads fastening her olive- velvet gown.
" Jealous r* he thought, " this queen among women !** Hit
heart sank. " She would never say anything," he thought •
" she would leave me." Almost he expected her to divine his
thoughts. He was relieved when she spoke to him of some
mere trifle of the day. Like many men, he could not be franlc,
because frankness would have seemed like insult to his wife.
He could not explain to her the mingled aversion and attrac-
tion which Olga Brancka possessed for him, the curious sting-
ing irritation which she produced on his nerves and his senses,
so that he despised her, disliked her, and yet could not wholly
resist the charm of her unwholesome magic. How could he
say this to his wife ? How could he hope to make her under-
stand, or, if she understood, persuade her not to resent as the
bitterest of affronts, this power which another woman; and
that woman nearly connected with her, possessed ? Besides,
even if he went so far, if he leaned so much on the nobility of
her nature, as to venture to do this, he knew very well that she
would in reason say to him, " Let us go away from where this
danger exists." He did not desire to go away. He was glad of
this old life of pleasure, which let him forget his secret sorrow.
Amidst the excitations of Paris he could push away the remem-
brance that another man knew the shame of his life. The calm
and the solitude of Hohenszalras, which had been delightfiil
to him once, had grown irksome when he had b^^n to cling
to them for fear lest any other should remember as V5j3^rhely
had remembered. Here in Paris, where he had always beeo
popular, admired, well known, he was as it were in his own
kingdom, and the magnificence with which he could now
live there brought him troops of friends. He hoped that his
wife would not be unwilling to pass a season there in every
year, and he stifled as it rose his consciousness that she would
assent to whatever he wished, however painful or unwelcome
to herself.

" It is really very unwholesome for you to be married to
Boch a saint as Wanda," his tormentor had said to him one
day. '^ You do not know what a little opposition and contra-
diction would do for you."

- WANDA. 393

.They were visiting the H6tel Noira, studying the probable
effects of a new method of lighting the gallery, y^ hich he cod-
templated, and she continued abruptly :

" Wanda has been buying very largely in Paris, has she
not? Aud she has bought this hdtel of the Noira heirs, I
believe? You mean to keep it altogether as it is, and of
course you will come and live in it ?''

" Whenever she pleases," he answered, intent on a Lancret
not well hung.

" Whenever you please," said Madame Brancka. " Why
will you pretend that Wanda has any separate will of her
own ? It is marvellous to see so resolute a person as she was
as obediently bent as a willow wand. But all this French
property will constitute quite a fortune apart. I suppose it
will alt be settled on your third son, as Gela is to have Idrac ?
Will not you give him your title? Count Victor de Sabran
will sound very pretty ; and you might rebuild Romaris."

He turned from her with impatience.

" Are we so very old, that you want to parcel out our suc-
oessioD among babies? No; I do not intend to give my
name to any of Wanda's children. There is an Imperial
permission for them all to bear hers."

" You are not very loyal to your forefathers," said Madame
Brancka. " Wanda might well spare them one of her boys.
If not, what is the use of accumulating all this property in
France ?'*

" All that she buys is done out of respect for the Due de
Noira," said Sabran, curtly. " If she bear me twenty sons,
they will all have her name. It was settled so on the marriage-
deeds and ratified by the Kaiser."

" Are prince-consorts always deposed from any throne they
have of their own ?" said Madame Olga, in the tone that he
hated. " If I \*ere you I should rebuild Romaris. I wonder
80 devoted a wife has not done so years ago."

" There is nothing at Romaris to rebuild.'*

** Decidedly," thought his companion, " he hates Romaris,
and has no love of his own race. Did he drown Vassia
Eaz&n in the sea there?"

Unsparingly she renewed the subject to Wanda herself.

" You should settle the French properties on little Victor,
and give him the Sabran title," she urged to her. '^ I told

394 WANDA.

R6n^j the other day, that I thought it very strange he shouU
not care to have one of his sons named afler him/'

Wanda answered, coldly enough, " In my will, if I die be-
fore him, everything goes to the Marquis de Sabran. He will
make what division he pleases between his children, Eibjoct
of course to Bela's rights of primogeniture."

Madame Brancka was silent for a moment from surprise.

" It is odd that he should not care for Romaris," she said,
ifler a long pause. '^ You have much more trust ih him,
Wanda, than it is wise to put in any man that lives."

" Whom one trusts with one's self, one may well trust with
everything else," said her sister-in-law, in a tone which closed
discussion. But when she was lefl alone the thorn remained
in her. She thought, with perplexity, —

" No, he does not care for Romaris. He dislikes its very
aame. He would never hear of one of the children bearing
it. There must be something he does not say."

She remembered sadly what the Due de Noira had once
laid to her :

^^ In morals, as in metals, my dear, you cannot work gold
without supporting it by alloy."

Madame ikancka had patience and skill perfect enough to
refrain altogether from those hints and tentatives by which a
iess clever woman would have attempted to approach and sur-
prise the key to those hidden facts which she believed to
be the theme of his correspondence with V5^5,rhely and
the cause of his rejection of the Russian appointment. A
less clever woman would have alarmed him and betrayed her-
self by perpetual allusions to the matter. But she never did
this : she treated him with an alternation of subtile compli-
ment and ironical malice, such as was most certain to allure
and perplex any man, and he never by the most distant sus-
picion imagined that she knew anything which he desired
unknown. She was a woman of strong nerve, and her equa-
nimity in his and his wife's presence was wholly undisturbed
by her consciousness that she had despatched the anonymous
suggestion as a seed of discord to Hohenszalras. She knew
indeed that it was not what people of her rank and breed-
ing did do, that it was not honest warfare, that it was what
even the very easy morality of her own world would have
condemned with disgust; but she bore the sin of it very

WANDA. 3D5

ligl.ily. If she had been driven to excuse i she would have
oharaotcrized it as mere mischief. If her sister-in-law had
shown her the letter, she would have glanced over it with a
tranquil face and an air of utter unconcern. If she could
not have done this sort of thing she would have thought her-
self a very poor creature. " I believe you could be as wicked
as the Scotch Lady Macbeth/' Stefan Brancka had said once
to her; and she had answered, with much contempt, '^At
least I promise you I should not walk in my sleep if I were
80. Your Lady Macbeth was a grotesque barbarian."

A great deal of the sin of this world, which is not at all
like Lady Macbeth's, comes from the want of excitement felt
by persons, only too numerous, who have exhausted excite-
ment in its usual shapes. She had done so; she required
what was detestable to arouse her, because she had lived at
such high pressure that any healthy diversion was vapid and
stupid to her. The destruction, if she could achieve it, of her
sister-in-law's happiness, offered her in prospect such an ex-
citement ; and the whim she had taken for passion grew out
of waywardness, till it nearly became passion in trath. She
never precisely weighed or considered its possible consequences,
but she endeavored to arouse a response in him with all the
unscrupulous skill of a mistress in coquetry. When, moved
by Madame Ottilie's warning, he strove honestly to avoid her,
and often excused himself from obedience to her summons.
the opposition only stimulated her endeavors, and made a
smarting mortification and anger against him supply a double
motor-power for his subjection. If she could have believed
that she succeeded in making his wife anxious, she might
have been content ; but Wanda always received her with the
same serenity and courtesy, which, if it covered disdain, cov-
ered it unimpeachably with admirable grace.

" If one broke her heart, she would only make one a grand
courtesy with a bland smile," thought Olga Brancka, irritably
and impatiently. *' There are people who die standing. Wanda
would do that."

That ill weeds grow apace is a true old saw, never truer
than of vindictive and envious passions. Sheer and causeless
jealousy of her sister-in-law had been alive in her many years.
and now, by being fed and unresisted, so grew that it became
almost a restless hatred. It was far more her enmity to his

396 WANDA.

wife than any other seDtiment which iiispired her with a fan«
tastic and unhealthy desire to attract and detach Sabran from
his allegiance. Joined to it now there was a sense of some
mystery in him that baffled her, and which was to such a
woman the most pungent of all stimulants. In all her edit-
neries and all her railleries she never lost sight of this one pur-
pose, of surprising from him the secret which she believed ex-
isted. But he was always on his guard with her ; even when
most influenced by her atmosphere and her magnetism he did
not once lose his se.fKK)ntrol and his habitual coolness. At
moments when she was most nearly triumphing, the remem-
brance of his wife came over him like a breath of sweet pure
air that passes through a hot-house, and restored him to self-
possession and to loyalty. She began to fear that all the
ability with which she had procured her exemption from court
duties and had induced her husband to remain in Vienna waa
in vain, and she grew bolder and more reckless in her use of
stratagems and solicitations to keep Sabran beside her in these
early spring days given over to racing and sporting, and at all
the evening entertainments at which the great world met, and
whither she carried with so much effect her gleaming sap-
phires and her black pearls.

'^ Black pearls argue a perverted taste,'* said the Princess
Ottilie once to her, and she unabashed answered, —

'^ It is perverted tastes that make any noise in the world
or possess any flavor. White pearls are much more beau-
tiful, no doubt, but then they are everywhere, from the
crown jewel-cases to the peasants* necks; but my black
pearls ! — ^you cannot find their match, and how white oiie*8
throat looks with them I I only want a green rose.'*

'^ Chemicals can supply any deformity," said the prinoess,
dryly. ** Doing so is called science, I believe."

*' Do you call me a deformity ?" she asked, with some an-
noyance.

*' You are an elaborate production of the laboratory," said
the princess, calmly. " I am sure you will admit yourself
that nature has had very little to do with you."

" My pearls are black by a freak of nature," said Madame
Olga. " Perhaps I am the same."

The princess made a little gesture signifying that polite*
ncss forbade her from asscn% but she thought, '^ Yes : yon

WANDA. 3«J7

were never a white pearl, but you have 5tcep,ed /oursclf in
acids and solutions of all degrees of poison till you arc darkci
than you need have been, and you think your darkness light,
and some men think so too."

Sabran had grown to look for that necklace of black pearls
with eagerness in the society to which they both belonged.
Few evenings found him where Madame Brancka was not.
She had known his Paris of the Second Empire ; she had
known Gompi^gne and Pierrcfonds as he had known them ;
she knew all the friendships and the by-words of his old life,
and all the dessous des cartes of that which was now around
them. She amused him. She comprehended all he said,
half uttered. She remembered all he recalled. At Hohen-
szalras he had not found any charm in this, but here he did
find one. She suited Paris ; she knew it profoundly, she
liked all its pastimes, she understood all its sports and all
its slang. She hunted at Chantilly, betted at La Marche,
plunged at baccara, shot and fenced well and gayly, had the
theatres and all their jargon at her fingers' ends : all this
made her no mean aspirant to the post of mistress of his
thoughts. All that had seemed tiresome, artificial, even ri-
diculous, amidst the grand forests and healthful air of the
Iselthal became in Paris agreeable and even bewitching
Once he said, almost angri)y, to his wife, —

" You, who ride so superbly, should surely show yourself
at the duke^s hunts. What is the use of long gallops in the
Bois before any one else is out of bed ?''

" I never rode for show yet," said Wanda, in surprise.
"And you know I never would join in any sort of chase."

'* Surely such humanitarianism is exaggeration," he said,
impatiently. " Olga Brancka rides every day they meet at
Chantilly, and she is by no means of your form in the sad-
dle."

" I have never yet imitated Olga," said his wife, a little
ooldly ; but she did not object when day after day her finest
horses wore lent to Madame Brancka. She never by a word
or a hint reminded him that he was not absolute master of all
that belonged to her. Only when her sister-in-law wanted
to take Bela and his pony to Chantilly, she made her will
strongly felt in refusal.

The child, whose fancy had been fired by what he had heard

34

398 WANL i,

of Iho ducal hunting, of the great hounds and the stately
gatherings, like pictures of the Valois time, was paEsionatcVj
angered at being forbidden to go, and made his mother ^
heart ache with his flashing eyes and his flaming cheelc-'^'
** Cannot she leave even the children alone?" she thougl»-*i
with more bitterness than she had ever felt against anyone> _

A few nights later they were both at the Grand C^ra, :^*^
the box which was allotted to the name of the Countess vc — ■•^
Szalras. She was herself not very well ; she was pale, ai
sat a little away from the light. Her gown was of whi'
velvet ; she had no ornament except a cluster of gardcnii
and stcphanotis, and her habitual necklace of pearls. Olp ^
Braucka, in a costume of many-shaded reds, marvellouR^^v
embroidered in gold cords, was as gorgeous as a tropical bir^^^j
and sat with her arms upon the front of the box, playing '8
with a fan of rod feathers, or looking through her glass roun^ci^id
the house. He talked most with her, but he looked most ^»- ^^
his wife. There was no woman, in a fnll and brilliant hoos-^*®)
who could compare with her. A thrill of the pride of po-^^***
session passed through him. The malicious eyes of the othes — sf»
glancing towards him over her shoulder, read his thought:: ^^
She smiled provokingly.

*' Le man amoureux .'" she murmured. " Really, I d;
not believe in the existence of that type. But it is qui
admirable that it should exist Its example is veiy mac
wanted in Paris."

He felt himself color like a youth, but it was with u
tion : he was at a loss for an answer. To have defended \m~ ">*
admiration of his wife at the sword*s point would have be£^ °
easy ; to defend it from a woman's ridicule was more difficu^- *•
Wanda did not hear : she was listening to the song of i)i&
rah, and was dreamily regretting the solitude of Hohensalr;
and thinking what pleasure it would be to return. All tf
news that Greswold and her stewards sent her thenoe w
precious to her; no details seemed to her insignificant
without inteiest; and her own letters in return were full
minute attention to the welfare of every one and of
thing she had lefl there. She was roused from her ho
revery by the voice of her sister-in-law, raised more hig^^^V
and saying, impatiently, — ^

" Why should you object, R4n6, when T say that T wish l*^ «

WANDA. 399

" What do you wish ?" said ^Yanda, who always felt a sin-
galar anDoyanco whcncvor sho heard him thus familiarly ad*
dressed. " Whatever you may wish, I am sure M. do Sabrao
^an require do second bidding to procure it for you, if it be
within the limits of the possible."

" I wish to see a Breton Pardon," said Olsja Brancka, with
a gesture of her fan towards the stage. ^^ There is one next
week in his own country ; I want him to invite mo — us — ta
Komaris."

Wanda, who knew that he always shrank from the mention
of Romaris, interposed to save him from persecution.

** There is nothing at Romaris to invite us to," she said foi
him. " Neither you nor I can live in a cabin or a fishing-
boat ; especially can we not in March weather."

"You can live in a hut on your Alps," returned the other,
" and I do not dislike tent-life in the Carpathians. If he sent
his major-domo down, he would soon make the sands and
rocks blossom like the rose, and villages would arise as fast as
they did before the great Catherine. Why not ? It would
be charming. Has he no feeling for the cradle of his ances-
tors ? We must put him through a course of Lamartine."

** An unfortuhate allusion : he lived to lose Milly," said
Sabran, finding himself forced to say something. " In mid-
summer, mesdames, you might perhaps rough it, tant hien q'^ie
rnal ; but now I — there is nothing to be seen except fog and
Burf at sea, and mud and pools inland. Even a Pardon would
not reconcile you, — not even the Breton jackets with scrip-
tural stories embroidered on them, nor the bagpipes."

" Positively, you will not take us ?"
. •' I must disobey even your wishes in the Ides of March."
** But, whether in March or July, why do you never go
yourself?"

" There is nothing to go there for," he answered, almost
losing his patience ; " a people to whom I am only a name, a
strip of shore on which I only own a few wind-tormented
oak-trees 1"

" Only imagine the duties that Wanda would evolve in
your place out of those people and those oaks I"

" I have not Wanda's virtues," he said, half sadly, half
jestingly.
" Wo have none of 'is, or the millennium would hay«

400 WANDA.

arrived. I caoDot understand your dislike to your melancholy
sea-shore. Most of your countrymen are forever home-sick
away from their landes and their dolmens. You seem to feel
no throh for the inater patHa^ even when listening to ^ Dino-
rah/ which sets every other Breton's heart beating."

'^ My heart is Austrian/' said Sabran, with a bow towards
his wife.

" That is very pretty, and what you are also obliged to say,"
interrupted Madame Brancka. '* But why hate Romaris ?
For my part, I believe you see ghosts there."

His wife said, with a quick reproach in her words, '' The
ghosts of men who knew how to live and to die nobly ? He
would not be afraid to meet them."

The simplicity of the words, and the trustfulness of them,
sank to his soul. A pang of terrible consciousness went through
him like poisoned steel. As his wife's eyes sought his, the
lights swam round with him, the music was only a confused
murmur on his ear; he heard as if from afar off the voice of
Olga Brancka saying, " My dear Wanda, you arc always so
exalted 1"

At that moment some one knocked at the door: he was
glad to rise and open it to admit Count Kaulaitz and two other
gentlemen.

Hardly anything else which his wife could have said would
have hurt him quite so much.

As he sat there in the brilliant illumination and the hot-
house warmth, with her delicate profile clear as a cameo against
the light, a sensation of physical cold passed through him.
He saw himself as he was, an actor, a traitor, a perjured and
dishonored man. What right had he there more than anjf
galley-slave at the hulks ? — he, Vassia Kazdn ?

Well tutored by the ways of the world, he laughed, and
spoke, and criticised the rendering of the opera, with his
usual readiness of grace, but Olga Brancka had marked the
fleeting expression of his face, and said to herself, *^ Whatever
the secret be, the key of it lies in the sands of Romaris."

As she took his arm, when they lefl the box, she mur-
mured to him, '^ I shall go to Romaris, and you will take me."

'* I think not," he said, curtly, without his usual suavity.
'' I am the servant of all your sex, it is true, but, like all ser-
vants, I am only willing to be commanded by my mistioids."

WANDA. 401

" O, most faithful of lovers, I understand I" she said, with
a contemptuous laugh. " And she never commands you she
only obeys. You are very fortunate, even though you do have
ghosts at your ruined tower by the sea."

" Yes, I am fortunate indeed," he answered, gravely, and
his eyes glanced towards his wife, who was standing a stair or
two below, conversing with her cousin Kaulnitz.

" Even though you had to abandon Russia," murmured
Olga Brancka, dreamily. She could feel that a certain thrill
passed through him. He was startled and alarmed. Was it
possible that Egon yh.s^rhely had betrayed him ?

" Paris is much more agreeable than Petersburg," he an-
swered, carelessly. " I am no loser. Wanda would have been
unhappy, and, what would have been worse, she would never
have said so."

" No, she would never have said so. She is like the Sioux,
the stoics, and the people who died in lace ruffles in '89. I
l>eg your pardon ; those are your people, I forgot, — the people
whose ghosta forbid you to entertain us at Eomaris."

'' I would brave an army of ghosts to please Madame
Brancka," said Sabran, with his usual gallantry.

" Call me ccyimnette, at' the least," she murmured, as they
descended the last stair.

" Bon 9oir, madame 1" he said, as he closed the door of her
carriage.

'^ Are you coming with me ?" said Wanda, as she went to
hers.

He hesitated. <'I think I will go for an hour to the
clubs," he answered. He kissed her hand. As he drew the
fur rug over her skirts she thought his face was very pale as
she saw it by the lamplight. She wished to ask him if he
were quite well, but she restrained herself, knowing how in-
tolerable such importunities are to men. Instead, she smiled
at him, as she said, *^ Amusez-voiis bien^^ and left him to di-
vert himself as he chose.

" How little women understand men, and how poorly they
love them when they do not leave them alone 1" she thought,
as her carriage rolled homeward. She never troubled him,
never interrogated him, never even tried to conjecture what
he did when away from her. Sometimes, when he returned
at sunrise, she had already risen, and had said a prayer with
aa 34*

402 WANDA.

her children, written her letters, or visited her horses, but she
alwajs met him with a smile and without a question.

It hurt her with an ever-deepening wound to perceive the
attraction which Olga Brancka possessed for him. She did
not for a moment believe that it was love, but she saw that it
was an influence which had audacity enough to compete with
her own, a sort of fascination which, commencing with dislike,
increased to an unhealthy and morbid potency. She could
not bring herself to speak of it to him. She was not one of
those women who reproach and implore. It would have
seemed to her as if both he and she would have lost all dig-
nity in each other's sight if once they had stooped to what
society calls jestingly " a scene." He guessed aright that if
she had really believed herself displaced in his heart she
would have lefl him without a word. She was too conscious
of his entire worship of her to be moved to anything like that
jealous passion which would have seemed to her the last
depths of humiliation ; but she was pained, fretted, stirred to
a scornful wonder, by the power this frivolous woman pos-
sessed of usurping his time and giving color to his thoughts.

It hurt her to think he feared her too much to tell her of any
trouble, any folly, any memory. She reproached herself with
having perhaps alienated his confidence by the gravity of
her temper, the seriousness of her opinions. It would be
hard to think that frivolous shallow women could inspire
men with more confidence than a deeper nature could do,
but perhaps it might be so. He had sometimes said to her,
half jestingly, ''You should dwell among the angels: the
human world is unfit for you T' Was it that which alarmed
him?

With that subtile sense of what is in the air around which
so often makes us aware of what is never spoken in our hear-
ing, she was sensible that the great world in which they lived
began to speak of the intimacy between her husband and the
wife of her cousin Stefan. She became sensible that the
world was in general disposed to resent for her, to pity her,
and to censure them, whilst it coupled their names together.
I'he very suspicion brought her an intolerable shame. Whea
she was quite alone, thinking of it, her face burned with angry
blushes. No one hinted it to her, no man breathed it to her,
no one even expressed it by a glance in her presence ; yet she

WANDA. 403

was as weU awaro of what they wcro saying ns though she had
beeD in a haodred salojis when they talked of her.

She knew the character of Olga Brancka, also, too well not
to know that her own mortification would be the sweetest
triumph for one of whose latent envy she had long been con-
scious. Ever since she had become the sole owner of the vast
fortunes of the Sxalras she had felt forever upon her the evil
eye of a foiled covetousness. The other had been very young,
and had waited long and patiently, but her hour had now
oome.

She said nothing to her husband, and she preserved to her
cousin's wife the same perfect courtesy of manner ; but in her
own soul she began to suffer keenly, more from a sense of lit-
tleness in him than from any mere personal feeling. To blame
him, to entreat him, to seek to detach him, — all these things
were impossible to her.

" If all our years of union do not hold him, what will ?''
she thought; and the great natural JiatUeitr of her temper
ooold never have let her oend to the solicitation of a constancy
denied to her.

One night, when they had no engagements but a ball, to
which they could go at midnight, he did not come in to din-
ner. Always before, when he had not returned to dine, he
had sent her a message to beg her not to wait. This evening
there was no message. She and the princess diued alone.

** He was never discourteous before," said the princess, who
disliked such omissions.

*' It is his own house,'' said Wanda. ^^ He has a right to
eome or not to come as he likes, without ceremony."

" There can never be too much ceremony," said the princess.
" It preserves amiability, self-respect, and good manners. It
IS the silver sheath which saves them from friction. It is the
distinguishing mark between the gentleman and the boor.
When politeness is only for the street or the saloji, it is but a
poor thing. Ho has always been so scrupulous in these mat-
ters."

Afl Wanda later crossed the head of the grand staircase, to
flo and dress for the ball, she heard her maUre-d' hSlef in the
ball below speak to the groom of the chambers.

*' Are the marquis's horses in, do you know ?" asked the
former, and the latter answered, —

404 WANDA,

'^ Yes, hours ago : they are to go for him at the Union at
eleven, hut they left him at the Hdtel Branoka."

Then the two officials laughed a little under their hreath.
Their words and their laughter came upwards distinctly to her
ear. Her first impulse was a natural and passionate one of
bitter burning pain and wonder. A sensation wholly new to
her, cf hatred and of impotence combined, seemed to choke
her.

' '< Is this what they call jealousy ?*' she thought, and the
mere thought checked her emotion and changed it to humilia-
tion.

" I — I — contend with her 1" she said in her soul. With a
blindness before her eyes she retraced her steps and went to
the sleeping-rooms of her children. They were all asleep, as
they had been for hours. She sat down beside the bed of the
little Ottilie, and gazed on the sofl flushed loveliness of the
child, bright as a rose in the dew.

She kissed the child's cheek without waking her, and sat
still there some time in the faint twilight and the perfect
silence, only stirred by the light breathing of the sleepers ;
the repose, the innocence, the silence, soothed and tranquillized
her.

" What matter a breath of folly ?" she thought. <* He is
their father ; he is my love ; we have all our lives to spend
together."

Then she rose and went to her chamber, and had herself
flothed m a court dress of white taffetas and white velvet,
embroidered with silver lilies.

" Make me look well," she said to her women. *' Put on
all my diamonds."

When he entered, near midnight, repentant, self-conscious,
almost confused, she stopped his excuses with a smile.

" I heard the servants say you dined with my cousin's wife.
Why not, if it please you ? But I wonder she allows you to
dine without un bout de toilette. Will you not make haste
to dress? We shall be late."

The words were perfectly simple and kind, but, as she spoke
them, so royal did she look, standing there in the blaze of her
jewels, with her lily-laden train, that he felt abashed, ashamed,
apgered against himself, yet more angered against his tempt<
resa.

WANDA. 405

The old linos of Marlowe came to his mind and his lips :

" Ohy thou art fairer than the OToning air,
Clihd in the beauty of a thousand stars.

**

" I am not young enough to merit that quotation/' she
■aid, with a smile : " ten years ago perhaps '*

Her heart contracted as she spoke ; she was conscious that
she had wished to look well in his eyes that night. The sens*
that she was stooping to measure weapons with such an oppo-
nent as Olga Braucka smote her with a sense of humiliation,
which did not leave her throughout the after-hours in which
Bhe carried her jewels through the gorgeous crowd of the ball
at the Austrian Embassy.

^^ If I lower myself to such a contest as that," she thought,
** I shall lose all self-respect and all his reverence. I shall
seem scarcely to him higher than an importunate mistress."

Now and again there came to her a passionate anger
against himself, a hardening of her heart to him, since he
oould thus be guilty of this inexcusable and insensate folly.
But she would not harbor these ; she would not judge him ;
she would not blame him. Her marriage-vows were not
mere dead letters to her. She conceived that obedience and
silence were her clearest duties. Only one thing was out-
Bide her duty and beyond her force : she could not stoop to
rivalry with Olga Brancka.

All at once she took a resolution of which few women
would have been capable. She resolved to leave them.

Three days after the ball she said very quietly to him, —

" If you do not object, I will go home and take the chil-
dren. It is time they were at Hohenszalras. Bcla, above
all, is not improved by what he sees and hears here : his
atudieti are broken and his fancy is excited. In a very little
while he would learu quite to despise his country pleasure!
and forget all his own people. I will take them home."

He looked at her quickly in surprise.

'^ I do not think I can leave Paris immediately," he said,
with hesitation. " I have many engagements. Of course
you can send the children."

" I said I should go, not you. I long to see my own
woods in their first leaiP,'' she answered, with a smile. " It
will bo better for you to remain. No one ous:ht to be allowed

406 WANDA

to suppose that you are bound to my side. That J9 neither
for your dignity nor mine."

" Has any one suggested " he began, and paused in

embarrassment, for he remembered the incessant taunts ana
innuendoes of Olga Brancka.

*^ I do not listen to suggestions of that sort," she replied,
tranquilly. " You wish to remain here, and I wish to return
home. We are both at liberty to do what we like. My
love," she added, with a grave tenderness in her voice, " have
I so poor an opinion of you that I dare not leave you alone ?
I think I should hardly care for a fealty which was only to
be retained by my constant presence. That is not my ideal."

He colored ; he was uncertain what to reply : before her
he felt unworthy and disloyal. A vast sense of her immeas-
urable nobility swept over him and made him conscious of
his own un worthiness.

" Whatever you wish, I wish," he murmured, and was
aware that this could not be what she would gladly have
heard him say. " I will follow you soon. Your heait is al-
ways in your highlands. I know that you are too grand a
creature to be happy in cities. I have the baser leaven in
mo that is not above them. The forests and the mountains
do not say to me all that they do to you."

** Men want the movement of the world, no doubt," sho
said, without showing any trace of disappointment. " I only
care for the subjective life ; I am very German, you see.
The woods interest me, and the world does not."

No more passed between them on the subject, but she gave
orders to her people to make arrangements for her departure
and her children's in two days' time, and sent out her cards
of farewell.

^^ Do you think you are wise ?" the princess ventured to
iay to her.

She answered, —

'^ I know what you mean, dear mother ; yes, 1 think so.
To struggle for influence with another, and that other Olga *
[ should indeed despise myself if I could stoop so low. If
he miss me, he can follow me. If he do not, — ^then he hag
no need of me."

" I confess I do not understand you," said Madame Ottilia :
^ to surrender so meekly 1"

WANDA, ^07

" 1 surrender nothing," she said, a most sternly. •* I know
^^hat I have seen again and again m society. The woman
jealoas and anxious, losing ground in his esteem and her
«wn every hour, and rendering alike herself and him actors
in a ludicrous comedy for the mockery of the world around
them, — a world which never has any sympathy for such a
struggle. Indeed, why should it have ? for, if the jealousy
of a lover be poetic, the jealousy of a wife is only ridiculous.
I am his wife; I am not his jailer. I refuse to admit to
others or to him or to myself that any other could be wholly
to him what I am ; and I should lose that place I hold, lose
it in his eyes and my own, if I once admitted my dethrone-
ment possible."

She spoke with more force and anger than was common
with her, and her auditor admired while she still failed to
comprehend her.

" Is there a more pitiable spectacle," she continued, ^' than
that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her
husband's sight which no philtres and no prayers can renew
when once it has fled forever ? Women are so unwise. Love
is like a bird's song, — ^beautiful and eloquent when heard in
forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung
from behind prison-bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance,
by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the
person of a man beside you, if his soul be truant from you ?
You all say that Olga Brancka has power over him. If she
have, let her use it and exhaust it, it will not last long ; but
I will not sink to her level by contesting it with her. For
what can you take me ?"

In her glance the leonine wrath of the Szalras flashed for
a moment ; her face was pale, she paced the room with a haLly
and uneven step. The princess sought a timid refuge in
silence. There were certain heights in the nature and im
pulses of her niece of which she, a dweller on a lower plain
never caught sight. There were times when the haughty re-
•erve and the admirable patience of this stronger character
made a union which awed her and altogether escaped her com-
prehension.

In two days' time she left Paris, the princess and the chil-
dren accompanying her.

He felt his heart misgive him as he let her go. What was

408 WANDA,

Olga Brancka, what was Paris, what was all tho world,
pared to her ? As he kissed her hands in farewell before
servaDts at the Gare de VEst^ the impulse came over him
throw himself into the carriage beside her, and return
her to the old, fair, still, peaceful life of Ilohenszalras.
he resisted it; he heard in memory the mocking of
Brancka's voice saying to him, —

"-4 A, quel man amour eux /**

He had his establishment, his engagements, his horses,
friends, his wagers ; he would seem ridiculous to all Paris ii
could not endure a few weeks' separation from his wife. A
banquet at his house was arranged to take place in a few days* ti
at which only great Legitimist nobles would be present,
at which the toast of " Le RoiT would be drunk with soleiiiM^nn
honors. What would they say of him if he failed to rec<3K- "ve
them because he had followed his wife into Austria ? Wm- ^h
a thousand sophisms he reconciled himself to remaining tH^^re
without her, and would not face the consciousness within li ^b- m
that the real motive of his staying on through the coiui »^g
weeks in Paris was that Olga Brancka was there. For li^sr-
self, she parted with him tenderly, kindly, without any trsB-<Je
of doubt in him or of purpose in her departure.

" You will come when you wish," were her last words ^«
him. *' You know well, dear, that Hohenszalras without y ^^u
will seem like a sadly empty eagle's nest."

All his offences against her were heavy on him as ^^e
returned to the great house no longer graced by her presen<5e.
He would have given twenty years of his life to have b^^n
able to undo what he had done when he had taken a naxiso
not his own. He was sensible of great talents in him whi^h
might have brought him to renown had he been willing *o
face hardship and laborious effort. Even as he had been at
hid birth — even as Vassia Kazdn — he might have achieV^^
such eminence as would have made him her equal in hoo^^^t
honor. But he had won the world and her by a lie, and tt^o
act was irrevocable. Chance and circumstance may be con-
trolled or altered, but the fate which men make for themsel v^
always abides with them for good or ill, — a spirit either of gc ^^
Dr ill which once incarnated by their incantations never depa-^^ •
from them till death.

WANDA. 409

CHAPTER XXX.

^' Are you actually lefl alone ?'* said Madame Olga gayly (o
him that evening, when they met at an embansy. ^^ I thouglit
Wanda was a Una, who never let her lion loose ?"

*' The remembrance of her would recall him if she did/* he
answered, quickly and coldly. ^' She does not believe in
chains because she docs not need them.**

** Most knightly of men I" she said, with a little laugh.
« It must be very fatiguing to have to play the part you so
affect, even in absence. Our metaphors are involved, but
your loyalty seems one and indivisible. I suppose you are
lefl on parole ?"

The departure of his wife had disconcerted and disappointed
her. As he, to realize his position, had required to have the
world about him as spectator of it, so she felt all her triumph
over him powerless and pointless if Wanda von Szalras were
not there to suffer by the sight of it. He had remained ;
that was much ; but she felt that the absence of his wife had
made him colder to herself, that the blank led made a void
between them, that remembrance might be more potent with
him than vicinity ; and his consciousness that he was trusted
might have more power than any interference or opposition
would have had. She became sensible that she had less charm
for him, that he was less easily moved by her mockery and
attracted by her wit. His earlier animosity to her still flashed
fire now and then, and with this sense of revived resistance
in him her own feeling, which had been born of caprice, took
giant growth as a passion. She grew cruel in it. If she
could only know his secret, she thought, she would crush him
with it, grind him under her foot, torture him. There was a
touch of the tigress under her feverish and artificial life.

" 11 favJt bmsquer la chose^^^ she said savagely to herself,
when he had been alone in Paris about a fortnight, and each
day had convinced her that he grew more wary of her, more
unwilling to surrender himself to the fascination which she
exercised upon his baser nature.' When she attempted jest*
• 85

410 WAI^DA,

at his wife he stopped her sternly, and she felt that she lost
ground with him. Yet she had still a power upon him, — an
nnhealthy and fatal power. When he looked at her he thought
oflen of two lines :

" 0 VenuB I scbSne Frau ineine,
Ihr sejd eine Teufelinne."

" Wanda writes to you every day ?" she asked, once.

^ She writes often," he answered.

" And what does she say of me?"

" Nothing !"

" Nothing ? What does she write about ? Of the priest's
sermons, and the horses* coughs, of how much wood has been
cut, and how many shoes the children wear, of how she sor-
rows for you, and says Latin prayers for you twice a day ?"

His face darkened.

" Madame my cousin," he said, irritably, " will you under-
stand that men do not like their religion spoken lightly of?
My wife is my religion."

Then Madame Olga laughed with silvery, hysterical laugh-
ter, and clapped her hands as if she were applauding a good
comedy, and cried shrilly, " Oh ! la bonne hlcigue .'"

But she knew very well that it was not ** blague^ She
knew very well, too, that, though . he was subjugated by a
certain sorcery when in her presence, when absent his good
taste condemned and his good sense escaped her. She was
one of those women who have a thousand means of usurping
a man's time and are not scrupulous if some of those measures
are bold ones. All her admirers tacitly left the field open to
one for whom she made no scruple of her preference ; and,
under pretext of her relationship to him, she contrived many
ways lo bring him beside her. Every day ho said to himself
that he would go home on the morrow; but each day bore its
diversions, its claims, its interests, and each day found him in
Paris, sometimes driving her to the Cascade, to St. Germain,
to Versailles, sometimes escorting her to the tribune of a race-
course or a premiere at a theatre, sometimes dining with her
in her pretty room, the table strewn with rose-leaves and the
windows open upon flowering orange-trees.

When he wrote home he wrote eloquent, witty, clever letters:

WANDA, 411

but he did not speak in them of the woman with whom he
Bpent so much of his time, and his wife, as she read them,
wished that they had heen less clever and had said more.
She began to fear lest she had done unwisely. She did not
repent, for it seemed to her that she could have done nothing
else with any self-esteem ; but she dreaded lest she had over-
estimated the power of her own memory upon him. Yet even
eo, she thought, it was better that he should degrade himself
and her in her absence than in her presence ; and she still fcit
a certainty — baseless, perhaps — that he would yet pause in
time before he actually gave her a rival in her cousin's wife.

" If it were any other," she thought, " he might fall ; but
irith Olga, never 1 never 1"

And she prayed for him half the night in her oratory, till
lier prayer seemed to beat against the very gates of heaven.
Bat in the days, to her children, to the princess, to the house-
hold, she seemed always tranquil, cheerful, and at ease. Shn
applied herself arduously to all those duties which her great
estates had always brought with them, and in occupation and
exertion strove to keep her anxiety at bay and attain that self-
control which enabled her to write in return to him letters
^hich had no shade of reproach in them, no hint of distrust.
It was now June.

The Paris of the world of fashion was soon about to take
wing, to disperse itself to country-houses, sea-shores, and for-
eign baths, — to change its place, but to take with it whereso-
ever it should go all its agitation, its weariness, its fever, its
delirium, and its intrigues. She saw the close of the season
approach with regret yet expectation. She knew that ho
mast escape her or succumb to her ; and she had a bitter, en-
raged sense that the power of his wife was stronger over him
than- her own. " // faut hrusquer la chose^'^ she said, again
and again, to herself. She grew reckless, imprudent, and was
tempted to discard even that external decency which her sta-
tion in the world had made her assume. She would have
compromised herself for him with any publicity he might
liave chosen to exact. But she had never been able to beguile
liim into any sort of declaration. When he most felt the
danger of her attraction, when he was nearest forgetting honor
snd decency, nearest submitting, the memory of his wife saved
liim. He recovered his coolness; he drew back from the

412 WANDA,

abyss. Once or twice she was tempted to throw the nan/e of
Yassia Kazda between them and watch its effect; but she
refrained, — she knew so little 1

" You will not take me to Romaris ?'* she said, for the
hundredth time, one evening, as they rode towards 8t.
Germain.

He laughed.

^\Cousinette ! if you and I went off to Finisterre ycu will
conifess that we should make a pretty paragraph for the papers,
and Count Stefan would have a very good right to run me
through the lungs.**

" Stefan 1" she echoed, with contempt. " It would bo the

first time ho ever Besides, you have had duels; you

are not afraid of them ; and, yet again besides, I do not see
what harm we should do if we looked at your chouans and
chasse-maries for a few days. No one need even know it.**

She spoke quite innocently, but her black eyes watched him
with the '^ Teufelinn'* cunning and passion. He caught the
look. He put his hand in the breast-pocket of his coat,
where a letter of his wife*s was lying.

" It is out of the question,** he said, almost rudely. " 1
have no wish to furnish Figaro with so good a jest. Ro-
mans," he added, with a smile, " is of course at your service,
like all I possess, if you are so bent upon seeing its desolation.
But you must pardon my receiving you by deputy, in the
person of the cur^, who is seventy years old and b the son of
a fisherman."

She cut her mare across the ears with a fierce gesture and
galloped away from him. Sabran, as he galloped after her,
thought with a vague apprehension, ^^ Why does she dwell on
Bomaris ? Does she suspect that I abhor the place ? Can
she have seen anything in my looks or in my words that has
raised any doubts in her ?** But he told himself that this
was impossible. As she rode, her heart swelled with rage and
mortification. There were many men in the world who would
have been happy to go at her call to Breton wilds, or any
other solitude ; and he refused her, bluntly, coldly, because
away there in the heart of Austria a woman, who was the
mother of his children, span, and read, and said her prayers,
and led her stupid, blameless, stately life 1 He escaped her
just because that woman lived. All that hot, cruel caprice

WANDA, 413

irhicli she called love fastened upon him and swore that it
would not be denied. She had a sense of a grand white fig-
ure which stood forever betwixt him and her. She brought
herself almost to believe that it was Wanda von Szalras who
wronged her.

Two nights later she was present at the last night of a gay
comic opera, which had made all Paris laugh ever since the
iirst fogs of winter,-;— a dazzling little opera, with a stage
<}rowded by Louis Treize costumes, and music that went as
trippingly as a shepherdesses feet in a pastoral. Sabran went
to her box a^r a dinner-party which he had given to a score
€)f men. She looked well, in a gown of many shades of yel-
low, which few women could have braved, but which suited
lier night-like eyes and her pearly skin ; she had deep-yellow
aroses, natural ones, in her bosom and hair.

" I am flattered that you wear my yellow roses," he mur.
vnured.

" If you had sent me white ones you would have outraged
♦ihe spirit of Wanda."

He made an impatient movement.
" When are you going home ?" she said, suddenly.
" Soon 1" he answered, with the same impatience.
*' Soon means anything, from an hour to a year. Besides,
'ou have said it for the last six weeks."
" Do you go to Noisettiers ?"

" Of course I go to Noisettiers : you can come there if you
»lease. I am more hospitable than you."
He was silent. Noisettiers was a little place on the Nor-
lao coast, which Stefan Brancka had given to her on his
lurriage, — a pleasure-house, with Swiss roofs, Caircne win-
clows, Italian balconies, and a Persian court, which was
l>owered among lime-trees and filbert-trees, near Villeville,
8ind had been the scene of much riotous midsummer gayety
"wlien she had filled it with Parisians and Russians.

" You are always too good to me," murmured Sabran, in

tbe meaningless compliment of usage, as other men entered

bei box. But she knew by the coldness of his eyes, by the

Blightness of his smile, that he would no more go to Noi-

MttierB than to Romaris.

** If Wanda had only remained here,'* she thought, nnjrrily,
opening and shutting her tortoise-shell fan, " he would have

35*

414 WANDA.

done whatever I had chosen. Men are mere children : thwart
them, and they pine."

" I suppose," she said aloud to him, " you will have your
own house-parties at Hohenszalras, as stiff as a minuet, crammed
with grand dukes and grand duchesses, all decorum and dig-
nity, all ennui and etiquette ? By the by, are you restored
again to the Emperor's good graces ?"

" It is not likely that I shall be so," replied Sabran, who
always dreaded the subject. " If ever I be so fortunate, I
shall owe it to the influence Wanda possesses."

" Why did you offend him ?" she said, bending her inquis-
itive glance upon him.

" All sovereigns are offended when not obeyed. We have
discussed this so often. Need we discuss it again in a theatre ?"

" You are very impenetrable," she said. " Your rule of
conduct must follow tlie lines of M. de Nothomb's * tl ne/aut
jamais se brouilleTy m se famlliariser^ avec qui que ce soit :
c'est le secret de durer,^ "

" M. de Nothomb only meant his rule to apply to his own
sex," replied Sabran. " With yours, unless a man be either
familiarisi or h'rouUU^\\^ life must be dull and his experi-
ence small."

** Which will you be with me?" she said, with significance.
•* The choice is open."

He understood that the words contained a menace.

" I am your cousin and your humble servitor," he said, with
gallantry, giving his place up to a young Spanish noble.

^' Take me home,'* she said to him, an hour later, before
the last scene of the opera. " Come to supper. I told them
to have ortolans and bisque. One is always hungry after a
theatre, and we must have a last long talk, since you go to
your duties and I to my sea-bathing."

He desired to refuse ; he dreaded her inquisitiveness and
her solicitation, but she had a magic about her ; she subdued
him to her side even while he mentally resisted it. The
fleshly charm of the " Teufelinn" was potent as he wrapped
her cloak about her and touched the yellow roses as he fastened
it. Almost in silence he entered her carriage, and drove
beside her to her house. She was silent also, affecting to
yawn and be tired, but by the gleam of the lamp he saw her
great black eyes glowing in the darkness, as he had seen those

WANDA. 415

oF a Jagasr in the forests of Americi glow, as it watched to
seiie a sleeping liiard or an unwary capybara.

The few streets were soon traversed by her rapid Russian
horses, and together they entered the little hotel, with its
strong perfume of orange-flowers and jessamine from the garden
about it. The midsummer stars were brilliant overhead ; he
looked up at them, pausing on the threshold.

** You are thinking how they shine on Wanda ?'* she said,
w^ith the laugh he hated. " Probably they do nothing of the
l^ind. I dare say she is wrapped in fog and cloud ; those are
the joys of the heights."

The little supper was perfectly prepared and seized with a
fine olaret and some tokay ; the lights burned mellowly in the
transparent gourds ; the windows were open, the moonlight
touched the great gold birds and silver lilies on the walls.
She had studied how to live and how to please. She held that
love ^as bom as much of scenic eflfects as of the senses. In
"Gr own way she was a true artist. She had left him a few
moincnts to change her attire to a tea-gown, which was one
oloud and cascade of lace from head to foot ; the yellow roses
*t.ill nestled at her breast.

Stretched on a divan of Oriental stuff, she put out her hand
^^ a cigar he lighted for her, and said, with a little smile, —
** You cannot say 1 do not know how to live."
A brutal response rose to his lips, — she did not know how
^ bridle her life ; but he could not say it. He murmured a
^mpliment, and added, *' What a supreme artist the theatre
^^8 lost by your being born with a countess's couronne .'"
^ "Yes," she said, with her eyes on the rings of smoke that
^^T crimson lips parted to send upward. " Sometimes when
Stefan does not give me liberty, or Egon does not pay my ao-
^^nnts, I make them both tremble by a threat that I will go
^ the stage. I should certainly draw all Paris and all Vienna
^Oo. But perhaps it is too late : in a few mora years I shall
^ave to marry my daughters. Can you realize that ? I am
sure I cannot. Now, it will suit Wanda perfectly to do that.
Hud her daughter is not three years old : she is always so
fortanate."
He listened impatiently :

" If we left Wanda's name alone it might be better. Did
yoa bring me to supper to talk of her ?"

41i5 WANDA.

<'No; she is your Madonna, I know. One must not be
BacrilegiouS) but one cannot always worship. You do not
touch the tokayer : it came from the Kaiser, You are always
so abstemious : you irritate me."

She poured out some of the wine into a jewel-like goblet
of Venice, and gave it him and made him drink it. She sat
up on her divan and leaned towards him : the breeze from the
garden stirred the laces of her gown and made the golden
roses nod.

" Wine openeth the heart of man," she cried, gayly. " Open
yours, and tell me frankly why you refused to go to Russia.
We are not in a. theatre now."

" Are we not ?" he said, with the smile which she feared
as her greatest foe. " Whether or not, I fear I must refuse
to please you. The matter lies between me and — the Em-
peror."

She remarked the hesitation which made him pause before
the last word.

" Between him and Egon," she thought ; but, after all,
what was the secret to her, except as a means of influence
over him ? She believed that she had here present subtler
and surer methods of influence which could attain their end
without coercion.

She ceased to pursue the theme, and grew gentle and win-
ning : she felt that he was on the defensive. He had oomo
weakly enough into the very heart of temptation, but he was
on his guard against her sorceries. Lying back among her
cushions, she amused him with that gay and discursive chatter
of which she had the secret, and which imperceptibly induced
him to relax his vigilance and to feel her charm. There was
that about her which made all scruples seem ridiculous ; there
was a contagion of levity and mockery in her which awakened
in him the cynicism of earlier years, and made him only heed
the marvellous force of seduction of which she was mistress.

** You ought to be ambitious," she continued, softly. " I
think you might achieve any eminence if you chose to seek it."

" Surely I have enough blessings from fortune not to tempt
it by that last infirmity ?"

" You mean you have married a very rich aristocrat," she
said, dryly. " Oh, yes ; you have made one of the finest mar-
riages in Europe, but that is not quite the same thing as ' win*

WANDA. 417

Aiog off jour hand.' It is a lucky coupy like breaking the

bank at rouhtte; but it cannot give you the same feeling that

a successful soldier or a successful politician has, nor the same

eminence. Indeed, I am not sure that your wife's possession

of every possible good and great thing has not prevented you

^thering laurels for yourself. You have dropped into a nest

lined with rose-leaves ; to have fallen on the rocks might have

been better. Do you know,*' she added, with a little smile,

** if I had been your wife I. should have given you no rest

iiDtil you had become the foremost man of the empire? I

should not have cared about horses and peasants and children ;

"but I should have loved yow."

He moved uneasily, conscious of the implied satire upon
liis wife, conscious also of a vibration of intense passion ia
the last words. He remained silent.

He knew well that had she been his wife she would have
l>een as false to him as she was false to Stefan Brancka. But
€he words sent a thrill through him half of emotion, half of
repugnance. There was little light on the divan where she
Yeclined ; the dewy darkness of the garden was behind her,
lie could see the outlines of her form, the glister of rings on
lier bands and of jewels at her throat, the shine of her eyes
matching him ardently.

His heart beat with a certain excitation : he vaguely felt
t;hat some hour of fate had come.

They were as utterly alone as though they had been in a
clesert : no one of her household would have ventured t: ap-
proach that room without a summons from her. A little
drummer in silver beat twelve strokes upon his drum, which
-vvas a clock. A nightingale was singing in the Cape jessa-
jaaine beneath one of the casements. The light was low and
0o{t, — so faint that the moonbeams could be seen where they
0i>rayed over the cranes and lilies on the wall. She said to
l-crself once more, " Ilfaut brusquer la chose,^^ If she let
li im go now he would escape her forever.

Ever and again there came to him the memory of his wife,
t^ut he shrank from it as he would have shrunk from seeing
tier in a gambling-den. It seemed almost a profanity to re-
member her here. He longed to rise and get away, yet ho
desired to remain. He knew that every moment increased his
danger, and yet he prolonged :hose moments with irresistibk
66

418 WANDA.

pleasure. Every gesture, glance, and breath of this woman
was provocative and alluring, yet he thought, as he felt hex
power, always the same thing, — " ihr seyd eine Teu/elmn.^^
Willingly he would have embraced her and then killed her,
that she might no more haunt him and do no more harm on
earth.

As he sat with his face half averted from her, she gazed at
him with her burning, covetous eyes ; the droop of his eye-
lids, the curves of his lips, the fairness of his features, all
seemed to her more beautiful than they had ever done ; the
very disquiet and coldness that were in them only allured her
the more. She leaned nearer still and took his wrist in her
ficgers.

" Come to Noisettiers," she murmured.

" No,'* he said, sharply and sternly, but he did not withdraw
his hand.

"Why not?'* she said, with her whole person swayed
towards him as by an irresistible impulse. " Why do you
affect to be of ice ? You are not indifferent to me. You
only obey what you think a law of honor. Why do you try
to do that ? There is only one law, — love."

He strove to draw away from him, but feebly, the clinging
of her warm fingers. The caress of her breath on his cheek,
the scent of the roses in her breast, intoxicated him for the in-
stant. She bent nearer and nearer, and still held him closely
in her slender hands, which were as strong as steel.

" You love me ?" she murmured, so low that it scarce stirred
the air, and yet had all the potency of hell in it. A shud-
der went over him ; the baseness of voluptuous impulse and
the revulsion of conscious shamefulness shook his strength as
though it were a reed in the wind. For a moment his arms
enclosed her, his heart beat against hers ; then he thrust her
away from him and rose to his feet.

" Love you ? No 1 a thousand times no 1" he said, with
unutterable scorn. " You are a shameless temptress ; you can
rouse the beast that lies hid in all men. 1 despise you, I
detest you ; I could kiss you and kill you in a breath ; but
love I — how dare you speak the word ? Mine is hers ; I son
hers : if I sinned to her with you I woild strangle you when
I awoke!"

AU the Qerceness and the barbaric strength of the blood of

WANDA. 419

desert and of steppe broke up in him from underneath tYie
courtesy and calm of many long years of culture. lie wa&
bom of men who had slain their mistresses for a glance, and
ravished their captives in war and yielded them to no release
but death, and his hereditary instincts broke the bonds of
custom and of habit, and spoke in him now as a wild animal
breaks its bars and leaps up in frank brutality of wrath, lie
thrust her backward and backward from him, rose to his feet,
wrenched aside with rude hand the Eastern stuffs that hung
before the door, and left her presence and her house before
any power of voice or movement had come back to her.

As he pushed past the waiting servants in the vestibule,
and went through the court-yard and the p^ateway, he looked
up once again at the stars shining overhead.

'* Wanda 1 Wanda 1" he said, with a deep breath, as men
may call in their estremity on Ood.

CHAPTER XXXI.

Within half an hour he had given a few orders to his
major-domo, and had taken a special train to overtake the
express, already far on its way that night towards Strasburg.
No steam could fly as fast as his own wishes flew. Never had
he felt happier than as the train rushed across the windy level
country of the northeast, bearing him back to the peace and
tenderness and honor which waited for him at Hohenszalsburg.
He was content with himself, and the future smiled at him.
He slept soundly all that night, undisturbed by the panting
and oscillating of the carriage, and visited by tranquil dreams.
He did not break the journey till he reached Sanct Johann.
The weather in the German lands was wild and rough. The
sound of the winds and rushing rains brought the remem-
brance of that year of the floods which had been the sweetest
of his life. Amidst the Austrian Alps the cold was still keen.
and the brisk buoyant air and the strength that seems always
to come on winds that blow over glaciers and snow-fields were
welcome to him, like a familiar and trusty friend. The ser-
vants who met him in answer to his message, the horses who

420 WANDA.

knew him and whinnied with pleasure, the summits of th^
Glockner, on which a noonday sun was shining, ail were de-
lightful to him : he thought of the Catulliau ^' laugh in th6
dim^ples of home."

Their ways of life renewed themselves as if they had been
never broken. She divined what had passed, but she never
spoke of it. She was happy in his return, and never disturbed
its happiness by inquiry or allusion. He entered with eager-
ness into plans and projects which had of recent years ceased
to interest him, and he resumed his old occupations and pur>
suits with almost boyish ardor. His restlessness was appeased,
and if a dull apprehension beat at his heart with warning now
and then, it was scarcely heeded in his deep sense of the in-
tense and forbearing love his wife bore to him. She never
asked him how he had escaped from Olga Brancka. She was
satisfied that if he had been faithless to herself he would nob
have returned with such single-hearted contentment and such
lover-like fervor.

" You are the only woman in the world who can forbear
from putting questions," said Madame Ottilic to her.

She answered, smiling, —

" I remember Psyche's lamp."

** That is very pretty," said the princess ; " and I do believo
you would never have cared for the lamp. But, all the same,
if the god had been as honest as he ought to have been, would
he have minded the light ?"

" I do not think that enters into the story," said Wanda.
^^ He did not resent the light, either : he resented the inquisi*
tiveness."

" You are the only woman who has none," said the prio-
cess, taking up her netting, and at times she galled her niece
Psyche, little imagining the terrible suitability of the name,
and the secret that was hidden in darkness from that noble
o)Dfidence of the last of the Szalras.

The remembrance of that night of base temptation lefl a
sense of uneasiness and of insecurity upon him, but the in-
fluence the Countess Brancka had possessed with him was of
that kind which fades instantly in absence. He honestly
abhorred the memory of her, and never spoke her name.

His wife, to whom the utter degradation of her cousin's
wife would never have seemed possible in a woman nobly

WANDA. 421

born and nurtured, never imagined the truth or anything
■imilar to it.

Another woman would have tormented herself and him
with innuendo or direct reference to what had passed in
those months when she had not heen beside him, and on
which he was absolutely silent. But she put all baseness of
curiosity from her : she was content to know that her own
influence in absence had been strong enough to bring him
back to his allegiance. She would not have wished to hear,
had he offered to reveal them, all the various conflicts of
good and evil which had gone on in his mind, all the subtle
changes by which her own power had been for a moment ob-
scured, only to regain stiU stronger and purer ascendency.
She was indulgent because she knew human nature well and
expected no miracles. That he had returned of his own ac-
cord, and was content so to return, was all she desired to
know. If to attain that equanimity had cast her many a
struggle, the fact was shut in her own soul and could concern
no other.

He was impressed and profoundly affected by that mute
magnanimity, which never vaunted itself or claimed any praise
for itself by any hint or suggestion. He felt disgust at his
own folly in ever having cared to be a single instant in the
presence of the woman of whose libertinage and inconstancy
his yellow roses had been the fitting symbol. When he hud
cast her from him, rejected and despised, the glamour she had
thrown over him had fallen like scales from the eyes of one
blind. Her memory made the beauty of his wife's nature
and thoughts seem to him more than ever things for reverence
and worship. More than ever his soul shrank within him when
he recollected the treachery and the deception with which he
had rewarded this noblest among women. Ah I why when
she had stretched out her hand to fiim in that supreme gifl of
herself, in that golden i^nset hour after the autumn floods of
Idrac, had he not had courage to kneel at her feet and tell her
all ? Perchance she might have still loved him, might have
Btill stooped to him !

He strove his utmost to conceal these anxious self-reproaches
from her, lest she should imagine that his hours of gloom
were caused by any lingering shadows of the fatal folly which
had been forced on him like a drug by Olga Brancka. The

36

422 WANDA.

sorceress had failed, and he had flung down and shiverec in
atoms the glass out of which she had hidden him drink ; she
was to him as utterly forgotten as though she were io her
grave ; but not so easily could he banish the memory of his
own treachery to his wife. The very forbearance of her made
him the more conscious of guilt, when he remembered that
one man lived who knew that he was unworthy even to kiss
the hem of her garment. He had been faithful to her in the
present, and so could greet her with clean hands and honest
lips ; but in the past he had betrayed her foully ; he had done
her what in her sight, if ever she knew it, would be tho
darkest dishonor the treachery of a human life could hold.

The sense of crime, which had slept quiet and mute in his
conscience so many years, was now awake and seldom to be
stilled.

The time passed serenely ; the autumn brought its hardy
sports, the winter its vigorous pastimes. With the new yeai
she gave him another son : she named him after Egoo Vufsar-
hely, without opposition from Sabran.

'' He is worthier to give them a name than I,'' he thought,
bitterly.

The months sped smoothly and happily on ; they did not
care to move from the green Iselthal. Of Olga Brancka they
heard but rarely. Now and then she sent a little witty flip-
pant note to Hohenszalras, dated from Paris, or Trouville, or
Biarritz, or Vienna, or Monaco, or Petersburg, according to
the season and her caprices. Of ^these little meaningless
notes Wanda did not speak to her husband. She could not
bring herself to talk to him of the woman who had so nearly
wrecked their peace, and it seemed to her that the old saw was
wise : " Let sleeping dogs lie." It appeared to her, too, f hat
theirs and Madame Brancka's paths in life would hencefurtl*
very seldom, if ever, meet.

The summer was a sofl and sunny dhe, and they enjoyed it
in simple and healthful pleasures of the open air and of the
aflections. The children throve and never ailed a day. Sabran
had lost all desire to return to the excitations and passions of
the world ; she was more than content in the joys of her
home, and if above her a storm brooded, if in his heart there
fretted ceaselessly the chafing sense of a gross trep.obery, of
an incessant peril, sho was as ignorant of what menaced hei

WANDA, 423

the child to whom she had given birth. With present
Becurity also, the sense of dread often wore away from him.

Of Olga Brancka he had ceased to think. Ho believed that
her overtures towards him had sprung from one of those insane
unhealthy passions which sometimes are created by their very
sense of their own immorality : he fancied it had died of its
own fir& He did not credit her with the tenacity and endur-
ance she really possessed. He had little doubt that long ere
now some dandy of the boulevards, some soldier of the palace,
had supplanted him in that brazier of heated senses which she
called by courtesy her heart. He mistook, as the cleverest men
often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.

The weeks sped on swiftly and serenely for the mistress of
Hohenszalras, the only shadows cast on them coming from
accidents to her poor people through flood or avalanche, and
the occasional waywardness and turbulence of her eldest born.
Bela had not been the better for his sojourn in a i^rcat city,
where parasites are never lacking to the heir of wealth, and
where his companions had been small coquettes and dandier
pitris du monde at six years old. The bright vigorous hardi-
hood of the child had escaped the contagion of affectation, but
he had arrived at an inordinate sense of his own importance
and dignity, despite the memory of the Dauphin which often
came to him. He grew quite beyond the management of his
governantes, and, though he never disobeyed his mother, gave
little heed to any one else's authority. Of Sabran he was alone
afraid ; but at the same time he preserved for him that silent
intend admiration which a young child sometimes nourishes
for a man by whom he is little noticed, but who is his ideal
of all power, force, and achievement, and of whom he hears
heroic tales.

Bela was now seven years old. It was time to think of a
tutor for him : he was beyond the control of the women in-
trusted with his education. When she spoke of it to Sabran,
he answered at once, —

" Take Greswold. He has the best temper in the world to
govern a child, and he is a great scholar.' '

" But he is a physician," she objected.

*' He has studied the mind no less than the body. He
■dores the boy, and will influence him as a stranger could not.
Hpeak to him : ho will be only too happy. As no one is evel

424 WANDA.

ill here/' ho added, with a smile, '^ his present position is a
sinecure j he can very well combine another office with it."

*^ I wanted you to take Bela in your hands/' he said later
to the old doctor, " because I say to you what I should not care
to say to a stranger. The boy has all my faults in him. As
he exactly resembles me physically, so he does morally. There
is in him, too, I am afraid, a tendency to tyranny that I have
never had. I am not cruel to anything, though I am indif-
ferent to most things ; he would be cruel if he were allowed ;
perhaps it is mere masterfulness, which may be conquered by
time. I imagine he has also my fatal facility. I call it fatal
because it renders acquisition and proficiency so easy that it
prevents laboriousncss and depth of knowledge. You are
much wiser than I am, and will know how to educate the
child much better than I can tell you how to do. Only re-
member two things : first, that he is cursed by certain hered-
itary passions coming to him from me which must be checked
and calmed, or he will gi'ow up with a character dangerous to
himself, and odious to othei'S in the great position he will one
day occupy. Secondly, that if any child of mine ever bring
any kind of sorrow upon her, I shall be of all men the most
wretched. You have always been my good friend. Be yet
more so in preventing my suffering from the pain of seeing my
own moral deformities face mo and accuse me in the life of
her eldest son."

The old physician listened with emotion and with surprise.
Of the moral defects Sabran spoke of, he had seen none. Since
his marriage his tenderness to his wife, his kindliness to his
dependants, his courage in field-sports, and his courtesy as a
host had been all that any one had seen in him, whilst his
abstinence from all interference with and all appropriation of
his wife's vast possessions had aroused a yet deeper esteem in
all who surrounded him. As he heard, over the old man's
mind drifted the memories of all he had observed at the time
of Sabran's accident in the forest and subsequent piostration
of nerve and will. But he thrust these vague suspicions away,
for he was blameless in his loyalty to the house he served,
and honored as his master the husband of the Countess von
tizalras.

" I will do my uttermost to deserve so precious a trust/* he
aaid, with deep feeling. ^' I think that you exaggerate child-

WANDA. 425

isb foiblas, and attach too much iniportance to them. The
little Count Bcla is imperious and higli-spirited, nothing more ;
and in this great household, where every one salutes him as
the heir, it is difficult to keep him wholly unspoiled by adula-
tion and consciousness of his own future power. But a great
pride has been always the mark of the race of Szalras, although
my lady has so chastened hers that you may well believe the
line she springs from has been always faultless as — if one may
say so of any mortal — one may say she herself is. It is not from
you alone that the child inherits his arrogance, if arrogant he
be. As for his facility, it is like a fairy's wand, a caduceus
of the gods ; it may be used for good unspeakable. At least
believe this, my dear lord, what any human teacher can do I
will do, thankful to pay my debt so easily. I have always,"
he added, less gravely, ^^ had my own theories as to the edu-
cation of young princes, and, like all theorists, believe every
one else who has had any doctrine on that subject to be wrong.
I shall be charmed to have so happy an occasion in which to
put my theories to the test. I think nature and learning to-
gether, the woods and the study, should be the preparation for
the world."

" I have entire confidence in your judgment," said Sabran.
'* Above all, try and keep the boy from pride. Train him as
Miidame de Genlis trained the Orleans boys, for any reverse
of fortune. He is born with that temper which would make
any humiliation, any loss of position, unbearable to him ; and
who can say *'

Me paused abruptly : what he thought was, who could say
that in future years Egon V^s^rhely might not tell his aon
of that secret shame which hung over Hohenszalras, a cloud
unseen, but big with tempest ? Greswold looked at him in a
surprise which he could not conceal, and Sabran left his
presence hastily, under excuse of visiting some stallions ar-
rived that morning from Tunis : he was afraid of the interro-
gations which the old man might be led in all innocence to
make. Greswold looked after him with some anxiety ; he
had become sincerely attached to his lord, whose life he had
saved in Pregratten ; but the uuevenness of his spirits, the
unhappiness which evidently came over him at times in the
midst of his serene and fortunate life, the strangeness of a few
words which from time to time he let fall, had uot escaped

8G*

426 WAI9DA.

the quick perception of the wise physician, and gave him at
intervals a vague, uncertain feeling of apprehension.

" Pride !** he thought now. " If the little Count were not
proud he would be no Szalras ; and if his father have not also
that superb sin he must be a greater philosopher than I have
ever thought him, and no fit mate for our lady. What should
overtake the child ? If war or revolution ruin him when he
grows up, that will be no humiliation ; he will be none the
less Bela von Szalras, and if he be like my lady he will be quite
content with being that. Nevertheless, one must try and
teach him humility ; that is, one must try and make the stork
creep iand the oak bend 1"

Sabran, as he examined his Eastern horses and conversed
about them with Ulrich, was haunted by the thoughts which
his own words had called up in him. It was possible, it was
always possible, that if she ever knew she might divorce him,
and the children would become bastards. The Law would
certainly give her her divorce, and the Church also. The
most severe of judges, the most austere of pontiflPs, would not
hold her bound to a man who had so grossly deceived her.

By his own act he had rendered it possible for her, if she
knew, to sever herself entirely from him and make his sons
nameless. Of course he had always known this. But in the
first ardors of his passion, the first ecstasies of his triumph,
he had scarcely thought of it. He had been certain that
Vassia Kazdn was dead to the whole world. Then, as the
years had rolled on, the security of his position, the calmness
of his happiness, had lulled all this remembrance in him. But
now tranquillity had departed from him, and there were hours
when an intense dread possessed him.

True, he did justice to the veracity and honor of his foe.
He believed that V5,s5.rhely would never speak whilst he him-
self was living ; but then again he himself might die at any
moment, a gun-accident, a false step on a glacier, a thrust from
a boar or a bear, ten thousand hazards might kill him in full
health, and were he dead his antagonist might be tempted to
break his word. Vhs^rhely had always loved her ; would it
not be a temptation beyond the power of humanity to resisij
when by a word he could show to her that she had been b»
trayed and outraged by a traitor?

And then the children ?

WANDA, 427

Though were he himself dead she would in all likelihood
never do aught that would let the world know his sin, yet she
would surely change to his offspring, most probably would
hate them when she saw in their lives only the evidence of
her own dishonor and knew that in their veins was the blood
of a man bom a serf.

"Born a serf! I!" he thought, incredulous of his own
memories, of his own knowledge, as he lefl the haras and
mounted a young, half-broken English horse and rode out into
the silent, fragrant forest ways. Almost to himself it seemed
a dream that he had ever been a little peasant on the Volga
plains. Almost to himself it seemed an impossible fable that
he had been born the natural son of Paul Zabaroff and a poor
maiden who had deemed herself honored when she had been
bidden to bear drink to the harine in his bedchamber. He
had once said that he was that best of all actors, one who be-
lieves in the part he plays ; and at all times, and above all
since his marriage, he had been identified in his own persua-
sions, and his own instincts and habits, with that character oi
a great noble, which, when he paused to remember, he knew
was but assumed. Patrician in all his temper and tone, it
seemed to him, when he did so remember, incredible that he
could be actually only a son of hazard, without name, right,
or station in the world. Was he even the husband of Wanda
▼on Szalras ? Law and Church would both deny it were his
A^ud once known.

It was not very often that these gloomy terrors seized him ;
his temper was elastic and his mind sanguine ; but when they
did so they overcame him utterly. He felt like Orestes pur-
sued by the Furies. What smote him most deeply and hardly
of all was his consciousness of the wrong done to his wife.

He rode fast and recklessly in the soft, gray atmosphere of
the still day, making his young horse leap brawling stream and
fallen tree-trunk and dash headlong through the dusky greenery
of the forests.

When he returned, Wanda was seated on the lawn undei
the great yews and cedars by the keep. She kissed her hand
io him as he rode in the distance up the avenue.

A little while later he joined her in her garden retreat,
calm and even gay. With her greeting his terror seemed to
flat 3 faded away; his home was here, he possessed her entire

428 WANDA.

devotion, what was there to fear? Yet the feeling of guilt ^jt
the child had aroused remained upon him ; on his conversa-
tion thera was a certain restraint. Never had the serenity of
his life here appeared more precious to him ; never had the

respect and honor which surrounded him seemed more need ^

ful as the bulwarks of a contented career. What could th(
furnace of ambition, the fatigue of exhausted pleasure, give,
that could equal this profound sense of peace, this culturec
leisure, and this untainted atmosphere ? When he recallcdL^^
the burning eyes, the alluring lips, the cruel passion, of th(
woman he had rejected a year before, the moral loveliness o^
his wife seemed to him almost more than mortal in its absolul
and unconscious rejection of all things mean or base. *'Th»-Mr-£
world would find the spring by following her," seemed to hiiM. m ^iin
to have been written for her, — the spring of hope, of faitlr:^ _:«h,
of strength, of purity. Perhaps a better man might hav^v^'-^ve
less intensely perceived and worshipped that spiritual beautji^-;^ ty,

" Shall we have any house-parties this year or not ?'* shMrM'^he
asked him, in the autumn. ** 1 fear you must fed lonely her^«: ^=3re
after your crowded days in Paris."

" No,'' he said, quickly. " Let us be without people,
had enough of the world in Paris, — too much of it. Ho'
can I be lonely whilst I have you? And the weather ftV
once is superb and promises to remain so."

" I do not know how it seems to you," she replied, " bu^:i^" ut,
when I came from the glare and the asphalte of Paris, thet^^:^^^
deep shadows, these cool, fresh greens, these cloud-bath(
mountains seemed to me to have the very calm of eternity
them. They seemed to say to me in such reproach, ^ Wl
will you wander? What can you find nobler and gladd.
than we are ? I want the children to grow up with that lo~
of country in them ; it is such a refuge, such an abiding,
nocent joy. What does the old English poet say : * It is
go from the world as it is man's to the world as it is God*8.'

" * Well, then, I now do plainly see

This busy world and I shall ne'er agree,'"

he said, with a smile. " Cowley was a very wise raan, — \
than Socrates, when all is counted. But then Cowley for|
and you, perhaps, forget, that one must be born with tl^-^
wiser, holier love in one \ like any other poetio facalty or i ^

WAJ^DA. 429

right, it is scarcely to be taught, certainly not to be acquired.
I hope your children may inherit it from you. There is no
Burer safeguard, no simpler happiness."

" But, since you are content, may it not be acquired ?"

** Ah, my beloved !" he said, with a sigh, " do not compare
the retreat of the soldier tired of his wounds, of the gambler
wearied by his losses, with the poet or the saint who is at peace
with himself, and sees all his life long what he at least believes
to be the smile of God. Loyola and Francis d'Assisi are not
the same thing, are not on the same plane."

" What matter what brought them," she said, softly, " if
they reach the same goal ?"

" You think any sin may be forgiven?" he said, irrelevantly,
with his face averted.

" That is a very wide question. I do not think St. Augus-
tine himself could answer it in a word or in a moment. For-
giveness, I think, would surely depend on repentance."

" Bepentance in secret — would that avail ?"

" Scarcely — would it ? — if it did not attain some sacrifice.
It would have to prove its sincerity to be accepted."

**you believe in public penance?" said Sabran, with some
impatience and contempt.

"Not necessarily public," she said, with a sense of perplex-
ity at the turn his words had taken. " But of what use is it
for one to say he repents, unless in some measure he makes
itonement?*'

" But where atonement is impossible?'*

** That could never be."

" Yes. There are crimes whose consequences can never be
undone. What then? Is he who did them shut out from
all hope?"

" I am no casuist," she said, vaguely troubled. " But if no
atonement were possible I still think — nay, I am sure — a sin-
cere and intense regret, which is, after all, what we mean by
repentance, must be accepted, must be enough."

** Enough to efface it in the eyes of one who had never
•inned ?"

" Where is there such an one ? I thought you spoke of
heaven."

" I spoke of earth. It is all we can be suro to have tc do
with ; it is our one poor heritage."

430 WANDA.

*-^ 1 hope it is bat an antechamber which we pass tl.roHgfa,
and filled with beautiful things, or beibul with dust and blood, ^

at our own will."

" Hardly at our own will. In your antechamber a capri- — ^.
cious tyrant waits us all at birth. Some come in chained; ^ ^*
some free."

They were seated at her favorite garden-seat, where the ^^m:m
great yews spread before the keep, and far down below the ^^.mziii
Szalrassee rippled away in shining silver and emerald hues, ^^3^38
bearing the Holy Isle upon its waters and parting the moun — «=r jd
tains as with a field of light. The impression which hadiE>wff3 a(
pursued her once or twice before came to her now. WafFiM^ "^aj
there any error in his own life, any cruel, crooked twist of'^<i>of
circumstance, concealed from her? An exceeding tendemcssK^s ^isca
and pity yearned in her towards him as the thought arose^^^'Se
Was he, with all his talent, power, pride, grace, and strength MiK^Mh,
conscious of fault or failure, weighted with any burden ? I-B I<
seemed impossible. Yet to her fine instinct, her accurate earrKT^^^ar,
there was in these generalities the more painful, the mpr#rm: ^iDro
passionate, tone of personal remorse. She might have spokenc^*' ^3en,
might once more have said to him what she had once saidE^-sr-id,
and invited him to place a fearless confidence in her affectiont:*^ <z^n,
but she remembered Olga Brancka ; she shrank from seeking mtm- -ng
an avowal which might be so painful to him and her alike.

At that moment the pretty figure of the Princess Ottili m:
appeared in the distance, a lace hood over her head, a broa».
red sunshade held above that, and Sabran rose to go forwar
and offer her his arm.

" You are always lovers still, and one is afraid of interrupr-^i^t-
ing you," said Madame Ottilie, as she took one of the gilde^^^^
wicker chairs. " I have had a letter from Olga Brancka : thc^^fl
post is come in. She says she will honor you in the autnm^r^ *^fl
on her way to waiting at Gbdbllo."

'^ It is impossible 1" cried Sabran, who grew first red,
pale.

" Nothing is impossible with Olga," said the princess, dryl
" I see even yet you are not acquainted with her many qu(
ties, which include among tnem a will of steel."

^'She cannot come here," he said, in haste, under
breath.

Wanda looked at him a moment.

WANDA 431

'* My aunt shall tell her that it will not suit us. She can
go to Godbllo by way of Grata," she said, quietly.
The princess shifted her sunshade.

" What eflfect do you think that will have? She will crosa
your mountains, and she will call up a snowstorm by incanta-
tion, so that you will be compelled to take her in. You who
know so much of tbe world, R6n6, can you inform me how it
is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to
the frivolity of their lives ? All these butterflies have a voli-
tion of iron."

" It is egotism," he replied, with effort, unable to recover
from his astonishment and disgust. " Intensely selfish people
are always very decided as to what they wish. That is in
itself a great force : they do not waste their energies in con-
sidering the good of others.'*

" 01ga*s energies are certainly not wasted in that direction,"
said Madame Ottilie.

Sabran rose and went in for his letters. It was intolerable
to him to hear the name of this woman, whom he had only
escaped by brutal violence, spoken in the presence of his wife ;
and even to him, hardened to the vices of the world though
experience had made him, it had never occurred as possible
that she would have the audacity to come thither ; he had
too hastily taken it for granted that conscience would have
kept her clear of their path forever, unless the hazards of
society should have brought them perforce together. The
most secretive of men is always more sincere than an insin-
cere and crafty woman, and he was overwhelmed for the
tnoment at the infamy and the hardihood of a character
v^hich he had flattered himself he had understood at a glance.
He forgot the truth that " bill hath no fury like a woman
scorned."

"There is not a dSclassSe in Paris who would not have
more decency 1" he thought, bitterly. He stood in the Rit-
tersaal and affected to be occupied with his letters, but his
eyes only followed their lines, his mind was absent. He saw
no way to prevent her continued intimacy with them, if she
were vile enough to persist in enforcing it. He could not tell
Jflgon VJls^rhely or Stefan Brancka ; a man cannot betray a
woman, however base she may be. He could not tell his wife
of that hateful hour, which seemed burnt into his brain as

ai

432 WANDA.

ai^uafortis bites into metal. He shaddcrcd as bo tbougbt o!
ber bero, in tbis bouse wbieb bad known so many centari
of bonor. He cursed the weak aud culpable folly wbieb bao,.^^ ^
&r9t led bim into ber snares. If be bad not dallied witb i\i\M .m:M\.
Dclilab, sbe would bave been vile of purpose and of natunr
in vain. He bad escaped ber indeed at tbe last ; he bad irv ^
deed remained faithful in act to bis wife ; but had it bee^
Bucb fidelity of tbe soul and tbe mind as sbe deservedE:^ ^3d
Would not even tbe semi-betrayal bring its punishment soc:» ^z^oo
or late ? Could be ever endure to see ber beside tbe worn
wbo so nearly bad tempted bim ? He felt that be yiomml-mt uid
sooner kill tbe other, as be bad threatened, than let ber p=^ set
foot across the sacred threshold of Hobenszalras.

" I knew what sbe was/' he tbougbt, witb endless flr~^ alf.
accusation. " Why did I ever loiter an hour by ber sid»>.JKe f
Why did I ever look once at ber hateful eyes ?"

If sbe bad been a stranger be would have braved bis wi^^fcfe jv
scorn of himself and told her all ; but when it was ber C(^^*«u-
sin*s wife — one wbo even bad once been in a still nearer re-

lationship to ber — he could not do it. It seemed to bim f as
if such nearness of shame would be so horrible to ber that lie
would be included in her righteous hatred of it.

Moreover, long habit had made bim reticent, and sile ^aD08
always seemed to bim safety.

Afler some meditation, be took bis way to tbe library ^0iod
there wrote a brief letter. He said in it, with no pream "fc/e,
ceremony, or courtesy, that he begged to decline for him^*<Jif
and bis wife the bonor of the Countess Brancka's presence? t<
Hobenszalras. He sealed it witb his arms, and sent a sp^^nl
messenger with it to Matrey. He said nothing of wbaO ^^
bad done to bis wife or ber aunt.

lie knew that if bis antagonist were so disposed sbe co'bW
make feud between him and her husband for tbe insult wt^ich
that curt rejection of her offered visit bore with it. But tlat
did not weigh on him : be would bave been glad to bav* •
man to deal with in the matter. All he cared to do waS to
preserve bis home from the pollution of her presence. M^*^
over, be knew that it would benot like i\iQ finesse and sccf^
of Olga Brancka to do aught so simple or so frank as to B^
the support of ber lord.

Meantime, the princess was saying to his wife, —

WANDA. 433

" Will you receive Olga ? She will not give up her wishes \
ihe will force her way to you."

" How can I refuse to receive Stefan's wife ?**

" It would be difficult, but you would be justified. She
endeavored to draw your husband into an intrigue."

" Are we sure ? Let us be charitable."

" My dear Wanda, you are a truer Christian than 1 am."

" Justice existed before Christianity, if you do not think
me profane to say so. I try to be just."

" Justice is blind," said the princess, dryly. " I never under-
stood very well how, being so, she can see her own scales."

Wanda made no reply. She had not been blind, but she
would have never said to any living being all that she had
Buffered in those weeks when he had stayed behind her in
Paris. That he had returned to her blameless she was certain ;
she had put far behind her forever the remembrance of those,
the only hours of anxiety and pain which he had given her
since their marriage.

The princess, communing with herself, wrote a letter to the
Countess Brancka, chill and austere, in which she conveyed,
in delicate but sufficiently clear language, her sense that the
same roof should not shelter her and Sabran, especially when
the roof was that of Hohenszalras. She sent it because she
believed it to be her duty to do so ; but she had little faith in
its efficacy. She would have written also to Stefan Brancka,
but she knew him to be a weak, indulgent, careless man, still
young, who had been lenient to her follies and frailties, and
who was only kept from ruin by the strong hand of his brother.
If she told him what was after all mere conjecture, he might
only laugh ; if he did not laugh, he might kill Sabran in a
duel, were his Magyar blood fired by suspicion. No one could
be ever sure what Count Stefan would or would not do ; the
only thing sure was that he would be never wise. To his wife
herself he was absolutely indifferent, but this did not prevent
him from having occasional moods of furious resentment against
her. He was too unstable and too perilous a person to resort
to in any difficulty.

In a few days she received her answer. It was brief and
playful and pathetic.

" Beloved and revered Mother, — You never like me, you
always lecture me, but I am glad that you honor me by re-
T ce 37

434 WANDA,

raembrancc, even if it be to upbraid. I know not of wba
mysterious crime you suspect me, nor do I uuderstaud yon
allusions to M. de Sabran. I have always found him char
in<:^, and I think if he had not married so rich a woman b
would have been eminent in some way; but content
ambition. Salute Wanda lovingly, and the pretty childre
How is your little Ottilie? My Mila and Marie are grow
out of knowledge. Wo shall soon have to be thinking a
their dots : alas 1 where will these come from ? Stefan a
I have been the prey of unjust stewards and extortionatt-
^radcsfolks till scarce anything is left except the mine s
Schemnits. Pity me a little, and pray for me much.

" Your ever devoted Olga."

Princess Ottilie was a holy woman, and knew that rage ws
a sin against herself and heaven, but when she had read t1
note she tore it in a hundred pieces, and stamped her smi
foot upon it, trembling with passion the while.

Two months went on ; the Countess Olga wrote no inor^
they deemed themselves delivered from her threatened pi
ence. She had not replied to his refusal to permit her
come thither, and Sabran felt relieved from an intolerak==)/e
position. Had she persisted, he had decided to make
confession to his wife rather than permit her to receive i|
rantly the insult of such a visit.

It was now the end of September, and the weather
mained fine and open. He spent a great deal of his time c^^^
of doors, and took his old interest in the forests, the stud, m, d/
the hunting. The letter of Olga Brancka had brought clcr^^
to him again the peril from which he had so hardly e6caf>^
in Paris, and the peace and sweetness cf his homo-life seenx.^
the more precious to him by contrast. The high intelligem <se^
the serene temper, of his wife, and her profound afFectioB*
seemed to him treasures for which he could be never grate^^*'
enough to fate and fortune : their days passed in tranquil B.ti^
lunny happiness.

Sabran one day took Bela with him when he rode, — a r»^
honor for the child, who rode superbly. His pony kept fs*"^*
pace with his father's English hunter, and even the leapi*'^
did not scare either it or its rider.

** Bravo, Bela 1" said Sabran, when they at last drew n?i** *

WANDA. 435

^ yoa ride like a centaur. Is your education advanced enough
to know what centaurs were?"

" Oh I they were what I should love to be," replied Bela,
rapturously. " They were joined on to the horse 1"

Sabran laughed. " Well, a good rider is one with his
horse, so you may come very near your ideal. Ulrich has
taught you an admirable seat. You are worthy of your
mother in the saddle."

Bela colored with pleasure.

** In the study you are not so, I fear ?" Sabran continued.
" You do not like learning, do you ?"

'' I like some sorts," said the child, with a little timidity.
'' I like history, knowing what the people did in the other
i^es. Now the Herr Professor lets us do our lessons out of
doors, I do not mind them at all. As for Gela, he likes
nothing but books and pictures," he added, with a sense of his
ono grief against his brother.

" Happy Gela I whatever his fate in life, he will never be
alone," said his father, as he dismounted to let his hunter take
breathing-space. The child leaped lightly from his saddle, took
his little silver folding cup out of his pocket, and drank at a
spring, one of the innumerable springs rushing over the mossy
stones and flower-filled grass.

"One is never alone with horses?'* he said, shyly, for he
never lost his awe of Sabran.

" Unless one be ill ; then a horse is sorry consolation, and
books and art are faithful companions."

" I have never been ill," said Bela, with a little wonder ai
himself. " I do not know what it is like."

" It is to be dependent upon others. A hero or a king
grows as helpless as a lame beggar when he is ill. You will
not escape the common lot, and when you stay in your bed,
and your pony in his stall, then you will bo glad of Gela and
his books."

** Oh I I do love Gela always," said the child, hastily and
generously ; " and the Herr Professor says he is ever — ever
BO much cleverer than I am ; a million times more clever!"

" You are clever enough," said Sabran. " If you do not let
yourself be vain and overbearing, you will do well. Try and
remember that if your pony made a false slip to-day and you
fell badly, all your good health would vanish at a stroke, aud

436 WANDA.

all your gieatness would serve you Qothiug. You would env^'^r' m^y
any one of the boys going with whole limbs up into the hills J! fil
and perhaps all your mother's love and wealth oould do uoIImcM •:^ «t
ing to mend your bones again."

Bela listened with a grave face. When women, even hi
fearless mother, spoke to him in such a way, he was apt
think with disdain that they overrated danger because th<
were women ; and when his tutor so addre^ed him, he wt
also apt to think that it was because the good professor was
bookworm and cared for weeds, stones, and butterflies. Bi
when his father said so, he was awed : he had heard Ulric
\nd Otto tell a hundred stories of their lord's prowess ai
Tourage and magnificent strength, for the deeds of Sabran
the floods and on the mountains had become almost legenda
in their heroism to all the mountaineers of the Hohe Taue:
and all the dwellers on the Danube forest.

'^ But ought one not to be brave ?'* he said, with hesitati(
" You are."

" We ought to be brave, certainly, or we are not fit to lii
but we must not be vain of being brave, or rely upon it
much. Courage is a mere gift of — he was about to
" chance," but, seeing the blue eyes of the child fastened uj:
him, changed the word and said, " a gift of God."

" What a handsome boy he is I" he thought, as he lool *ed
thus at his little son. " And how wise it is to leave child :aren
wholly to their mothers, when their mothers are wise I"

" I will remember," said Bela, thoughtfully. " When I ^an
a man I want to be just what you are."

Sabran turned away at the innocent words. " Be what y onr
mother's people were, and I shall be content," he said, grair^/.

" But your people too," said Bela, " they were very gx"«ii
and very good. The Herr Professor reads us things out> of
that big book on Mexico, and the Marquis Xavier was a saint,
he says. Gela likes the book better than I, because it is ^^
about birds, and beasts, and flowers ; but the part about ^he
[ndians, and the Incas, that pleases me ; and then there ^J^
the Breton stories too that are in real history, they are quit^
beautiful, and I would die like that."

Bela's tongue once loosened seldom paused of its owd ^
cord ; his eyes were dark and animated, his face was eager ^^
proud.

WANDA, 437

'^The Marquis Xavicrwas a saint, indeed/' said nis father^
tbraptlj. *^ Kevere bis name. All my children should revere
bis name and memory. But lean most to your mother's peo-
ple : you are Austrian born, and the chief of your duties and
possessions will be in Austria. I think you would die hero-
icall^, my boy, but you will find that it is harder to live so.
The horses are rested ; let us ride home : it grows late for
you."

Bela, whose mind was quick in intuition, felt that his falLor
did not care to talk about Mexico or Brittany.

*'• I will ask the Herr Professor if I did wrong to speak to
him of the big book/' he said to himself as he mounted
his pony : he was very anxious to please his father, but ho
was afraid he had missed the way. *' I suppose it is because
they were only saints, and the Szalras were all soldiers," ho
thought, on reflection, soldiers being by far the foremost in his
esteem.

'^ He says it is harder to live well than to die well," said
Bela over his bread-and-milk that night to his brother.

^* I suppose that is because dying is over so soon," said the
meditative Oela ; ** and you know it must take an enormous
time to live to be old. — quite old, — like Aunt Ottilie."

^^ I should like to die very grandly," said Bela, with shining
eyes, '^ and have all the world remember me forever and for-
ever, as they do great Kudolph."

" I should like to die saving somebody," said Q^la, ''just as
Uncle Bela saved the pilgrims : that would please our mother
best."

'* I should like to die in battle," said the living Bela ; '' and
that would please our mother, because so many of us havo
always died so, fighting the French, or the Prussians, or the
Turks. When I am a man I shall die like Wallenstein.'

'^ But Wallenstein was killed in a room," said Gela, who
was very accurate.

^* You are always so particular 1" said Bela, impatiently,
who had himself only a vague idea of Wallenstein, as of some
one who had gone on fighting without stopping for thirty years.

" The Herr Professor says it is just being particular which
makes the difference between the scholar and the sciolist," said
Ckla, solemnly, his pretty rosy lips closing carefully over the

long word hcdbgdehrU.

S7*

438 WANDA.

This night after the ride he and she dined quite alone. As
he sat in the Rittersaal and looked at the long line of knights,
the many hlazoned shields, the weapons home in gallant war-
fare, a sudden sensation came to him of the vile thing that he
did in being in this place. It seemed to him that those
armored figures should grow animate and descend and drive
him out. Bela, then sleeping happily, dreaming of the glories
of his ride, had raised with his innocent words a torturing
spirit in his father's breast. What had he brought to this
haughty and chivalrous race ? — the servile Sclav, the barbaric
Persian, blood, and all the dishonor that their creed would
hold the basest upon earth. Besides, to lie to her children I
Even the blue eyes of Bela had made him embarrassed and
humiliated, as if she were judging him through her first-born's
gaze. What would it be when that child, grown to man's
estate, should speak to him of his people, of his forefathers ?

For the fii'st time it occurred to him that these boys would
inevitably, as they grew older, ask him many questions, wish
to know many things. He could turn aside a child's inquisi-
tive interest, but it would be more painful, less easy, to refuse
to supply a grown youth's legitimate interrogations. All these
boys would some time or another make many inquiries of him
that his wife, out of delicate sympathy, never had intruded
upon him. The fallen fortunes of the Sabran race had always
seemed to her one of those blameless misfortunes for which
the best respect is shown by silence. But her sons would
naturally, one day or another, be more interested in learning
more of those from whom they were descended.

The lie in reply would be easy and secure. There were all
the traditions and recollections of the Sabrans of Romaris to
be gathered from the tongues of the people in Finisterre, and
the private papers of their race which he possessed. He could
answer well enough ; but it would be a lie, and a lie seemed to
him now a disgrace. Before his marriage he had looked on
falsehood as a necessary part of the world's furniture ; but he
had not lived all these years beside a noble nature, to which
even a prevarication was impossible, without growing ashamed
of his former laxities.

" There is not a dead man among all those knights who bore
these arms that should not rise to punish and disown me 1" he
thought, with poignant hatred of his past.

WANDA. 4a9

When he went to his room the impulse once more came over
liim to tell his wife all, — to throw himself on her mercy, and
let her do the wor^t she would. He had a certain fear of her
which acted like a spell on that moral cowardice which his
Sclav temperament and his hidden secret combined to bind in
a dead weight on the physical courage and natural pride of his
character..

' He resolved to do his uttermost as they grew older to rear
his sons to worthiness of that great race whose name they
bore, — to uproot in them by all means in his power any
falser or darker faults they might have inherited from him.
He promised himself so to watch over his own words and deeds
that as they grew to manhood they should find no palliative or
example of wrong-doing in his life. The closeness of his peril,
the folly of his dalliance, with Olga Brancka had Icfl him dis-
trustful and diffident of his own powers to resist evil. He
said to himself that he would seek the world no more ; his
wife was happiest in her own dominion, amidst her own people ;
he would court neither pleasure nor ambition again. Here he
had peace ; here he loved and was beloved ; here he would
abide, and let courts and cities hold those less blessed than he.

In the morning he awoke refreshed and tranquil ; a beauti-
ful sunrise was tinging with rose the snows of the opposite
Yenediger peaks; the flush of early autumn was upon the
lower woods, but no snow had fallen even on the mountains.
The lake was deeply green as a laurel leaf, and its waters
rolled briskly under a strong breeze. It was a brilliant day
for the hills, and the jligemieister and his men were in wait-
ing, for he had arranged over-night to go chamois-hunting on
those steep alps and glaciers which towered above the hind-
most forests of Hohenszalras. He did not very often give
r^n to his natural love of field-sports, for he knew that his
wife liked to feel that the innocent creatures of the mountains
were safe wherever she ruled. But there was real sport to be
had here, with every variety of danger accompanying to excuse
it, and Otto and his men were proud of their lord's prowess
and perseverance on the high hills, and only sorrowed that ho
BO oflen let his rifles lie unused in the gun-room. He went
out whilst the day was still red and young, like a rose yet in
bud, and climbed easily and willingly the steep paths and pre-
cipitous slopes which led to the glaciers.

440 WAJ^DA.

*^ Coant Bela wants sadly to come with us ono of thc^Ezx»e
days," said Otto, with a broad smilo. *' He can use Id^iVhig
crampons right manfully. Will not the countess soon let ie3k~id6
teach him to shoot?*'

<' I think not willingly, Otto,*' said Sabran. '' She rliiuM ■ilu
children's hands are best free of bloodshed, and so do L It

can do a child no good to see the dying agony of an innocr^ ent
creature. Teach 1 1 err Bela to climb as much as you like, b:^Pl>ut
leave powder and shot alone."

" I am sure the ilerr Marquis himself must have beetB- ^d a
fine shot very early?"

^^ I was at a semi-military college," said Sabran, think:
of those days at the Lycee Olovis when he had sought
8idU (Tarmes with such eagerness, as being the scene of tl
lessons which would most surely enable him to meet mei
their equal or their master.

" If only Count Bela might be taught to shoot at a marl
said the old huntsman, wistfully.

" You know very well, Otto, that your lady decides eve — ^ry-
thing for her children, and that all her decisions I upho^^Bd,"
said his master. ** Be sure they are wiser than either ycrr^ura
or mine would be. She can teach him herself, too : she can
hit a running mark as well as you or I. Do you remen^^bcr
the day when you arrested me in these woods ?"

" Ah, my lord," said Otto, with a rolling oath, " never csub- o I
pardon myself, though you have so mercifully pardoned m^^ /"

^' And my good rifle is still lying in the bed of the lafg^^"
said Sabran, glancing backward at the Szalrassee, now m^ ^oy
hundred feet below them, a mere green ribbon shining thro'^gh
the deeper green of fir and pine woods.

" Yes, my lord," answered the man, cheerily. " The fzood
English rifle indeed was lost, but it seems to me that the Ben
Marquis did not make wholly a bad exchange I"

" No, indeed," said his master, as he paused and looked
down to where the towers and spires of ilohenszalras p;liiD-
mered like mere points of glittering metal m the sunshiue for
below.

They were now at the highest altitude st which gemsbocb
are found, and the business of the day commenced as tbejr
ttghted what looked like a mere brown s^^ck against the graj-
ness of the opposite glacier. Before Che day was done, Si*

WANDA. 441

bran had shot to his own gun eight chamois on the heights;
Gtod some score of ptarmigan and black-cock on the lowei
level. He saw more than one hutengeier and lammergeier^
but, in deference to the traditions of the Szalras, did not fire
on them. The healthful fatigue, the rarefied air, the buoyant
eKbilaratlon which comes with the atmosphere of the great
heights made him feci happy, and gave him back all his con*
fidence in the present and the future. When he rested on a
ledge of rock, listening to Otto's hunter's tales and making a
fmgal meal of some hard biscuit and a draught of Voslauer,
he wondered at himself for having so recently been beguiled
by the febrile excitations of Paris or having desired the fret
and wear of a public career. What could be better than this
life was ? To have sought to leave it was folly and ingrati-
tude. The p^ace and the calm of the great mountains which
she loved so well seemed to descend into his soul.

It was twilight when they reached the lower slopes of the
hills, the jagers loaded with game, he and Otto walking in
front of them. From the still far-off islet on the lake, and
from the belfry of the Schloss, the Ave Maria was chiming,
the deep-toned bells of the latter ringing the Emperor's
Hymn.

Talking gayly with Otto, with that frank kindliness which
endeared him to all these mountaineers, he approached the
house slowly, fatigued with the pleasant tire of a healthy and
vigorous man afler a long day's pastime on the hills, and en-
tered by a back entrance, which led through the stables into
the wing of the building where his own private rooms were
situated. He took his bath and had himself dressed for the
evening, then went on his way across the vast house to the
white salon^ where his wife and her aunt were usually to be
found at the time of the children's hour before dinner. With
some words on his lips to claim her praise for having spared
the vultures, he pushed aside the portihre and entered, but
the words died on his tongue, half spoken.

His wife was there, but before the hearth, seated with her
profile turned towards him, also was Olga Brancka. His wife,
who was standing, came towards him.

" My cousin Olga took us by surprise an hour ago. The
tel^ram must have missed us which she says she sent yester
day from Salzburg."

442 WANDA.

lier eyes had a cold gaze as she spoke : her sense of th€
duties of hospitality and of high breeding had alone oodl
pellcd her to give any form of welcome to her guest. Madame
Brancka, playing with a feather screen, looked up with a little
quiet self-satisfied smile.

" Unexpected guests are the most welcome. When there
is an old proverb, pretty if musty, all ready made for you
K6n<^, why do you not repeat it ? I am truly sorry, though^
that my telegram miscarried. I suspect it comes from Wanda's
old-fashioned prejudice against having a wire of her own here
from Linz. I dare say they never send you half your mes-
sages."

8abran had mechanically bowed over the hand she held out
to him, but he scarcely touched it with his own. He was
deadly pale. The amazement that her effrontery produced on
him was stupefaction. Versed in the ways of women and of
the world though he was, he was speechless and helpless before
this incredible audacity. She looked at him, she smiled, she
spoke, like the most innocent and unconscious creature. For
a moment an impulse seized him to unmask her then and
there, and hound her out of his wife's presence ; the next he
knew that it was impossible to do so. Men cannot betray
women in that way, nor was he even wholly free enough from
blame himself to have the right to do so. But an intense rage,
the more intense because perforce mute, seized him against this
intruder by his hearth. Only to see her beside his wife was
an intolerable suffering and shame. When he recovered him-
self a little, feeling his wife's gaze upon him, he said, with
some plain incredulity in his contemptuous words, —

^^ The failure of messages is often caused by the senders ot
them. The people are extremely careful at Linz. I do not
think the fault lies there. We can, however, only regret the
want of due warning, for the reason that we can give no fit or
flattering reception of an honored guest. You come froni
Paris?"

For the first time a slight sudden flush rose upon Olga
Brancka's cheek, callous though she was. She felt the irony
and the disdain. She perceived that she had in him an inex-
orable foe, beyond all allurement and all entreaty.

** 1 passed by Paris," she answered, easily enough. * Of
■ourse I had 'to see my tailors, like every one else in Scptoiu*

WANDA, 443

bor. I have been first to Noisettiers, tlion to London, then to
Homburg, then to Russia. I do not know where I have not
been since we met. And you good people have been vegeta-
ting underneath your forests all that time ? I was curious to
oome and see you in your felicity. Uohenszalrasburg used to be
Galled the vulture's nest : it appears to have become a dove's 1"

" I spared a whole family of lammergeier to-day in defer-
ence to your forest law/' he said, turning to his wife, whilst
to himself he thought what a far worse beast of prey was sit-
ting here, smoothing her glossy feathers in the warmth of his
own hearth. She noticed the extreme pallor of his face, the
sound of anger and emotion forcibly restrained ; she imagined
something of wha* he felt, though she could guess neither its
intensity nor its extent. She had done herself violence in meet-
ing with courtesy and tranquillity the woman who now sat
between them, but she could not measure or imagine the guile
and the audacity of her.

When, that evening, as twilight came on, she had heard the
sound of wheels beneath the terraces, and in a little while had
been informed by Hubert that the Countess Brancka had ar-
rived, her first movement had been to refuse to receive her, her
next to remember that to one who had been Gela's wife, and
now was Stefan Brancka's, the doors of Hohenszalras could not
be shut without an open quarrel and scandal that would regale
the world and make feud inevitable between her husband and
the whole race of Vhrsiirhely. The Vi.sji,rhely knew the worth-
lessness of Stefan's wife, but for the honor of their name they
would never admit that they did so ; they would never fail to
defend her. Moreover, hospitality of a high and antique
type had always been the first of obligations upon all those
whom she descended from and represented. They would not
have refused to harbor their worst foe if he had demanded
asylum. They would not have turned away sovereign or
beggar from their gates. Those days were gone, indeed, but
their high and generous temper lived in her. In the brief
fpace in which Hubert, having made the announcement,
waited for her commands, she had struggled with her own re-
pugnance and conquered it. She had told herself that to turn
Ste^Ein's wife from her doors would be the mere vulgar melo-
drama of a common and undignified anger. After all, she
knew nothing : therefore she traversed the house to receive

444 WAXDA.

her unasked guest, and gave her welcome without any pre^
tence of cordiality or friendship, hut with a perfect and
unhesitating politeness void of all offence.

Olga Brancka had been profuse in her apologies and ex-
pressions of regret, but she had at once let her carriage, hired al
Sanct Johann, with its four post-horses changed at Matrey, b€
taken to the stables, and had gone herself to her old apart-
ments, where in little time her two maids had changed her
heavy furs and travelling clothes for the costume of consum-
mate simplicity and elegance in which she now sat, putting
forth her small feet in rose satin shoes to the warmth from
the great Hirschvogel stove, which, with its burnished and
enamelled color, illumined one side of the vrhite salon,

Sabran and his wife both remained standing, he leaning his
arm on the scroll-work of the great stove, she playing with the
delicate ears of one of the hounds. Madame Brancka alone
sat and leaned back in her low seat, quite content. She was
aware that she was unwelcome, and that her presence was an
embarrassment and worse; but the sense of the wrong and
cruel position in which she placed them was sweet and pun-
gent to her: she was refreshed by the very sense of dilemma
and of danger which surrounded her. She had her vengeance
in her hand, and she would not exhaust it quickly, but tasted
its savor with the slow care and patient appetite of the connois-
seur in such things. She had a Chinese-like skill in patiently
drawing out the prolonged pangs of an ingeniously-invented
martyrdom.

" Why do you both stand ?" she said, looking up at him
between her half-closed lids. " Are you standing to imply to
me, as we do with monarchs, ' This house is yours whilst you
are in it* ? I am much obliged, but I should sell it at once
if it were really mine. It is a splendid, barbaric solitude, like
Tardc. We have not been to Tar6c this year. Stefan sayi
Egon lives altogether with his troopers and grows very
morose. You hear from him sometimes, I suppose ?'*

To Sabran it seemed as if her half-shut black eyes shot
forth actual sparks of fire, as she spoke the name which he
could never hear without an inward spasm of fear.

" Of course I hear from Egon," said his wife. " But he
writes very briefly ; he was never much of a penman. Hi
prefers a rifle, a sword, a riding-whip."

WANDA, 445

" I boar you have called the last child after him ? Where
are the boys ? They can Dot be in bed Let me see them.
It is surely their hour to be here. B.6n6j ring, and send for
them."

His brow contracted.

" No ; it is late," he said, abruptly. " They would only
weary you ; they are barbaric, like the bouse."

He felt an extreme reluctance to bring his children into her
presence, to see her speak to them, touch them ; he was long-
ing passionately to seize her and thrust her out of the doors
As she sat there in the full light of the many wax candles
burning around, sparkling, imperturbable, like a coquette of
a yaudeville, with her rose satin, and her white taffetas,
and her lace ruff, and her pink coral necklace and ear-rings,
and a little pink coral hand upholding her curls in the most
studied disorder, she seemed to him the loathlicst thing that
he had ever seen. He hated her more intensely than he had
ever hated any one in all his life, — even more than he had
hated the traitress who had sold him to the Prussians.

" Pray let me see the children ; I know you never dine till
eight," she was persisting to his wif'^ , who knew well that she
was entirely indifferent to the children, but who was not unwill-
ing for their entrance to break the constraint of what was to her
an intolerable trial. She did ring, and ordered their presence.
They soon came, making their obeisances with the pretty
grave courtliness which they were taught from infancy, — Bela
and Gela and Victor in white velvet dresses, while their sister,
in a frock of old Venetian point, looked like a Stuart child
painted by Vandyck.

**^A, quels amours .'" cried Olga Brancka, with admirable
effusion, as they kissed her hand. Sabran turned away ab
ruptly, and, muttering a word as to some orders he had to give
the stud-groom, left the chamber without ceremony, as she,
with an ardor wholly unknown to her own daughters, lifted
the little Ottilie on her knee and kissed the child's rose-leaf
cheek.

" What lovely creatures they are I" she said, in German ;
** and how they have grown since they left Paris. They are
all the image of R6n6; he must be very proud. They have
all his eyes, — ^those deep dark-blue eyes like jewels, like the
depths of the sea."

88

446 WANDA.

" You ate very poetic," said Wanda, " but I should be glad
if you would speak their praises in some tongue they do not
understand. The boys may not be hurt, but Lili, as we call
her, is a little vaiu already, though she is sd young."

" Would you deny her the birthright of her sex ?" said
Madame Brancka, clasping her coral necklace round the child's
throat. " Surely she will have lectures enough from her god-
mother against all feminine foibles. By the way, where is tb«
princess?"

" My aunt is with the Lilienhdhe."

" I am grieved not to have the pleasure," murmured Ma-
dame Brancka, indififerently, letting Ottilie glide from her lap.

" Give back the necklace, lieMing^^^ said Wanda, as she
unclasped it.

^^ No, no ; I entreat you ; let her keep it. It is leagues
too large, but she likes it, and when she grows up she will
wear it and think of me."

" Pray take it," said Wanda, lifling it from the child's little
breast. " You are too kind, but they must not be given what
they admire. It teaches them bad habits."

" What severe rules 1' cried Madame Brancka. "Are these
poor babies brought up on St. Chrysostom and St. Basil ? Is
Lili already doomed to the cloister? You are too austere :>
you should have been an abbess, instead of having all these
golden-curled cupidons about you. Where is the youngest
one, Egon's namesake?"

^* He is in his cot," said Gela, who was always very direot
in his replies, and who found himself addressed by her.

Meantime, Bela took hold of his mother's hand and whis-
pered to her, " Mutterchen, she is rude to you. Send hei
away."

" My darling," answered Wanda, " when people laugh Id
our own house we must let them do it, even if it be at oar*
selves. And, Bela, to whisper is very rude."

" Egon is so little," continued Gela, plaintively. " lie caa-
not read ; I do not think he ever will read 1"

" But you could not when you were as small as he ?"

^* Could I not ?" said Gela, doubtfully, to whom that time
«eemed many centuries back.

" And LiU, can she read ?" said Madame Olga, suppressing
A yawn.

WANDA 447

" Ob, veB," said Gela ; " at least, two-letter words she caa ;
and me, I read to her.*'

*' What model children 1" cried Madame Branoka, with a
little laugh. " And the naughty boy who was in a rage ba-
cause he was not permitted to go to Chan til ly ? That was
Bela, was it not ? Bcla, do you remember how cruel your
mother was, and how you cried ?**

Bela looked at her, with his blue eyes growing as stern and
cold as his father's.

" My mother is always right," he said, gajlantly. " She
knows what I ought to do. 1 do not think I cried, meine
gn&dige Frau; I never cry."

" Even the naughty boy has become an angel I What a
wonderful disciplinarian you are, Wanda 1 If your children
were not so handsome they would be insufferable with their
goodness. They are very handsome ; they are just like Sa-
bran, and yet they are not at all a Russian type."

" Why should they be Russian ? We have no Russian
blood," said their mother, in surprise.

Madame Brancka laughed a little confusedly, and fluttered
her feather screen.

** I do not know what I was thinking of, Ren 6 always re- ,
minds me of my old friend Paul Zabaroff; they are very
alike."

" I have seen the present Prince Zabaroff," said Wanda,
wondering what the purpose of her guest's words were. " He
was not, as I remember him, much like M. de Sabran."

^*0h, of course he was not equal to your Apollo," said
Madame Brancka, winding Ottilie's long hair around her
fingers.

" You have had enough of them ; they must not worry
you," said their mother, and she dismissed the children with
a word.

" In what marvellous control you keep them," said Madame
Olga. " Now, my children never obeyed me, let me scream
at them as I would."

'* I do not think screaming has much effect on any one,
young or old."

" It paralyzes a man. But I suppose a child can always
out-scream one ?"

" Probably. A child never respects any person who loses

44« WANDA,

their calmness. As for men, you are better versed in their
follies than I."

" But do you and R6n6 absolutely never quarrel ?"
" Quarrel 1 My dear Olga, how very hiirgerlich an idea."
" Do you suppose ooly the bourgeois quarrel ?" said
Madame Brancka. '^ Beally, you live in your enchanted
forest until you forget what the world is like." And she be-
gan an interminable history of the scenes between a friend of
hers and her husband and her family, a quarrel which had
ended in conseils judidaires and separation. '* It is a cruel
thing that there is not one law of divorce for all the world/*
she said, with a sigh, as she ended the unsavory relation.
" If Stefan and I could only set each other free, we should
have done it years and years ago."

" I did not know your griefs against Stefan were so great ?"
'* Oh, I have no great griefs against him ; he is bon enfant:
but we are both ruined, and we both detest each other, — we
do not know very well why."
" Poor Mila and Marie 1"

" What has it to do with them ? They are happy at
Sucre Coeur, and when they come out they will marry. Egon
will be sure to portion them ; we cannot. We are not like
you, who will be able to give a couple of millions to Lili with •
out hurting her brothers."

" Lili's dot is far enough in the future," said Lili's mother,
who, very weary of the conversation, saw with relief the doors
open, and heard Hubert anqounce that dinner could be served.
By an opposite door Sabran entered also, a mqment later.
The dinner was tedious to both him and her : they alike found
it an almost intolerable penance. Their guest alone was gay,
ironical, at her ease, and never at a loss for a topic. Sabran
looked at her now and then with absolute wonder coming over
him as to whether he had not dreamed of that evening in
Paris, alone beside her, with the smell of the jessamine and
orange-buds, and the moonbeams crossing her white throat,
her auburn curls. Was it possible that a woman lived with such
incredible self-control, insolence, shamelessness ? There was
not a shadow of consciousness in her regard, not a moment
of uneasiness in her manner. Except the one passing faint
flush which had come on her face at his words of greeting,
there was not a single sign that she was other than the most

WA NDA, 449

innocdnt of women. The impatienoe, the disgast, the amaze-
ment which were in him were too strong for his worldly tact
and composure altogether to conquer them ; his eyes were
downcast, his words were studied or irrelevant, his discompo-
isure was evident ; he felt as reluctant to meet the gaze of
his wife as that of his enemy. In vain did he endeavor to
sustain equably the airy nothings of the usual dinner-table
conversation. He was sensible of an effort too great for art
to •x>ver it ; he felt that there was a strange sound in his
voice, he fancied the very men waiting upon him must be
conscious of hb embarrassment. If he could have turned her
out of the house he would have been at peace, for, after all,
her offences were much greater than his own ; but to be com-
pelled to sit motionless whilst she called his wife caressing
names, broke her bread, and would sleep under her roof, was
absolute torture to him.

When they went back again to the white-room he sat down
at the piano, glad to find a temporary refuge in music from
the embarrassment of her presence.

" He cannot have spoken to Wanda ?" she thought, uneasy
for the first time, as she glanced at Sabran, who was playing
with his usual maestria a concerto of Schubert's. With the
plea that her long journey post had fatigued her, she asked
leave to retire when half an hour had elapsed, filled with scien-
tific and intricate melody, which had spared them the effort of
further conversation. Her host and hostess accompanied her
to the guest-chambers, with the courtesy which was an antique
custom of the Schloss, as of all Austrian country-houses. Their
leave-taking on the threshold was cold, but studied in polite-
ness ; the door closed on her, and Sabran and his wife returned
along the corridor together.

His heart beat heavily with apprehension: he dreaded her
next word. To his relief, to his surprise, she said simply to
him, —

" It is very early. I will go and write to Roth wand about
the mines. Will you come and tell me again all you said
about them ? I have half forgotten. Or, if you would rather
do nothing to-night, I have other letters to look over, and I
will go to my own room."

" I will come there," he said ; and, though he was well used
to her strong self-control and forbearance, he felt amazed at
dd 33*

450 WANDA.

Ihe f(/rce of these now, and was moved to a passioDate gra*:.
tude. " Any other woman," he thought, " would have to
me asunder to know what there has been between me and
gu 38t. She does not even speak ; and yet God knows b(
she loves me 1 She trusts me, and she will not weary mo,
importune me, nor seem to suspect me with doubt. W
shall be worthy of that ? How can I rid her house of tl
insult? The other shall go: she shall go if I put her
with public shame before my servants. Would to hea^
that to kill such as she is were no more murder than
slay a vicious beast or a poisonous worm I"

He followed his wife into the octagon room, where all bcr

private papers were. There were details of a mine in Oalz icia
which were disquieting and troublesome ; on the previous ■ day
they had agreed together what to do, but before she had an-
swered her inspector, fresh details had come in by the post-l ~)ag,
whilst he had been chamois-hunting. She sat down and han. ^ed
him these fresh reports.

'* I do not think there is anything that will alter your do-
ciaions," she said. " But read them, and tell me, and I ^^ili
then write.'*

He drew the documents from her, and began to pc^cnise
them, but his hand shook a little as he held the papers; liu
eyes were not clear, his mind was not free. He laid t'B::ieni
down and looked at her ; she was seated near him. She "^^
paler than usual, and her face was grave, but she seemed qf^ito
absorbed in what she did, as she added figures together snd
made a quick precis of the reports she had received. Her M
hand lay on the table as she wrote ; on the great dhraond
of the hague tValliance^ the only gift which he had presumed
to offer her on their marriage, the light was sparkling: h
looked like a cluster of dewdrops on a lily. He took thai
hand on a sudden impulse of infinite reverence, and raised it
to his lips.

She looked at him, and a mist of tears came in her ey«
that were tears of pleasure, of relief, of restrained emotion
comforted ; the gesture gave her all the reassurance that she
cared to have ; she was sure then that Olga Brancka had
never made him false to his honor and hers. She said nothing
to him of what was foremost in the minds of both. She held
the value of silenpe )iig|i* She thought that there were things

WANDA. 451

of wbiob merely to speak seemed a species of dishonor. A
single word ill said is so often the *^ little rifl within the lute
which makes the music dumb."

She went to rest content ; but he was none the less ill at
dase, disturbed, offended, and violently offended, at the pres-
ence of his temptress under the roof of Uohenszalras. It was
Ein outrage to all he loved and respected, — an outrage to which
he was determined to put an end. The only possible way to do
so was to see her himself alone. He could not visit her in her
apartments ; he could not summon her to his ; if he waited
for chance he might wait for days. The insolence which had
brought her here would probably, he reasoned, keep her here
Bome time, and he was resolved that she should not pass an-
other night in the same house with his wife and his chil-
dren.

Xiong afler Wanda had gone to sleep he sat alone, thinking
and perplexing himself with many a scheme, each of which he
dismissed as impracticable and likely to draw that attention
from his household which he most desired to avoid. He slept
ill, scarcely at all, and rose before daybreak : when he was
dressed he sent his man to ask Greswold to come to him. The
old physician, who usually got up before the sun, soon obeyed
bis summons, and anxiously inquired what need there was of
him.

^^ Dear professor,'* said Subran, with that gracious kindliness
which always won his listener's heart, *^ you were my earliest
iriend here ; you are the tutor of my sons ; you are an old
man, a wise man, and a prudent man. I want you to under-
stand something without my explaining it : I do not desire or
intend the Countess Brancka to be the guest of my wife for
another day."

Greswold looked up quickly: he knew the character of
Stefan Brancka's wife, he guessed the rest.

" What can I do ?" he said, simply. " Pray command
me."

" Do this," said Sabran. " Make some excuse to see her ;
saj that the chaplain, or that my wife, has sent you, say any-
thing you choose to get admitted to her rooms in the visitors'
gallery. When you see her alone, say to her frankly, brutally
if you like, that I say she must leave Uohenszalras. She can
make any excuse she pleases, invent any dispatch to recall her-

452 WAt^DA.

self, but sbe must go. I do not pretend to put any gloss Tip<Ml
it ; I do not wish to do so. I want her to know that I do not
permit her to remain under the same roof with my wife."

The old physician's face grew grave and troubled ; he fore-
saw difficulty and pain for those whom he loved and to whom
he owed his bread.

" I am to give her no explanation ?" he said, doubtf\illy.

" She will need none," said Sabran, curtly.

Greswold was mute. After a pause of some moments, ho
■aid, with hesitation, —

'* By all I have heard of the Countess Branoka, I am much
afraid she will not be moved by such a message delivered by
any one so insignificant as myself; but what you desire me to
do I will do, only I pray you do not blame me if I fail. You
are, of course, indifferent to her certain indignation, to her
possible violence?"

" I am indifferent to everything," said Sabran, with rising
impatience, " except to the outrage which her presence here is
to the Countess von Szalras."

^' Allow me one question, my marquis," said Greswold.
*^ Is our lady your wife aware that the presence of her cousin's
wife is an indignity to herself?"

Sabran hesitated.

** Yes and no," he answered, at last. "She knew some-
thing in Paris, but she does not know or imagine all, nor a
tithe part, of what Madame Brancka is."

** I go at once," said the old man, without more words,
" though of course the lady will not be awake for some hours.
I will ask to see her maids. I shall learn then when I can
with any chance of success get admittance. You wi4I not
write a word by me ? Would it not offend her less ?"

" I desire to offend her," said Sabran, with a vibration of
intense passion in his voice. " No ; I will not write to her.
She is a woman who has studied Talleyrand : she would hang
you if she had a single line from your pen. If I wrote, Gt)d
knows what evil she would not twist out of it. She hates me
and she hates my wife. It must be war to the knife."

Greswold bowed and went out, asking no more.

Sabran passed the next three hours in a state of almost
uncontrollable impatience.

It was the pleasant custom at Hohenszalras for every one

WAiXDA, 453

lo baTo their first meal in their own apartmetits at any houi
Uiat they chose, but he and Wanda usually breakfasted to-
gether by choice in the little Saxe room, when the weather
was cold. The cold without made the fire-glow dancing on
the embroidered roses, and the gay Watteau panels, and the
carpet of lambs' skins, and the coqu€!ttish Meissen shepherds
and shepherdesses, seem all the warmer and more cheerful by
contrast. Here he had been received on the first morning of
his visit to Hohcnszalras ; here they had breakfasted in the
early days aflcr their marriage ; here they had a thousand
happy memories.

Into that room ho could not go this morning. lie sent his
yalet with a message to his wife, saying that he would remain
in his own room, being fatigued from the sport of the previous
day. When they brought him his breakfast he could not
touch it. He drank a little strong coffee and a great glass of
iced water ; he could take nothing else. He paced up and
down his own chambers in almost unendurable suspense. If
he had been wholly innocent he would have been less agitated,
but he could not pardon himself the mad imprudences and
follies with which he had pandered to the vanities and pro-
yoked the passions of this hateful woman. If she refused to
go he almost resolved to tell all as it had passed to his wife,
not sparing himself. The three or four hours that went by
after Oreswold had left him appeared to him like whole, long,
tedious days.

The men came as usual to him for his orders as to horses,
sport, or other matters, but he could not attend to them ; he
hardly even heard what they said, and dismissed them im-
patiently. When at last the heavy, slow tread of the old phy-
sician was heard in the corridor, he went eagerly to his door,
and himself admitted Grcswold.

The professor spread out his hands with a deprecating
gesture.

" I have done my best. But may I never pass such a
quarter of an hour again 1 She will not go.'*

" She will not ?" Sabran's face flushed darkly, his eyes
kindled with deep wrath. " She defies me, then ?'*

" She evidently deems herself strong enough to defy you.
She laughed at me ; she spok 3 to me as though 1 were one of
ihe scullions or the sweepers ; she menaced me as if we wer«

454 WANDA.

still in the Middle Ages. Id a word, she is not to be moved
by me. She bade me tell you that if you wish her out of
your wife*s house you must have the courage to say so
yourself."

*' Courage 1" echoed Sabran. " It is not courage that will
be any match for her ; rt is not courage that will rid one of
her ; she knows the difficulty in which I am. I cannot be-
tray her to her husband. No man can ever do that. I can*
not risk a quarrel, a scandal, a duel, with the relatives of my
wife. I cannot put her out of the house, as I might do if
she had no relationship with the V^s5,rhely and the Szalras.
She knows that ; she relies upon it.''

" My lord," said the physician, very gently, " will you
pardon me one question ? Is the offence done to the Countess
von Szalras by Madame Brancka altogether on her side?
Are you wholly (pardon me the word) wholly blameless?"

" Not altogether," said Sabran, frankly, with a deep color
on his face. " I have been culpable of folly, but in the
sense you mean I have been quite guiltless. If I had been
guilty in that sense, I would not have returned to Hohen-
szalras I"

" I thank you for so much confidence in me," said Gres-
wold. " I only wanted to know so far, because I would sug-
gest that you should send for Prince Egon and simply tell
him as much as you have told me. Egon Vks^^rhely is the
soul of honor, and he has great authority over the members
of his own family. He will make his sister-in-law leave here
without any scandal."

'* There are reasons why I cannot take Prince y^sh,rhely
into my confidence in this matter," said Sabran, with hesita-
tion. ** That is not to be thought of for a moment. Is there
no other way ?"

" See her yourself. She imagines you will not, perhaps
ihe thinks you dare not, say thepe things to her yourself."

" See her alone ? What will my wife suppose ?"

" Would it not be better frankly to say to my lady that
you have need to see her so ? Pardon me, my dear lord, but
I am quite sure that the straight way is the best to take with
our Countess Wanda. The only thing which she might very
bitterly resent, which she might perhaps never forgive, would
be concealment, insincerity, want of good faith. If you will

WANDA, 45fi

allow me to counsel you, I would most strongly advocate your
saying honestly to her that you know that of Madame
Brancka which makes you hold her an unfit guest here,
and that you are ahout to see that lady alone to induce her
to leave the castle without open rupture/'

Sahran listened, stung sharply in his conscience hy every
one of the simple and honest words. When Qreswold spoke
of his wife as ready to pardon any offences except those of
fidseness and concealment, his soul shrank as the flesh shrinks
from the touch of caustic.

"You are right," he said, with effort. "But, my dear
Oreswold, though I am not absolutely guilty, as you were led
for a moment to think, I am not absolutely blameless. I was
sensible of the fatal attraction of an unscrupulous person. I
was never &ithles8 to my wife, either in spirit or act, but
you know there are miserable sensual temptations which coun-
terfeit passion, though they do not possess it ; there are un-
speakable follies from which men at no age are safe. I do not
wish to be a coward like the father of mankind, and throw
the blame upon a woman, but it is certain that the old answer
is often still the true one, ' The woman tempted me.' I am
not wholly innocent ; I played with fi^re, and was surprised,
like an idiot, when it burnt me. I would say as much as this
to my wife (and it is the whole truth) if it were only myself
who would be hurt or lowered by the telling of it ; but 1 can-
not do her such dishonor as I should seem to do by the mere
rdfttion of it. She esteems me as so much stronger and
inser than I am ; she has so very noble an ideal of me : how
oan I pull all that down with my own hands, and say to her,
^ I am as weak and unstable as any one of them' ?"

Grcswold listened and smiled a little.

" Perhaps the countess knows more than you think, deal
rir : she is capable of immense self-control, and her feeling foi
jou is not the ordinary selfish love of ordinary women. If ]
were you I should tell her everything. Speak to her as you
speak to me." .

" I cannot 1"

" That is for you to judge, sir," said the old physician.

'^ I cannot!" repeated Sabran, with a look of infinite dis-
troes. " I cannot tell my wife that any other woman has had
influence on me, even for five seconds. I think it is St. Au-

456 WANDA.

gusiine who says that it is possible, in the endeavor to b^
truthful, to convey an entirely false impression. An utterly
false impression would be conveyed to her if I made her sup-
pose that any other than herself had ever been loved by me
in any measure since my marriage ; and how should one make
such a mind as hers comprehend all the baseness and fever
and folly of a man's mere oaprice of the senses ? It would
be impossible."

Greswold was silent.

*' You do not see how difficult oven such a confession as
that would be," Sabran insisted, with irritation. " Were you
in my place you would feel as I feel."

" Perhaps," said Greswold. " But I believe not. I be-
lieve, sir, that you underrate the knowledge of the world and
of humanity which the Countess von 8zalras possesses, and
that you also underrate the extent of her sympathy and the
elasticity of her pardon."

Sabran sighed restlessly.

" I do not know what to do. One thing only I know,—
the wife of Stefan Brancka shall not remain here."

" Then, sir, you must be the one to say so or to write it.
She will heed no one except yourself. Perhaps it is natural.
I am nothing more in the sight of a great lady like that than
Hubert or Otto would be. She does not think I am of fit
station to go to her as your ambassador."

" You would dbown her if she were your daughter I" said
Sabran, with bitter contempt " Well, I will see her. I will
say a word to the Countess von Szalras first."

" Say all," suggested Greswold.

Sabran shook his head and passed quickly through the suite
of sleeping- and dressing-chambers to the little Saxe talon^
where he thought it possible that Wanda might still be. lie
found her there alone. She had opened one of the casements,
and was speaking with a gardener. The autumnal scent of wet
earth and fallen leaves came into the room ; the air without
was cold, but sunbeams were piercing the mist; the darkness
of the cedars and the yews made the airy and brilliant grace
of the eighteenth-century room seem all the brighter. She
herself, in a sacque of brocaded silk, with quantities of old
French lace falling down it, seemed of the time of those gra-
iioas ladies that were painted on the parcels. She turned aa

WAR DA. 45;

she heard his step, a red rose in her fingers which she had jiial
gathei'ed from tlie boughs about the windows.

" The last rose of the year, I am afraid ; for I never coudi
those of the hot-houses," she said, as she brought it to him.

He kissed her hand as he took it from her ; she suddenly
perceived the expression of distress and of preoccupation on
his face.

" Is there anything the matter ?" she asked ; " did you over-
itrain yourself yesterday on the hills ?"

" No, no," he said, quickly, then added, with hesitation,
'* Wanda, I have to see Madame Brancka alone this morning.
Will you be angered, or will you trust me ?"

For a moment her eyebrows drew together, and the
haughtier, colder look that he dreaded came on her face, —
the look that came there when her children disobeyed or hei
stewards offended her, the look which told how, beneath the
womanly sweetness and serenity of her temper, were the im-
perious habit and the instincts of authority inherited from
centuries of dominant nobility. In another instant or two she
had controlled her impulse of displeasure. She said, gravely,
bat very gently, —

" Of course I trust you. You know bcs^ what you wish,
what you are called on to do. Never think that you need
give explanation or ask permission to or of me. That is
Dot the man's part in marriage."

" But I would not have you suspect "

'* I never suspect," she said, more haughtily. " Suspicion
degrades two people. Listen, my love. In Paris I saw, 1
heArd, more than you thought. The world never leaves one
in ignorance or in peace. I neither suspected you nor spied
upon you. I left you free. You returned to me, and I knew
then that I had done wisely I could never comprehend the
passion and pleasure that some women take in hawks only
kept by a hood, in hounds only held by a leash. What is
allegiance worth unless it be voluntary ? For the rest, if the
wife of my cousin be a worse woman than I think, do not tell
me 80. I do not desire to know it. She was the idol of my
dead brother's youth ; she once entered this house as his bride.
Hor honor is ours."

A flush passed over her husband's face. ^* You are the
noblest woman that lives," he said, in a hushed aud reverent
xj &9

\

458 WANDA.

voice. He stooped almost timidly and kissed her ; ihen ^^
bowed very low, as though she were a queou and he her co- '^''
tier, and left her.

" That devil shall leave her house before another nigb^*^ ^ ^*
down r* he said in his own thoughts, as he took his way aci . ^ ro^
the great building to Olga Brancka's apartments. He had the

red autumn rose she had gathered in his hand as he we^-^ cut.
Instinctively he slipped it within his coat as he drew near ■ the

doore of the guests' corridor : it was too sacred for hiin to he ^Mznave
it made the subject of a sneer or of a smile.

Wanda remained in the little Watteau room. A cert^r^' "nrtain
sense of fear — a thing so unfamiliar, so almost unknowi
her — came upon her as the flowered satin of the door-hi
ings fell behind him, and his steps passed away down
passages without. The bright pictured panels of the si
herds in court suits, and the milkmaids in hoops and pani*
smiling amidst the sunny landscapes of their artificial Ai
dia ; the gay and courtly figures of the Meissen china, ;
the huge bowls, filled with the gorgeous deep-hued flo!
the autumn season ; the singing of a little wren perched
branch of a yew, the distant trot of ponies' feet as the chil(
rode along the unseen avenues, the happy barking of dogs
were going with them, the smell of wet grass and of Icl ii 'ivog
freshly dropped, the swish of a gardener's birch broom sw«»- "eop-
ing the turf beneath the cedars, — all these remained on
mind for ever afterwards, with that cruel distinctness wl
always paints the scene of our last happy hours in such ui
ing colors on the memory of the brain. She never, from
day, willingly entered the pretty chamber, with its air
coquetry and stateliness, and its little gay court of porce^ ^*in
people. She had gathered there the last rose of the year^

CHAPTER XXXIL

He was so passionately angered against the invader of ^^ **
domestic peace, he was so profoundly touched by the nobi I ^- '
and faith of his wife, that he went to Olga Brancka's pres^*^^ j
without fear or hesitation, possessed only by a man's nat«^

WANDA. 45.>

md hoDOst indignation at an insult passed upon (?hat ho most
venerntcd upon earth.

Ono of his own servants, who was seated in tho corridor, in

readiness for the Countess Brancka's orders, flung wide the

door which opened into tho vestibule of the suite of guest-

chambers allotted to this most hated guest, and said to his

• master, —

" Tho most noble lady bade me say that she waited for your
Excellency.'*

" The braien wretch !'' murmured Sabran, as he crossed the
antechamber and entered the small saloon adjoining it, — a room
hung with Flemish tapestries and looking out on the Szal-
rassee.

Olga Brancka was seated in one of the long low tapestried
chairs : she did not move or speak as he approached : she only
looked up with a smile in her eyes. He wished she would
have risen in fury ; it would have made his errand easier. It
was difficult to say to her in cold blood that which he had to
say. But he loathed her so utterly as he saw her indolent
and graceful posture, and the calm smile in her eyes, that he
was indififerent how he shoul i hurt her, what outrage he should
offer to her. He went straight up to whdre she sat, and with-
out any preface said, almost brutally, —

" Madame Brancka, you affected not to understand my mes-
sage through Greswold ; you will not misunderstand me now
when I repeat that you must leave the house of my wife be-
fore another night.*'

" Ah !** said Olga Brancka, with nonchalance, moving tho
Indian bangles on her wrist, and gazing calmly into tho air.
" I am to leave the house of your wife, — of my cousin, who
was once my sister-in-law ? And will you tell me why ?"

Sabran flushed with passion.

" You have a short memory, I believe, countess ; at least
your lovers have said so in Paris," he answered, recklessly.
*' But I think if your remembrance could carry you back to
the last evening I had the honor to see you in your hotel,
you will not force me to the brutality and coarseness of fur-
ther explanation."

" Ah !" she said tranquilly once more, in an unvaried tone,
clasping her hands behind her head and having both back-
ward against tho cushions of her chair, whilot her eyes still

4 GO WANDA,

smiled w\th an abstracted gaze. " How scrupulous yon an
about trifles! Wby not about great things, my friend?
What does Holy Writ tell us ? One strains at a gnat and
svvallows a camel. I have heard a professor of Hebrew say
that the Latin translation is not correct, but "

'^ Madame,'' said Sabran, sternly, controlling his rage with
diflSculty, " pardon me, but I can have no trifling. I giw
vou time and occasion to make any excuses that you please,
but, once for all, you will leave here before nightfall."

** Ah 1" said Olga Brancka, for the third time; ^^aod if I
do not choose to comply with your desire, how do you iuteod
to enforce it ?"

" That will be my affair."

" You will make a scone with my husband ? That will
be theatrical and useless. Stefan is one of those men who
are always swearing at their wives in piivate, but in public
never admit that their wives are otherwise than saints. Those
men do not mind being cheated, but they will never let others
say that they are so : amour-propre d'homme.**

Sabran could have struck her. He reined in his wrath
with more difficulty every moment.

** I have no doubt your psychology is correct, and has taught
you all the weaknesses of our idiotic sex," he said, bitterly*
^^ But you must pardon me if I cannot spare time to listen to
your experiences. The Countess von Szalras is aware that I
have come to visit you, and I tell you frankly that I will not
stay more than ten minutes in your rooms."

** You have told her?"

A wicked gleam flashed from under her half-shut eyelids*

"I would have told her, — told her all," said Sabran,--
" but she stopped me with my words unspoken. What think
you she said, madame, of you, who are the vilest enemy, the
only enemy, she has ? That if you had graver faults than
she knew, she wished not to hear them ; you were her relativa.
and once had been her brother's wife.'*

His voice had sternness and strong emotion in it He
looked to see her touched to some shame, some humiliation.
But she only laughed a little languidly, not changing hei
attitude.

" Poor Wanda I" she said, softly ; " she was always so ex-
•ggerated, — so terribly mot/enrage and heroic i"

WANDA. 461

The Tcins sweLed on his forehead with his endeavor to keep
down his rago. He did not wish to honor this woman hj
bringing his wife's namo into their contention, and he strove
not to forget the sex of his antagonist.

** Madame Brancka/' he said, with a coldness and calmness
which it cost him hard to preserve, " this conversation is of
no use that I can see. L came to tell you a hard fact, simply
this, that you must leave Hohenszalras within the next few
hours. As the master of thb house, I insist on it.''

" But how will you accomplish it ?"

^' I will compel you to go," said Sabran, between his teeth,
•* if I disgrace you publicly before all my whole household.
The fault will not be mine. I have endeavored to spare you ;
but if you be so dead to all feeling and decency as to think it
possible that the same roof can shelter you and my wife, I
must undeceive you, however roughly."

She heard him patiently and smiled a little. ** Disgrace
me f" she echoed, gently. *' Count Brancka will kill you.**

Sabran signified by a gesture that the possibility was pro*
foundly indifferent to him. He turned to leave her.

" Understand me plainly," he said, as he moved away. " I
leave it at your option to invent any summons, any excuse, as
your reason for your departure ; but if you do not announce
your departure for this aflernoon, I shall do what I have said.
I have the honor to wish you good -morning."

'' Wait a moment," said Madame Brancka, still very soflly.
" Are you judicious to make an enemy of me ?"

•• I much prefer you as an enemy," said Sabran, curtly ; and
he added, with contemptuous irony, "your friendship is far
more perilous than your animosity ; your compliments are like
the Borgias* banquets."

*' Ah I" said Olga Brancka, once again, " you are ungrateful,
like all men, and you are not very wise, either. You forget
that I am the sister-in-law of Egon VJisJlrhely."

Sabran could never hear that name mentioned without a
certain inward tremor, a self-consciousness which he could not
entirely conceal. But he was infuriated, and he answered,
with reckless scorn, —

" Prince Vh^ilrhely is a man of honor. He would disown
you if he knew that you offer yourself with the shamelessness
of a diclassSe, and that you outrage a noble and unsuspecting

39^

462 WANDA.

woman by forcing yourself into her home when you h
failed in tempting her huAband to offor her the last dishonc

Her face paled under the unveiled and unsparing insi
but she did not lose her equanimity.

" We are very like a scene of Sardou's/* she said, with hci

unchan^^cable smile. " You would have made your fort^^ —une
on the boards of the Frangais. Why did you not gn tlK~~ ^icre
instead of calling yourself Marquis de Sabran? It wuKL_3ould
have been wiser."

lie felt as if a knife had been plunged through his loir ^ns;
all the color lefl his face. Had V^rhely told her f
it was impossible. They were mere chance words of a woi
eager to insult, not knowing what she said. Ho affected
to hear, and with a bow to her ho moved once more to U
the chamber. But her voice again arrested him.

^' Tell me one thing before you go," she said, very gec^^EJitly,
" Docs Wanda know that you are Vassia Kaz4n ?"

She spoke with perfect moderation and simplicity, not a^ :^lcr-

ing her posture as she lay back in her tapestried chair, but sho

watched him with trepidation. She was not altogether suit)
of facts she had half guessed, half gathered. She had pi^ eeed
details together with infinite skill, but sho could not be bc^iW
lutely certain of her conclusions. She watched him 'with
eager avidity beneath her smiling calmness. If he showc^<f uq
consciousness, her cast was wrong ; she would miss her toq.
geance ; she would remain in his power. But at a glance? ah^
saw her shaft, had pierced straight home. Ho had strong con.
trol and even strong power of dissimulation in need ; but> thai
name thrown at him stunned him as a stone might have done.
His face grew livid, he stood motionless, he had no Msehjod
ready, he was taken off his guard : all he realized was that h'a
ruin was in the grasp of his mortal foe. His hold on ber wag
lost. His authority, his strength, his dignity, all fell before
those two hateful words, " Vassia Kazdn I'*

^* He has told her !" he thought, and the blood surgnd in
his brain and made him dazed and giddy. He had not told
her. By private investigation, by keen wit, by careful aud
cruel comparison of various information, she hud arrived at
the conclusion that Vassia Kazdn and he who had come frr^m
Mexico as the grandson of the Marquis Xavier d& Sabrao
were one and the same. Certain she could not bo, but skf

WANDA. 468

was near cnoagh to certainty to dare to cast bci atone at a
venture. If it missed — ^she was a woman. He could not kill
or harm a woman, or call her to account.

Even now, if he had preserved his composure and turned
on her with a calm challenge, she would have been powerless.

But he had lost the habit of falsehood ; self-consciousness
made him weak; he believed that Egon V53h,rhely had be-
traved him. His lips were mute, his tongue seemed to cleave
to nis mouth. A less keen-sighted woman would have read
oonfusion on his face. She was satisfied.

*' You have not answered my question," she said, quietly.
^ Does Wanda know it ? Does such a saintly woman * com-
pound a felony' ? I believe a false name is a sort of felony, is
it not r

He breathed heavily ; his eyes had a terrible look in them ;
he put his hand to his heart. For a moment the longing as-
sailed him to spring upon her and throttle her as a man may
a dangerous beast. He could not speak; a leaden weight
seemed to shut his lips.

He never doubted that she knew his whole history from
Viiskrhely.

" It was an ingenious device," she pursued, in her honeyed,
even tones, "but it was scarcely wise. Things are always
fouui X t some time or another ; at least, men's secrets are. A
woman can keep hers. My dear friend, you are really a crim-
inal. It is very strange that Wanda of all people should have
made such a misalliance and had such an imposture passed ofif
on her I I belong to her family ; I ought to abhor you ; and
yet I can imagine your temptation if I cannot forgive it.
StiU, it was a foolish thing to do, not worthy a man of your
wit; and in France, I believe, the punishment for such an
assumption is some years' imprisonment, and here, you know
(perhaps you do not know ?), your marriage would be null
and void if she chose."

He made a movement towards her, and for the moment,
though she was a woman of great courage, her spirit quailed
before the look she met.

" Hold your peace I" he said, savagely. " Speak truth, if
you can. What has V5,skrhely told you ?"

y^^rliely had told her nothing, but she looked him fulJ in
ihe face with perfect serenity and answered, ^^ All f

464 WANDA.

He never doubted her, ho coald not doubt her : what Aa
paid was met by too full confirmatioQ from his memory and
his coDscicncc.

" He gave me his word," he muttered.

She sftiiled. '^ His word to you^ when he is in love with
your wife ? The minicle is that he has not told her. She
would divorce you, and after a decent interval I dare say she
would marry him, if only poar hcdaycr la chose. For a man
BO devoted to her as you are, you have certainly contrived to
outrage and injure her in the most complete manner, i^"
bean marquis ! to think how fooled we all were all the time by
you I How haughty you were, how fastidious, how patrician 1*

He leaned against the high column of the enamelled stove
and covered his eyes with his hands. He was unnerved, QQ-
strung, half paralyzed. The blow had fallen on him without
{•reparation or defence being possible to him. His thoughts
were all in confusion ; one thing alone he knew, — he, and all
he loved, were in the power of a merciless woman, who would
no more spare them than the sloughi astride the antelope will
let go its quivering flesh.

Slic looked at him, and a contemptuous wonder came upoa
her that a man could be so easily beaten, so easily betrayed
into tacit confession. She ignored the power of conscioooe,
for she did not know it herself.

She thought with scorn, " Why did ho not deny, deny
boldly, as I should have done in his place ? He would have
twisted my weapon out of my hand at once. I know so littlOt
and I could prove nothing I But he is unnerved at onco,
just because it Ls true! Men are all imbeciles. If holuui
only denied and questioned me, he must have found that
Egon had told me nothing."

And she watched him with derision.

In truth, she knew so little ; she had scarce more to guide
!ier than coincidence and conjecture. She longed to kuow
everything from himself, but, strong as was her curiosity, hei
prudence and her cruelty were stronger still, and she admirabl)
assumed a knowledge that she had not, guided in all her dag*
ger-strokes by the suffering she caused.

Yet her passion for him which, unslaked, was as ardent as
ever, became not the less, but the greater, because she had
him in her power. She was one of those women to whom

WANDA, 465

lore 18 only delightful if it possess the means to torture.
Besides, it was not him whom she hated : it was his wife.
To make him faithless to his wife would he a more exquisite
triumph than to betray him to her.

" He would be wax in my hands," she thought. A vision
of the future passed before her, with her dominion absolute
over him, her knowledge of his shame holding him down with
a chain never to be broken. She would compel him to wound,
to deceive, to torment his wife ; she would dictate his every
word, his every act ; she would make him ridiculous to the
world, so servile should be his obedience to her, so great should
be his terror of her anger. He should be her lover, weak as
water in all semblance, because the puppet of her pleasure.
This would be a vengeance worthy of herself when she should
see him kneel at her feet for permission for every slightest
act, and she should scourge him as with whips, knowing he
dare not rise ; when she should say softly in his ear a thousand
times a year, " You are Vassia Kaz4n !"

She was silent a few moments, lost in the witchery of the
vision she conjured up ; then she looked up at him and said,
very caressingly, in her sweetest voice, —

" Why are you so dejected ? Your secret may be safe with
me. You know — you know — I was willing ever to be your
friend ; I am not less willing now. I told you that you were
unwise to make an enemy of me. Wanda's regard would not
outlive such a trial, but perhaps mine may, if you be discern-
ing enough, grateful enough, to trust to it. I know your crime,
for a crime it is, and a foul one : we must not attempt to pal-
liate it. When we last met, you offended, you outraged me.
Only a few moments since you insulted me as though I were
the lowest creature on the Paris asphalte. Yet all this I — I
•—should be tempted to forgive if you love me as I believe
that you do. I love yow, not as that cold, calm, unerring
woman yonder may, but as those only can who know and care
for no heaven but earth. R6nc — Vassia — who, knowing your
sin, your shame, your birth, your treachery, would say to you
what I say ? Not Wanda I"

He seemed not to hear ; he did not hear. He leaned his
forehead upon his arms ; he was sunk in the apathy of an
intense woe ; only the name of his wife reached him, and he
shivered a little as with cold.

466 WANDA,

At his silence, his indifference, her eyes grew alight
flame, but she controlled herself; she rose and clasped J
hands upon his arm.

" Listen," she murmured. " T love you, I love you I I a
kiothing what you were born, what sins you have siunec^i;
love you I Love me, and she shall never know. I will sift, ^m
Egon. I will bury your secret as though it were one tk
would cost me my life were it known."

Only at the touch of her hands did he arouse himself to
any consciousness of what she was saying, of how she ieia.'pted
him. Then he shook off her clasp with a rude gesture ; be
looked down on her with the bitterest of scorn : not for a
single instant did he dream of purchasing her silence so.

" You are even viler than I thought," he said in his throitj
with a dreary laugh of mockery. ** How long would yon
spare me if I sinned against her with you ? Go, do jonr
worst, say your worst I But if you stay beneath my wife's
roof to-night, I will drive you out of the house before all her
people, if it be my last act of authority in Hohenszalras !"

** I love you I" she murmured, and almost knelt to him;
but he thrust her away from him, and stood erect, his arms
folded on his chest.

" How dare you speak of love to me ? You force me to
employ the language of the gutter. If Egon V^t\rhelj have
put me in your power, use it, like the incarnate fiend you are.
I ask no mercy of you, but if you dare to speak of love to
me I will strangle you where you stand. Since you call me
the wolf of the steppes, you shall feel my grip."

She fell a few steps backward and stretched her hand be-
hind her, and rung a little silver bell. Absorbed in his own
bitterness of thought, he did not hear the sound or see tho
movement. She had already, between Greswold's visit to hei
and his master's, written a little letter :

" Loved Wanda, — Will you be so good as to come to »•
for a moment at once ? — Yours,

Olga."

She had said to one of her women, who was in the next
apartment, " When I ring you will take that note at once to
my cousin, the countess, yourself, without coming to me." Sh6

WANDA, 467

had had no fear of leaving the woman in the adjoining room,
who was a Russian wholly ignorant of the French tongue,
which she herself always used.

She recoiled from him, frightened for the moment, but only
for that ; she had nerves of steel, and many men had cursed
her and menaced her for the ruin of their lives, and she had
lived on none the worse. " On crie — et puis c^ est fini^^^ she
was wont to say, with her airy cynicism. Something in his
Jook, in his voice, told her that here it would not finish thus.

" He will shoot himself if he do not strangle me, and he
ivill escape so,*' she thought, and a faint sort of fear touched
her. She was alone before him ; she had said enough to
drive him out of all calmness and all reason. She had Icfb
him nothing to hope for ; she had made him believe that she
knew all his fatal past. If he had struck her down into the
dauibness of death he would have been scarcely guilty.

But it was only for a moment that such a dread as this
passed over her.

" Pshaw 1 we are people of the world," she thought. " Society
is with us even in our solitude. Those violent crimes are not
ours : we strike otherwise than with our hands."

And, reassured, she sank dowti into her chair again, a deli-
cate figure in a cloud of muslin of the Deccan and old lace of
Flanders, and clasped her fingers gracefully behind her head,
and waited.

He did not move ; his eyes were fastened on her, glitter-
ing and cold as ice, and full of unspeakable hatred. He was
deadly pale. She thought she had never seen his face more
beautiful than in that intense mute wrath which was like the
iron frost of his own land.

" When he goes he will go and kill himself,'* she mused,
and she listened with passionate eagerness for the passing of
steps down the corridor.

But he did not stir : he was absorbed in wondering how he
could deal with this woman so that his wife should be spared.
Was there any way save tbat vile way to which she had
tempted him ? He could seo none. From a passion rejected
and despised there can be no chance of mercy. He had ceased
altogether to think of himself.

To take his own life did not pass over his thoughts then«
It would have spared Wanda nothing. His shame, told

468 WANDA.

when be were dead, would hurt her almost more than wtft<
he were living. He had too much courage to evade so
consequences of his own acts. In the confusion of his nxio
only this one thing was present to it, — the memory of tiX
wife. All that he had dreaded of disgrace, of divorce, af
banishment, of ruin, were nothing to him : what he thoug'b^
of was the loss of her herself, her adoration, her honor, her
Rweet obedience, her perfect faith. Would ever he toucA
even her hand again if once she knew ?

His remorse and his grief for his wife overwhelmed and de-
stroyed every personal remembrance. If to spare her he could
have undergone any extremity of torture, he would have wel-
comed it with rapture. But it is not thus that a false step
can be retrieved, not thus that a false word can be effaced.
It, and the fate it brings, must be faced to the bitter end.

He had no illusions ; he was certain that the woman who
would have tempted him to be false to her would spare her
nothing. He would not even stoop to solicit a respite for her
from Olga Brancka. He knew the only price at which it
could be obtained.

He stood there, leaning his shoulders on the high cornice
of the stove, his arms crossed upon his chest, repressing every
expression of gesture that could have delighted his enemy by
revelation of what he sufi'ered. In himself he felt paralyzed;
ho felt as though neither his brain nor his limbs would ever
serve him again. He had the sensation of having fallen from
a great height, — the same numbness and exhaustion he had
felt when he had dropped down the frozen side of the Umbal
glacier. Both he and she were silent, — he from the stupe-
faction of horror, she from the eagerness with which she waa
listening for the coming of Wanda von Szalras. Afler a
short interval of her thirsty and cruel anxiety, the page, who
was in waiting outside, entered with a note for his master.

Sabran strove to recover his composure as he stretched hia
hand out and took the letter off the salver. It contained cnly
two lines from his wife :

" Olga asks me to come to her. Do you wish me to do so ?"

A convulsion passed over his face.

" Oh I most faithful of all friends !" he thought, with a
pang, touched to the quick by those simple words of a woman
whose fidelity was to be repaid by torture.

WANDA. 469

"Where is the countess ?" he asked of the young servant,
^ho answered that she was in the library.

'^ Say that I will be with her there in a few moments.*'

The page withdrew.

Olga Brancka was mxki% : there was a great anger in her
veiled eyes. Her last stroke had missed, through the loyalty
>£ the woman whom she hated.

He took a step towards her.

" You dared to send for her, then ?"

She laughed aloud and with insolence.

" Dare ? Is that a word to be used by a Russian mottjlky
as you are, to me, the daughter of Fedor Demetrivitch Ser-
riatine ? Certainly I sent for your wife, my cousin. Who
should know what I know, if not she? Egon might make
you what promises he would ; he is a man and a fool. I make
none. If you prevent my seeing Wanda, I shall write to her ;
if you stop her letters, I shall' telegraph to her ; if you stop
the tel^rams, I will put your story in the Paris journals,
where the Marquis de Sabran is as well known as the Arc de
TEtoile. You were born a serf, you shall feel the knout. It
would have been well for you if you had smarted under it in
your youth."

So absorbed was he in the memory of his wife, and in the
thought of the misery about to fall upon her innocent life, that
the insults to himself struck on him harmless, as hail on iron.

" Spare your threats," he said, coldly. " No one shall tell
her but myself. You know her present condition: it will
moBt likely kill her."

'^ Oh, no," said the Countess Brancka, with a little smile.
" Her nerves are of iron. She will divorce you, that is all.*'

" She will be in her right," he said, with the same coldness.
Then, without another word, he turned and lefl her chamber.

" For a bastard, he crows well I" she said, loud enough to
be heard by him, in the old twelfth -century French of the
words she quoted.

Sabran went onward with a quick step : if he had paused, if
he had looked back, he felt that he would have murdered her.

" Talk of the cruelty of men I What beast that lives," he
thobght, ^* has the slow unsparing brutality of a jealoua
woman ?"

He went on, without pausing once, across the great house.

40

470 WANDA.

So much he could spare his wife, he could save her from h ^rJ\ve\
enemy's triumph in her sufferiug ; he could do as men did ^ ^^

the Indian Mutiny, plunge the knife himself into the hesv^^jearl
that loved him, and spare her further outrage.

When he reached the door of the library, he stopped sjm^^^ and
drew a deep breath. He would have gone to his death wi' m ^^raitb
calmness and a smile ; but here he had no courage. A siGs:> jf sick-
ening spasm of pain seemed to suffocate him. He knew tliMrf ^i^that
he met only his j ust punishment. If he could only have suffer tx: ^^red
alone, he would not have rebelled against his doom. But ^^.st to
smite her I

With greater courage than is needed in the battle-field M he

turned the handle of the door and entered. She was seatz^
at one of the writing- tables with a mass of correspondei
before her, to which she had been vainly striving to gw
her attention. Her thoughts had been with him and OH
Brancka. She looked up with the light on her face whr-
always came there when she saw him after any absence, loci:^ Aoug
or short. But that light was clouded as she perceived t^ the
change in his look, in his carriage, in his very features, whr -^: Jiich
were aged and drawn and bloodless. She rose with an exci^ j^gIsl-
mation of alarm, as he came to her across the length of W' the
noble room, where he had first seen her seated by her o-^i^wwn
hearth and heard her welcome him a stranger and unkno '^ci^dwq
beneath her roof.

" Wanda I Wanda I" he said, and his voice seemed strangET "^ied,
his lips seemed dumb.

" My God I what is it ?" she cried, faintly. « Are the

children "

" No, no," he muttered. " The children are well. I- t U

worse than death. Wanda, I have come to tell you the^ «in

of my life, the shame of it. Oh I how will you ever belS^*eve
that 1 loved you, since I wronged you so ?"

A great sob broke down his words.

She put her hand to her heart.

" Tell me," she said, in a low whisper ; " tell me everyth »-og.
Why not have trusted me? Tell me: I am strong."

Then he told her the whole history of his past, and sp^*'^
nothing.

She listened in unbroken silence, standing all the wl»^
leaning one hand upon the ebony table by her.

WANDA. 471

When he had ceased to speak, he buried his face in bia
hands where he knelt at her feet ; he did not dare to look at
her. She was still silent ; her breath came and went with
shuddering effort. She drew her velvet gown from him with
a gesture of unspeakable horror.

" You ! — ^you I" she said, and could find no other word.

Then all grew dark around her ; she threw her arms out
ID the void, and fell &om her full height as a stone drops from
a rock into the gulf below, — struck dumb and senseless for
the first time in all the years that she had lived.

CHAPTER XXXIIL

Twelve hours later she gave premature birth to a male
child, dead. Once in those hours when her physical agony
lulled for a moment and her consciousness returned, she said
to her physician, —

" Tell him to send for Egon. Egon betrays no one."

They were the first words she had spoken. Greswold under-
stood nothing, but he saw that some great calamity had fallen
on those he loved and honored, and that her lord never came
nigh her chamber, but only paced to and fro the corridors and
passages of the house, with restless, ceaseless steps, pausing ever
and again to whisper, " Does she live ?"

'^ Come to her," said the old man once ; but Sabran shud-
dered and turned aside.

" I dare not," he answered ; " I dare not. If she die, it is
I who shall have killed her."

Greswold did not venture to ask what had happened : he
knew it must be some disaster of which the Countess Brancka
was the origin or the messenger.

" My lady has spoken a few words," he said later to his
master. " She bade me tell you to send for Prince V^siirhely .
She said he would betray no one. I could ask nothing, for
her agony returned."

Sabran was silent : the thought came to him for the first
time that it might be possible Olga Brancka had u:4ed tho
name of her brother-in-law falsely.

472 WANDA.

" Send for him yourself," he said, wearily. " What sho
wishes must be done. Nothing matters to me."

" I think the prince is in Vienna," said Greswold ; and he
sent an urgent message thither, entreating Y^s^rhely's im
mediate presence at Hohenszalras, in the name of his cousin,

Olga Brancka remained in her own apartments, uncertain
what to do.

" If Wanda die," she thought, " it will all have been of no
use : he will be neither divorced nor disgraced. Perhaps one
might plead the marriage invalid, and disinherit the children ;
but one would want so much proof, and I have none. If he
had not been so stunned and taken ofif his guard, he might
easily have defied me. Egon may know more, but if W^anda
die he would not move. He would care for nothing on earth.
He would forget the children were Sabran's. He would only
remember they were hers."

No one who loved her could have been more anxious for
Wanda von Szalras to live than was this cruellest of her en-
emies, who passed the time in a perpetual agitation, and, as
her women brought her tidings from hour to hour, testified so
much genuine alternation of hope and terror, that they were
amazed to see so much feeling in one so indifferent usually to
all woes not her own. She was miserably dull ; she had no one
to speak to ; she had no lover, friend, rival, or foe to give her
the stimulant to life that was indispensable to her. Even she
did not dare to approach the man whose happiness she had
ruined, any more than she would have dared to touch a lion
wounded to the death. Yet she could not tear herself away
from the scene of her vengeance.

The whole house was hushed like a grave ; the servants
were full of grief at the danger of a mistress they adored ;
even the young children, understanding that their mother was
in peril, did not play or laugh, but sat unhappy and silent
over their books, or wandered aimlessly along the leafless gar-
dens. They knew that there was something terrible, though
they knew not what.

" What is death ?" said Lili to her brothers.

" It is to go and live with God, they «ay," answered BelA|
doubtfully.

'^ But how can God be happy Himself," said Gela, *' when
ke causes so much sorrow ?"

" Our mother will never go away from us," said the little
Lili, who listened. ^^ They may call her from heaven ever —
ever so much; she will not leave ti«."

Bela sighed : he had a heavy, hopeless impression of death
as a thing that was stronger than himself.

^^ Pride can do naught against death, my little lord," one
of the foresters had once said to him. ^^ You will find your
master there one day."

A day and a night passed; puerperal convulsions succeeded
to the birth of the dead boy, and Wanda was unconscious aliko
of her bodily and her mental torture. The physicians, whom
OreswMd had summoned instantly, were around her bed, grave
and anxious. The only chance for her lay in the magnificent
health and strength with which nature had dowered her. Her
constitution might, they said, enable her to resist what weak-
lier women would have gone down under like boats in an
ocean storm.

It was towards dawn on the second day when Egon V^ar-
hely arrived.

" She lives ?" he said, as he entered.
" That is all," said Greswold, with tears in his voice.
« Can I see her ?"

" It would be useless. She would not know your Excel-
lency."

Sabran came forward from the farther end of the Rittersaal,
where the lights were burning with a yellow glare as the gray
light of the dawn was stealing through the unshuttered win-
dows.

"Allow me the honor of a word with you, prince," he
said. " I understand : you have come at her summons, —
not at mine."

Greswold withdrew and left the n alone. Vks5,rhely was
Btill wrapped in the furs in which he had travelled. He stood
erect and listened : his face was very stern.

" Did you give up my secret to your brother's wife ?" said
Sabran, abruptly.

" Can you ask that ?" said V^krhely. " You had my
word."

" Madame Brancka knows all that you know. She said
that you had betrayed me to her. She would have told
Wanda. I chose sooner to tell her myself. The shock haa

40*

7 i WANDA.

(illod the child. It may kill her. Your sister-in-law is hete
Lf she used your name falsely, it is for you to avenge it.*'

" Tell me what passed between you," said Prince Egon.
His face was dark as night.

Sabran hesitated a moment. Even now he could not bring
himself to disclose the passion which his enemy had conceived
for him. It was one of those women's secrets which no gen-
tleman can surrender to another.

" You are aware/' he replied, " that Madame Brancka has
been always envious of your cousin, always willing to hurt
her. When she got possession of the story of my past, she
used it without mercy. She would have told my wife with
brutality ; I told her myself, hoping to spare her something
by my own confession. Madame Brancka affirmed to me,
twice or thrice over, that you had given her all the informa-
tion against me."

" How could you believe her ? You had had my promise."

" How could I doubt her?"

" It is natural you should know nothing of honor 1" thoughi
Viis^rhely, but he did not utter what he thought. He saw
that, dark as had been the crimes of Sabran against those of
his race, the chastisement of them was as great.

He said simply, —

" You might sooner have doubted anything than have
believed that I should intrust the Countess Brancka with
such a secret and have given her such a power to injure my
cousin. How can she have learnea your history? Have
you betrayed yourself?"

" Never I Since she had it not from you, I cannot conceive
how or where she learned it. Not a soul lives that knows me
as

He paused ; hs could not bring himself to say the name ho
bore from birth.

" My brother is unfortunate," said Vksltrhely, curtly. " He
has wedded a vile woman. Leave her to me."

He saluted Sabran with cold but careful ceremony, and
went to his own apartments. Sabran passed to the corridor
which led to his wife's rooms, and there resumed his miserable
restless walk to and fro before her door. He dared not enter.
[n her conscious hours she had not asked for him. He tad
tver present before his eyes that movement oi' horror, of re-

WANDA. 475

pulsioD, with which she had drawn the hem of her gown
J'rom his grasp.

Now and again, when her attendants came in and out, ho
eaw through the opening of the door the hed on which she
J.ay, and the outline of her form in the pale light of the lump.
e could not rest. He could not even sit down or hreak a
outhful of bread. If she died, his sin against her would
Slave slain her as surely as though his hand had taken her life.
Jt was about six of the dock in the chilly dawn of the autum-
Mkui day.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

EooN VXsXrhely passed the next three hours in menta.
^onflict with his own passions. It would have been precious
to him — would have been a blessed and sacred duty — to
avenge the woman he adored. But he had a harder task.
Por her sake he had to befriend the traitor who had wronged
lier, and shelter him from the just opprobrium of the world.
Crueller combat with temptation none ever waged than he
fought now against his own truest instincts, his own dearest
iiffections. She lay there perchance dying of this treachery,
-which had struck her down in her happiest hours ; and it
seemed to him as if, through the silence of the darkened and
melancholy house, he heard her voice snying to him, " For my
sake, spare him ; spare my children 1"

" I give you more than my life, my beloved 1" he mur-
•mured, as he sat alone, whilst the gray day widened over forest
and mountain, and for her sake prepared to shield the man
who had deceived her from disgrace and death.

" The hound I" he thought. " He should be branded as a
perjurer and thief throughout the world I Yet for her — for
her — one must protect him."

An hour or two later he sent his name to the Countess
Brancka, with a request to be received by her. She was but
then awakening, and heard with astonishment and alarm of
his arrival, so unlocked for and so dreaded. It had never oc-
curred to her as possible that he would come to Hohenszalras.

476 WANDa,

" Wunda must have sent for him !" she thought. " Oh^
heavens I why could she not die with the child 1"

It'was impossible for her to avoid him ; shut up here, she
could neither deceive nor escape him. She could not go away
without her departure being known to the whole household.
She was afraid of him, terribly afraid : the V^sitrhely had a
hand of iron when they were offended or injured. But she put
a fair face on a bitter obligation, and, when she was dressed,
went with a pretty smile into the salon to receive him.

VJlskrhely gave her no greeting as he entered. A great
fear took possession of her as she saw the expression of his
eyes. He was the only living being of whom she was in awe.
He approached her without any observances of courtesy. He
said, simply and sternly, —

^^ I hear that you have used my name falsely to the husband
of Wanda, — that you have dared to give me as your author-
ity for accusations against him. What is your excuse ?"

She was for the moment so bewildered and disturbed by his
presence and his charge that she lost all her ability and power
of interminable falsehood. She was silent, and he saw her
bosom heave and her hands tremble a little.

" What is your excuse ?" he said, again. " Why did you
come into this house to injure Wanda von Szalras? How did
you dare to use my name to do her that injury ?"

She tried to laugh a little, but she was nervous and thrown
off her guard.

^^ I wished to do her a service 1 Since she has married an
adventurer — an impostor — she ought to know it and be free."

" What is your authority for calling the Marquis de Sabran
an adventurer ? To him you employed my name as your au-
thority. What truth was beneath that lie ?"

She was silent. For the only time in her life she knew not
what to say. She had no facts in her hands. Her ground
was too uncertain to sustain her in a steady attitude.

" You know that he is Vassia Kazan I" she said, with an
Other little laugh.

The face of V^sh,rhely revealed nothing.

" Who is Vassia Kaz4n ?" he repeated.

" He is — the man who robbed you of Wanda."

*^ He could not rob me of what I never possessed. What
grounds have you for calling him by this name ?"

WANDA, 477

** I have reason to believe it."

** Keason to believe it I You told him that you heard this
Btory from myself/'

" He never denied it."

" I am not concerned to discuss what he did or did not do.
I come here to know on what grounds you employed my
Dame."

" Egon, I will tell you the truth I"

"Can you?*'

" Yes ; I can and I will. When I was at Tar5c, three
summers ago, I saw a fragment of a letter in Sabran's writing.
I saw the name of Yassia Kazdn. I put this and that to-
gether. I heard something from Russia ; I sent some people
to Mexico. I had always had my suspicions. I do not say
I have any positive legal proof, but I am morally convinced
that he is no Marquis de Sabran, and that he was born a serf
near the city of Kazdn. I have charged him with it, and he
has as good as confessed it. He was struck dumb with con-
sciousness."

She watched the face of VJts^rhely, but it might have been
cast in bronze for anything that it told her.

" You saw a fragment of a letter, of which you knew noth-
ing," he said, coldly ; " you formed some vague suspicions ;
you descended to the use of spies, and, because you have in-
vented a theory of your own on your so-called discoveries, you
deem you have a title to ruin the happiness of your cousin's
home. And you father your work upon me I Often have I
pitied my brother, but never so deeply as now."

" If my so-called discoveries were false," she interrupted,
with hardihood, " why did he not say so ? He was convicted
by his own admissions. If my charge had been baseless,
would he have said that he would tell his wife himself rather
than let her learn it from me ?"

** I neither know nor care what he said," answered Vt\sh,rhely,
*« I have only your version for it. You must pardon me if I
do not attach implicit credence to your word. What I do
know is that you ventured to use my name to give force and
credibility to your accusations. Had you really known for
certainty such a history, you would, had you had any decency
or feeling, have consulted your husband and myself on the
best means of shielding our cousin's honor. But you have

478 WANDA,

always envied and hated her. What is her husband tc you •
what is it to you whether he be a noble or a clown ? You
snatch at the first brand you think you see, in the hope to
scorch her honor with it. But when you used my name
falsely you did a dangerous thing for yourself. I shall waste
no more words upon you, but you will sign what I write new,
or you will repent it."

She affected to laugh.

" My dear Egon, quel ton de maitre ! What authority
have you over me ? Even if you invest yourself in your
brother's, that counts for very little, I assure you."

" Perhaps so ; but if my brother be too careless of his honor
and too credulous of your deceptions, he is yet man enough to
resent such infamy as you have been guilty of now. You will
sign this."

He passed to her a few lines which ho had already written
and brought with him. They ran thus :

" I, Olga, Countess Brancka, do acknowledge that I most
untruthfully used the name of my husband's brother, the
Prince Vksi\rhely, in an endeavor to injure the gentleman
known as the Marquis de Sabran ; and I hereby do ask the
pardon of them both, and confes- that in such pardon I re-
ceive great leniency and forbearance."

" Sign it," said Prince Egon.

'*• Pshaw !" said Madame Brancka, and pushed it away with
a loud laugh, deigning no further answer.

" Will you sign it or not ?" asked VJis5,rhely.

She replied by tearing it in shreds.

" It is easily rewritten," he said, unmoved. He went to a
writing-table that stood in the room, looked for paper and
found it, and wrote out the same formula.

" Do not be foolish, Olga," he said, curtly, as he returned. «

*• You are a clever woman, and always consult your own in

tercsts. I dare say you have done a thousand things as basest
as your attempt to ruin my cousin's happiness, but I do do^- .
suppose you have often done anything so unwise. You wH ^
sign this at once, or you will regret it very greatly."

" Why should I sign it ?" she said, insolently. " The maii
is what I say : he could not deny it. If I only guessed at the
truth, I guessed aright. I wonder that you do not see yowr
interests lie in exposing him. When the world knows he k

WA:i!fVA, 479

an impostor, Wanda will divorce him, and pat the children
under other names in religious houses. Then you will be able
to marry her. I told him she would marry you pour halayer
la hontey

For the moment she was alarmed at the fires that leaped
from Viis^rhely's sombre eyes. It cost him much — as much
as it had cost Sabran — not to strike her where she stood. He
paused a second to control himself, then answered her, coldly
and calmly, —

" My cousin will never seek a divorce, nor shall I wed with
a divorced woman. Your hate misleads you : there is no
blinder thing than hate. You will sign this paper, or I shall
telefi;raph for my brother."

**"'For Stefan I"

All her boundless indifference to her husband, and her
contempt for him, were spoken in the accent she gave his
name.

" For Stefan. You are pleased to despise him because you
can lead him into mad follies, and can make him believe you
are an innocent woman. But Stefan is not altogether the ig-
noble dupe you think him. He is a dupe, wiser men than he
have been so ; but he would not bear your infidelity to him if
he really knew it, nor would he bear other things if he knew
of them. Two years ago you took two hundred thousand
florins' worth of diamonds, in my name, i'rom my jeweller
Landsee in the Grabcn. How should a tradesman suspect
that a Countess Brancka was dishonest ? At the end of the
year he brought his bill for that and other things to me, whilst
I was in Vienna. He had never, of course, doubted that you
went on my authority. Equally of course, I did not betray
you, but paid the amount. When you do such things you
should not give written orders. They remain against you.
Now, if Stefan knew this, or if he knew that you had tiken
money from the richest of your lovers, the young Due do Blois,
as I knew it so long as seven years ago, you would no longer
find him the malleable easily-cozened fool you deem him. You
would learn that he has V5.s5.rhely blood in him. I have only
named two out of the many questionable facts I know against
you. They have been safe with me. I would never urge
Stefan to a public scandal. But, unless you sign this, and
a^Hilogize for using my name to the husband of my cousin, as

480 WANDA.

you used it to Landsee of the Graben, I shall tell my brother.
He will not divorce you. That is not our way. We do not go
to lawyers to redress our wrongs, but he will compel you to
retire for your life into a religious house, — as you would compel
the harmless children of Wanda, — or he would imprison you
himself in one of our lonely places in the mountains, where you
would cry in vain for your lovers, and your friends, and your
menus plauirs, and none would hear you. Do not mistake
me. You have often called us barbaric : you will find we can
be so. As I say, we do not carry our wrongs to lawyers. We
can avenge ourselves."

She had lost all color as he spoke. A nervous spasm of
laughter contracted her mouth, and remained on it like the
ghastly rictus of death. She knew him well enough to know
that he meant every syllable he said. The Vks5,rhely had had
stern tragedies in their annals, and to women impure and un*
faithful had been merciless as Othello.

She felt that she was vanquished, — that she would have to
obey him or suffer worse things. But, though she was aware
of her own impotence, she could not resist a retort that should
sting him.

" You are very chivalrous ! I always knew you had an
insane adoration of your cousin, but I never should have
thought you"would have put on sabre and spurs in her hus-
band's defence. Will he reward you by effacing himself?
Will he end as he has begun, like the hero of a melodrama at
the Gymnase, and shoot himself at Wanda's feet ? You would
marry a widow, though you would not marry a divorced
woman !''

" Some time ago, when we spoke of him," he replied, still
with stern self-control, " I told you that were his honor called
in question I would defend it as I would my brother's, — not
for his sake, for hers. I would, for her sake, defend it so
were he the guiltiest soul on earth. He belongs to her. He
b sacred to me. You mistake if you deem her such a woman
as yourself. She has loved him. She will love no other
whilst she lives. She has given herself to him. She will
give herself to no other, though she outlive him from this
hour. You make your calculations unwisely, for when you
make them you suppose that every man and every woman have
your own dit^honesty, your own passions, your own batienesa.

WANDA. 481

Yoa arc short of sight, because you only see in the drcle oT
your own conceptions."

She understood that ha knew the secret of the man he
protected, but that he would never admit that he did so, —
would never reveal it or let any other reveal it She under-
stood that he had himself forborne from its exposure, and
would never, whilst he lived, allow any other to hold it up to
the derision of the world. She understood that, if need were,
ViisJlrhely would defend, as he said, the honor of his cousin^s
husband at the point of the sword against all foes or mockers.

" For her sake T* she cried ; " always for her sake I What
can you both see so marvellous in her? She has been a
greater fool than any woman that has ever lived, though she
can read Greek and write in Latin ! What has she done, with
all her wisdom and her holiness ? You know as well as thou^
it were written there upon the wall that he is what I say.
Why do you put your lance in rest for him ? Why are yoa
ready to shed blood on his behalf? He is an impostor who
has taken in first the world and then the mistress of Hohen-
Bsalras. If you were the hero you have always seemed to me,
you would tear his heart out of his breast, shoot him like a
wolf in these very woods 1 If her honor is yours, avenge her
dishonor 1"

She spoke with force and fire, and longing to behold the
spirit of evil roused in her hearer's soul and stung to action.

But she might as well have tried to move the mountains
from their base as rouse either pain or rage in her brother-in-
law. V^^rhely kept his attitude of stern, cold, contemptu-
ous disgust. Not a muscle of his face changed. He said
merely, —

" You have been told what I shall do if you do not sign
this paper. The choice is yours. If you desire to hear any
more episodes of your past, I can tell you many."

Then she changed her attitude and her eloquence. She dis-
•olved in tears ; she wept ; she implored ; she tried to kneel
to him. But he was inflexible.

" You are a good actress," he said, simply. " But you for-
get : it is Stefan whom you can deceive, not me."

When she had vainly used all her resources of alternate en-
treaty and invective, of cajolery and insolence, she sank into
her chair, exhausted, hysterical, nerveless.

▼ // 41

482 WANDA.

*' I am ill ; call my woman," sho said, faintly.

He replied, —

" You are no more ill than I am."

" You are brutal, Egon," she said, raising herself, with
0ashiDg eyes and hissing tongue.

" What have you been to her ?" said Vb^rhely.

He waited with cold inflexible patience. When another
half-hour had gone by, she signed the paper, and flung it with
fury to him.

'^ You know very well it is true I" she cried, as she leaned
across the table like a slender snake that darted. '* Would
she lie dying of it if it were only a lie ?'*

'- That I know not," said Vh.s5,rhely, coldly. " What I
know is that your carriage will be ready in an hour, and that
you will go hence. If ever you be tempted to speak of what
has occurred here you will remember that my silence to Stefan
and your own people is only conditional on yours on another
matter."

Then he left her.

She was cowed, intimidated, vanquished. When the hour
was over she went through the two lines of bowing servants,
and lefl Hohenszalras ere the noon was past.

*' It is the first time in my life I ever failed," she thought,
as the pinnacles and towers of the burg were lost to her sight.
** What do these men see in that woman ?"

CHAPTER XXXV-

VXsArhely, when he left her, went straight to Sabran,
who, seated on an oaken bench in the corridor of his^ wife'i
apartments, knew not how the hours passed, and seemed aged
ten years in a day. y5sh.rhely motioned him to pass into one
of the empty chambers. There he gave him the lines which
Olga Bran oka had signed.

" You are safe from her," he said. " She cannot tell your
story to the world. She will not dare even to whisper it as a
conjecture."

WANDA. 483

Sabran did not Rpoak. This p^reat debt owed to his greatest
foe hurt him even whilst it delivered him.

"For the first time I have concealed the truth," pursued
V^skrhely. " I affected to dbbelieve her story. There was
no other way to save it from publicity. That alone would
not have sufficed, but I had means to coerce her.'*

" You have been very generous."

V2is&rhely shrank from his praise as though from some io^
aolence. He did not look at Sabran : he spoke briefly between
his closed teeth. All his soul was full of longing to strike
this man, to meet him in open combat and to kill him, forcing
him and his foul secret together down underneath the sole
0ure cover of the grave. But the sense that so near, within
a few feet of them, she lay in peril of her life, made even
vengeance seem for the moment profune and blasphemous.

" There will be always time," he thought.

That hushed and darkened chamber hard by awed his hatred
into silence. What would she wish ? What would she com-
mand? Could he but know that, how clear would be his
path!

He hesitated a moment, then turned away.

** I shall wait here until the danger is past, or she is called
to Ood," he said, hoarsely.

Then he walked away down the corridor slowly, like a man
mounded with a wound that bleeds within.

Sabran stood awhile where he had lefl him, his eyes bent
«n the ground, his heart sick with shame.

" He was worthy of her 1" he thought, with the most bitter
|>ang of his life.

Three more days and nights passed ; they were to him like
WL hideous nightmare ; at times ho thought with horror that he
"^ould lose his reason. The dreadful stillness, the dreadful
eilence, the knowledge that death was so near that bed which
lie dared not approach, the impossibility of learning what
memories of him, what hatred of him, might not be haunting
the stupor in which she lay, together made up a torture to
which her bitterest reproach, her deadliest punishment, would
have seemed merciful.

All through that exhaustion, in which they believed her
mind was without consciousness, the memory of all that he
had told her was alive in it, in that poignant remembrance

484 WANDA,

which the confusion of a dulled brain only makes but tlie
more terrible, turning and changing what it suffers from into
tt thousand shapes. In her worst agony this consciousness
never left her ; she kept silence because in her uttermost
weakness she was strong enough not to give her woe to the
ears of others, but in her heart there seemed a groat knife
plunged, a knife rusted with blood that was dishonored.

When she knew that the child she bore was dead, she felt
no sorrow ; she thought only, '^ Begotten of a serf, of a cow-
ard 1"

The intolerable outrage, the intolerable deception, were like
flames of fire that seemed to eat up her life ; her love for him,
for the hour at least, had been stunned and ceased to speak.
To the woman who came of the races of Szalras and Y5sar-
hely, the dishonor covered every other memory.

'^ All his life only one long lie !'* she thought.

Her race had been stainless through a thousand years of
chivalry and heroism, and she — its sole descendant — had
sullied it with the blood of a base-born impostor 1

Whilst she lay sunk in what they deemed a perfect apathy,
the disgrace done to her, to her name, to her ancestry, was
ever present to her mind, a spectre which no one saw save
herself. Every other emotion was for the time quenched in
that. She felt as though the whole world had struck her on
the cheek and she was powerless to resent or revenge the
blow. In hours of delirium she thought she saw all the men
and women of her race who had reigned there before her
standing about her bed, and saying, " You held our honor, and
what did you with it ? You let it sink to the earth in the
arms of a nameless coward."

One night she said suddenly, " My cousin, — is he here?*'

When they told her that he had remained at Hohenszalraa
she seemed reassured. At sunrise she asked the same ques-
tion. When they answered with the same affirmative, she
said, " Bid him come to me.*'

They fetched him instantly. As he passed Sabran in the
corridor, he paused.

** Your wife has sent for me," he said : " have I your per-
mission to see her ?"

Sabran bent his head, but his heart beat thickly with the
only jealousy he had ever felt. She asked for Egon Yks^rbely

WANDA. 485

in lier stnpor of misery^ and he, her husband, had lost the
right to enter her chamber, dared not approach her presence 1

" Wanda, I am here I" said VJisSirhely, softly, as he bent over
her. She looked at him with eyes full of unspeakable agony.

" Is it true ?" she murmured.

** Yes I" he said bitterly between hb teeth.

" And you knew it ?'*

" Too late 1 But, Wanda, — my beloved Wanda, — ^trust to
me. The world shall never hear it."

Her eyes had closed ; a shiver ran through all her frame.
*' Olga ?'' she muttered.

" She is in my power. I will deal with her," he answered.
** She will be silent as the grave."

She gave a long shuddering sigh, and her head sank back
apon her pillows.

Vilsiirhely fell on his knees beside her bed, and buried his
face on her hands.

" My violated saint I" he murmured. " Fear not : I will
avenge you."

Low though the words were, thej reached and moved her
in her dim blind weakness. She stretched out her hand, and
touched his bowed head.

" No, no, not that. He is my children's father. He must
be sacred. Give me your word, Egon, there shall be no
bloodshed between him and you."

*' I am your next friend," he said, with intense appeal in
liis voice. " You are insulted and dishonored, — your race is
affronted and stained : who should avenge that, if not I, your
kinsman ? There is no male of your house. It falls to me."

All the manhood and knighthood in him was athirst foi
the life of the impostor who had dishonored what he adored.

" Promise me," she said again,

" Your brothers are dead," he muttered. " I may well
stand in their place. Their swords would have found him
out ere he were an hour older."

She raised herself with a supreme effort, and through the
pallor and misery of her face there came a momentary flash
of anger, a momentary flash of the old spirit of command.

** My brothers are dead, and I forbid any other to meddle
with my life. If any one slew him, it would be I — I — in my
9wn right."

41*

486 WANDA.

Ilcr voice had been for the instant stern and sustained, bat
physical i'uintness overcame her ; her lips grew gray, and the
darkness of great weakness came before her sight.

^^ I forbid you ! I forbid you 1" she said, as her breath
failed her.

Vas^rhely remained kneeling beside her bed. His ehoul*
ders trembled with restrained emotion. Even now she shut
him out of her life. She denied him the right to bo her
champion and avenger.

She moved her hand towards him as a blind woman would
have done.

" Give me your word."

" You are my law," he answered. '* I will do nothing that
you forbid."

She inclined her head with a feeble gesture of recognition
of the words. He rose slowly, kissed the white fingers that
lay near him, and, without speaking, left her presenoe.r

'* Bloodshed, bloodshed I" she thought, in the vague fever-
ish confusion of half-conscious thought. " Though rivers of
blood rolled between him and me, what could they wash away
of the shame that is with me forever ? What could death do ?
Death could blot out nothing."

A sense of awful impotence lay upon her like a weight of
iron. Do what she would, she could never change the past !
Her sons must grow up to youth and manhood tainted and
dishonored in her sight. There were times when all the mar-
tial and arrogant spirit in her was like flame in her veins, and
she thought, " Could I but rise and kill him, — I, myself 1"

It seemed to her that it would be but justice.

When V^s^rhely, coming out from her chamber, passed
Ihe impostor who had done her this dishonor, it cost him the
greatest self-sacrifice of his life not to order him out yonder in
the chilly twilight of the leafless woods, to stand before him
in that ordeal of combat which, in the code of honor of the
Magyar prince, was the sole tribunal to which a man of honor
could appeal. But she had forbidden him to avenge her.
He felt that he had no share in her life sufficient to give him
title to disobey her. His own love for her told him that this
offender was still dear enough to her for his life to be sacred
in her sight.

** If I had not loved her," he thought, " I obuld hav9

WANDA. 487

ayeDged her without suspicion ; but what would it seem to hei
aud to the world? — only that I slew him out of jealous rancor 1
Id her soul she loves him still. Her hate will fade, her love
will survive, tiaitor and hound though he be.''

He motioned Sabran towards one of the empty chambers
in the gallery. When he had closed the door of it he spoke
with a low, hoarse voice :

^ " Sir, I have the right as her kinsman, I have the right her
brothers would have had, to publicly insult you, to publicly
chastise you. But she has commanded me to abstain : she
will have no feud between us. I obey her ; so must you. I
have but one thing to say to you. Once you spoke of suicide.
I forbid you to follow up your crimes by causing the unending
misery ihat death by your own hand would bring to her. You
have been coward enough. Have courage at least not to leave
a woman alone under the disgrace you have brought upon
her."

" Alone I" echoed Sabran. " She will never admit me to her
presence again. She will demand her divorce as soon as ever
she has strength to remember and to speak."

" Do you know her so ill after nine years of marriage ?
Whatever she do, it will be for you to accept it, and not evade
your chastisement by the poltroon's refuge of oblivion in the
grave. You have said you think yourself my debtor ; all the
quittance I desire is this. You will obey me when I forbid
you to entail on your wife the lifelong remorse that your sui-
cide— however you disguised it — would bring upon her. In
obeying her, by holding back my hand from avenging her, I
make the greatest sacrifice that she could have demanded.
Make yours likewise. It would be easy for you to escape
ehastisement in death. You must forego that ease, and live.
I leave you to your conscience and to her."

He opened the door and passed down the corridor, his steps
echoing on the oaken floor.

In half an hour he had left the house, and gone on his
lonely way to Tardc.

Sabran stood mute.

He had lost the power to resent ; he knew that if this man
ohose to strike him across the eyes with his whip he would be
within his right. The insults cut him to the bone as though
the lash were on him \ but he held his peace and bore them.

488 WANDA.

not in submission, Init in silence. His prc^onnd humiliation,
his absolute despair, had broken the nerve in him. He felt
that he had no tide to look a gentleman in the face, no power
to defend himself, whatever oatragcs were heaped on him.

CHAPTER XXXVL

In time the convulsions ceased, the stupor lightened ; they
began to hape.

The danger had been great, but it was well nigh past ; the
vigor and perfection of her strength had enabled her to keep
her hold on life. After those few words to her kinsman she
spoke seldom, she appeared sunk in silent thought ; when the
door opened she shrank with a sort of apprehension. Gres-
wold watching her said to himself, " She is afraid lest her
husband should enter."

Sabran did not dare to ask to see her. When Greswold
would fain have urged him, he refused with vehemence.

" I dare not : it would be to insult her more. Only if sho
summon me — but that she will never do."

" He has been faithless to her," thought the old man.

Her convalescence came in due course, but the silence,
ahnost absolute sifence, which she preserved on the full recov-
ery of her consciousness alarmed her physicians, who had no
dtto to the cause. Greswold alone, who divined that there
was some wrong or disaster which severed her from her hus-
band, guessed that this immutable silence was but the cover
and guard of some great sorrow. No tears ever dimmed
her eyes or relieved her bursting heart ; she lay still, ab-
sorl»ed in mute and terrible retrospection. As her great
weakness fcft her, there came upon her features the coldei
darker look of her race, the look which he who had betrayed
her had always feared. She never spoke of him, -nor of
the children. Her women would have ventured to brinjr
the children to her, but Greswold forbade them ; he knew
that for the devoted tenderness she bore them to be thus
utterly still and changed, some shock must have befallen

^

WANDA. 489

hear, so great that the instincts of maternity were momentarily
quenched in her, as water-springs aro dried up hj earthquake.

** She never speaks of me, nor of them ?" asked Sabran,
with agony, every day of Greswold, and the old man answered
him, —

" She never speaks at all. She replies to our questions as
to her health, she asks briefly for what she needs ; no more/'

'* The children are innocent I'* he said, wearily, and his heart
had never gone forth to them so much as \{> did now, when
they were shut oat like himself from the arms of their mother.

y ot he understood how she shrank from them, — might well
almost abhor them, — seeing in them, as y5.s5.rhely saw, the
living proofs of her surrender to a coward and a traitor.

" What can he have done ?" mused Greswold. " Infidelity,
perhaps, she would not forgive, but it would not make her
thus blind and deaf to the children."

He passed his days in utter wretchedness ; he wandered in
the wintry woods for hours, or sat in weary waiting outside
her door. He cared nothing what his household thought or
guessed. He had forgotten every living creature save herself.
When he saw his young sons in the distance, he avoided them :
he dreaded their guileless questions, the stab of their uncon-
scious words. Again and again he was tempted to blow out
his brains, or fling himself from the ice walls that towered
above him ; but the sense that it would seem to her the last
oowardico — the last shame — restrained him.

Sometimes it seemed to him that the tie between them was
so strong, the memories of their past passion so sweet, that
even his crime could not part them. Then he remembered
of what race she came, of what honor she was the represen-
tative and guardian, and his heart sank within him, and he
knew that his oflence was one beyond all pardon.

The whole household dimly felt that some great grief had
fallen on their master. His attitude, his absence from his
wife's room, the arrival of Prince V^s^rhely, the abrupt de-
parture of the Countess Brancka, all told them that some
calamity had come, though they were loyally silent one to the
other, their service having been always one of devotion and
veneration for their mistress, since they were all Tauern-born
people, bred up by their fathers in loyalty to Hohenszalras.

" The first who speakg of aught he «»uspects goes forever,"

490 WANDA,

old Hubert had said to his numerous dtenerscha/t^ in the
hearing of them all, when one of the pages — he who had
borne the note to his master in Olga Brancka's rooms — ven-
tured to hint that he thought some evil was abroad and would
part their lord and lady. But all the faithful silence of their at-
tendants could not wholly conceal from the elder children that
something wrong, some greater sorrow even than their mother's
illness, was hanging over the old house. They were dully and
vaguely alarmed. They had not even the kindly presence of
the princess, who, if she sometimes wearied them with ad-
monitions, treated them with tenderness and atoned for her
homilies by unending gifts. They were very unhappy, though
they said little, and wandered like little ghosts among the
wintry woods and in their spacious play-rooms. They were
tended, amused, provided for, in all the same ways as usual.
There were all their pastimes and playthings ; all their com-
forts and habits were unaltered ; but from the background of
their sports and studies the stately figure of their mother was
missing, with her serene smile and her happy power of check-
ing all dispute or turbulence with a mere word or a mere
glance.

The winter had come at a stroke, as it-does without warning
oftentimes in the old archduchy ; the snow falling fast and
thick, the waters freezing in a night, the hills and valleys
growing white and silent between a sunset and a sunset.

Their sledges carried them like lightning over the frozen
roads, and their little skates bore them swift as circling swal-
lows over the ice. It was the season Bela loved so well;'
but he had no joy in anything. There was no twilight hour
in the white-room at their mother's feet, whilst she told them
legends and stories ; there was no moment in the mornings
when she came into their study and found their little puzzled
brains weary over a Latin declension or a crabbed page of history,
and made all clear to them by a few lucid graphic sentences:
there was no possible hope that when the day was broad an(
bright over the wintry land, she would call to them to brin*
the dogs and go with her and her black horses through th<
glittering forests, where every bough was heavy with the dia-^—
monds of the frost. To the little boys it seemed as if th^^
whole world had grown suddenly silent and they were left akf
alono in it

WANDA. 4yi

Their troops of attendants were no more consolation to thciu
than his crowd of courtiers is to a bereaved sovereign.

Then, again, when Egon Viis^rhely iiad by chance met
thorn he had looked at them strangely, and had always turned
away without a greeting. *' And when I was quite little lie
was so kind/' thought Bela, whose pride seemed falling from
him like a useless ragged garment.

" It*s all since Madame Olga came/' he said once to his
brother. '^ She is a bad, bad woman. She was rude to our
mother."

" I thought ladies were always good ?" said Gela.

'* They are much wickeder than men," said Bcla, with pre-
mature wisdom. *' At least, when they are wicked. I heard
a gentleman say so in Paris."

". What could she do when she was here, do you think?*'
asked Gela, with a tremor.

" I do not know," said Bela, gravely and sadly. " But I
am sure that she hated our mother."

He was sure that all the evil had come from her ; he had
heard of evil spirits, the people believed in them, and had
charms against them. She was one of them. Had she not
tempted him to disobedience and revolt, with her pictures of
the grand gayety, the magnificent gatherings, the heart-rousing
" Halali 1" of the Chantilly hunt ?

Bela did not forget.

He would have cut off his little right hand, now, never to
have vexed his mother.

He was yet more sorrowful still for his father. The children,
though they were not allowed to approach their mother's
apartments, had disobeyed the injunction more than once, and
had seen Sabran Walking to and fro that long gallery, or seated
with bent head and folded arms on one of the oaken benches.
With all his boldness, Bela had not dared to approach that
melancholy figure : but it had haunted his dreams, and troubled
him sorely as he rode and drove, and played and did his
lessons. The snow came on the second week of his mother's
illness, and when he visited his riding-pony in its loose box on
those frosted days on which he could not use it, he buried his
face* in its abundant mane, and wept bitterly, though he boasted
that h3 never cried.

All those weeks of her slow and painful restoration to lif«

492 WANDA.

she was mute, her lips only moving in reply to the questions
of her physicians. It seemed to her strange that, when her
spiritual and mental life had been poisoned to their source,
l>er bodily life should be able mechanically to gather force and
resume its functions. Had matter so far more resistance than
the soul ?

Her women were frightened at the look upon her face ; it
had the rigidity, the changelessness, of marble, and all the
blood seemed gone out of it forever.

In after-days her heart would speak ; remembered happi*
ncss, lost beliefs, ruined love, would in their turn have place
in her misery ; but now all she was sensible of was the un-
bearable insult, the ineffaceable soil and shame. She was like
a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded
and wasted by a traitor.

Any other thing she would have pardoned, — infidelity, in
diflference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion,
— but who should pardon this ? The sin was not alone against
herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that
ever she had been taught to hold sacred ; it was against all
those great dead who lay with the cross on their breasts and
their swords by their side, from whom she had received and
treasured the traditions of honor, the purity of a race.

It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the
mouth and mocked, crying to them, " Lo I your place is mine ;
my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race
forever ; forever my blood flows with yours."

The greatness of a great race is a thing far higher than
mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme, its obliga-
tions are no less than its privileges ; it is a great light which
streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by
that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrico
accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands.

So had she always thought, and now he had dashed the
lamp in the dust.

Eight weeks passed by after the departure of Olga Brancka
before Wanda could leave her bed ; and all that while,
save for a brief question now and again as to their health,
put to her physician, she had never mentioned the ohildreo
once. " She does not want us any more," said Bela, with thd
great tears dimming his bold eyes.

WANDA. 493

In Jie niDth week she was lifted on to a great chair, placed
beside one of the windows, and she turned her weary ^azc on
lo the snow world without. What use was life ? Why had
it returned to her? All emotion of maternity, all memory
of love, were for the time killed in her. She was only con-
scious of an intolerable indignity, for which neither God nor
man could give her consolation.

She would have gone barefoot all the world over sooner than
be again in his presence, had not the imperious courage which
was the strongest instinct of her nature refused to confess
itself unable to meet the man who had wronged her. In the
long dark night which these past two months had seemed to
her, she had brought herself to face the inevitable end. She
had nerved herself to be her own judge and his. Weaker
women would have made the world their judge; she did not.
She did not even seek the counsel of that Church of which
she was a reverent daughter. Her priest had no access to her.

'* God must see my torture, but n6 other shall," she said
in her heart, nor should the world ever have her love to make
an hour's jesting wonder of, as is its way with all calamity.
It would be her lifelong companion, — a rusted iron forever
piercing deeper and deeper into her flesh, — but she would
dwell alone with it unpitied. The men of her race had always
been their own lawgivers, their own avengers ; she would be
hers.

Once she bade them bring her pens and ink, and she bega^
to use them. Then she laid them down, and tore in two an
unfinished letter. " Only cowards write to save themselves
from pain,'* she thought, and on the tenth day ailer she had
risen from her bed she said to Greswold, —

'^ Tell the women to leave me alone, and ask — my husband
—to come here."

She said the last words as if they choked her in their ut-
terance. Her husband he was; nothing could change the
past.

The old man hesitated, and ventured to suggest that any
exertion was dangerous: would it be wise, he asked, to speak
of what might agitate her? And thereon he paused and
stammered, knowing that it was not his place to have observed
that there was any estrangement between them.

She looked at him with suspicion.

42

494 WANDA.

^^ Have I spoken in my sleep or in mj unconBcioasneflB T
she thought.

Aloud she said only, —

" Bo 80 good as to go to him at once."

He bowed and went, and to himself mused,-^

" Since she loves him, her heart will melt when sho mcetii
his eyes. His sin, after all, cannot be beyond thoso which
women have forgiven a million times over since first creation
began."

Yet in himself he was not sure of that. The Szalras had
had many great and many generous qualities, but forgiveness
of offence had never been among them.

She remained still, her hands folded on her knees, her face
set as though it were cast in bronze. The great bedchamber,
with its hangings of pale-blue plush and its silver-mounted
furniture, was dim and shadowy in the grayness of a midwinter
afternoon. Doors opened, here to the bath and dressing-
chambers, there to the oratory, yonder to the apartments of
Sabran. She looked across to the last, and a shudder passed
over her ; a sense of sickness and revulsion came on her.

She sat still and waited : she was too weak to go farther
than this room. She was wrapped in a long loose gown of
white satin, lined and trimmed with sable. There were black
bear-skins beneath her feet ; the room was warmed by hot air,
and fragrant with some bowls full of forced roses, which her -aK'sr
.women had placed there at noon. The gray light of the ^^.e
fading afternoon touched the silver scroll-work of the bed, ^ f ,
and the silver frame of one large mirror, and fell on her folded Mi^d
hands and on the glisten of their rings. Her head leaned f^d
backward against the high carved ebony of her chair. Her
face was stern and bitterly cold, as that of Maria The
when she signed the loss of Silesia.

Two months had gone by since he had seen her. Whe
he entered, he read on her features that he must leave all ho
behind.

He approached from his own apartments, and came timidi
and with a slow step forward. He did not dare to salute hei
or go near to her ; he stood like a banished man, disgraced, *
tcw yards from her seat.

Her whole frame shrank within her as she saw him the
but she gave no sign of what she felt. Without looking

-I

\

WANDA, 495

him, slie spoke, in a voice quite firm, though it was faint
from feebleness:

'^ I have but little to say to jou, but that little is best said,
not written."

He did not reply ; his eyes were watching her with a ter-
rible appeal, a very agony of longing. They had not rested
on her for two months. She had been near the gates of the
grave, within the shadow of death. He would have given his
life for a word of pity, a touch, a regard ; and he dared not
approach her I

She did not look at him. Afler that first glance in which
there had been so much of horror, of revulsion, she did not
once look towards him. Her face had the immutability of a
mask of stone ; so many wretched days and haunted nights
had she spent nerving herself for this inevitable moment that
no emotion was visible in her ; into her agony she had poured
her pride, and it sustained her, as the plaster poured into the
dry bones at Pompeii makes the skeleton stand erect, the
ashes speak.

" Afler that which you have told me," she said, afler a
moment's silence in which he fancied she must hear the throb-
bing of his heart, " you must know that my life cannot be lived
.out beside yours. The law gives you many rights, no doubt,
but I believe you will not be so base as to enforce them."

" I have no rights 1" he muttered. " I am a criminal be-
fore the law. The law will free you from me, if you choose."

" I do not choose," she said, coldly. " You understand mo
ill. I do not carry my wrongs or my woes to others. What
you have told me is known only to Prince V^s^rhely and to
the Countess Brancka. He will be silent ; he has the power
to make her so. The world need know nothing. Can yoa
-think that I shall be its informant ?"

** If you divorce me " he murmured.

A quiver of bitter anger passed over her features, but she
retained her self-control.

" Divorce? What could divorce do for me? Could it de-
stroy the past ? Neither Church nor Law can undo what you
have done. Divorce would make me feel that in the past I
had been your mistress, not your wife, — that is all."

She breathed heavily, and again pressed her hand on her
Ireast.

196 WANDA.

"Divorce!" she repeated. "Neither prieat nor jadgc can
eflface a past as you clean a slate with a sponge I No power,
human or divine, can free me, purify me, wash your dishonored
blood from your children's veins."

She almost lost her self-control ; her lips trembled, her eyes
were full of flame, her brow was black with passion. With
a violent effort she restrained herself; invective or reproach
soemed to her low and coarse and vile.*

He was silent ; his greatest fear, the torture of which had
harassed him sleeping and waking ever since he had placed
his secret in her hands, was banished at her words. She
would seek no divorce ; the children would not be di^raced,
the world of men would not learn his shame ; and yet, as he
heard, a deeper despair than any he had ever known came
over him. She was but as those sovereigns of old who scorned
the poor tribunals of man's justice because they hold in their
own might the power of so much heavier chastisement.

" I shall not seek for a legal separation," alio resumed ;
" that is to say, I shall not, unless you force me to do so
to protect myself from you. If you fail to abide by the con-
ditions I shall prescribe, then you will compel me to • resort
to any means that may shelter me from your demands But
I do not think you will endeavor to force on me conjugal
rights which you obtained over me by a fraud."

All that she desired was to end quickly the torture of this
interview, from which her courage had not permitted her to
shrink. She had to defend herself because she would not be
defended by others, and she only sought to strike swiflly and
unerringly so as to spare herself and him all needless or lin-
gering throes. Her speech was brief, for it seemed to h
that no human language held expression deep and vast enougl
to measure the wrong done to her, could she seok to give i
utterance.

She would not have made a sound had any murdere:~~-^r
stabbed her body ; she would not now show the death-wonn^iHi*/

of her soul and honor to this man who had stabbed both t o

the quick. Other women would have made their moan alou
and cursed him. The daughter of the Szalras choked dow^ ^
her heart in silence, and spoke as a judge speaks to one oo^n
demned by man and God.

" I wish no words between us," she said, with renew^</

WANDA. 497

ealmness. " Tou know your sin : all your life has been a
lie. I will keep me and mine back from vengeance, but do
not mistake:. God may pardon you, I never I What t de-
sired to say to you is that henceforth you shall give up the
name you stole ; you shall give the land of liomaris to the
people : you shall be known only as you have been known
here of late, as the Count von Idrac. The title was mine to
give, I gave it you : no wrong is done save to my fathers, who
were brave men."

He remained silent; all excuse he might have offered
seemed as if from him to her it would be but added outrage.
He was hei: betrayer, and she had the power to avenge be-
trayal ; naught that she could say or do could seem unjust or
undeserved beside the enormity of her irreparable wrongs.

" The children ?" he muttered, faintly, in an unuttcred sup-
plication.

" They are mine," she said, always with the same unchang
log calm that 'was cold as the frozen earth without. '^ You
will not, I believe, seek to enforce your title to dispute them
with me ?"

He gave a gesture of denial.

He, the wrong-doer, could not realize the gulf which his
betrayal had opened betwixt himself and her. On him all
the ties of their past passion were sweet, precious,*unchanged
in their dominion. He could not realize that to her all these
memories were abhorred, poisoned, stamped with ineffable
shaine ; he could not believe that she who had loved the dust
that his feet had brushed could now regard him as one leprous
and accursed. He was slow to understand that his sin had
driven him out of her life for evermore.

Commonly it is the woman on whom the remembrance of
love has an enthralling power when bve itself is traitor ; com-
monly it is the man on whom the past has little influence, and
to whom its appeal is vainly made ; but here the position was
reversed. He would have pleaded by it : she refused to ac-
knowledge it, and remained as adamant before it. His nerve
was too broken, his conscience was too heavily weighted, fo!"
him to attempt to rebel against her decisions or sway her
judgment. If she had bidden him go out and slay himself, he
would gladly have obeyed.

" Once you said," he munnured, timidly, " that repentance
gg 42*

498 WANDA,

washed out all crimes. Will you count my remorse as noth-

ins?"

" You would have known no remorse had your secret never

been discovered I**

He shrank as from a blow.

" That is not true," he said, wearily. " But how can I
hope you will believe me ?"

She answered nothing.

*' Once you told me that there was no sin you would not
pardon me !" he muttered.

She replied, —

" We pardon sin ; we do not pardon baseness."

She paused and put her hand to her heart ; then she spoke
again, in that cold, forced, measured voice, which seemed on
his ear as hard and pitiless as the strokes of an iron hammer,
beating life out beneath it.

" You will leave Hohenszalras ; you will go where you will ;
you have the revenues of Idrac. Any other financial arrange-
ments that you may wish to make I will direct my lawyers to
carry out. If the revenues of Idrac be insufficient to main-
tain you **

" Do not insult me — so," he murmured, with a suffi)cated
sound in his voice, as though some hand were clutching at hia
throat. •

" Insult you .'" she echoed, with a terrible scorn.

She resumed with the same inflexible calmness :

" You must live as becomes the rank due to my husband.
The world need suspect nothing. There is no obligation to
make it your confidante. If any one were wronged by the
usurpation of the name you took, it would be otherwise ; but
as it is you will lose nothing in the eyes of men ; society will
not flatter you the less.- The world will only believe that we
are tired of each other, like so many. The blame will be
placed on me. You are a brilliant comedian,* and can please
and humor it. I am known to be a cold, grave, eccentrio
woman, a recluse, of whom it will deem it natural that you
are weary. Since you allow that I have the right to separate
from you, — to deal with you as with a criminal, — you will not
seek to recall your existence to me. You will meet my absti-
nence by the only amends you car make to me. Let me forget
— as far as I am able — let me forget that ever you have lived I'

WANDA, 499

IIo staggered slightly, as if under some sword-stroke from
an unseen hand. A great faintness came upon him. He had
been prepared for rage, for reproach, for bitter tears, for pas-
sionate vengeance, but this chill, passionless, disdainful sever-
ance from him for all eternity he had never dreamed of: it
crept like the cold of frost into his very marrow ; he was
speechless and mute with shame. If she had dragged him
through all the tribunals of the world she would have hurt
him and humiliated him far less. Better ail the hooting
voices of the whole earth than this one voice, so cold, so in«
flexible, so full of utter scorn I

Despite her bodily weakness, she rose to her full height,
and for the first time looked at him.

" You have heard me," she said, " now go 1"

But instead, blindly, not knowing what he did, he fell at
her feet.

" But you loved me," he cried, " you loved me so well 1"

The tears were coursing down his cheeks.

She drew the sables of her robe from his touch.

** Do not recall thaty^ she said, with a bitter smile. " Women
of my race have killed men before now for less outrage thaa
yours has been to me."

" Kill me I" he cried to her. " I will kiss your hand."

She was mute.

He clung to her gown with an almost convulsive supplicatioi

"Believe, at least, that / loved youT he cried, besid
himself in his misery and impotence. " Believe that at tk y
least ! "

She turned from him.

'* Sir, I have been your dupe for ten long years : I can b«
BO no more 1"

Under that intolerable insult he rose slowly, and his eyc%
grew blind, and his limbs trembled, but he walked from hci.
and sought not again either her pity or her pardon.

On the threshold he looked back once. She stood eiect
one hand resting upon the carved work of her high oak chair j
cold, stately, motionless, the furred velvets falling to her he\
like a queen's robes.

He looked, then passed the threshold and closed the door
behind him. He walked down the corridors blindly, not
knowing whither he went.

500 WANDA.

They were dusky, for the twilight of the winter's day had
come. He did uot see a little figure which was coming to«
wards him, until the child had stopped him with a timid
outstretched hand.

" Shall we never see her again ?" said Bela, in a hushed
7oice. " It is so long ! — so long I Oh, please do tell mo !"

Sabran paused, and looked down on the boy with blood-shot
burning eyes. For a moment or so he did not answer ; then
with a sudden movement he drew his son to him, lifled him
in his arms, and kissed him passionately.

" You will see her, not I — not 1 1" he said, with a sob like
a woman's. '^ Bela, listen I Be obedient to her, adore her,
have no will but hers ; be loyal, be truthful, be noble in all
your words and all your thoughts, and then in time perhaps
— perhaps — she will pardon you for being also mine 1"

The child, terrified, clung to him with all his force, dimly
conscious of some great agony near him, and far beyond his
comprehension or consolation.

" Bela loves you, Bela will always love you I" he said, with
his hands clasped around his father's throat.

" Love your mother I" said Sabran, as he kissed the boy's
soft cheeks, made wet by his own tears ; then he released the
little frightened form, and went himself away into the darkness.

In a little time, with no word to any living soul there, he
had harnessed some horses with his own hands, and in the
fast-falling gloom of the night had driven from Hohenszahras.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Bela heard the galloping hoofs of the horses,- and ran
with his fleet feet, quick as a fawn's, down the grand staircase
and cut on to the terrace, where the winds of the north were
driving with icy cold and furious force over a world of snow.
With his golden hair streaming in the blast, he strained his
eyes into the gloom of the avenues below, but the animals had
vanished from sight. He turned sadly and went into the
Rittersaal.

'^ Is that my father who has gone ?" he said in a low voica

WANDA. 501

to Hubert, who was there. The old 'servant, with the tears in
his eyes, told him that it was. A groom had come to him to
say that their lord had made ready a sledge and driven away
without a word to any one of them, while the night was fall-
ing apace.

Bela heard and said nothing : he had his mother's power
of silence in sorrow. He climbed the staircase silently, and
wont and listened in the corridor where his fatlier had waited
and watched so long. His head was heavy, and ached with an
indefinable dread. He did not seek Gela. It seemed to hiui
that this sorrow was his alone. He alone had heard his
father's farewell words, he alone had seen his father weep.

All the selfishness and vanity of his little soul was broken
up and vanished, and the first grief he had ever known
poured into their empty place. He had adored his father
with an unreasoning blind devotion, like a dog's ; and this
intense affection had been increased rather than repressed by
the indifference with which he had been treated.

His father was gone ; he felt sure that it was forever : if
he could not see his mother he thought he could not live.
To the mind of a child such gigantic and unutterable terrors
rise up under the visitation of a vague alarm. Abroad in the
woods, or under any bodily pain or fear, Bela was as brave as
a lion whelp, but he had enough of the German mystic in his
blood to be imaginative and visionary when trouble touched
him. The sight of his father's grief had shaken his nerves
and filled him with the first passionate pity he had ever
known. A man so great, so strong, so wonderful in prowess,
80 far aloof from himself as Sabran had always seemed to hia
little son, to be so overwhelmed in such helpless soitow, ap-
peared to Bela so terribly a thing that an intense fear took for
the first time possession of his little valiant soul. His father
could slay all the great beasts of the forests, could break in
the horse fresh from the freedom of the plains, could breast
the stormy waters like a petrel, could scale the highest heights
of the mountains. And yet some one — something — had had
power to break down all his strength, and make him flee in
wretchedness.

It could not be his mother who had done this thing ? No,
no ! never, never I It had been done because she was lying
ill, helpless, perhaps was dead.

502 WANDA.

As that last dread came over him he lost all control over
himself. He knew what death was. A little girl he had
been fond of in Paris had died whilst he was her playmate,
and he had seen her lying, so waxen, so cold, so unresponsive,
when he had laid his lilies on her little breast. A great despair
came over him, and made him reckless what he did. In the
desperation of terror blent with love, he started up and ran to
the door of his mother's apartments. It yielded to his press-
ure ; he ran across the antechamber and the dressing-rooms,
and pulled aside the tapestry.

Then he saw her, seated at the farther side of the great
bedchamber. There was a feeble gray light from the western
sky, to which the casements of the chamber turned. It was
very pale and dim, but by it he saw her lying back, rigid and
colorless, the white satin, the dusky fur, the deep shadows
gathered around her. There was that in her look and in her
attitude which made the child's heart grow cold, as his father's
had done.

She was alone ; for she had bidden her women not come
unless she summoned them. Bela stood and gazed, his pulses
beating loud and hard ; then with a cry he ran forward and
sprang to her, and threw his arms about her.

" Oh, mother, mother, you are not dead I" he cried. " Oh,
Bpeak to me 1 do speak to me 1 He is gone away for ever and
ever, and if we cannot see you we shall all die. Oh, do not
look at me so I Pray, pray do ndt. Shall I fetch Lili ? **

In his vague terror he thought to disarm her by his little
sister's name. She had thrust him away from her, and was
looking with cold and cruel eyes on his face, that was so like
the face of his father. She was thinking, —

" You are the son of a serf, of a traitor, of a liar, of a
bastard, and yet you are mine ! I bore you, and yet you are -
his. You are shame incarnate. You are the living sign of
my dishonor. You bear my name — my untainted name,-
and yet you were begotten by him."

Bela dropped down at her feet as his father had done.

*' Oh, do not look at me so I" he sobbed. " Oh, mother -
what have I done ? I have tried to be good all this whila*
He is gone away, and he is so unhappy, and he bade me neve^
vex or disobey you, and I never will.**

His voice was broken in hb sobs, and he leaned bis head

WANDA, 603

upon her knees, and clasped t' m with buth liis arms. She
looked down, on him, and drew a deep shuddering breath.
The holif^t joy of a woman*8 life was, for her, poisoned at the
springs.

Then, at the child's clinging embrace, at his piteous an^
innocent grief, the motherhood in her welled up under the
frost of her heart, and all its long-suffering and infinite tender-
ness revived, and overcame the horror that wrestled with it.
She raised him up and strained him to her breast.

'^ You are mine 1 you are mine I'' she murmured over him.
'' I must forget all else."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Tns spring dawned once more on Hohenszalras, and the
summer followed it. The waters leaped, the woods rejoiced,
the gardens blossomed, and the children played ; but the house
was silent as a house in which the dead are lying. There was
indeed a corpse there — the corpse of buried joy, of murdered
love, of ruined honor. The household resumed its calm order,
the routine of the days was unbroken, the quiet yet stately
life had been taken up in its course as though it had never
been broken ; and wherever young children are there will al-
ways be some shout of mirth, some sound of happy laughter
somewhere. The children laugh as the birds sing, though
those amidst them bury their dead.

But the house was a house of mourning, and the sense of
death was there as utterly as though he hud been laid in his
grave amidst the silver figures and the marble tombs in the
Chapel of the Knights. No one heard ever a sigh from her
lips, or ever saw the tears beneath her eyelids, but the sense
of her bereavement, as one terrible, unconsolable, eternal,
weighed like a pall on all those who were about her : the low-
liest peasant on her estates understood that the sanctity of
some untold woe had built up a wall of granite between hei
and all the living world.

She had always been grateful to fate for her old homo set
amidst the silence of the mountains, but she had never been

504 WANVA,

60 thankful for it as now. It shielded her from all tb« ob-
servation and interrogation of the world ; no one came tliither
unbidden ; unless she chose, no visitant would ever breaK that
absolute solitude which was the sole approach to peace that
she would ever know. Even her relatives could not pass the
ivjy barrier of her cold denial. They wearied her for a while
with written importunities and suggestions, hinted wonder,
delicately-expressed questions. But they made no wa^ into
her confidence ; they soon left her to herself and to hei chil-
dren. They said angrily to themselves that she had been
always whimsical and a solitary; they bad been oertaii that
soon or late that ill-advised union would be dissolved h lome
way, private or public. They were all people haughty, .sensi-
tive, abhorrent of scandal ; they were content that the separa
tion was by mutual consent and noiseless.

The screen of her dark forests protected her from all the
cruel comment and examination of the men and women of
her world. She knew them well enough to know that when
she ceased to appear amidst them, when she ceased to con-
tribute to their entertainment, when she ceased to bid them
to her houses, she would soon cease also to be remembered bj
them ; even their wonder would live but for a day. If the^
blamed her in their ignorance, their blame would be as indif
ferent as their praise had been.

She had been told by her lawyers that her husband had
refused to touch a coin of the revenues of Idrac, and had once
visited them to sign a power of procuration, whereby they
could receive those revenues and set them aside in accumu-
lation for his son Gela. That was all she heard. Whither
he had gone she was ignorant. She did not make any effort
to learn. On the night following his departure a peasant had
been sent with the sleigh and horses home to Hohenszalraa.
The solicitors of Salzburg had seen him a week or two later
at their ancient offices under the Calvarienburg : that was all.
She had bidden him let it be forgotten that he nad evei lived
beside ker. He had obeyed her.

The days, and weeks, and months went on, and his place
knew him no more. The jiigers, seated round their fires in
their forest-huts, spoke longingly and wonderingly of. his ab-
ienoe. The hunters, when they brought down a steinbock
wiUi unusual effort or skill, said that it had been a shot thai

WANDA. 505

woald have been worthy of him. His old friend wept for him
with the slow sad tears of age, and the child Bela prayed for
his return every night that he knelt down before his crucifix.
But his name never passed his wife's lips, and was never writ-
ten by her hand. She had given her all with the superb gen-
erosity of a sovereign ; she had in her wrongS the intense
abiding unalterable disgust of a sovereign betrayed and out-
Taged. When she let grief have its way, it was when no eyes
beheld her, when the night was down and solitude sheltered
her.

She had never spoken of what had befallen her to any
human ear, — not even to her priest's. The horror of it was
buried in her own breast, its sepulchre all the waste and ashes
of her perished joys.

When the Princess Ottilie, weeping, entreated to be told tho
worst, she answered, briefly, —

" He betrayed me. How, matters nothing."

More than that she never said. The princess supposed that
she spoke of tho infidelity of the passions, and dared not urge
her to more confidence. " I warned hira that she would never
forgive if he were faithless," she thought, and wept for hours
at her orisons, her gentle soul resenting the inflexibility of
this mute immutable bitterness of oflended love.

" With time she will change," she said to herself. But time
passed on, and she could see no change, nor any hope of it.

The grave severe beauty of their mother had a vague terror
for the children. She never now smiled at their mirth, laughed
at their sports, or joined in their pastimes. She was almost
always silent. Bela longed to throw his arms about her knees,
and cry out to her, " Mother, mother, where is he .?" But he
did not venture to do so. Without his reasoning upon it, the
child instinctively felt that her frozen calm covered depths of
Bufiering which he did not dare disturb. He had been so
completely terrified once, that the remembrance of that hour
lay like ice upon his bright courage. Even the younger ones
felt something of the same fear. Their mother remembered
Uiem, cared for them, was heedful that their needs of body
and of brain were perfectly. supplied. But they felt, as young
children feel what they cannot explain, that they were outside
her life, iusufl&cient for her, even fraught with intense pain to
hdr. OfltQ when she stooped to kiss them a shudder passed
w 43

5l)6 WANDA,

over her ; often wh^^n they came into her presence she looked
away from them, as thouf^h the sight of them stung and
blinded her. Tliey neve»* heard an angry word from her lips,
but even repeated anger would have kept them at less distance
from her than did that mute majesty of a grief they could not
comprehend.

She was more severe to all her dependants ; she never be-
came nnjust, but she was oft/Cn stern ; the children at the
schools saw her smile no more. Santa Claus still filled their
stockings on Christmas Eve, but of the stately figure which
moved amidst them, robed in black, they grew afraid ; she
seldom went to ^hem or to her peasantry. Bela and Gela were
sent with her v^ter gifts. In the summer the sennerin never
now saw her enter their high huts and drink a cup of milk,
talking with them of their herds and flocks.

She had had letters from Egon Vksdrhely full of delicate
tenderness : in the last he had asked with humility if he mi<;ht
visit Hohenszalras. She had written in return to him, " You
have my gratitude and my affection, but until we are quite old
we will not meet. Leave me alone : you can do naught for
me.'*

He obeyed : he understood the loyalty to one disloyal which
made her refuse to meet him, of whose loyalty she was so
sure.

He sent a magnificent present to the child who was his
namesake, and wrote to her no more save upon formal anni-
versaries.

She wafi tranquil as of old. She fulfilled the duties of her
properties, and attended to all the demands made upon her by
ner people ; her liberalities were unchanged, her justice was
unwarped, her mind was clear and keen. But she nevei smiled,
even on her children. And tlie little Lili said once to her
brothers, —

" Do you know, I think our mother is changing to marble?
She will soon be of stone, like the statues in the chapeL
When I touch her I feel cold."

Bela was angered.

" You are ungrateful, you little child," he said to his sister.
" Who loves us, who cares for us, who thinks of us, as oor
mother docs? If her lips are cold, perhaps her heart if
broken. We are only children ; we can do so little.'*

WANDA. 507

Ho had treasured the words of his father in his soul. He
had never told them, except to Gela, but they were always
present to him. He alone had seen and heard enough tc-
understand that some dire disaster had shattered in pieces the
beautiful life that his parents had led together. He had re*
ceived an indelible impression from the two scenes of that
evening. Without comprehending, he had felt that something
had befallen them, which struck at their honor no less than
at their peace. He had a clear conception of what honor was:
it was the first tuition that Wanda von Szalras gave her chil-
dren. Vague as his understanding of their grief had been, it
had been sufficient' to strike at that pride which was inborn in
him. He was like the Dauphin of whom he had thought in
Paris. He had seen his father driven from his throne; he
had seen his mother in the sackcloth and ashes of affliction.
He was humiliated, bewildered, softened ; he, who had be-
lieved himself omnipotent because all the people of the Isel-
thal ran to do his bidding, felt how helpless he was in truth.'
He was shut out from his mother's confidence ; he had been
powerless to console her or to retain his father ; there was
something even in himself from which his mother shrank.
What had his father said ? " She will in time pardon you
for being mine." What had been the meaning of those
fitrange words ? And where had his father gone ?

When the summer came and Bela rode through the glad
green woods, his heart was heavy. Would his father never
ride there any more? Bela had oflen watched, himself un-
seen, the fiery horse that bore the man he loved come plung-
ing and leaping through bough and brake till it passed him as
though the wind bore it. He had always thought, as he had
watched, " When I grow up I will be just what he is," and
now that splendid and gracious figure which had been always
present on the horizon of his child's mind, magnified and
glorified like the illuminated figures in the painted chronicles,
was no more there, — had faded utterly away in the dusk and
the snow of that wintry twilight.

A thousand times was the question to his mother on his
lips, " AVill he never come back ? Shall we never see him
again ?" But he dared not speak it when he saw that look
of a revulsion they could not comprehend always upon her

608 WANDA.

" Ho bade me ncTer vex her," Bela thought. Of theh
father they knew nothiog.

*' I wonder if ever he thinks of us," he said once to Oela,
as their ponies walked down one of the grassy rides of the
home woods.

'^ Perhaps he is dead," said Gela, in a hushed, wistful
voice.

" How dare you say that, Gela?" said his brother, angry
from an intolerable pain. " If he were — were — fhaty we should
be told it. There would be masses in the chapel. We should
have black clothes. Oh, no 1 he is not dead. I should know
it ; I am sure I should know it. Ue would send down some
angel to tell me."

*' Why do you care so much for him ?" said Gela, very low.
" It must be he who has made our mother so changed, so un-
happy, and it is she whom we should love most. You say
even he told you so."

Bela's lips unclosed to loose an angry answer. He was
thinking, " It is she who sent him away, she who made him
weep." But his loyalty checked it : he would not utter what
he thought, even to his brother.

" I think he would not wish us to talk of it," he said,
gravely and sadly. " We will pray for him ; that is all we
can do."

" And for her," said Oela, under his breath.

They were both mute, and let the bridles lie on their ponies
necks as they road home quietly and sorrowfully in the still
summer aflernoon to the great house, which, with all its
thousand casements gleaming in the sun, seemed to them sc
silent, so empty, so deserted, now. Bcla looked up at tha
banner, with its deep red and its blazoned gold streaming on
a westerly wind. " The flag would be half-mast high if it
were that,*^ he thought, his heart wrung by the dread which
Gela had suggested to him. He had seen the banner lowered
when Prince Lilienhbhe had died.

On the lawn under the terrace the other children were
playing with little painted balloons ; the boys did not go to
them, but, riding round to the stables, entered the liouse by
the side-entrance. Gela went to his violin, which he loved
better than any toy and studied seriously. Bela wandered
wearily over the building, tormented by the doubt hb brothef

WANDA. 509

had put Iti his thonglits. They were always enjoined to keep
to their own wing of the house, but Bela often broke tho rule,
as ho did most others. He walked listlessly along the innu-
merable galleries, and up and down the grand staircases, his
St. Hubert hound following his steps. His face was very
pale, his little hands were folded behind his back, his head
was bent. He knew that the Latin and Greek for the
morrow were all unprepared, but he could not think of
them. He was thinking only, " If it should be ? if it should
be ?"

He came at last to the door of the library. It was there
that his mother now spent most of her time. She took long
rides alone, always alone, and often chose for them the wildest
weather. When she was in-doors, she passed her time in
unremitting application to all the business of her esUtes.
Bela opened the great oak door very softly, and saw her
seated at the table. Donau and Neva, who now were old,
were lying near her feet. She was studying some papers.
The sunset glow came through the painted casements and
warmed all the Hght about her, but by its contrast her atti-
tude, her expression, her features, looked only the graver, the
colder, the more colorless. Her gown was black, her pearls
were about her throat, her profile was severe, her cheek,
turned to the light, was pale and thin. She did not see the
little gallant figure of her son in his white summer riding-
clothes, and with his golden hair cut across his brows, looking
like a boy*8 portrait by Vandyck.

He stood a moment irresolute; then he went across the
long room and stood before her, and bowed as he knew he
ought to do. She started and turned her head and saw the
pallor of the child's face. She put out her hand to him ; it
was very thin, and the rings were large upon it. He saw a
contraction on her features as of pain ; it was but of a mo-
ment, because he looked so like his father.

" What is it, Bela?'* she said to him. " You ought not to
oome here."

His lower lip quivered. He hesitated, then, gathering all
bis courage, said, timidly, —

" May I ask you just one thing?"

" Surely, my child : are you afraid of me?"

It struck her, with a sudden sense of contrition, that she

43*

510 WANDA.

had made the children dfraid of her. She had never tly>Qgl't
of it before.

Bela hesitated once more, then said, boldly, " Gela said to-
day lie might be dead. Oh, if he ever die, will you please teD
me ? I shall think of it day and night ?"

Her face changed terribly: the darker passions of her nature
were spoken on it.

" I have forbidden you to speak of your fathef) if it be he
you mean," she said, sternly and very coldly.

But Bela, though frightened, clung to his one thought.

" But he may die 1" he said, piteously. " Will you tell
me? Please, will you tell me? He might be dead now;
we never hear."

She leaned her arm upon the table, and covered her eyes
with her hand. She was silent. She strove with herself so
as not to treat the child with harshness. Though he hurt her
so cruelly, he was right. She honored him for his courage.

" If you will only tell me that," said the boy, with tears in
his throat, " I will never ask anything else, — never — never !"

" Why do you cling so to his memory ?" she said, with a
sudden impatience of jealousy. " He never took heed of you."

" I wus so little," said Bela, with a sigh. " But I loved
him, oh I I have always loved him, and I was the last to see
him that night."

" I know I" she said, harshly, a' hamed meanwhile of her
own harshness, for how could the child suspect the torture bis
words were to her? What had his father given her beautiful
boy ? — disgraced descent, sullied blood, the heritage of false-
hood and of dishonor. Yet the boy loved his memory better •
than he loved her presence. And the time had been, not so
long past, when she would have recognized the preference
with fond and generous delight.

Bela stood beside her, with his eyes watching her with
timid interrogation, with longing appeal. The look upon hi*
face went to her heart. She knew not what to say to him.
She had hoped he would be always silent, and forget, as chil-
dren usually forget.

" You are ri^ht to feel so," she said to him at last, with •
violent eflPort. " Cherish his memory, and pray for him always,
but do not speak of him to me. When you are grown to
manhood, if I be living then, you shall hear what has parted

WANDA. 511

your father and me ; yon shall jud^ as yourself. But there
«re many years to that, — many weary years for me. I shall
endeavor that they shall he happy ones for you, hut you must
never ask me, never speak of, him. I gave you that command
that nighc ; but you are very young, you have forgotten."

Bcia listened with a sinking heart He gathered from her
words that his father's absence was, as he had feared, forever,

" I had not forgotten," he said, in a whisper, for the mo-
ment was terrible to him. ** But if — if what Gela said should
ever be, will you tell me that? I will not disobey again, but
pray — pray — tell me thatr

His mother's face seemed to him to grow colder and colder,
paler and paler, till she scarcely looked a living woman.

" I will tell you, — if 1 know," sho said, with a pause be-
tween each slow-spoken word. Then the only smile that had
come upon her lips for many months came there, — a smile
'sadder than tears, more bitter than all scorn.

" He will outlive me, fear not," she said, as she put out her
hand to the child. " Now leave me, my dear ; I am occupied."

Bela touched her hand with his lips, which, despite his
will, quivered as he did so. He felt that he had failed, that
he had disobeyed and hurt her, that he had been unable to
show one-tenth of all the feelings that choked him with their
force and longing. He hung his head as he went sorrowfully
away. ** She may not know I She may not know !" he
thought, with terror. He looked back at her timidly as ho
closed the door. She had resumed her writing ; the red sun-
set light fell on her black gown, on her stately head, on her
profile, cut clear as on a cameo.

He dared not return.

The mother whom he had known in other years, on whose
knee he had rested his head as she told him tales in the twi-
light hour, whose hand had caressed his curls, whose smile had
rewarded his stammering Latin or his hardly-achieved line of
handwriting, who had stooped over him in his drowsy dreams
and made him think of angels, the mother who had said to
Egon Vb,s5.rhely, " This is my Bcla : love him a little for my
sake," seemed as far from him as though she were lying in
her tomb.

She, when the tapestry had fallen behind the slender figure
of her little son, continued to write on. It was hard, dry

612 WANDA.

matter that she wrote of, — the condition of her miners amcmg
the silver ore of the northeast. Slie forced her mind to it,
she compelled her will and her hand ; that was all. These
things depended on her; she would not neglect them, she
rtrove to find in them that distraction which lighter natures
seek in pleasure. But in vain she strove to be able to com-
pel her attention to the details she was following and correct-
ing ; soon they became to her so confused that they were
unintelligible ; for once her intelligence refused to obey her
will. The child's words haunted her. She laid down her
pen, pushed aside the reports and the letter in which she was
replying to them, and, rising, paced to and fro the long pol-
ished floor of the library.

It was here that he had first bowed before her on that night
when Hohenszalras had sheltered him from the storm.

" We had a mass of thanksgiving 1" she thought

The child's words haunted her. Not to know even thai,
when they had passed nine years together in the closest of all
human ties I For the first time the misgiving came to her,
had she been too harsh ? No ; it would have been impossible
to do less ; many would have done far more in chastisement
of the fraud upon their honor and good faith. Yet as she
recalled their many hours of joy it seemed as if she remem-
bered these too little ; then again she scouted her own weak-
ness. What had been all his life beside her save one elaborate
lie?

The broad shafls of the blazing sunset slanted, across the
inlaid woods of the floor that she paced, the windows were
open, the birds sang in the rose-boughs and ivy without. The
summers would come thus, one after another, with their intol-
erable light, and the intolerable laughter of the unconscious
children, and she would carry her burden through them though
the day was forever dark for her.

Time had been when she had thought that she should die
if he were lost to her, but she lived on and marvelled at her-
irelf. Her very soul seemed to have gone from her with the
destruction of her love. Her body seemed to her but a mere
shell, an inanimate pulseless thing. The only thing that
seemed alive in her was shame.

She paced now up and down the long room while the sunset
died and the gray evening dulled the painted panes of the

WANDA. 513

easemates. The cluld's words had pierced through hci frozen
calm. It was true that she had no knowledj^e where his father
was ; he might be dead, he might be killed by his own hand,
she knew nothing; She had bidden him let her forget that
he had ever lived beside her, and he had obeyed her. lie
might be in the world of men, careless and content, consoled
by others, or he might be in his grave.

All she knew was that he never touched the revenues of
[drac.

She paused on the same spot where he had stood before her
first, with his fair beauty, his courtier's smile, his easy grace,
the very prince of gentlemen ; and her hands clinched the
folds of her gown as she thought — ** the first of actors I Noth-
ing more.'' And she, Wanda von Szalras, had been th£ dupe
of that inimitable mimicry and mgckery !

The thought was like a rusted iron, eating deeper and deeper
into her heart each day. When her consciousness, her mem-
ory, would have said otherwise, would have told her that in
much he was loyal and sincere, though in one great thing he
had been false, she would not trust herself to heafken to the
suggestion. " Let me see clearly, though I die of what I
see !" she said in her soul. She would be blind no more.
She hated herself that she had been ever blind.

She had been always his dupe, from the first sonorous
phrases she had heard him utter in the French Chamber to
the last sentence with which he had left her when he went
from her to the presence of Olga Brancka. So she believed.
Here she did him wrong ; but how was she to tell that ? To
her it seemed but one long-sustained comedy, one brilliant and
hateful imposture.

Sometimes his cry to her rang in her ears, " Believe at least
that I did love you 1" and some subtile true instinct in her
whispered to her that he had there been sincere, that in pas-
sion and devotion at least he had been never false. But she
thrust the thought away : it seemed but another form of self-
deception.

The dull, slow evening passed as usual ; it was late in
mummer, and the night came early. She dined in company
with Madame Ottilie, and sat with her, as usual, afterwardn.
The room seemed full of his voice, of his laugh ter, of tk^
music of which he had had such mastefv.

514 WANDA.

She span on at her ivory wheel because it was mere me*
chanical work which lefl thought free. The princess, in lieu
of slumbering, looked at her ever and again. Suddenly she
gathered her courage and spoke.

" Wanda, you are a Christian woman," she said, slowly and
softly. " Is it Christian never to forgive ?"

Her face did not chanp^e as she turned the wheel.

" What is forgiveness ?'* she said, coldly. " Is it abstinence
from vengeance ? I have abstained.'*

" It is far more than that 1"

" Then I do not reach it."

" No ; you do not. That is why I presumed to ask you,
is it in consonance with your tenets, with your duties ?"

" I think so," she answered, with hauteur,

" Then change your creed," said the princess.

A sombre wrath shone In her eyes as she looked up one
inoment :

" I have the blood in me of men who were not alwayi
Christians, but who, even when Pagan, knew what honor was.
There are some things which are so vile that one must be vile
one's self before one can forgive them."

The princess sighed.

" I am in ignorance of the nature of your wrongs ; but
this I know: they erred, who gave you absolution at Easter-
tide, whilst you still bore bitterness in your soul."

^^ Would I lay bare my soul and his shame now to any
priest?" thought Wanda, but she repressed the answer. She
said, simply, "Dear mother, believe me, I have been more
merciful than many would have been." .

" You mean that you have not sought for a divorce ? Nay,
that is not mercy ; that is decency, dignity, self-respect. When
they of a great race go to the public with their wrongs they
drag their escutcheon in the mud for the pleasure of the
crowd. That you have not done that is not mercy. You do
but follow your instinct : you are a gentlewoman."

A momentary impulse came over her, as she heard, to tell
her companion his sin and her own shame ; the woman's weak-
ness, desiring sympathy and comprehension, assailed her for
an instant. But she resisted and repressed it. The Princess
Ottilie was aged and feeble. She had had no slight share in
bringing about this union, which was now so cruelly broken •

WANDA, 615

she had been ever proud of her penetration and devoted to
his defence. To learn the truth would be a shock so terrible
to her that it must needs be veiled from her forever. Besides,
his wife felt as though the relation would blister her lips wero
the to make it even to her oldest friend.

Had she known all, the princess would have been even more
bitter in her hatred, even more inflexible in her sense of out-
rage, than she herself; but his wife could not purchase her
sympathy at such a price. She chose rather to be herself
condemned.

Offended, the princess rose slowly to go to her own apart-
ments. The tears welled painfully in her eyes.

** Yoti were so happy, he was so devoted," she murmured.
'* Can all that have crumbled like a house of sand ?"

Wanda von Szalras said, bitterly, —

" What did I say once, the day of my betrothal ? That I
leaned on a reed. The reed has withered ; that is all."

She conducted her aunt to her bedchamber with the usual
courteous observances, then returned and sat long alone in the
silent chamber.

"Forgive! what is the obligation of forgiveness?" she
thought. " It is the obligation to pardon offences, infidelity,
unkindness, cruelty, but not dishonor. To forgive dishonor
is to be dishonored. So would my fathers have said."

CHAPTER XXXIX.

BiSJJL that dawn was awakened by his mother standing
beside his bed. She stooped and touched his curls with her
lips.

" I was harsh to you this afternoon, my child," she said to
him. " I come to tell you now that you were quite right to
have the thought you had. You are his son ; you must not
forget him."

Bela lifted up his beautiful flushed face and hb eyes brilliant
from sleep.

" I am glad I may remember," he said, simply ; then he

516 WANDA.

added, with his checks baiming, " When I am a man I will go
and find him and bring him back."

His mother turned away her face.

When his manhood should come, and he should hear the
Btory of his father's sin, what would he say ? Would not all
his soul cry out aloud and curse the impostor who had begot-
ten him?

The eyes of Bela followed the dark form of his mother ai
the passed from his room.

" She is very unhappy," he thought, wistfully. " If I
could find him 7ww, would it make her happy again, I won-
der ?"

And the chivalry that was in his blood stirred in his childish
veins.

"But you said that she sent him away?" objected Gela,
when Bela got upon his brother's bed and confided his thoughts
to him.

" I did think so, but I might mistake," said Bela. " Per-
haps he went because he was obliged, and that it is which
grieves her."

" Perhaps," said Gela, meditatively.

" If I only knew where to go to find him, I would go all
over the world," said Bela, with passion. " I would ride
Folko to the earth's very, very end to find him."

" You could not get over the seas so," said Gela, *' and he
may be over the seas."

" And we have never even seen the sea I" said Bela, to
whom the suggested distance seemed more terrible than he
had ever imagined. " What can we do, Gela ? Do you
think ; you are clever about everything."

Gela was silent a moment.

" Let us pray for him with all our might," he said, sol-
emnly ; and the two little boys knelt down by the bedside
in their little night-shirts and prayed together for their
father.

When Bela rose, his face was very troubled, but very reso-
lute. He drew out of its sheath a small sword with a handle
of gold, which Egon V^sJirhely had sent him years before.
" One must pray first," he thought, " but afterwards one must
help one's self. God does not care for cowards."

In the day he went out by himself and found Otto : the

WANDA. 517

ehildrcn were allowed to go all over the home woods at their
pleasure. The jageiTneister was very dear to Bela, for he told
such woDdrous tales of sport and danger and spoke with such
reverent afTcction of his lost lord.

"Where can he be, Otto?" said Bela, in a low hushed
voice, as they sat under the green oak boughs.

" Ah, my little count, if only I knew T* said Otto. " I
would walk a thousand miles to him, and take him the first
blackcock that shall fall to my gun this autumn."

"You really say the truth? You do not know?" said
Bela, with stern questioning eyes.

" Would I tell a lie, my little lord?" said the old hunter,
reproachfully. " Since your father drove away that cruel
night none of us have set eyes on him, or ever heard a word.
If Her Excellency do not know, how should we ?"

" I mean to find him," said the child, solemnly.

The old man sighed.

" How should you do that ? Our hills are between us and
all the rest of the world. Perhaps he is gone because he was
tired of being here."

" No,** said Bela, who remembered his father's farewell to
him, of which he could never bring himself to speak to any
living creature.

Otto was silent too : ho could not tell the child what all the
household believed, — that his father had found too great a
charm in the presence of the Countess Brancka.

The weeks and months stole on their course, which in the
forest-heart of the old archduchy seems so leisurely beside the
feverish haste of the mad world. The ways of life went on
unchanged ; the children throve, and studied, and played, and
grew apace ; the health of the princess became more delicate,
and her strength more feeble; the seasons succeeded each
other with monotony ; no sound from the cities of men that
lay beyond the ramparts of the glaciers broke the silence an 1
the calm of Hohenszalras.

Wanda herself would not have known that one year was
different from another had she not been been forced to count
time by the inches that it added to the stature of her off-
spring, and the recurrence of the days of their patron saints.
They grew as fast as reeds in peaceful waters, and forced her to
recognize that the years were dropping into the vast. Timi

44

518 WANDA,

for her was shod with lead and crept tamely, like a cripple
upon broken ground. For the children's sake she lived ; but
for thera, she know not why she rose to these long, colorless,
lonely hours. But her corporeal life ailed nothing, whilst her
spiritual life was sick unto death. Almost she could have
wished for the lassitude of weakness to dull her pain : her
bodily strength seemed to intensify what she suffered.

In the frosted, brilliant winter time she still drove her fiery
horses over the snow that was like marble, plunging into the
recesses of the woods, seeing above her the ramparts and
bastions and pinnacles of the great ice-range of the Glockner
glaciers. The intense cold, the rushing air, the whiteness as
of a virgin earth, the sense of profound solitude, did her good,
cooled the sense of shame that seemed burnt into her life,
soothed the anguish of a love fooled, betrayed, and widowed.
She felt with horror that the longer she kneeled beside the
altar, the longer she prayed before the great Christ in her
chapel, the more passionately she rebelled against the fate
that had overtaken her. But alone in the rarefied air, with
the vastness of the mountains about her, with the cold wind
pouring like spring-water down a thirsty throat in its merci-
ful coldness, with the white peaks meeting the stan'y skies
and the waters hushed in their shroud of ice, she gathered
some kind of peace, some power of endurance: consolatioo
neither earth nor heaven could give to her.

Of him she never heard. She could only have heard
through her lawyers, and they knew nothing. Neither in
Paris nor in Vienna was he seen. By a letter she received
from the priest of Ilomaris she had learned that he was not
there. She had sent one of her men of business thither with
money and plans, to build on the site of the old house of
the Sabrans a Maison de Dieu for the aored and sick fisher-
men of the coast, and their widows. " It will be a chapeUt
expiatoirey^ she had thought, bitterly, and she had endowed
it richly, so that it should be independent of all those who
should come afler her. In all the occupations entailed by
this and similar projects she was as attentive as of yore to all
demands made on her.

When she perused a lawyer's long preamble, or corrected
an architect's estimates and drawings, she was the same woman
M she had been ere her betrayer had crossed the threshold of

WANDA. 519

her home. Her character had been built on lines too strong,
on a base too firm, for the earthquake of calamity, the whirl-
wind of passion, to undo it. But in her heart there was utter
shipwreck. She had given herself and all that was hers with
magnificent generosity ; and she had received in return be-
trayal and a dishonor under which day and night all the
patrician in her writhed and suffered.

A hard trial to her was the tacit condemnation of the
Princess Ottilie. Too proud and too delicate to intrude un-
desired into any confidence, and too tender-hearted to utter
censure aloud to one she loved, the princess showed in a thou-
sand ways without speech that she considered there were
cruelty and egotism in her unexplained separation from her
husband. Believing as she did that his offence was that
conjugal infidelity which, however blamable, was one of those
injuries which all women who love forgive, and which those
who do not love endure in silence from patience and dignity,
herself offended at her exclusion from all knowledge of the
facts, the princess said but little ; but her whole attitude was
one of restrained reproach. When in the autumn of that
year Cardinal Vils^rhely, travelling in great state from Buda-
Pesth, arrived at Hohenszalras, — a guest whom none could
deny, a judge whom none could evade, — he did not spare
more open interrogation, more stern rebuke.

The Lilienhbhe she had excused herself from receiving; the
Kaulnitz she had also refused ; others as nearly related to her
had encountered the same resistance to their overtures; but
Cardinal Vitsarhely came to take up his residence at the Holy
Isle, with the weight of authority and the sanctity of the
Church. He visited his niece for the sole purpose of remon-
strance.

When he found himself met by a respectful but firm refusal
to acquaint him with the reasons for her conduct, he did not,
either, spare her the stately wrath of the incensed ecclesiastic.

" If your griefs against your husband," he urged, " are of
sufficient gravity to justify you in desiring eternal separation
from him, you should not lean merely upon your own strength.
You should seek the support of your spiritual counsellors.
Although the Holy Church has never sanctioned the concu-
binage which the laws of men have called by the name of
divorce, yet, as you are aware, my daughter, in extreme cases

620 WANDA.

the Holy Father has himself deigned to unloose an unworthy
bond, to annul an unsuitable marriage. In your case, if the
offences of your lord have been so grave, I make no doubt
that by my intercession with His Sanctity it would be possible
to dissolve a union which has become unholy."

The cardinal was a man of noble presence, and of austere
if arrogant life. He spoke now with all the weight of his
sixty years and of his eminence in the service of the Church.
His eyes were bent on her in stern scrutiny as he stood drawn
up to all his great height beside her in the library.

She met his gaze calmly and coldly.

" Your Eminence is very good to interest yourself in my
sorrows,** she replied, '* but for the intercession with our Holy
Father which you offer, I will not trouble you. Whatever
the offences of my husband be against me, they can concern
me alone. I have summoned no one to hear them. I seek
no one's judgment. As regards the power of the Supreme
Pontiff to bind and loose, I would bow to it in all matters
spiritual, but I cannot admit that even he can release me from
an eartlily tie which I voluntarily assumed."

A rebuking wrath flashed from the eagle eyes of the great
churchman.

" I did not think that Wanda von Szalras would heretically
deny the Pope his power over all souls 1" he said, sternly.
" Are you not aware that when the Holy Father deigns in
his mercifulness to decree a marriage as null and void, it be-
comes so from that instant? It is as though it had never
been ; the union is effaced, the woman is decreed pure."

" And the children," she said, bitterly, — " can the Holy
Father efface them T' ,

The cardinal was affronted and appalled.

" You would call in question the infallible omnipotence of
the Head of the Church 1" he said, with horror.

" The days of miracles are past," she said, coldly. '* I shall
not entreat for them to be wrought for me. I trust your Em-
inence will pardon me if I say that no human, nay, no heav-
enly, permission could legitimate adultery in my sight or in
my person."

" You merit excommunication, my daughter," said the
haughty prelate, his brow black with wrath. He saw do
reason why this marriage, which had offended all her house,

WANDA. 521

Rhould not be annulled by the all-powerful verdict of the
Vatican. Such cases were rare, but it would be possible to
include hors among them. The children could be consigned
to religious houses, brought up to religious lives, unknown to
and unknowing of the world.

" If the man whom you chose to wed," he continued, sternly,
" has offended or outraged you so greatly, let your relatives
judge him and deal with him. You were warned against the
gill of your hand to a stranger with an uncertain past behind
him ; he had not the eminence, the repute, the character that
should have been demanded in your husband. But you were
inflexible in your resolve then, as you are now in your silence."

" I know of no one living to whom I owe any account,"
she said, with haughty decision, — '* no one to whom I was
bound to lay bare my mind and heart then, or to whom I am
60 bound now."

" You are so bound every time you kneel in the confes-
sional."

" To reveal my own sins, perchance ; not his."

" Your soul should be as an open book before your priest."

" Your Eminence will pardon me. I bow willingly and
reverently to the Church in all matters spiritual, but in the
rule of my own conduct I admit no guide but my conscience.
My sorrows are all my own. No priest or layman shall intrude
upon them."

She spoke with peremptory and unyielding decision ; the
old spirit of her race was aroused in her, which in times by-
gone had bearded popes and monarchs and braved the thunders
of excommunication. They had been pious sons of Rome,
but yet ofttimes rebellious ones : when their honor called ono
way and the priests pointed the other, they had lifted their
swords in the sunlight and gone whither honor bade.

The churchman knew that power of secular revolt which
had been always latent in the Szalras blood ; he knew now that,
armed with the weapons of the Church though he was, he
might as well seek to bow the mountains down as bend her
will. He took for granted that her wrongs were great enough
to entitle her to freedom ; he had thought that she might wed
again with his nephew, who had loved her so long; their
mighty fortunes would fitly meet ; this hateful union with a
foreigner, a sceptic, a debauchee, would become a thing of the

41*

622 WANDA.

past, washed away into absolute non-existence : so ho had
dreamed, and he found himself confronted with a woman ti
illogical inconsistency and obstinacy.

He was deeply incensed. He assailed her for many days
with all the subtle arguments of the ecclesiastic's armory, but
he made no impression. She utterly refused to tell why she
had exiled her husband from her house, and she as utterly
refused to take any measures to attain her own freedom.
When he left her he said a word of rebuke that long lingered
in her memory : " You are rebellious and almost heretical,
my daughter. You intrench yourself in your silence and
your pride, which you appear to forget are heinous sins when
opposed to your spiritual superiors. But this only I will re-
mind you of: if you deny the Church the power to annul the
union of which its sacrament sanctified the consummation, be
at least consistent ; do not absolve yourself from its duties."

With that keen home-thrust in parting he left her, giving;
his blessing to the kneeling household ; and six white mules,
always kept there in readiness for his visits, bore him away
through the embrowning woods.

When he reached his palace in Buda he summoned Egon
V^s;\rhely and related what had passed.

His nephew heard in silence.

" Your Eminence erred in your judgment of Wanda," he
said, at length. " She would never make her wrongs, what-
ever they be, public, nor seek for dissolution of her marriage.
She may repent it, but she will repent it in solitude."

" If the marriage be so sacred in her eyes," said the angry
prelate, " let her continue to live with her husband. She has
been a law to herself; she has parted from him. W^here is
the wifely submission there? where the sanctity of the im-
mutable bond?"

" Perhaps some day she will bid him return," said Vh.s^r«
hcly, whose features were very grave and pale.

*' She could forget this fatal folly like a bad dream," cou-
tmued the cardinal, unheeding. " She could begin a new
life ; she could wed with you."

" Your Eminence mistakes," said V^sJtrhely, abruptly.
" Though that man were dead ten times over, Wanda would
never wed with me, — nor I with her."

'^ You are both wiser than the wisdom and holier than the

WANDA. 523

Woliccss of the Church," said the incensed ecclesiastic, with
boundless scorn. He was accustomed to bend human volition
like a willow wand in his hand.

When she left the terrace where she had parted from the
prelate, havinj]j accompanied him there in that stately etiquette
which, though she had been dying, habit would have compelled
her to observe in every detail, she turned with a sense of in-
tolerable pain from the sunshine of the September day. It
was a pretty scene that stretched before her, the children
standing bareheaded, the household hushed and kneeling still
where the mighty dignitary of the Mother Church had given
them his benediction ; the gold embroideries and rich colors
of the liveries glowing in the light ; the white mules and the
scarlet-clothed attendants of the cardinal passing down the
avenue of oaks, with the immediate background of the dark-
some yews, and, farther, the flushed foliage of the forests and
the shine of the snow-peaks ; but to her it was fraught with
unendurable associations. The central figure was missing from
it, which for so many years had graced all pageants and con-
ducted all ceremonies there. It was the sole time since the
exile of her husband that there had been any arrival or de-
parture at Hohenszalras.

She had been compelled to receive the prelate with all duo
state and observance, and the oppressiveness of his three days*
sojourn had worn and wearied her.

" I would sooner receive five emperors than one churchman,"
she said to the princess. " We are far from the days of the
apostles 1"

" Christ must be honored in His Vicars," said the princess,
ooldly, and with disapprobation chill on all her features.

Wanda turned away as the white mules disappeared in a
bend of the avenue, and went into the house alone, whilst the
children and the household still lingered in the sunshine. She
traversed the whole length of the building to reach her octa-
gon room, where she was certain to be alone. The interroga-
tion and censure of her uncle had left on her a harassed sense
of being somewhere at fault, — not to him, nor to the Church he
represented and invoked, but to her own conscience.

As she passed through one of the galleries, she saw her
youngest child Egon, now nearly two years old, playing with
his nurse, an old, gravo North-German woman. They werd

524 WANDA.

the only living beings of the house who had not been upon
the terraces to receive the cardinars last blessing, — the one loo
young, the other too old to care. The child, with his fair face
and his light curls, was like the child Christ of Carlo Dolci,
yet there was the same resemblance in him to his father which
pierced her soul whenever she looked in the faces of her off-
spring.

She paused and stooped towards him now, where he played
with a toy lamb in the breadth of sunlight that fell warm and
broad through the open lattices of an oriel window, in the em
brasure of which his attendant was sitting. The baby looked
up under his long dark lashes, and made a little timid move*
ment towards his old nurse.

" Is he afraid of me ?" she said, with the same pang of
self-reproach that she had felt for his eldest brother.

" Oh, no 1 he is not afVaid, my lady," said the old woman
with him, hurriedly. " But he sees you so rarely now, and
when they are so young they are frightened at grave faces."

The nurse stopped herself, fearing she had said too much ;
but her mistress listened without anger and with a sharp pang
of self-reproach.

" Come for him to my room when I ring," she said ; and
she stooped again and lifted the little boy in her arras.

" Are you all afraid of me, my poor children ?" she mur-
mured to him. " Surely I have never been cruel to you ?"

He did not understand ; he was still frightened, but he put
his arm about her throat and hid his pretty face on her shoul-
der with a gesture that was half terror, half confidence. She
took him to her own room and soothed and caressed and
amused him, till he regained his natural fearlessness and sat
happy on her knee, playing with some Indian ivory toys ; then
he grew tired, and leaned his head against her breast, and fell
asleep as prettily as a Star of Bethlehem shuts its white leavea
up at sunset.

She watched him with an aching heart

She could look on none of her children without a throb of
intolerable shame. They were the symbols as they were the
offspring of all her hours of love. Another woman might
!iave forgotten all except that they were hers.

She could not.

WANDA 625

CHAPTER XL.

From that day she had the younger children brought to
bcr more often, drove them out at times, and soon regained
their affection, although to them all a majesty and melancholy,
A8 inseparable from her now as shadows from the night, made
her presence inspire them with a certain awe ; even Lili, the
most wilful of them all, in her pretty, gay, childish vanity
and naughtiness, never ventured to disobey or to weary her.

" When I am with her it is as if I were at mass," Lili said
to her brothers. " You know what one feels when the Host
comes and the bell rings, and it is all so still, and only the
Latin words "

" It is the presence of God that we feel at mass," said Gela,
in a hushed voice. " And I think our mother has God with
her very much. Only He makes her sad."

" But she never does cry," said Lili.

" No," said Gela, " I think she is too sad for that. You
know when it is very, very cold the skies cannot rain. 1
think that it is just so cold with her."

And Gela*s own eyes filled, for he, the most thoughtful and
the most quick in perception of them all, adored his mother.
When he could, he would sit in her presence for hours, mute
and motionless, with a book on his knees, glancing at her with
his meditative eyes now and then in rapt veneration.

" When Bela grows up he will wander, I dare say, and
perhaps be a great soldier," Gela thought, at such times.
" But for me, I shall stay always with our mother, and read
every thing that is written, and do all I can for the people,
and care for nothing but for her and them."

She had not let loose in the presence of Cardinal Vh.s5,rhely
the burning wrath which had consumed her. And yet the
valedictory words of the prelate recurred to her with haunting
persistency. Was it possible that she still owed allegiance to
one who, whilst he had embraced her, had dishonored her ?

" As well," she thought, bitterly, " as well say that the man
and woman chained and drowned together in the Noyades of
Nantes were united in a holy union.''

526 WANDA,

" E(/o conjungo vos in matrimonium^ in nomine PcUHm M
FiUi et Spiritus Sanctis

As she remembered those words of the Marriaoje Sacrament,
ottered as she had stood beside him in the midst of the in-
cense, the color, the pomp, the f^orgeous grandeur of the
Court Chapel in Vienna, she felt that they had bound on her
eternal silence, perpetual constancy, even in a sense conti'jual
submission ; they forbade her to disgrace him before the world,
they made his shame hers, they required her to defend him
80 far as in her lay from the punishment with which the laws
would have met his wrong-doing : but she could not bring
herself to acknowledge that it demanded more. Truth could
not be forced to dwell beside falsehood. Honor oould not
take the kiss of peace from dishonor.

The unerring knowledge of human nature which is given
by an ecclesiastical career had enabled His Eminence to leave
behind him a thorn which never ceased to pierce anew the
wound in his niece's heart. He had said to her, " If you re-
fuse to be released from your marriage, do not absolve your-
self from its duties.'*

The natural veneration she bore to the speaker added to
the weight of the reproach they implied. Even beyond her
pride was her intense sense of the obligations of duty. She
askf^d herself a thousand times a week if she had indeed failed
in these Honor was a yet higher thing than duty. Offended
honor had its title to any choice. Her race had never gone
to others with their wrongs ; they had known how to avenge
themselves by their own hand, in their own way. If she had
chosen to stab him in the throat which had lied to her, she
would not have gone outside her right. Yet she had been
merciful to him ; she had neither exposed nor chastised him ;
she had simply cut his life adrift from hers, which he had
outraged.

No man's repute was hurt by separation from his wife ; he
was in no worse circumstance than he had been ere he had
met her ; she did not withdraw her gifts. She had given a
noble name to one nameless ; she had granted a feudal title tc
a bastard ; she had enriched a man who previously had owned
nothing, save half a million of francs won at play and a strip
of sea-shore that was stolen. She withdrew none of her gitls ;
she left him to the full enjoyment of the world ; she did not

W^ANDA. 527

even move a step to secure the world's sympathy with herself.
Ail she had done as her just vengeance was to withdraw her-
self from the pollution of his touch and to exile him from the
home of her fathers. Who could have done less? His
children would in the future possess all she had, though
through him they destroyed the purity of her race forever :
centuries would not wash out in her sight the stain that wai
in their blood, but she did not disinherit them. She could
not see that she had failed anywhere in her duty : she had
been more generous in her judgment than many could have
been Wherever women spoke of her and of her separation
from her husband, there would they surely, with many a
bitter word, repay her all the affronts which she had put
upon them by her indifference and what they had esteemed
her arrogance. She knew that in such a position as she had
perforce created, unexplained, the man is easily and constantly
absolved of blame, the woman is always and certainly con-
demned. Therefore she had never doubted that the future
would lie lightly on his shoulders, passed in sensual idleness,
whether on the banks of the Almerida or of the Seine. Could
it be possible that though she had been so cruelly betrayed
her own obligations remained the same? . Had her marriage-
vows compelled her to endure even such offence as this without
alteration in her own obedience? Was she inconsistent in
sending her betrayer from her whilst she still considered her
bond to him binding ? Since she refused to take advantage of
the release that the Law and the Church would give her, was
it unjustified to free herself from his hourly presence, his
daily contact ? No I she could not believe that it was so.

CHAPTER XLI.

On her name-day, in the following spring, addressing hia
felicitations to her, Egon V^^rhely added words which had
cost him much to write.

" You know how dear, more dear than any earthly thing,
you have been ever to me," he wrote, " therefore you will
pardon me what I am about to say. If I had followed my
own selfish desires T sh )uld have entreated you to disgraoe

528 WANDA.

hitn publicly begjijcd you to shake off publicly all bonds to •
traitor ; and I should have shot him dead, with or without the
formula of a quarrel : he himself knew that well. But for
your own sake I would say to you now, pardon him if you
can. Though you are the possessor of a position and of a char-
acter rare among women, yet even you must suffer as a sepa-
rated wife. The children as they grow older will suffer from
it likewise. You could divorce your husband ; the Law and
the Church would set you free from a union contracted in
ignorance with a man guilty of a fraud. You would be free,
and he would endure his fit chastisement. But I understand
why you refuse to do that. I comprehend your feeling.
Publicity would to you intensify disgrace. Divorce could do
nothing to heal your cruel wounds. Therefore I urge on you
forgiveness. It has cost me many months* bitter struggle to
be able to write this to you. His offence is vile. His past
is hateful. He himself merits nothing. But for you I would
set my heel on his throat as on a snake*s. But there may
have been excuses even for him ; and since you acknowledge
him as your husband you will, in the end, be more at peace
if you do not continue to insist on a separation which will be
food for the world's calumny. Besides, though you know it
not, you have not exiled him from your heart, though you
have sent him from your house. If you had not still loved
him you would have said to me. Slay hirA. I believe that he
loved you, though he had such foul guilt against you, and he
must have some true qualities of character and mind since he
satisfied yours for many long years. Of where he may be I
know not. Since I saw you I have not quitted my own
country. But I would say to you. Wherever he be, send for
him. You will understand without words what it costs me to
say to you, Since you will not accept the freedom of the Law,
summon him to you and cleanse his soul in yours. I speak
for you, not him. If I saw him lying dead like a dog in a
ditch, for myself, I should thank God. Sometimes I look
with stupor at my sword. Can it lie idle there and you be
unavenged ?"

The letter touched her profoundly. She realized th^
grandeur of generosity, the force of compelling duty, which
had enabled Yh^skrhely to wriie it, proudest of gentlemen as
he was, most devoted of lovers as he had been.

^•-1

WANDA. 529

She replied to him, —

" I have thought myself strong, but of late years I have
found that there are things beyond my strength : what you
counsel is one of them. Religion enjoins indeed forgiveness
withe at limit ; but there are wrongs for which religion makes
no provision and of which it has no comprehension. Never-
fcheless, I thank you for him and for myself."

Any crime, any folly, any violence or faithlessness, which
yet should have left his honor pure, she thought it would
have been possible to condone ; the life of a woman who loves
must ever be one long pardon. But such shame as this of his
ate into her very soul, as rust into the pure metal. It was
such shame that when her heart went out to him in the yearn-
ing of affection she felt herself disgi-aced, feeling that the
dominion of the senses, the weakness of remembered and de-
sired joys, made her oblivious of indignity, feeble as an en*
amored fool.

Her friends, her priests, even her own eonecience, might
say to her, Forgive him, but she could not bend her will to do
it. Forgiveness would mean reconciliation, union, life spent
together as in their days of 1^ ve. • She could not bring herself
to endure that perpetual contact, that incessant communion.
To her he was stained with a moral leprosy. She could not
consent to admit that one in spiritual health, and clean of
guilt, must dwell with one spiritually diseased.

CHAPTER XLII.

Once she, having occasion to go to the room which had been
«ct aside for the boys' studies, saw the old professor absorbed
in the perusal of a letter. Confused and startled, he slipped
it hurriedly beneath a Latin exercise of Bcla's, which lay with
other papers on the table. The children were out riding.

His mistress looked at him, and her face grew a shade paler
Btill.

" You correspond with my husband ?" she said, abruptly
pausing, as she always paused, before she said the latter words.
X kk 45

530 WANDA.

Greswold flashed coDSciously, stammered a few uniDtelli*
gibio words, and was silent.

" You hear from him ?" she continued, with correct infer-
ence. " You know where he is?"

" I have promised that I will not say. I pray your Excel-
lency to pardon me/' murmured the old man, the color mount-
ing upward to his gray locks.

She was silent a moment; she knew not what emotion
moved her^ whether wrath, or wonder, or offence, or whether
even relief from long suspense.

" Do not be angered, my lady," pleaded Greswold, timidly.
" It is the only way in which he can hear of you and of his chil-
dren. Could your Excellency believe that all these months,
these years, he lived on without any tidings ?"

** I think you have exceeded your duty,*' she said, coldly.
'^ I think that you should have asked my permission."

The old man stood penitent, like a chidden child. He was
terribly afraid of her interrogations, but she made none.

" You will give me your word," she pursued, " never to
speak of this correspondence to Herr Bela or to any of the
children."-

Greswold bowed his assent. *^ My lord has forbidden me
also," he said, eagerly.

Her brows contracted.

^' You have committed an imprudence," she said, in a tone
which chilled the old man to the marrow. " Be heedful that
no one knows of it."

She said no more, took the volume she had needed, and
quitted the room.

" Who shall tell the heart of a woman ?" thought Greswold,
left to himself. " She knows not whether the man she once
adored be living or dead, and she does not put to me one singh
question, does not even seek to learn where he dwells or what
he does 1 What could hi* sin be, to sweep all love away as
fire makes a desert of a smiling meadow ? And be it what it
would, of what use is human love if it have not enough of
the divine love in it to rejoice over the sinner who repents ?"

He knew not that the sin she might, she would, have for*
given, but that the shame ate into the fair marble of her hooot
like a corroding acid.

From that time he expected daily some fresh question, somi

WANDA, 631

allusion at least to the confession which she had surprised from
him. But she never spoke to him aguin of it. If she placed
a violent control upon herself, because she did not think it
fitting to speak of hei husband to one in her employ, or if
her husband were absolutely dead to her memory and her
affections, he could not tell. He only knew that by no word
or sign did she appear to recall the brief conversation which
had passed between them.

Although what he bad done was innocent enough, the old
physician, in his scrupulous sense of duty, began to have a
sense of guilt. Had he any right to retain any hidden knowl-
edge from the mistress whose roof sheltered him and whose
bread he ate ?

But his loyalty to his pledged word, and to him whom the
world of men still called Sabran, obliged him to be mute.

" After all," he thought, " if she knew, it might be better ;
but my first duty is to keep my word."

She never tempted him to break it. She was not callous
and hardened, as he supposed. She felt a growing desire to
learn where and how her husband had taken up the- broken
threads of his severed life. She had believed either that he
would return to the unfettered existence that qould be dreamed
away under the cedar groves of Mexico, with the senses sat-
isfied and the moral law set at naught, or that he would go
among the men and women of the great world, popular, pitied,
and easily consoled. She had seen that world exercise a potent
fascination over him, and if it were called to pronounce against
her or against him, she was well aware that he would bear
away all its suffrages. He had always humored and flattered
it ; she never.

Another year passed by, and of her husband she still heard
nothing. As once before his silence had told her of his pas-
sion more eloquently than speech could have done, so now the
same silence tended to soften her wrath, to soothe her shame.
She h id expected him to take one of two courses : either to
assail her with written entreaties for pardon and ceavseless
efforts to palliate his crime in her sight, or to go out into the
world of men to seek oblivion in pleasure, and perhaps abso-
lution in ambition.

He had done neither.

He had passed from the sight of those who knew him as

532 WANDA.

utterly as though he had descended to his grave. No sound
or hint told her of his destiny. She still thought at times
that he must have sought those flowery recesses of the West
which had given his youth their shelter. It might well be
that in his total ruin his instincts had urged him to return to
the free barbaric life of his early manhood, where none would
reproach him, none deride him, none know hi» secret or his
sin. His correspondence with Greswold suggested a doubt
to her. Perhaps remorse was with him and the weight of
remembrance.

When, too harshly, she had assumed that all his love and
life had been a lie, because one lie had been beneath it, she
had told herself that he would find solace in those vices and
pastimes which in his earlier years had been fatal to his ambi-
tion and to his perseverance. But since he cared to hear ot
his children*s welfare, it might well be that their life together
WAS nearer to his heart than she had credited. She believed
that, if he had been sunk in the kind of self-indulgence she
had imagined, ho would have shunned all tidings, all memories,
of his lost home.

Then again, with the inconsistency of all great suffering,
an intense indignation possessed her that he did dare to re-
member, did dare to recall that her offspring were also his.
Even alone the hot flush of an ever-increasing shame came to
her face when she thought that she had been for nine lonsj
years his, in the most absolute possession that woman can
grant to man. Exile, severance, silence, cold and dark as the
winters of the land of his birth, could not alter that. When-
ever he chose to think of her she must be his in remembrance
still.

She never opened her lips to say to the Princess Ottilie,
" But for you he would have Jassed from my life a mere
stranger, seen but once." But the tender conscience of the
princess made her feel the bitterest reproach every time that
the eyes of her niece met her own, every time that she passed
the blank space in the picture-gallery where once had hung
the portrait of Sabran, painted in court dress by Makart.
The portrait was locked away in a dark closet that opened out
from the oratory of his wife. With its emblazoned arms and
marquis's coronet on the irame, it had seemed such a per-
petual record of his sin that she had had it taken from th«

WANDA. 633

wall and shut in darkness, feeling that it could net hang in
its falsehood amidst the portraits of her people. But often
she opened the door of her oratory and let the light stream
upon the portrait where it leaned against the closet wall. It
was as if he stood living before her, looking as he had looked
BO oflen at the banquets and balls of the Hof burg, when she
had felt so much pride in his personal beauty, his grace of
bearing, his supreme distinction.

" Who could have dreamed that it was but a perfect comedy ,'*
she thought, " as much a comedy as Got's or Bressant's?"

Then her conscience smote her with a sense that she did
him injustice when she thought so. In all things save his
one crime he had been as true a gentleman as any of the great
nobles of the empire. His intelligence, his bearing, his habits,
his person, were all those of a patrician of the highest culture.
The fraud of his name apart, there had been nothing in him
that the most fastidious aristocrats would have disowned. Ho
had inherited the qualities of a race of princes, though he
was descended unlawfully from them. His title had been a
borrowed thing, unlawfully worn ; but his supreme distinction
of manner, his tact, his bodily grace, that large and temperate
view of men and things which marks a gentleman, these had
all been inborn in and natural to him. He had been no mere
actor when he had moved through a throne-room by her side.
Her calmer reason told her this, but her instincts of <iandor
and of pride made her deny that where there was one fraud
there could be any truth.

Once the princess ventured to say again to her a word which
came from her heart. They were standing on the terrace,
watching the blush of evening glow on the virginal snows of
the mountains.

** * Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,' " she
murmured. " Wanda mine, do never you think of those
words, — you who let so many suns rise and set and find your
wrath unchanged ?"

" If it were onlt/ that 1" she answered, bitterly. " It is so
much else, — so much else! Crimes deep as yonder water,
high as yonder hills, I could forgive, but — a baseness — never I
Nay, there are pardons that would only be as ba^ie as what
they pardoned."

So it «eemed to licr.

45*

534 WANDA.

When again and again her heart was thrilled with its c!d
tenderness, her mind was haunted by a million memories of
dead delights, she strove against herself, and trod down her
temptation with the merciless self-punishment of an ascetic.
It humbled and stained her in her own sight to feci that love
could live within her without honor.

" Forgive me," said the princess, " but it always seems tc
me that you, noble and generous and pure of mind as you are,
yet have met ill the supreme trial, the supreme test, of your
life. You believed that you loved the man you wedded,
but you loved your own pride more. If love be not endless
forbearance, endless compassion, endless pity and sympathy,
what is it but the mere fever and instincts of carnal passions ?
What raises it above the self-indulgence of the senses, if not
its sacrifice of will and its long-suffering? You have said so
yourself in other days than these."

" And what," she thought, passionately, as she heard, " what
would it be but the basest indulgence of the senses to let one's
self love and be beloved by what one scorned ? — to stoop and
kiss the lips that lied, for mere sake of their sweetness? — to
gather in one's arms the coward, the traitor, and persuade
one's self that one forgave because one grew blind with amor-
ous remembrance ?"

" Is it well," pursued her companion, with soft solemnity,
" to let any one who is so near to you live his own life, when
that life may be one of sin ? You send him from you, and how
can you tell into what extremes of evil or of folly despair may
not drive him ? A man cast forth from his home is like a
ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever
may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve
you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be
his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and
his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of mar-
riage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over,
it^ duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain
has failed in these, the other is not acquitted of obligation.
Paition me if I seem to censure. Look in your own heart
and judge if I err."

" You dp not know ! You do not know I If I forgave him
I should never forgive myself!"

She turned her head from the roseate and happy light that

WANDA. 535

spoke to her of other days, an'' ^ent with a swift uneven step
into the house, now darkened t^y the passing of the day.

She flung his memory from her as so much unhuliness.
Had passion not yet lived in her the coldness of unforgiving
sorrow might not have seemed to her so sovereign a duty.

Some weeks after she had seen the letter in Gres wold's hands
« small hamlet was burnt down during a high north wind. It
belonged to her. Hearing of the calamity, she went thither
at once. It was some two and a half German miles from the
castle. She drove, herself, four young Hungarian horses,
whose fretting graces and tempestuous gallop gave her the
only pleasure which she was now capable of enjoying. They
were harnessed to a carriage light and strong, built on purpose
to scour rapidly rough forest roads and steep hill-sides. When
she had visited the melancholy scene, given what consolation
she could, and distributed money to the homeless peasants,
promising to rebuild the houses with her own timber and
shingles, — for the conflagration had been the fault of no one,
but of the wild wind which had scattered the burning embers
of a hearth-fire on a neighboring wood-stack, — her horses were
rested, and she began her homeward drive as the pale after-
noon grow gray and the twilight fell on the little grassy vale,
now charred and smoking with the smouldering ruins of the
chalets.

" Our countess never leaves us alone in any trouble," said
the women gathered about the stone statue of St. Florian,
their most trusted patron, who, despite their prayers, had
refused to save them from the flames. The hamlet was not
far from the Maurer glaciers, and was shut in by a complete
wall of mountains ; it was green, fresh, beautifully cool in
summer. Now, in the late spring, it was still dreary, and
patches of snow still lay on its sward ; it was set high on the
mountain-side, and dense forests sloped down from it, seldom
traversed, and dark early in the afternoon. Her groom lit
the lamps of her carriage as she entered the deep woods,
through which the road was little more than a timber-track.
The long gallops. and the steep inclines coming thither had
calmed and pacified her young horses. They gave her no
trouble to control them, as they trotted rapidly along the
shadowy forest ways. In other parts ol the country the sun
had not then set, but here the gloom was gray, like that of a

536 WANDA.

cloudy dawn. Tct it was not so dark but that she perceived
ahead of her, as her horses turned a curve in the moss-grown
path, a figure whose height and outline made her heart stand
still. As the horses went past him in their swinging trot the
blaze of the lamps fell full upon him. He turned and retreated
quickly into the undergrowth beneath the drooping bought
of the Siberian pines, but she saw him, he saw her. Mo-
chanically he uncovered his head and bowed low ; she drove
onward with a sense of suffocation at her throat and a chill
like ice in her veins. She had recognized him in that mo-
ment of time. He was changed, aged, and there were threads
of gray in his hair. He wore a forester's dress and had a gun
on his shoulder.

Where they had met, in these woods that lay under the
snow saddle of the Reggen Thorl, it was still twenty English
miles away from the burg. It was late when she reached
home, but her people were used to those long night drives,
and even the princess had become resigned to them. On the
plea of fatigue she went to her own rooms and there remained.
A faintncss and sense of confusion stayed with her. She had
not thought that merely meeting him thus would affect her.
She had underrated the power of the past.

When she had deemed him far away in other countries he
was there in her own lands, not twenty miles from her. The
knowledge of his vicinity moved her with a mingled sense of
unendurable pain, partial anger, reviving love. It seemed
horrible to have passed him by as any stranger would have
passed, without a sign or a word. Yet he was dead to her,
whether oceans were between them or only a few leagues of
hill and grass and forest.

She did not sleep, she did not even lie down, that night.
He seemed always before her ; in the stillness of her chamber
she heard his voice, and she started up thiLking he touched
her.

He had looked aged, ill, weary, unhappy; the sight of him
bore conviction to her that he, like herself, found no com pen-
iation, no consolation. Perchance her monitress had been
right ; she had been cruel. Perchance whatever sin his pres-
ent or his future life might hold would lie, directly indeed at
his own door, but indirectly at hers. She had always held
that high and spiritual view of marriage which, rising above

WANDA. 537

more sensual indulgence, regarded the bond of souls as sacred
*ind made the life on earth mere passage and preparation for
iternity. She had loved to believe that she ennobled, purified,
exalted his life by union with hers. Was she now false to
her own creed when she left him alone, unfriended, unpar-
doned, to drift to. any solace in vice, or any distraction in evil,
which might be his fate ? The sensitiveness and apprehension
of her conscience before the possibility of a neglected duty
made of her meditations a very martyrdom. All her life long
she had been resolute and serene in action, deciding quickly,
and carrying resolve into action without hesitation ; but here,
in the supreme crisis of her fate, she was irresolute and wrung
by continual doubt. Had it only been any other crime than
this I — this which cankered all the honor of her race, and was
rank with the abhorred putridity of fraud I

The spring passed into summer, and the children played
amidst masses of roses and sweet ranks of lilies, stretching
down the green grass alleys of the gardens. More than once
she went to the same hamlet, where now chalets were arising,
made of pine and eliu cut in the past winter in her own woods.
But of him she saw no more. She could not bend her will
to ask of him of any of her household, not even of Greswold.
Whether he lingered amidst her mountains, or whether he
had but come thither in a momentary impulse, she knew not.

The infinite yearning of affection, which is wholly outside
the instincts of the passions, awoke in her once more. She
began to doubt her own reading of obligation and of duty.
Had her counsellors been right ? had she met the supreme
test of her character and failed before it ?

Was it true that a great love must be as exhaustless as
the ocean in its mercy and as profound in its comprehension ?

Had his sin to her released her from her duties towards
him ? Because he had been disloyal was she absolved from
loyalty to him ? Ought she sooner to have said to him, " Nay,
no crime, no untruth, no failure in yourself shall divide you
from me ; the darker your soul, the greater need hath it to
lean on mine" ?

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant
honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left un-
done?

In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous

638 WANDA.

weakness had site stifled and denied the cry of pity, the ery
of conscicnoe?

To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite,
To forgive wrongs darker than death or nighty
To defy power which seems omnipotent.
To love, and live to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplateSi
Neither to change, nor falter^ nor repent, —

tills, perchance, had been the higher, diviner way which she
had missed, — this the obligation from the passion of the past
which she had lefl unfulfilled, unaccepted.

For three years she had gone on upon her joyless path, not
doubling that her course was right. It had seemed to her
that there was no other way possible ; that, stretching her
hand to him across the gulf of shame that severed them, she
would do nothing to raise him, but only fall herself, degraded
to his likeness.

So it had always seemed to her.

Now alone the misgiving arose in her whether she had
mistaken arrogance for duty ; whether, cleaving so closely to
the traditions of honor, she had forgotten the obligations of
mercy. Had it been any other thing, any other sin, she
thought, rather than this, which struck at the very root of
all the trusts, of all the faiths, which she had most venerated
as the legacy of her fathers I

Sometimes it seemed to her as though, were that time of
torture to be lived through again, she would not send him
from her ; she would say to him, —

" What we love once we love forever. Shall there be joy
in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness fo^ them
upon earth ?'*

Sometimes it seemed to her as though even now, after
these years, she still should summon him and say this. But
time passed on and passed away, and it remained unsaid.

She passed through the same woods, now in full leaf with
sunny waters tumbling and sparkling through their flower-
filled moss, but he crossed her path no more. He might have
come thither, she thought, in some brief hope of possible
reconciliation to her, and then his courage might have failed
him, and he might have returi cd to whatsoever distant climate

WANDA. b3b

held him, whatsoever manner of life consoled him. That he
might dwell amidst the hills, unseen of men, for her sake,
never once seemed to her possible. Egon V^sh-rhely might
have done that, but not he ; he loved the world.

The summer weighed wearily upon her. The light, the
fragrance, the gayety of nature hurt her. The keen winds,
the glittering snow, the air that was like a bath of ice, the
sense of absolute isolation and seclusion which the winter
brought with it were precious to her. In winter all the earth
seemed of accord with herself: it was silent, stern, solitary.
Not even the pretty figures of the children running through
the bowers of blossom and of foliage could make the summer
otherwise than oppressive and mournful to her.

Sometimes she thought of how it had been on other sum-
mer nights, when he had wandered with her through the white
lines of the lilies by the starlight, or sent the melodies of
Schumann and of Beethoven out upon the dewy, balmy air.
Then she could bear no more to look upon the moonlit gar-
dens.

The love she had borne him stirred at times beneath the
grave-stones of scorn, and wrath, and almost hatred which she
had heaped upon it to keep it buried far down for evermore.
All the echoes of passion came to her at these moments. She
despised herself because she felt that she would give her soul
to feel his lips on hers again. She was ashamed that the
mere sight of him could thus have moved her. Again and
again she recalled noble acts, beautiful thoughts, which had
been his ; again and again she recalled the early hours of their
love with burning cheeks and longing heart. She could have
0Gourgcd herself to banish those memories, those desires.
They were terrible and irresistible to her as the visions that
assailed the saints of the Thebaid. Her whole soul softened
to him, yearned for him, forgave him. Then she would
shrink in disdain from her own weakness, and pace her cham-
ber like a wounded Uoloqs.

540 WANDA.'

CHAPTER XLin.

The first flush of autumn came upon the woods. Soon it
would he three years sincr. Olga Braucka had driven thither,
and her work had held good and never been undone. Bcla
and Gela had grown tall and slender as the young fir-trees ;
and Bela often said to his brother, ** I was ten years old on
Ascension Day. That is quite old. If ever I am to find him
I am old enough now."

He had not forgotten. He never forgot. Every day he
wearied his little brain with thinking what he could do. Every
night he asked heaven to help him. He had read a Bohemian
ballad that had fascinated him, — the story of how, in the dayi
of chivalry, Wratislaw, the son of Berka, when but twelve
years old, had made, all by himself and on foot, a pilgrimage
from Prague to Tartary, to release his brother from captivity.
Bela knew very well that the world had changed since then,
and that if some things were easier some were harder now
than then. But if Wratislaw had done so much at twelve,
why should he, who was ten, not do something ?

Almost he was ready to set forth on a quixotic search
without any clue to where his father dwelt, but his educated
sense checked him with the remembrance that, wide as the
world was, it would be of no avail to begin a hare-brained pil-
grimage with no fixed goal. Even Wratislaw, who was his
ideal, had been certain that his brother languished in the
Tartar tents before he had set his fair face to the southeast.
So ho remained patient in his impatience, and strove with all
his might to perfect himself in all bodily exercises and manly
habits, that he might be the better fitted to go on his errand
whenever he should have any thread of guidance. No one
guessed the resolves and the hopes which fermented like new
wine in his pretty golden-haired head. His attendants thought
each year that he grew gentler and more serious, and hi?
tutors found him at once more docile and more absent-mi ndecL
But no one imagined that he was bent on any unusual
enterprise.

He thought himself quite old. He had a big pony, and

WANDA. 541

Folko was ridden by his little broth era. He had been taught
to shoot at a target and a running mark ; he had become
skilful at climbing with crampons and managing a boat.
When he rode he had long boots that pulled up to his knees.
He could drive three ponies, harnessed in the Russian way,
with skill and surety. Perhaps, he thought, the Bohemian
boy had not been able to do half as much as this. The ballad
spoke of him as a little weakling, and yet he had found hia
way from Prague, in her dusky plains, to burning Tartary.

His father had not been recognized by the groom who had
accompanied his mistress in the drive through the woods of
the Reggen Thorl ; and no rumor of the near presence of Sa-
bran had reached any of the household. Greswold alone knew
that amidst the solitudes of the avalanche and the glacier, in
the chill of the air where the eagle and the vulture alone made
their home, in a life of absolute isolation, asceticism, and
physical denial of every kind, the man who had sinned against
her spent his exile, in such self chosen expiation as was possi-
ble to one who had neither the faith nor the humility needful
to make him seek refuge and atonement in any religious ser-
vice. He dwelt in the loneliness of the ice-slopes, leading the
life of a common hunter, shunning all men, accepting each
monotonous and joyless day as portion of his just punishment ;
in the perils of winter on the mountains doing what he could
to save human or animal life ; knowing no solace save such as
existed for him in the sense of being near all that he had lost,
and the power of watching through his strong lenses the dis-
tant movements of his wife and children at such rare hours as
he ventured to approach the hills of Hohenszalras and turn
his telescope on the gardens of his lost home. A hunter or
Iwo, a guide or two of the Umbal and the Trojerthal, had his
3onfidence, but the loyalty which is the common virtue of all
mountaineers made them observe it faithfully. For the rest,
in these unfrequented places avoidance of all those who might
have recognized him was easy : he was clothed like the men
of the hills, and lived like them in a chalet, high perched on
a ledge of rock at a great altitude in the wild and almost in-
accessible region of the Hinther Thor. Of the future he
never dared to think ; ]ie took each day as it came: the best
he hoped for was a mountaineer's death some hour or auother,
amidst the clear serene blue ice, the everlasting snows.

46

542 WANDA.

When he had gone out from the chamber of his wife, ban-
ished and accursed, all his spirit had died in him, and nothing
seemed clear in his memory except that love which had been

00 insufficient to wash out his sin. The world would no doubt
have welcomed him ; ho was not too old for its distractions and
it3 ambitions to be still possible for him ; but he had no cour-
age left to take them up, no energy to make another future
for himself. His whole life was consumed in a vain regrefc|
as vain a desire, as vain a penitence. Had he had the faith
of those men who dwelt under the willows of the Holy Isle.
he would have joined them. But he had no belief; he had
only a futile, heart-broken, helpless repentance, which availed
him nothing and could atone for nothing.

Perhaps, he thought, if she had known that, it might have
changed her. But he did not dare to approach her by any
written appeal. It seemed to him as if any words from him
would only seem but added falsehood, added insult. He
never, even in his own thoughts, reproached her for her sepa-
ration from him. He recognized that no other path was open
to her. The pure daylight of her nature could find no mate
in the dusk and shadow of his own ; the loyalty of truth
could not unite with the servitude and cowardice of falsehood.

Whilst still it was dawn one morning, Bela, just awaking,
heard a pebble thrown at his window. He sprang out of bed,
and ran and looked out. Old Otto stood below.

" My little lord,*' he said, softly, " if you can come to me
in the woods, when you are dressed, I have something to tell
you."

" Of him ?" cried Bcla.

The huntsman made a sign of assent.

The child, excited to intense emotion, hardly knew how
his servant dressed him, or how he swallowed his breakfast.
After their morning meal he could always run in the woods,
as he chose, before beginning his studies, and he sped as fast
as his feet could bear him to the tiysting-place.

" My lord, your father has been seen on the other side of
Glockner by my underling, Fritz," said Otto, gravely ; " and

1 have heard, too, that the villagers have seen him in Pre-
gratten. I made bold to tell you. Count Bela, for I had given
you my word."

Bela*s whole form shook with excitement

WANDA, 543 •

" I knew if he had died I should have known it !'' he said,
with a hushed ecstasy. ** Tell me more ! tell me more, quick 1"

** There is no more to tell, my little lord," said Otto. " Frita
will swear that he saw your father, though there was a stretch
of glaciers and many fathoms of ice between them. He says
there was no mistaking the way he sighted his rifle and fired.
And I have heard by gossip, too, from the folks of Upper
I^elthal, that there can be no manner of doubt of the fact
that His Excellency has dwelt there, for a time at least.''

Bela gave a deep breath.

" Then he lives, and I can find him I"

" Yes, he lives ; the Lord be praised I" said Otto.

When he went to the house the boy told no one his pre-
cious secret. He studied ill, and wa^^ punished, but he did
not heed it. His heart was full of joy ; his brain teemed
with projects.

" I will go and bring him back I" he kept saying to himself;
and no force could hold hb thoughts to his Homer or his
Euclid.

He would tell no one, he resolved, not even Gela ; and he
would go alone, all alone, as the Bohemian boy had gone.

" What ails Bela to-day ? He is not like himself,*' said his
mother to Greswold, who assured her he was well, but added
that he was often careless.

The child shut his secret up in his own breast, and though
he longed to tell Gela he did not. He had been tempted to
confide in Otto, but resbted even that desire, knowing that
Otto was stern where duty pointed, and had been always for-
bidden to let the little nobles wander alone to the mountains.
He had his father's power of reticence, his mother's strength
of self-control.

Bela knew what hill -work was like. The elder boys often
went climbilig, with their guides, on fine days from May to
September, and had a little tent which was set up for them
at a fair altitude, whence Greswold taught them to take obser-
vations and measurements. But the mountaineering for the
season was now over ; it was now St. Michael's Day, and ava-
lanches fell and snow-storms had begun on the higher slopes.
He knew that if any one saw him he would be stopped and
taken back. For that reason he said nothing to Gela, who
could never be persuaded to a disobedience \ and he rose in

ti44 WANDA.

the dark, before the hour at which his attendant came to drcsB
him, got his clothes on as best he could, slipped the sword
Yasarhely had given him in his belt, and took his crampons
and alpenstock in his hand.

He kneeled and said his prayers, fervently though quickly.

" A soldier cannot pray ver^ long if he hear the trumpets
Bounding," he thought, as he rose. He felt neither irresolu-
tion nor fear ; he was filled with ardor and an exalted sense
jf right- doing.

He had the little knapsack which, in the long forest walks
with his tutor, he was used to carry filled with simple food
for a morning meal when they halted under the pines. He
had put some bread and cakes into this over-night, and he had
filled his little silver flask with milk, as he had seen the flasks
of the gentlemen filled with wine in those grand days when
the Kaiser and the Court had hunted with his father. Thus
equipped, he managed to escape from the house by a side-door,
left open by some of the under-servants, who had just risen.
He knew the quick way to reach the Glockner slopes, for he
had been taken there by Otto to learn mountaineering, and
for his age he climbed well. His eye was sure, his step firm,
and he knew not fear. He never thought of the misery his
absence might cause; he was absorbed in his self-imposed
mission.

" I will bring him back,'* he thought, " and then she will
smile again."

He had been trained in the lore of the high hills too well
not to know that it would take him several days to reach
Pregratten, but he said to himself that must be as it would.
He would climb on and on, sleep in any hut he could, and
find what food he might. The Bohemian boy had crossed
many mountains, and seas, and deserts before he had ransomed
his brother.

It was a fine morning, with light pleasant winds. There
was plenty of blue in the sky, though northeast there was a
brown haze, such as hunters fear, upon the hills.

" It will rain or snow to-morrow," thought Bela, who had
been made wise in the signs of the weather. But even that
prevision did not deter him ; he had his liberty and he meant
to use it. He had been well trained to all bodily exercises,
and he could walk long and fast without fatigue. His slendef

WANDA, 545

fair limbs were as strong as steel, and his health was perfect.
He knew all the tracks of the home-lying woods, and he wanted
DO one to guide him. He got, with promptitude and address,
out of sight of the terraces and towers of Hohenszalras, and
soon entered what was called the Schwarzeuwald, a dense pine
wood ascending abruptly the mountain-side from the gardens,
—the only place where the wildness of the hills came in un-
broken contact and close proximity to the lawns and flowers
of the south side of the Schloss, the lower spurs of the Gross
Glocknor descending there so steep and stern that they en-
closed the parterres with a gigantic rajmpart of granite.

The contrast of the rose-gardens with these huge overhang-
ing heights had always so pleased the tastes of the Szalraa
chatelaines that they had never allowed any attempts to be
made to change or modify the savage grandeur and sombre
wilds of the black wood.

He was already a trained pedestrian, and he covered five
miles without pausing to breathe himself. Then he thought
he had come far enough to make it safe to pause and eat. He
drank his milk and opened his knapsack. There was turf
Btill about him, and a few trees, but he had come into the
rocky region. Huge walls of red and gray marbles leaned
over him ; white limestone crags faced him. Precipices, black
with pines and firs, shelved downward. He was still on his
mother's land, hut in a part unknown to him.

Once rested, he climbed up manfully, straining his little
velvet breechos and soaking his silver-buckled shoes in the
wet moss as he went, for in the Schwarzenwald regular paths
soon ceased. There was the barest track visible, made by
sheep, and pushing its upward way under branches, over
boulders, and through wimpling burns. It was the loneliest
part of all the woods and hills : descending as it did to the
rose-gardens of the burg, the hunters and shepherds seldom
passed through it. Steep and solitary, crowned with bare
rocks, and leading only to the glacier-slopes, few steps ever
passed over its short grass save those of woodland animals
and of shepherds' flocks. At this time of the year even the
latter were not near. They had been already brought down
to their stables from the green stretches of pasture betweeu
the rocks. Bela met no one; not even one of his own
[ casantry.

U 46*

546 WANDA.

He climbed and climbed uninterrupted) at first enjoying
his solitude rapturously, his triumph boisterously, and then
going on more solemnly, being a little awed by the sense of
utter silence round him, in which no sound was heard except
of rippling water, of blowing boughs, and afar off some faint
tinkle of a church-bell from a distant hamlet.

His spirits were exalted and full of enthusiasm. Joined
to his boldness and ardor he had the German love of the
mystical and marvellous. All the vast wide range of the
Olockner to him was as a fairy-land, opening on enchantad
empires all his own. All the forenoon he was happy.

He climbed the grasisy slopes, the steep stone ways, as he
had learned to do with Otto, and though he was still far from
the sides of Glockner he was yet soon on very high ground.
A great mountain, green at the base, snow-covered half the
way down, frowned above him : it was but one of the spurs
of the Glocknerwand, but he believed it to be the king of the
Austrian Alps itself. He met no one ; the mountains were
solitary; the first breath of autumn had scared the cattle-
keepers downward with their flocks and herds. Sometimes,
very far off, he saw a lonely figure, a peddler, or a hunter, or
a shepherd, or some aim still tenanted by its flock, but they
were mere specks on the immensity of the glacier-slopes and
the domes of snow. The solitude enchanted him at first;
he had never been alone before. He drank from a stream,
ate more bread, and held on firmly and fearlessly. The
thought that his father was there beyond him, amidst those
dazzling peaks, those lowering clouds, seemed to shoe his little
feet with fire. He felt weaker, for his bread had nourished
him but little, and he had not found a hut of any kind as he
had expected to do. But he toiled on, the slope of the same
mountain always facing him, always seeming to recede and to
grow higher and higher the farther and farther he went.

The mountain he was on, nine miles or more above and
beyond his home, was known as the Adler Spitze. He had
been near it in other days, but he did not recognize it now ;
sill these stern slopes and steeps, all these domes and roof-like
ridges of snow and ice, go resemble each other that a longer
apprenticeship to the hills than his had been is needed to
distinguish them one from another. The Adler Spitze was t
dangerous and seldom traversed peak ; its sides were I ristUng

WANDA, 64T

witli jagged rocks, and its chasms were many and deep. More
than one death had been caused by it in late years, and near
Its summit his mother had caused to be erected a refuge, one
of the highest of the district, where a keeper was forever on
the watch for belated travellers. These were, however, very
few, for the mountain had gained a bad name among the
hunters and peddlers and muleteers who alone traversed these
hills, and was left almost entirely to the birds of prey, which
were numerous there and had given it its name.

When the pine woods ceased, and there was only around
him mere naked rock, with a little moss growing on it here
and there, Bela knew that he had come very high indeed^
And he had his wish : he was quite alone. There was nothing
to be seen here except the dusky forest, shelving downward,
and vast slopes of naked gray stone, with large loose rocks
scattered over them, as if giants had been playing there at
pitch-and-toss. There was too much mist in the north and
west, which faced him, for the opposite mountains to be seen,
for it was still early in the day. He did not now feel the joy
and excitement he had expected. He had climbed above the
Schwurzcnwald indeed, but the scene around was dreary, and
the vast expanse of vapor surrounding him looked chUl and
melancholy.

His brain was busy with many pictures as he went. He
saw his search successful and his father found ; he saw his
happy return, and the crowd of the glad household which
would flock to meet hb steps; he thought how he would
kneel down at her feet, and never rise until his prayer should
be heard, and his mother smile again ; he thought how he
would cry out to her, " Oh, mother, mother 1 I have brought
him home 1" and how she would look, and the light and the
warmth come back into her face. It was so little to do, —
only to climb amidst these kindly familiar mountains that had
been alway-s above him and around him since first his eyes had
opened. Wratislaw had gone over lands, and seas, and des-
erts, and braved the jaws of lions, and the steel of foemen, and
the dragon's breath of the hot sand wind : he himself had so
little to do ; only to climb some rough uneven ground, some
green steep pastures, some smooth fields of ice. He felt sad
(o think it was such a little thing.

Far down below he could hear the great bells of the burg

648 WAXDA.

cliimiDgand clangiiij^, and he knew that they were giving the
alarm for him ; he saw men small as mice grouping together
hero, and running apart there ; he knew they were coming
but to search for him. He resolved to be very wary. He
had got so long a start that he was high on the hills ere he
heard the alarm-bells. He knew that he must avoid being
Been by any one he met, or, knows as he was to the whole
country-side, his liberty would soon be at an end. But the
huts of the sennerin were empty, and the chances of meeting
a mountaineer were few. Hundreds of men might come up-
ward in search of him, and yet miss him amidst those endless
walls of stone, those innumerable peaks and paths and preci-
pices, each one the fellow of the other.

In the excitation and exultation of hl<i thoughts he had
forgott-en many things that he knew very well, trained to the
hills as he was ; he had forgotten that it might rain or snow
before he reached any halting-place, that fogs came on at that
season with fatal suddenness, that if the sun were obscured
the cold would soon become great, that if a mist came down
he would be unable to find any road, and that men had been
oflen kiiled on those heights who had known every inch of
the hills.

Something of his buoyancy and certainty of success began
to pale and grow dull as the isolation lost its sense of novelty,
and that intense silence of the glacier world, which is at all
times so solemn, began to strike awe into his intrepid little
Boul. He had often been as high, but there had been always
on his ear his brother's voice, and his guide's laugh, and the
merry sounds of the men chattering together as they climbed.
Now there was no sound anywhere, save now and then a split-
ting cracking noise, which ho knew was ice giving way under
the noonday heat of the sun. ^* It must be just as still as this
in the grave," he thought, with a chill in his warm eager leap-
ing young blood. A little tuft of edelweiss growing in a
crevice, and a vulture winging its way through the blue air,
seemed to him like friends.

Ho wished now that Gela were with him.

" But it would have been of no use to ask him,^ he thought,
Badly. " He never will disobey, even to make good come of it."

A white mist had settled over all the lower world : OLe of
the autumn fogs which come from the lower clouds enwrapped

WA NDA, 549

all the lakes and pastures and forests of Ilohenszalras. No-
thing could better bafile and distract his pursuers: perplexed
and blinded, they would be wholly at a loss to trace his steps.
It did not occur to him that the fog on the lower lands might
mean also storm and snow, and the darkness and dampness of
ice-cold vapors, in the upper air where he was.

It had become rough, hard, toilsome work ; he was bruised|
and almost lame, and very tired. But the spirit in him waa
not crushed ; he kept always thinking, ^^ If it did not hurt, it
would be nothing to do it.'*

He had now got above all grass; the ground was loose
shingle where it was not bare granite, limestone, or marble,
on all of which it was difficult to keep a hold. There was
snow not very far above him. The air here was intensely
cold. He had not thought to bring any furs with him. His
limbs were sorely cramped, his feet began to feel numb, his
fingers were so chilled he could hardly grip his alpenstock ;
the hard slopes gave scarcely any footing to his climbing-
irons ; there were clouds about him, enveloping him, freezing
him in their icy mist. He began to think piteously of his
brother, of his home, and of the warm-cushioned nooks by the
study fire, but he would not give in ; he toiled on, cutting and
hurting his hands and knees as he groped on his upward way.
He reminded himself of Wratislaw, of Casablanca, of all the
boy-heroes he had ever read of ; he would not yield in endur-
ance to any one of them.

But, looking up, he knew by the color of the sky that it
was about to snow ; the heavens were of a leaden uniform
gray and seemed to meet and touch the mountain. Then
Bela knew that in all likelihood he would never see Gela or
bis home again.

He choked down the sob that rose in his throat, and tried
to think what he could do to save himself. The ascent was
now so steep that he could make no upward way, and could
barely keep himself from sliding downwards. He caught at
a projecting boulder and pulled himself with great effort up
on to it; there he could sit in a cramped position and take
breath. When ho looked down he saw no forests, no land,
DO rocks, nothing but a sea of fog, which had gathered thick
and gray beneath him. In autumn and spring the mountaia
weather changes in ten minutes from fair to fouL

5:0 WAKDA.

The odd stupor that comes from long exposure at a great
altitude in cold and vapor was stealing over him. Strange
noises sounded in his ears, and his feet and hands tingled.
He began to fear that he should get no farther on hi« way,
and he had not listened so often to the tales told by the jager
without knowing clearly enough the dangers which await
those who are out on the mountain-side in bad weather when
daylight goes.

As he sat there, gazing dizzily into the ocean of vapor be-
low him, and upward to the huge walls of granite and of
snow, he saw coming and descending towards him from out
the clouds a huge dark bird ; the immense wings seemed wide
as heaven itself as it circled and swept the air.

Bcla*8 heart stood still : it was a male eagle, an aquUa
/ulva.

The child's aching eyes watched the monarch of the upper
air with a horrible fascination: It looked black as night
against the steely sky, the snow-covered peaks.

He sat erect, and cried aloud to it in half-delirious indig-
nant reproof, " Oh, you great bird I you are treacherous, you
are thankless I We have spared you and yours always, and
now you will kill me I Oh, do you not hear ? Do you not
hear ?" But the shout of his young voice died away against
the granite walls around him, and the king-bird paused not,
but came nearer, and nearer, and nearer.

It circled round and round, each circle narrowing, till it was
poised immediately above his head, motionless, balancing itself
upon its outstretched pinions. He could see its eyes bent on
him, see the giant claws drawn up against its belly, see the
hooked yellow beak. The eagle was lord of the air, and he
had intruded on its royalty : in another moment he felt that
it would descend on him and bear him off in its talons or bat-
ter him to death with the blows of its wings. He drew his
little sword and waited for it ; his eyes did not shrink, his
body did not cower ; he looked upward with his toy-blade,
drawn in as true a courage as that of Lconidas.

** If only I could take him home once, — once, — ^I would not
mind dying here afterwards," he thought, in his dreamy ex-
altation; but to die with his errand undone, that seemed
cruel.

The huge dark mass balanced itself one moment more, theiii

WANDA. 551

measuring its prey, rushed through the air towards him. But,
ere it had seized him, a shot flashed through the shadows, and
rang through the silence ; the bird dropped dead in a ring of
blood on the naked stone of the mountain-side.

Bela sprang up, and, tottering on the slippery shelving rock,
threw his arms outward with a loud cry.

" 1 came to find you !" he shouted, in his rapturous joy ;
then cold and fatigue and past terror conquered him. He
swooned at his father's feet.

Sabran had not known that it was his son whom he saved.
He had seen a child menaced by a bird of prey, and so had
fired. When the boy staggered to him with that cry of wel-
come, he was for the moment stunned with amazement and
gratitude and inexpressible emotion ; the next he raised the
little brave body in his arms.

" Oh, tell me where your mother kissed you last, that I
may set my lips there 1" he murmured to the child : but Bela
heard not.

He was cold, inanimate, and senseless. He had gained his
goal, but he had no sight or sense to know it. His father
looked around him with terror for his sake. The snow had
begun to fall, the darkness was deepening, the mists were
creeping upward ; he, who for three years had dwelt a moun-
taineer amidst these mountains, knew the danger of being
belated amidst them in autumn, when, at a stroke, autumn
became winter sometimes in a single night. He himself had
his dwelling far from there, upon the Isel water, under the
IJmbal glacier. If he had to carry the boy it would be use-
less to dream of reaching the rude place which he had made
his home : the weight of a tall child of ten years is no light
burden, and he knew that even if Bela regained his conscious-
ness he would be incapable of exertion in the cold, which
would intensify with every hour. But he wasted no momenta;
in hesitation. He knew what the white fall of those softly-
descending feathers from above, what the darkness and wet-
ness of the dense fog down below, meant, out on the spurs of
Glockner after sunset. Lives were lost there every year;
herds that had stayed on the alps too late were surprised and
destroyed by early snow-storms; peddlers and carriers were
belated, and sent to a last sleep by that sudden plunge of
autumn into frost. He knew his way inch by inch, and lie

652 WANDA.

knew that there was, some mile or so beyond him, the Wanda-
fa utte, erected in a dangerous pass by his wife, as a thanks-
giving in the first months of their marriage. There he would
find a rude bed, food, wine, and shelter for the night. He
set himself to reach it.

It was hard to climb with the child held by one arm and
thrown ' across one shoulder, as shepherds throw a disabled
lamb. His other hand gripped his alpenstock ; he had left
his rifle under a ledge of rock, as a useless load. He had
stripped off the hunter's jacket that he wore, and wrapped it
round Bela, whose body and limbs felt frozen. Down below
in the valleys fruit-trees had still their plums and pears, and
asters and dahlias still flowered, but at this elevation the cold
was piercing and the snow froze as it fell.

A high wind also had risen as the day declined, and blew
the white powder of the snow in whirling clouds, — the terrible
tourmente of the Alps, which every traveller dreads. In the
confusion of it he knew that he might walk round and round
on the same road all night, making no progress. Soon it grew
dark, though not quite four o^clock. He had no light with
him, for he had not intended to be out at night ; he had but
oome thither, as he often came, to see the distant gleam of
the Szalrassee, the far-off outline of the Hohenszalrasburg.
He had been reascending and returning when he had seen a
child menaced by an eagle, and had fired. Had he been by
himself he would have found the hut soon, but weighted with
the burden of Bela's inert body he made little way, and stag-
gered often on the slippery frozen steep. He had no hands
free to wield his hatchet and cut his way by steps over the
ice which had formed in all the fissures of the rocks. The
mountains had been his only friends in his exile. He had
returned to them, he had dwelt among them, he had borno
his sorrows through their help, and strengthened himself with
their strength. But they menaced him sorely now. For
himself he cared not, but his heart ached for the child,
whose courage and affection had brought him thither to meet
his death.

"My poor Bela," he murmured, as the boy's fair head
hung over his shoulder, " why did you come to me ? I give
you nothing but evil. Safety, comfort, happiness, honor, all
come from Aer."

WANDA. 653

The Tvbolo heavens seemed to open, so dense a stonn of
snow now poured upon him. There were strange deep noises
Bver and again, as from the very bowels of the hills. A thou-
sand times had he rejoiced to match his strength against the
mountains and to conquer, but now they wore his masters.
All around him were the bastions and walls and domes of the
great ice-peaks ; the huge glaciers hung above, like frozen
seas suspended ; he could not behold them, but ho felt their
presence and their awe.

" The snow is in my blood, and my blood is yours, and
BOW it claims us," he muttered to the senseless ear of the
ehild. He and the child had loved the snow, met it with
welcome, sported with it in triumph ; and now it killed them.
They would lie down in it, and be one with it forever.

But, although these fancies drifted in his brain, he strove
with all his might to keep in movement, to ascend ever in
the easterly direction of the refuge which he sought to gain.
So far as he could, weighted with his burden and blinded by
the darkness, he continued to climb, gripping the hard slopes
with his feet and his alpenstock. He had given his coat to
the child ; the cold made every vein in his own body numb ;
his limbs pricked and seemed to swell ; he had only his woollen
shirt, above his linen one, and his velvet breeches between
him and the frozen air, that could slay a hundred sheep
massed together in their warmth and wool. He knew that
the hut was but a mile, or little more, from the place where
he had found Bela : but half a mile in the snow-storm and
the darkness was longer than forty miles in sunshine and fair
weather. He could not be even sure that he went aright ;
he could see nothing ; the sky was covered with the low dense
clouds ; he could only guess. All the slender signs and land-
marks, that would even in mere twilight have served to guide
his steps, were now hidden. A thick woolly impenetrable
gloom enshrouded him ; he felt as though he were muffled
and suffocated by it, and the fatal drowsiness — the fatal desire
to lie down and be at rest — with which frost kills, stole on
him.

With all the manhood in him he resisted it for the child's
Bake.

After a while he struck his repeater again ; it was seven of
the clock. He had been climbing and wandering three short
Y 47

554 WANDA,

hours only, and he had believed that it was midnight at the
least. Bela still hung like a lifeless thing over his shoulder*
but he felt that his limbs were warmer, and his heart beat
feebly, but with regularity.

" God grant me power to save him, for his mother's sake 1"
thought Sabran ; " then there may come what will."

He struggled anew against the mortal sleepiness, the in-
creasing numbness, that grew upon himtelf. Suddenly, as he
turned, without knowing it, the corner of a wall of rock, he
Baw a starry light. He knew that it was the light of the
refuge which, by his wife's command, was lit at twilight every
evening the whole year round. It was now but a few roods
off; he could see even the outline of the cabin itself, black
against its background of snow. But he had taken the wrong
path to it. Between him and it there yawned a wide crevasse
in the glacier on which he now stood.

He shouted loud, but the wind was louder than his voice.
The keeper in the refuge could not hear. He paused doubt-
fully. To retrace his steps and seek the right path would be
certain destruction ; it would take him many miles about, and
there was no chance even in the darkness that he would ever
find it ; his strength, too, was failing him, and the child was
still unconscious. There was but one way of escape, — to leap
the fissure. It was wider than any man could be sure to clear,
and if he fell within it he would fall into jagged ice a thou-
sand fathoms down. By daylight he had often looked down
into its awful depths, blue in their darkness, set with jagged
teeth of ice like a trap's jaws.

The leap might be death or life.

He hesitated a few instants, then drew quite close to the
edge, cast aside his pole, for the chasm was too wide for that
to help him, and he needed both hands free to hold the boy
more firmly. The lamp from the hut shed light enough to
guide him ; the snow fell fast, the wind was violent. He
paused another moment on the brink, drew the child closer to
him and clasped him with both arms ; then, gathering all his
force into his limbs, he leaped.

He cleared the fissure, but sta<]^ercd on the slippery ice
beyond. He fell heavily, but held his son so that Bcla fell
unpermost and dropped upon him.

Crushed by his weis^ht, Sabran sank at full length on the

WANDA 555

white crystfil ground ; alone he would have jeaped as surely
as the chamois. <

The shock awoke Bcla from his trance ; he opened his blue
eyes giddily.

*' It is you I" he murmured, feebly, as he felt himself lying
on his father's breast.

" It is 1 1" said Sabran. " My child, if you can move, try
and creep to that hut and call. I cannot.'*

The child, without a sound, trembling sorely, and with a
sense of confusion making his head dizzy, obeyed, drew him-
self slowly up, and dragged his tired, aching, cramped limba
. over the snow.

" You are brave,** murmured his father, whose eyes fol-
lowed him. " You are your mother's child.**

Bela reached the door of the hut and beat on it with hL<)
little frozen hands, and then fell down against it.

" It is I — Count Bela I'* he managed to cry aloud. " Come
to my father ; quick 1"

The door was flung aside, and the keepers of the hut rushed
out at the first cry. They had been asleep. They were old
jUgers, past the work of the forests, but still strong. Having
lighted the beacon without, they had drunk a little wine, and
chattered, and then dozed. Terrified at their own negligence
and at the sight of their lady's son, they staggered out into
the night, and together they bore the body of Sabran into the
refuge. He was unable to rise.

" You cannot move !** sobbed the child, raining kisses on
his hands.

^^ I am stiff from the cold ; nothing more," said his father,
faintly.

Then he looked at the men.

" One of you, if it be possible, go to the burg. Tell the
Countess von Szalras that her son is safe. You need not
speak of me. Bring the physician here when it is morning ;
but say nothing of me to-night. Give me a little of your

wine **

His lips were blue, he felt faint ; in his own heart he said
to himself, " I am hurt unto death.**

Bela had thrown his arms about him, and, trembling like a
leaf, clung there and sobbed aloud deliriously.

'^ You are hurt, you are hurt, and all for me !** he sobbed,

556 WANDA.

as he saw his father placed on the trackle^bed set aside fa^

any belated wanderer on the hills.

Sabran smiled on him.

^^ My child, do not grieve so ; it is nothing ; a mere mo-
mentary wrench ; do not even think of it. No, no 1 I am not
in pain."

The wine revived him, and restored his strength, and he
sought to conceal his injury from the child.

" Warm some of this wine and give it to my son,'' he said
to the keeper of the hut ; ^^ then undress him, wrap him
warmly, and make him sleep before the fire.''

** You are hurt, you are ill !" moaned Bela. " I came to
find you to take you back. Our mother has never been the
same ; — she has never smiled "

^^ Hush I" said Sabran, almost sternly. ''Do not speak of
your mother before these men, her servants. You came to
seek me, my poor little boy ? That was good of you, and it
was good to remember me. It is three years "

Bela clung to him and put his lips to his father's ear, that
the men might not hear.

** The others have always prayed for you," he murmured,
" because we were all told. But me, I have loved you always.
I have never thought of anything else. And I have tried to
be good, oh ! I have tried I"

A great suffering came on his father's face as he heard the
innocent words, and a great tenderness.

'' When I am dead, as I shall be so soon, will he remember,
too?" he thought.

Aloud he said, —

" My child, it is very sweet to me to hear your voice again.
But, if you love me, now obey me. You will have fever and
ague if you do not drink some warm wine, let yourself be un-
dressed, and lie down before the fire. Do not be afraid. Y^ov
will see me when you wake. I shall not stir."

He thought, as he spoke, —

" No, I shall never stir again : they will bear mo away to
my grave, that is all. I am like a felled tree. All is over.
Well, perchance so best : when I am dead she may forgive ;
ahe may love the children."

When at last Bela, sobbing piteously, had reluctantly obeyed,
and when, despite all his struggles, nature, frozen, weary, and

WAK DA. 657

irorn out, compelled Lim to close his eager eyes in heavy
dreamless slumber, Sabran with a glance called the keeper to
him.

" Now the child sleeps," he said, " get my clothes off me,
if you can. Touch me gently. I think my back is broken."

CHAPTER XLIV.

It was twelve o'clock in the night. Wanda von Szalras
paced the Eittersaal with feverish steps and limbs which,
whilst they quivered with fear, knew no fatiffue. It had been '
Dine in the mon>iDg when Gr^wold and the servants, having
searched in vain, came at last to her with the tidings that his
first-born son was lost,-:-his bed empty; his clothes gone, his
little sword away from its place. All the day she had sought
herself, and organized the search, with all the energy and
courage of her race. She had not given way to the despair
which had seized her, but in her own soul she had said, ^^ Does
fate chastise me thus for my own cruelty? I have shrunk
from their sweet faces because they were like his. For two
long months I exiled them, I thrust them from my presence
and my heart. I have been ashamed of them. Does God
punish me through them ? Shall I lose my children too ?
Can I forgive myself? Have I not even wished them un-
born ? Oh, my Bela, my darling, my first-born ! Yes, you.
are his, but, more than all, you are mine !"

When night closed in, and all the many separate searc!i-
parties returned, bringing no news of him, she thought that
she would lose her reason. All had been done that could be
done ; the men on the estates were scattered far and wide. It
was known that there were snow-storms on the heights ; the
white fury had even at eventide descended to the lower ground,
end the terraces and gardens shone white as the lights of the
heavens fell upon them. Every now and then there came the
report of a gun on the hills ; the men were firing in hope that
the child, if lost, might hear the shots. The evening passed
on, and midnight came, and no one knew where Bela was in

47*

558 WANDA.

those vast forests, those immense hills, all hidden in the im-
penetrable darkness. She saw him at every moment lying
white and cold in some hollow in the snow ; she saw the cruel
winds blow his curls, his fair limbs stiffen. Every year the
winter and the mountains took their toll of lives.

Gela had stayed up beside her, his little pale face pressed
to the window-frame, his terrified eyes staring into the gloom
which near at hand grew red with the beacon-fires.

She had known nothing of the purport of the child's
disappearance : she had been lefl to every vague conjecture
with which her mind could torture her. The whole household
and all the woodsmen and huntsmen had scoured the hills far
and wide, and the whole day and night had gone by, with no
tidings, no result. Sleep had visited no eyes at Hohenszalras;
from its terraces the snow-storm and hurricanes beating around
the head of Glockner were discernible by the agitation of the
clouds that hid one- half the heights.

As midnight tolled from the clock tower, Gela came to her,
and touched her hand.

" Mother," he whispered, " I dared not say it before, but I
must say it now. I think — ^I think — Bela is gone to try and
bring him home."

" Him !" she echoed, while a thrill ran like fire and ice
together through her, from head to foot ^ You mean — ^your
father ?"

*' Yes."

She was silent. Her breast heaved.

" What makes you think that ?" she said, at last.

" Bela thought of nothing else all this year and last year
too," said Gela, in a hushed voice. " He was always talking
of it. When he was smaller he thought of riding all over
the world. Yesterday he was so strange, and when we went
to bed he kissed me ever so many times ; and he prayed a
long, long while. And for nothing less would he have takeu
the sword, I think. And — and I heard the men saying to-
day that our father was somewhere near ; and I think that
Bela might have heard that, and so have gone to bring him
home."

" To bring him home 1"

The words, uttered in his son's soft, graye, flote-Ilke Yoiod»
pierced her heart. She could not speak.

WANDA. 559

" Will he rob me even of my first-born ?" she thought, bit-
terly.

At that moment Greswold entered. Gela, looking in his
face, gave a shout of joy.

^^ You have found my Bela !'* he cried, flinging his arms
about the old man.

" Yes, your brother is safe, quite safe I My lady hears ?"

She heard, and the first tears that she had ever shed for
years rushed to her eyes. She drew Gela with a passionate
gesture to her side, and, falling on her knees beside the Im-
perial throne in the Rittersaal, praised God.

Then, when she rose, she cried, in very ecstasy, —

" Fetch him ; bring him at once I — oh, my child I Who
found him ? Who has him now ? If a peasant saved his
life, he and his shall have the finest of all my land in Iselthal
in grant forever and forever ! "

Greswold looked at her timidly, then said, —

" "May I speak to your Excellency alone ?"

She touched Gela's hair tenderly.

" Go, my darling, and bear the good news to our reverend
mother. You know how she has suffered.'^

The boy obeyed and lefl the halL She turned to Gres-
wold.

" Tell me all, now."

The old man hesitated, then took his courage up and an-
swered,—

" My lady, his father found your son."

She put her hand out and clutched the arm of the throne
as if to save herself from falling.

'^ His father!" she echoed. "How came he there? An-
swer me, with the truth, the whole truth."

" My lady," said Greswold, while his voice shook, " your
husband has dwelt amidst the Glockner slopes almost for the
last three years. When he left here he remained absent
awhile, but not long. He has lived in utter solitude. Few
knew it. The few who did kept his secret. I was one of
these. He had corresponded with me ever since he left your
house. You may remember being angered ?"

She made a gesture of assent.

"Go on/' she murmured. "He found my child, yon
•ay?''

6G0 WANDA.

" He fouDd Count Bela ; yes. It seems he had como m
near here as some nine miles eastward, — near the hut which
your Excellency huilt not very long after your marriage oa
the crest of the Adlcr Spitze, in consequence of the fatal ac-
cident to the Bavarian peddlers. He knew nothing of Count
Bela's loss, but he saw a young boy threatened by an eagle,
and shot the bird. The fog was even then coming on upon
the heights. He found his son insensible from fatigue and
cold and terror, and bore him in his arms until he reached
the refuge. He had been near it all the time, but as the mist
deepened and the snow fell he lost his way, and must have
gone round and round on the same path for hours. We were,
in despair, mounting towards the Adler Spitze, though we did
not believe the child could have got so far, when we met one
of the keepers descending with the news. The storm is at
its height j we could only grope our way, and we missed it
many times, so that we have been four mortal hours and more
coming downward those seven miles. The keeper said that
my lord desired you should hear at once of the safety of the
child, but not of his own presence in the hut. But I felt
that your Excellency should be told of all."

*'You were right. I thank you. You have been ever
faithful to me and mine."

She stretched out her hand to him in dbmissal, and sought
a refuge in her oratory.

She felt that she must be alone.

She almost forgot the safety of her first-bom in the sense
that his father was near her. She fell on her knees before
the Christ of Andermeyer and praised heaven for her child's
preservation, and with a passion of tears besought guidance
in her struggle with what now seemed to her the long and
cruel hardness of her heart. To hear thus of him whom once
she had adored blinded Ler to all save the memories of the
past, which thronged up:)n her.

If he had repented so greatly, was it not her obligation to
meet his penitence with pardon ? It would be hard^ to her to
live out her life beside one whose word she would forever
doubt, whose disloyalty had cut to the roots of the pride and
purity of her race. Nevermore between them would be the
undoubting faith, the unblemished trust, which are the glori-
ous noonday of a cloudless love. She might forgive, bol

WANDA. 561

never, never, she thought, would she be able to command for-
getfulness.

But for that very reason, maybe, would her duty lie this
way.

The knowledge of those lonely desolate years, passed so
near her, whilst he kept the dignity and the humility of
silence, touched all the generosity of her nature. She knew
that he had suffered ; she believed that, though he had be*
trayed her, he had loved and honored her in honesty and truth.
One lie had poisoned his life, as a rusted nail driven through
an oak-tree in its prime corrodes and kills it. But he had now
been a liar always. She had made his life her own in bygone
years : was she not bound now to redeem it, to raise it, to
shelter it on her heart and in her home ? Was not the very
shrinking scorn she felt for his past a reason the more that
she should bend her pride to union with him? She had
thought of her life ever as the poet of the flower :

" The ever sacred cap
Of the pare lily hath between my hands,
Felt safe unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold."

Had there been egotism in the purity of it, self-love be-
neath love of honor ? Had she treasured the " grain of gold"
in her bands rather with the Pharisee's arrogance of purity
than with the true humility of the acolyte ?

She kneeled there before the ivory Christ in an anguish of
doubt. He had given her back her first-born. Should she
be less generous to him ?

Should she forever arrogate the right of judgment against
him, or should she stretch the palm of pardon even across
that great gulf of shame dividing them as by a bottomless
pit?

Tears came like dew to her parched heart It was the first
time she had ever wept since the night when she had exiled
him. Three long barren years had drifted by, — ^years cold
and dark and joyless as the winter days which bour.d the
earth, under bands of iron and let no living thing or creeping
herb rejoice or procreate.

When she rose from her knees her mind was made up, a
great peace had descended on her soul. She had forgiven
mm

5C2 WANDA,

her own dishonor. She had laid her heart bare befbre Gk)d
and plucked her pride up from its bleeding roots.

All the early hours of her love, recurred to her with an
aching remembrance, which h?.d lost its shame and was sweet
in its very pain. His crime was still dark as the night .ii
her eyes, but her conscience and her awakening tenderness
spoke together and pleaded for her pardon.

What was love, if not one long forgiveness ? What raised
it higher than the senses, if not its infinite patience and en-
durance of all wrong ? What was its hope of eternal life, if it
had not gathered in it enough to rise above human arrogance
and human vengeance ?

" Oh, my love, my love I" she cried aloud. " We will live
our lives out together !"

Her resolve was taken when she lefb her oratory and
traversed her apartments to those of the Princess Ottilie,
who met her with eager words of joy, herself tremulous and
feeble after the anxious terrors of the past day. Some look
on Wanda^s face checked the utterance of her gladness.

" Is it not true ?'* she said, in sudden fear. " Is the child
not found ?"

" Yes ; his father has found him," she answered, simply.
" Dear mother, long you have condemned me, judged me uq-
christian, unmerciful, harsh. I know not whether you were
right, or I. God knows ; we cannot. But give me your blessing
ere I go out into the night. I go to him ; I will bring him
here."

The princess gazed at her doubting, incredulous, touched to
a great hope.

" Bring him ?" she echoed. " Your child ?"

« My husband."

" Heaven will be with you I"

She sighed as she raised her head.

^' Who can tell ? Perhaps my harshness will make heaven
harsh.to me."

When she came forth again from her own rooms she iraa
clothed in a fur-lined riding-habit.

** Bid them saddle a horse used to the hills," she said, '' and
let Otto and two other men be ready to go with me."

" It is a fearful night," Greswold ventured to suggest. " It
will be as bad a dawn. It snows even here. We met the

WANDA. 663

keeper aimost midway up the Adler Spitze, yet it took us four
hours to make the descent."

She did not even seem to ^ear him.

" May I follow ?" he asked her, humhiy. She gave a sign
of assent) and stood motionless and mute ; her thoughts were
far away.

When the horse was saddled she went o it into the night
The storm of the upper hills had descended to the lower ; the
wind was blowing icily and strong, the snow was falling fast,
but on the lower lands it did not freeze as it fell, and riding
was possible, though at a slow pace from the great darkness.
She knew every step of the way through her own woods and
up to the spurs of the Glockner. She rode on till the ascent
grew too steep for any animal ; then she abandoned the horse
to one of her attendants, took her alpenstock, and went on her
way towards the Adler Spitze on foot, the men with their Ian*
terns lighting the ground in front of her. It was wild weather,
and grew wilder the nearer it grew to dawn. There was danger
at every step from slippery frozen ground, from thin ice that
might break over bottomless abysses. The snow was driven
in her face, and the wind tore madly at her clothes. But she
was used to the mountains, and held on steadily, refusing the
rope which Otto entreated her to take and permit him to
fasten to his loins. They kept to the right paths, for their
strong lights enabled them to see whither they went. Once
they crept along a narrow ledge where a man could barely
stand. The ascent was long and weary in the teeth of the
weather ; it tried even the stout . j'dgers, but she scarcely felt
the force of the wind, the chill of the black frost.

No woman but one used as she was to measure her strength
with her native Alps could have lived through that night,
which tried hardly even the hunters born and bred amidst the
snow-summits. By day the ascent hither was difficult and
dangerous after the summer months, but after nightfall the
sturdiest mountaineer dreamed not of facing it. But on those
heights above her, in the dark yonder, beneath the clouds,
were her husband and her child. That knowledge sufficed to
nerve her limbs to preternatural power, and the men who fol-
lowed her were loyal and devoted to her service : they would
have lain down to die at her word.

When her body seemed to sink with the burden of fatiguo

664 WANDA.

and cold, she looked up into the blackness of the air, and
thought that they were there, and fancied that already she
heard their voices. Then she gathered new strength, and
erept onward and upward, her hands and feet clinging to the
bare rock, the smooth ice, as a swallow clings to a house-wall.

She had issued from a battle more bitter with her own soul,
and had conquered.

At last they neared the refuge built by and named from her
and set amidst the desolation of the snow-fields. She signed
to her men to stay without, and, standing alone, pushed open
the heavy door.

She opened it a little way and looked intc the cabin. It
was a mere hut of two chambers made of pitch pine and
lighted by a single window. There was no light but from the
pallid day without, which had barely broken. Before the fire
of burning logs was a nest of hay, and in it lay the child,
sleeping a deep and healthful sleep, his hands folded on his
breast, his face flushed with warmth and recovered life, his
long lashes dark upon his cheeks.

His father lay still as a statue on the truckle-bed of the
keeper who watched beside him.

The day had now broken, clear, pale, cold ; the faint rose
of sunrise was behind the snow-peaks of the Glockner, and
an cUpenflUevo^el was trilling and tripping on the frozen
ground. From a distant unseen hamlet far below there came
a faint sound of Ave-Maria bells.

She thrust the door farther open, and entered. She made
a gesture to the keeper, who started up with a low obeisance,
to go without. She dosed the door upon him, then, without
waking the sleeping child, went up to her husband's bed.
His eyes were closed ; he did not notice the opening and shut-
ting of the door ; he was still and white as the snow without ;
he looked weary and exhausted.

At sight of him all the great love she had once borne him
sprang up in all its normal strength ; her heart swelled with
unspeakable emotion ; she stood and gazed on him with thirsty
eyes tired of their long denial.

Stirred by some vague sense of her presence near him, he
looked up and saw her. All his blood rushed into his face.
He could not speak. She stooped towards him and laid her
hand gently upon his.

WANDA. 565

" I am come to thank you."

Her voice trembled.

He gave a restless sigh.

" Ah I for the child*s sake," he murmured. " You do not
come for me ! "

She hesitated a moment, then she gathered all her strength
and all her mercy.

** I come for you," she answered, in low clear tones. " I
will forget all else save that I once loved you."

His face grew transfigured with a great joy.

" It cannot be I" he gasped. " It cannot I"

" You were my lover, you are my children's father. You
shall return to us," she murmured, while her voice seemed to
him heard in some dream of heaven. " Your sin was great,
yes ; but love pardons all sins, nay, effaces them, washes them
out, makes them as though they were not. I know that now.
What have not been my own sins ? — my coldness, my harsh-
ness, my cruel unyielding pride ? Nay, sometimes I have
thought of late my fault was darker than your own, more
hateful in God's sight."

" Noblest of all women always !" he said, faintly. " If it
be true, if it be true, stoop down and kiss me once again."

She stooped and touched his lips with hers.

The child slept on in his nest of hay before the burning
wood. The silence of the high hills reigned around them.
The light of the risen day came through the small square
window of the hut. Outside the bird still sang.

He looked up in her eyes, and his own eyes smiled with
celestial joy.

" I am happy !" he said, simply. " I have lived among your
hills almost ever since that night, that I might see your
shadow as you passed, hear the feet of your horse in the
woods. The men were faithful ; they never told. Kiss mo
once more. You believe, say you believe, now^ that I did
love you, though I wronged you so ?"

'' I do believe," she answered him. '' I think Qod cannot
pardon me that I ever doubted I"

Then, as she saw that he still lay quite motionless, not turn-
ing towards her, though his eyes sought hers, a sudden terror
smote dully at her heart.

"Are you hurt? Cannot you move?" she whispered.

48

566 WANDA.

^ Look at me ; speak to me 1 It b dawn already ; jtm shall
come home at once."

He smiled.

" Nay, love, I shall not move again. My spine b hurt, —

not broken, I believe, but hurt beyond help ; paralysis haa

begun. My angel, grieve not for me, I shall die happy.

Yon love me still ! Ah, it is best thus ! Were I to live, my

•in and shame might still torture you, still part us, but when

1 am dead you will forget them. You are so generous, you

are so great, you will forget them. You will only remember

that we were happy once, happy through many a long sweet

year, and that I lovod you, — cloved you in all truth, though I

betrayed you."
*♦♦♦♦♦♦*

The hunters bore him gently down in the cool pale noon«
tide along the peaceful mountain-side homeward to Hohen-
Bzalras, and there, after eleven days, he died.

The white marble in its carven semblance of him lies above
his grave in the Silver Chapel, but in the heart of his wife he
lives forever, and with him lives a sleepless and an eternal
lemorse.

vu inx

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12WO, Cloth^ ornamental, $1^2^

The popular author of '* Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tfikyo** and
** Madam Butterfly" has taken a long step forward in this beautiful,
idyllic new tale of ** Far Japan." There is a legend of that country,
of the beautiful " Fox- Woman," who, having been given no soul,
cannot reach Nirvana unless she steals the soul of a man. Mr. Long
adapts this legend to modem purposes in his fascinating story.

Miss Cherry-Blossom of Tokyo.

I2ma Qoth, $1.25.

** The delicate touches of sceneiry, society, and character that give
constantly changing cojor to almost every page, are like the work of a
painter over his stretcijed canvas, which one i^ so fond of watching as
it is laid on. A more ideal story right in tiie middle of tl^e hard facts
of every-day life it is not often one's good fortune to fall upon. Jt is
like a pot of honey fetched from the cupboard for the delectation of
the mental palate." — Boston Courier,

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA.

LIST OF POPULAR NOVELS.

By Baroness Von Hutten.

Miss Carmichaers Conscience.

With frontispiece by Elizabeth Shippen Green. i2mo. Cloth,

ornamental, $i.oo.

It will be evident to the readers of this volume that a new writer
of clever, temperamental society stories has arisen, and one who must
be admitted to be one of the brightest, most entertaining, and most
earnest writers in this vein. Baroness Von Hutten is young, and an
American by birth.

By Dr. C. W. Doyle.

The Shadow of Quong Lung.

l2mo. Cloth, extra, $1.25.

A powerful and original story of the Chinese quarter of San Fran-
cisco. Bound to extend the wide and immediate reputation gained for
the author by the publication of his first book, "The Taming of the
Jungle."

By Dr. C. W. Doyle.

The Taming of the Jungle.

Third Edition, l2mo. Cloth, ornamental, $1.00.

"The most notable new book of the hour." — Philadelphia
Record.

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA.

WILSON BARRETT'S GREAT NOVEL

The Sign of the Cross

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY B. WEST CLINEDINST.

i2mo. Cloth, extra, $1.50.

** You seem to me to have rendered a great service to the best and holiest ot
all causes, — The Cause of Faith." — Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone.

" Mr. Barrett has succeeded admirably in placing a strong and intense story
before the reading public." — Cincinnati Cotninercial Tribune,

" Mr. Barrett has treated his subject with reverence and dignity. The brutal,
licentious Nero and his ribald drunken satellites make an admirable foil to tho
spiritual Mercia and the other followers of Christ ; and throughout the book the
nobility, the simple faith, and the steadfastness of these last are dominating notes.
No more impressive lesson of the power of the doctrines of Christianity has been
given in fiction than the conversion of Marcus, Nero's Prefect, through the ex-
ample and fearlessness of the girl Mercia." — Philadelphia Evening' Bulletin,

** ' The Sign of the Cross' is an historical story of the first Christian century
which in a forcible way portrays the conflict between the religion of the Caesam
and that of Christ. It is crowded with picturesque personages, some of them
historical, and it is provided with moving scenes and dramatic situations. The
triumph of the Cross is set forth in a manner to make vivid the odds it Qvercame
and the force of its influence. Mr. Barrett, in making fiction out of drama, shows
himself to possess a decided literary ability (not necessarily to be found in the
writer of a good acting play), and he tells the story with keen instinct for its
dramatic value. The result is a readable and impressive novel whose action is
swift and whose interest is sustained throughout. The book is a justification
of the experiment of turning stage literature into closet reading." — I/art/ard
Courant,

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA.

By "The Duchess."

The Coming of Chloe. Lovice.

zamo. Cloth, ^z.25. zamo. Cloth, $1.25.

» . ,.

The Three Graces.

With six full-page illustrations, zsmo. Cloth, $1.9$.

Peter's Wife. A Little Irish Girl.

Lady Patty. The Hoyden.

A Lonely Maid. An Unsatisfactory Lover.

zamo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, ^z.oo.

Phyllis. Mrs. Geoffrey.

Molly Bawn. Portia,

Airy Fairy Lilian. Loys, Lord Berresford, and

Beauty's Daughters. Other Stories.

Faith and Unfaith. Rossmoyne.

Doris. A Mental Struggle.

**0 Tender Dolores.** Lady Valworth's Diamonds.

A Maiden All Forlorn. Lady Branksmere.

In Durance Vile. A Modem Circe.

The Duchess. The Honourable Mrs. Vereker.

Marvel. Under-Currents.

Jerry, and Other Stories. A Life's Remorse.

A Point of (Conscience.

zamo. Bound only in cloth, ^.oo.

'* ' The Duchess' has well deserved the title of being one of the most fasci-
«ating novelists of the day. The stories written by her are the airiest, lightest.
And brightest imaginable ; full of wit, spirit, and gayety, yet containing touches of
the most exquisite pathos. There is something gpod ii^ al} pf them." — London
Academy.

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHII^PELPHIA.

Bimbi Stories

for Children

By " OUIDA »

Small quarto. Cloth, ornamental, 60 cents per volume.

A PROVENCE ROSE THE NURNBERG STOVE.

MOUFFLOU AND OTHER
STORIES.

THE CHILD OF URBINO AND
MELEAGRIS GALLOPAVO.

A DOG OF FLANDERS.

IN THE APPLE COUNTRY

THE LITTLE EARL. AND FINDELKIND.

"However much difference of opinion there may be as to the
moral tone of some of the novels of Louise de la Ram^, there can
be but one opinion concerning the purity and admirable tone of her
stories designed for young readers. The opening story, for pathetic
beauty and descriptive power, has rarely been surpassed in the entire
range of classic juveniles. The others are of like touching, pathetic
character, revealing on the part of the gifted author a tender sym-
pathy with the poor and humble, and a wonderful power in pictur-
ing their every-day experiences. In his beautiful page illustrations
£dmund H. Garrett has entered fully into the spirit of the author's
descriptions. * * — Boston Home Journal,

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY,

PUBLISHERS, PHILADELPHIA.

MORRIS'S UNITED STATES HISTORIES.

A HISTORY OF THE UNITED
STATES OF AMERICA :

ITS PEOPLE AND ITS INSTITUTIONS.
By CHARLES MORRIS.

Profusely Illustrated. School Edition. Half leather, $1.00.

" The whole history is placed on a broad and high ground, where
it commands respect, pleads for itself, and is large enough and noble
enough to leave the most patriotic citizen free to speak the truth about
its minor episodes. The proportions and perspective of the history
are well preserved. As much of the philosophy of the history, of its
constitutional development and general relation to civilization is intro-
duced as a work of this class and brevity would bear. It is the reverse
of dry, and at the furthest possible remove from a ^uU chronicle of
events." — JVew York Independent,

BY THE SAME AUTHOR,

An Elementary History of the United States.

Illustrated. i2mo. Cloth, 75 cents.

A Primary History of the United States.

Illustrated. i2mo. Cloth, 60 cents.

No recent publications have elicited more flattering testimonials
from teachers and school officers than have Morris's Histories, and
none praise them more highly than those who are using them.

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA.

Bohemian Paris of To-Day.

Written by W. C. MORROW,

fixjm Notes by EDOUARD CUCUEL.

Illustrated with one hundred and six pen drawings by Edouard Cucuel.
Cloth, gilt top, ornamental binding, ^3.50.

, . The text of the papers describing the Fine Art Schools, public ateliers,
(>rivate studios, cafes, cabarets, and dance-halls frequented by Parisian students
appears to have been written up to M. Cucuel's admirable arawings-every one
^f which is instinct with frank fun or rollicking humour." — Daily Telegraph,
London.

" No book with which we are familiar gives so graphic or so appreciative a
\ketch of this bohemian life. Of the illustrations too much cannot be said in
Iheir praise. They give the very life of the Latin Quarter." — San Francisco
Chronicle f San Francisco.

** It is a unique volume of its kind. It cannot fail to be of interest to the
foreign tourist in tne gay French capital who had imagined that he * kn«w it all,'
and yet felt that there was something lacking." — Times ^ New York.

'' An inside view of Bohemian Paris, its caf6s and boulevards, its balls and
amusements, its student and artistic life ; with pictures drawn on the spot and
depicting all the features which have made the Latin Quarter and Montmartre so
famous. There is much described in this book which many of those who have
visited Paris have never seen, and it afifords a complete guide for those desiring to
see the Bohemian quarter as it really is, as well as being one of the most charm'
ing books for general reading recently published." — Literary Remew, Boston.

" To an American intending to depart to Paris to study, nothing can be more
useful than this work. Mr. Morrow's Iceen observation has not permitted a point
to befool him, and he has transcribed the Bohemian quarters with laudable per-
spicuity and exactness. His pen is charmingly aided by the pencil of Mr.
Edouard Cucuel. The artistic qualities and veracity (a difficult combination ordi-
narily) endorse the prophecy of eminence which has been made for him since his
entrance into the Quarter." — Boston Courier.

** * Bohemian Paris of To-day' is so steeped in the atmosphere of that whereof
it treats that the appreciative reader (and who could be otherwise as regards so
fascinating a subject so delightfully tiandled ?) becomes almost a participator in
the life and adventures described, and feels like one returned from some stranger
land when he closes the book. Faithful to its title the volume adheres strictly to
the ways of Bohemia in the world's fairest city ; but what ways and how diverse
they are one quickly learns when turning these pages."— 7i4* Home Journal,
New York.

" A great many books have been written about the life of the art students in
Paris, but this book, it can be said frankly, surpasses all its rivals in vivacity and
fidelity. The value of this book is that it comes from the hand of a man who
has actively lived the life of an art student in Paris. The book, therefore, is a
frank, matter-of-fact exhibition of student life in Paris from the student's view-

f)oint, — the good and the bad. Everything is related with engaging, charming
rankness. The studios, the balls, the cafes, cabarets, lodging-houses, and dance
halls all are described vividly, with neither toning up or toning down. The draw-
ings with which the book is illustrated are as frank and yet charming as the text
is. The combination of the two is the most fascinating study of Bohemian Paris
made up to date." — Boston Journal.

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA.

Novels by Maris Corblll

" Marie Corelli has many remarkable qualities as a writer
of fiction. Her style is singularly clear and alert, and she is the
most independent of thinkers and authors of fiction ; but her
principal gift is an imagination which rises on a bold and easy
wing to the highest heaven of invention.** — Boston Home Journal,

BARABBAS:

A Dream of the World's Tragedy. i2mo. Red
buckram, $i.oo.

THB SORROWS OF SATAN;

Or, The Strange Experience of one Geoffrey Tem-
pest, Millionaire. With Frontispiece by Van Schaick.
i2mo. Red buckram, $1.50.

THM MVRDMR OF DBLICIA.

i2mo. Red buckram, $1.25.

THB MIGHTY ATOM.

i2mo. Paper, 50 cents ; red buckram, $1.25.

CAMMOS.

i2mo. Red buckram, $1.00.

VENDBTTA ;

Or, The Story OF One Forgotten. i2mo. Cloth, $i.c)o.

JANB.

Issued in the Lotos Library, i6mo. Polished buckram,
75 cents.

For sale by all Booksellers,

J. B. I/ippincott Company, Publisbera,

Philadelphia.

823.6 .D33wa v' T 3 •

Wanda. ADP3770 6 jT Ot ^

3 6105 044 967 981

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CECIL H, GREEN LIBRARY [

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305-6004 II

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