Chapter VI (2)

'There are schools on every estate,' she said, a little angrily and disconnectedly. 'These are modelled on my own whim; that is all. The world would say I ought to teach these little peasants the science that dissects its own sources, and the philosophies that resolve all creation into an egg. But I follow ancient ways enough to think the country 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 armour 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! surely not!'

'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 stem 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 wonder that the heart of its own accord goes up in peace and praise to the Creator. The printed page may teach envy, desire, covetousness, hatred, but the Book of Nature teaches resignation, hope, willingness to labour and live, submission to die. The world has gone further and further from peace since larger and larger have grown its cities and its shepherd kings are no more.'

He was silent.

Her voice moved him like sweet remembered music; yet in his own remembrance what were there? Only 'envy, desire, 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, useless, and untrue manhood.

'Do not think,' she added, unconscious of the pain that she had caused him, 'that I undervalue the blessing of great books; but I do think that, to recognise the beauty of literature, as much culture and comprehension are needed as to understand Leonardo's painting, or the structure of Wagner's music. Those who read well are as rare as those who love well. The curse of our age is superficial knowledge; it is a _cryptogram_ of the rankest sort, and I will not let my scholars touch it. Do you not think it is better for a country child to know what flowers are poisonous for her cattle, and what herbs are useful in her neighbours' fever, than to be able to spell through a Jesuit's newspaper, or suck evil from a Communist'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 often. I have liked luxury, and have not denied myself folly. I recognised 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 fortunes and useless ambitions.'

'I cannot pardon anyone of an old nobility turning Republican; it is like a son insulting the tombs of his fathers!' 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 baseborn 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 that 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 by capitalists, and the capitalists will in turn be devoured by the democracy. _Les loups se mangeront entre eux._ You 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 or Gilles de Retz were the nearest neighbours of Romaris,' he said, with a smile. 'Yet if feudalism could be sure of such châtelaines as the Countess von 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 witch's caldron, in which all _cultes_ are melted down, and evaporate in a steam of disillusion and mockery; into the caldron we have long flung, alas! 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 Romaris?'

'Why should I? There is nothing but a few sea-tormented oaks, endless sands, endless marshes, 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! 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 horrible.'

'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 the summons the eldest pupil of the school, a handsome boy of fourteen, came out and stood bareheaded before her.

'Hansl, ask the teachers to grant you all an hour's frolic, that you may amuse this gentleman,' she said to him. 'And, Hansl, take care that you do your best, all of you, in dancing, wrestling, and singing, and above all with the zither, for the honour 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 I would not have disturbed them,' she said to him. 'They come here at sunrise; 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 labours interest them, and their classes are varied.'

Soon the children all trooped out, made their bow or curtsey 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 châlets in many a mountain village which even the mountain letter-carrier, on his climbing irons, cannot reach for months together when all the highlands are ice. They ended their dances with the Hungarian czardas, into which they threw all the vigour 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 Vàsàrhely?'

'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 beyond them.

When the czardas was ended, the girls sat down on the sward to rest, and the boys began their leaping, running, and stone-heaving, with their favourite 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 fathers make them wrestle and shoot at marks. The favourite sport here is one I will not countenance--the finger-hooking. If I 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 allowed 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!' made their reverence once more at a sign of dismissal from her, and vanished in a proud and happy crowd into the schoolhouses.

'Do you never praise them or reward them?' he asked in surprise.

'Santa Claus 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 farmhouse or the summer solitude of the cattle-hut. We do not cultivate music one-half enough among the peasantry. It lightens labour; it purifies and strengthens the home-life; it sweetens black-bread. Do you remember that happy picture of Jordaens' "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 goat crops the vine-leaves off the table? I should like to see 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 sun-gleaming woods.

'I hope that I teach them content,' she continued. 'It is the lesson most neglected in our day. "_Niemand will ein Schuster seyn; Jederman ein Dichter._" It is true we are very happy in our surroundings. A mountaineer's is such a beautiful life; so simple, healthful, hardy, and fine; always face to face with nature. I try to teach them what an inestimable joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the prosaic views of rural life. It is true that the peasant digging his trench sees the clod, not the sky but then when he does lift his head the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling. That is so much in itself. And here the sky is an everlasting grandeur: clouds and domes of snow are blent together. When the stars are out above the glaciers how serene the night is, how majestic! even the humblest creature feels lifted up into that eternal greatness. Then you think of the home-life in the long winters as dreary; but it is not so. Over away there, at Lahn, and other places on the Hallstadtersee, they do not see the sun 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 tales of the mountains and the French war, and they sing the homely songs of the _Schnaderhupfeln._ Then when winter passes, when the sun comes 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 me, 'It is like being born again!' and another said, 'Where it is always warm and light I doubt they forget to thank God for the sunshine;' and quite a young child said, all of his own accord, 'The primroses live in the dusk all the winter, like us, and then when the sun comes up we and they run out together, and the Mother of Christ has set the waters and the little birds laughing.' I would rather have the winter of Lahn than the winter of Belleville.'

'But they do go away from their mountains a good deal? 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 reaching manhood; but as soon as they have made a little money they return to dwell at home for the remainder of their days. I think living amidst the great mountains creates a restfulness, a steadfastness in the character. If Paris were set amidst Alps you would have had Lamartine, you would not have had Rochefort.'

When she spoke thus of her own country, of her own people, all her coldness vanished, her eyes grew full of light, her reserve was broken up into animation. They were what she 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! And then something 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 Romaris, and he had once known Egon Vàsàrhely.

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 wickerwork chair under the great yew on the south side 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 before 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!' said the Princess, with a little, a very little, asperity. 'The world was much happier when distinctions and divisions were impassable. There are no sumptuary laws now. What is the consequence? That, your bourgeoise 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 favour. If one look through the chronicles and miniatures, say of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, how much more sensible for the change of seasons and the ease of work seems the costume of the working people? The _cotte hardie_ was a thousand times more comfortable and more becoming than anything we have. If we could dress once more as all did under Louis Treize gentle and simple would alike benefit.'

'What a charmingly intelligent person he is!' thought the Princess, as she remarked that in Austria they were happier than the rest of the world: there were peasant costumes still there.

Wanda left 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 Frau 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 left to the Church, of which they constitute alike 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 otherwise, and she is mistress here.'

'But the schools surely are eminently practical ones?'

'Practical! 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 have a taint of that modern poison which her mind, though it is so strong iii many 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 believe in the fables that naturalists invent about weeds and beetles, and she finds a Kosmos in a puddle!'

'You are very severe, Princess.'

'I 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 understand 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 gentle? You might as well say that Her Majesty is not Empress because she washes the feet of the twelve poor men! Wanda is the best woman that I know, but she is also the proudest.'

'The Countess has never loved anyone?' 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 themselves in their affections; she would not. She would always remain the mistress of it, and it would be a love like her character. Of that I am sure.'

Sabran was silent; he was discouraged.

'I think the boldest man would always be held at a distance 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 get more out of a nature than there is in it, and there is no sort of passion in the nature of my niece.'

He 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 excess. Heaven has mercifully eliminated from her almost all mortal errors.'

'By pride
Angels have fallen ere thy time!'

suggested Sabran.

'Angels, perhaps,' said the Princess, drily. 'But for women it is an admirable preservative, second only to piety.'

He went home sculling himself across the lake, now perfectly 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, as a crime allures men who contemplate 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 thought. 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 awakened any sympathy in her, his pride was more flattered than it could have been by the most complete subjection of any other woman. He had looked on all women with the chill, amorous cynicism of the Parisian psychology, as _l'éternel féminin_, at best as '_la forme perverse, vaporeuse, langoureuse, souple comme les roseaux, blanche comme les lis, incapable de se mouvoir pendant les deux tiers du jour--sans équilibre, sans but, sans équateur, donnant son corps en pâture à sa tête._ He had had no other ideal; no other conception. This psychology, like some other sciences, brutalises as it equalises. In the woman who had risen up before him in the night of storm upon the Szalrassee he had recognised with his intelligence a woman who made his philosophy at fault, who aroused something beyond his mere instincts, who was not to be classified with the Lias, or the Cesarines, or the Jane de Simeroses, who had been in his love, as in his literature, the various types of the _éternel féminin._ The simplicity and the dignity of her life astonished and convinced him; he began to understand that where he had imagined he had studied the universe in his knowledge of women, he had in reality only seen two phases of it--the hothouse and the ditch. It is a common error to take the forced flower and the slime weed, and think that there is nothing between or beyond the two.

He had the convictions of his school that all women were at heart coquettes or hypocrites, consciously or unconsciously. Wanda von Szalras routed all his theories. Before her candour, her directness and gravity of thought, her serene indifference to all forms of compliment, all his doctrines and all his experiences were useless. She inspired him with reverential and hopeless admiration, which was mingled with an angry astonishment, and something of the bitterness of envy. Sometimes, as he sat and watched the green water of the lake tumble and roll beneath a north wind's wrath under a cloudy sky which hid the snows of the Glöckner range, he remembered a horrible story that had once fascinated him of Malatesta of Rimini slaying the princess that would have none of his love, striking his sword across her white throat in the dusky evening time, and casting her body upon the silken curtains of her wicked litter. Almost he could have found it in him to do such a crime--almost. Only he thought that at one look of her eyes his sword would have dropped upon the dust.

Her personal beauty had inspired him with a sudden passion, but her character checked it with the sense of fear which it imposed on him; fear of those high and blameless instincts which were an integral part of her nature, fear of that frank, unswerving truth which was the paramount law of her 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 unforgiving to weakness or to sin.

She remained the Nibelungen Queen to him, clothed in flawless armour 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 the 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 another 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. He 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 he 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 misspelt. How the writer had tracked him she did not say. He tore the letter up and threw the pieces into the water flowing 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 Felix's devising when she sung her triplets as a soubrette. She had been constant to no one for three months, and she had been constant 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 misspelt.

The letter which he threw into the lake brought all the memories of his old life before him; it was like the flavour of absinthe after 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 upward in the mists. He shook himself as though to shake off the memory of an unpleasant dream as he went out, descended the landing steps, drew his boat from under the willows and sculled himself across towards the water-stairs of the Schloss. In a quarter of an hour he was playing the themes of the 'Gotterdammerung,' whilst his châtelaine 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 he 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 disentangling the flax.

After the noonday breakfast the sun shone, the mists lifted from the water, the clouds drifted from the lower mountains, only leaving the snow-capped head of the Glöckner enveloped in them.

'I am going to ride; will you come?' said Wanda von Szalras to him. He assented with ardour, and a hunter, Siegfried, the mount which was always given to him, was led round under the great terrace, in company with her Arab riding-horse Ali. They rode far through the forests and out on the one level road there was, which swept round the south side of the lake; a road, turf-bordered, overhung with huge trees, closed in with a dewy veil of greenery, across which ever and anon some flash of falling water or some shimmer of glacier or of snow crest shone through the dense leafage. They rode too fast for conversation, both the horses racing like greyhounds; but as they returned, towards the close of the afternoon, they slackened their pace in pity to the steaming heaving flanks beneath their saddles, and then they could hear each other's voices.

'What a lovely life it is here!' he said, with a sigh. 'The world will seem very vulgar and noisy to me after it.'

'You would soon tire, and wish for the world,' she answered him.

'No,' he said quickly; 'I have been two months on the Holy Isle, and I have not known weariness for a moment.'

'That is because it is still summer. If you were here in the winter you would bemoan your imprisonment, like my aunt Ottilie. Even the post sometimes fails us.'

'I should not lament the post,' he replied, thinking of the letter he had cast into the lake. 'My old life seems to me insanity, fever, disease, beside these past two months I have spent with the monks.'

'You can take the vows,' she suggested with a smile. He smiled too.

'Nay: I should not dare to so insult our mother Church. 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 would have said could he have laid his heart bare.

'When you go away,' she pursued, 'remember my words. Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your talents in a napkin--in a napkin that lies on the supper table at Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I dare say, in its way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles.'

'But they have had a great position.'

'Men make their own position; they 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 make your manner of life worthy of it.'

He grew pale as she spoke.

'Cannot make a name?' he said, with forced gaiety. 'Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the ministries and half the nobilities!'

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 can only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meaning 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, 'would you allow the same nobility to Falcon-bridge 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 sunk 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 prepared 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 the 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 stern and pure than theirs. Her words spoken in their ride were like a weight of ice on his heart. Never to her, never, could he confess the errors of his past. He was a man bold to temerity, but he was not bold enough to risk the contempt of Wanda von Szalras. He had never much heeded right or wrong, or much believed in such ethical distinctions, only adhering to the conventional honour and good breeding of the world, but before her his moral sense awakened.

'The Marquis Xavier would bid me go from here,' he thought to himself, as the night wore on and he heard the footfall of the monks passing down the passages to their midnight orisons.

'After all these years in the _pourriture_ of Paris, have I such a thing as conscience left?' he asked his own thoughts, bitterly. The moon passed behind a cloud and darkness fell over the lake and hid the great pile of the Hohenszalrasburg from his sight. He closed the casement and turned away. 'Farewell!' 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 his best friend, who looked up startled.

'Away? Are you going away?'

'Yes,' said Sabran, abruptly; 'and you, I think, madame, 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. 'Wanda is a beautiful woman; many men have loved her; they might as well have loved that glacier yonder.'

'It is not that,' said Sabran, hastily. 'It is my own poverty----'

The Princess looked at him keenly.

'Do you think her not cold?'

'She who can so love a brother would surely love her lover not less, did she stoop to one,' he replied evasively. 'At least I think so; I ought not to presume to judge.'

'And you care for her?' The glance her eyes gave him added as plainly as words could have done, 'It is not only her wealth, her position? Are you sure?'

He coloured very much as he answered quickly: 'Were she beggared to-morrow, you would see.'

'It is a pity,' murmured the Princess. He did not ask her what she regretted; he knew her sympathy was with him.

They were both mute. The Princess pushed the end of her 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 have stayed too long as it is. What can she think of me?'

'She does not think about your reasons; she is too proud a woman to be vain. In a measure you have won her friendship. 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. Do not misunderstand me, I am not a coxcomb; _je ne me 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!" Absence alone can say it for me without offence as without hope.'

The Princess was silent. She was thinking of the maxim,; _L'absence éteint les petites passions et allume les grandes_.' Which was his?

'You have been so good to me,' he murmured caressingly, 'so benevolent, so merciful, I dare to ask of you a greater kindness yet. Will you explain for me to the Countess 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 should not dare to hope it.'

'I have no reason to suppose it either, but I think you are _de guerre las_ before the battle is decided.'

'There is no battle possible for me. There is only a quite certain dishonour.'

His face was dark and weary. He spoke low and with effort. She glanced at him, and felt the vague awe with which strong unintelligible emotion always filled her.

'You must judge the question for yourself,' she said with a little hesitation. 'I will express what you wish to my niece if you really desire it.'

'You are always so good to me,' he murmured, with some agitation, and he bent down before her and reverently kissed her little white hands.

'God be with you, sir,' she said, with tears in her own tender eyes.

'You have been so good to me,' he murmured; 'the purest hours of my worthless life have been spent at Hohenszalras. Here only have I known what peace and holiness can mean. Give me your blessing ere I go.'

In another moment he had bowed himself from her presence, and the Princess sat mute and motionless in the sun. 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 châtelaine.

'If she were a humbler woman,' she thought, 'how much happier she would be! What a pity it all is--what a pity! Of course he 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! 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.