by Ouida
That slender space of angry yellow to the north boded ill for the night. Bitter storms rolled in west from the Bœhmerwald, or north from the Salzkammergut, many a time in the summer weather, changing it to winter as they passed, tugging at the roof-ropes of the châlets, driving the sheep into their sennerin’s huts, covering with mist and rain the mountain sides, and echoing in thunder from the peaks of the Untersburg to the snows of the Ortler Spitze. It was such a sudden storm which had taken Bela’s life.
‘I think we shall have wild weather,’ said the Princess, drawing her furs around her, as she walked down the broad length of the stone terrace.
‘I think so too,’ said Wanda. ‘It is coming very soon; and I fear I did a cruel thing this morning.’
‘What was that?’
‘I sent a stranger to find his way over our hills to Matrey, as best he might. He will hardly have reached it by now, and if a storm should come — —’
‘A stranger?’ said Princess Ottilie, whose curiosity was always alive, and had also lately no food for its hunger.
‘Only a poacher; but he was a gentleman, which made his crime the worse.’
‘A gentleman, and you sent him over the hills without a guide? It seems unlike the hospitality of Hohenszalras.’
‘Why he would have shot a kuttengeier!’
‘A kuttengeier is a horrible beast,’ said the Princess, with a shudder; ‘and a stranger, just for an hour or so, would be welcome.’
‘Even if his name were not in the Hof-Kalender?’ asked her niece, smiling.
‘If he had been a pedlar, or a clockmaker, you would have sent him in to rest. For a gentlewoman, Wanda, and so proud a one as you are, you become curiously cruel to your own class.’
‘I am always cruel to poachers. And to shoot a vulture in the month of May!’
CHAPTER II.
The dining-hall was a vast chamber, panelled and ceiled with oak. In the centre of the panels were emblazoned shields bearing the arms of the Szalras, and of the families with which they had intermarried; the long lancet windows had been painted by no less a hand than that of Jacob of Ulm; the knights’ stalls which ran round the hall were the elaborate carving of Georges Syrlin; and old gorgeous banners dropped down above them, heavy with broideries and bullion.
There were upper servants in black clothes with knee breeches, and a dozen lacqueys in crimson and gold liveries, ranged about the table. In many ways there were a carelessness and ease in the household which always seemed lamentable to the Princess Ottilie, but in matters of etiquette the great household was ruled like a small court; and when sovereigns became guests there little in the order of the day needed change at Hohenszalras.
The castle was half fortress, half palace; a noble and solemn place, which had seen many centuries of warfare, of splendour, and of alternate war and joy. Strangers used to Paris gilding, to Italian sunlight, to English country-houses, found it too severe, too august, too dark, and too stern in its majesty, and were awed by it. But she who had loved it and played in it in infancy changed nothing there, but cherished it as it had come to her; and it was in all much the same as it had been in the days of Henry the Lion, from its Gothic Silber-kapelle, that was like an ivory and jewelled casket set in dusky silver, to its immense Rittersäal, with a hundred knights in full armour standing down it, as the bronze figures stand round Maximilian’s empty tomb in Tirol. There are many such noble places hidden away in the deep forests and the mountain glens of Maximilian’s empire.
In this hall there were some fifteen persons standing. They were the priest, the doctor, the high steward, the almoner, some dames de compagnie, and some poor ladies, widows or spinsters, who subsisted on the charities of Hohenszalras. The two noble ladies bowed to them all and said a few kind words; then passed on and seated themselves at their own table, whilst these other persons took their seats noiselessly at a longer table, behind a low screen of carved oak.
The lords of Hohenszalras had always thus adhered to the old feudal habit of dining in public, and in royal fashion, thus.
The Countess Wanda and her aunt spoke little; the one was thinking of many other things than of the food brought to her, the other was enjoying to the uttermost each bouchée, each relevée, each morsel of quail, each mouthful of wine-stewed trout, each succulent truffle, and each rich drop of crown Tokaï.
The repast was long, and to one of them extremely tedious; but these formal and prolonged ceremonials had been the habit of her house, and Wanda von Szalras carefully observed all hereditary usage and custom. When her aunt had eaten her last fruit, and she herself had broken her last biscuit between the dogs, they rose, one glad that the most tiresome, and the other regretful that the most pleasant, hour of the uneventful day was over.
With a bow of farewell to the standing household, they went by mutual consent their divers ways; the Princess to her favourite blue room and her after-dinner doze, Wanda to her own study, the chamber most essentially her own, where all were hers.
The softness and radiance of the after-glow had given place to night and rain; the mists and the clouds had rolled up from the Zillerthal Alps, and the water was pouring from the skies.
Lamps, wax candles, flambeaux, burning in sconces or upheld by statues or swinging from chains, were illumining the darkness of the great castle, but in her own study only one little light was shining, for she, a daughter of the mystical mountains and forests, loved the shadows of the night.
She seated herself here by the unshuttered casement. The full moon was rising above the Glöckner range, and the rain-clouds as yet did not obscure it, though a film of falling water veiled all the westward shore of the lake, and all the snows on the peaks and crests of the Venediger. She leaned her elbows on the cushioned seat, and looked out into the night.
‘Bela, my Bela! are you content with me?’ she murmured. To her Bela was as living as though he were present by her side; she lived in the constant belief of his companionship and his sight. Death was a cruel — ah, how cruel! — wall built up between him and her, forbidding them the touch of each other’s hands, denying them the smile of each other’s eyes; but none the less to her was he there, unseen, but ever near, hidden behind that inexorable, invisible barrier which one day would fall and let her pass and join him.
She sat idle in the embrasure of the oriel window, whilst the one lamp burned behind her. This, her favourite room, had scarcely been changed since Maria Theresa, on a visit there, had made it her bower-room. The window-panes had been painted by Selier of Landshut in 1440; the stove was one of Hirschvögel’s; the wood-carvings had been done by Schuferstein; there was silver repoussé work of Kellerthaler, tapestries of Marc de Comans, enamels of Elbertus of Köln, of Jean of Limoges, of Leonard Limousin, of Penicaudius; embroidered stuffs of Isabeau Maire, damascened armour once worn by Henry the Lion, a painted spinet that had belonged to Isabella of Bavaria, and an ivory Book of Hours, once used by Carolus Magnus; and all these things, like the many other treasures of the castle, had been there for centuries; gifts from royal guests, spoils of foreign conquest, memorials of splendid embassies or offices of state held by the lords of Szalras, or marriage presents at magnificent nuptials in the old magnificent ages.
In this room she, their sole living representative, was never disturbed on any pretext. In the adjacent library (a great cedar-lined room, holding half a million volumes, with many missals and early classics, and many an editio princeps of the Renaissance), she held all her audiences, heard all petitions or complaints, audited her accounts, conversed with her tenants or her stewards, her lawyers or her peasants, and laboured earnestly to use to the best of her intelligence the power bequeathed to her.
‘I am but God’s and Bela’s steward, as my steward is mine,’ she said always to herself, and never avoided any duty or labour entailed on her, never allowed weariness or self-indulgence to enervate her. Qui facit per alium, facit per se had been early taught to her, and she never forgot it. She never did anything vicariously wh
ich concerned those dependent upon her. And she was an absolute sovereign in this her kingdom of glaciers and forests; her frozen sea as she had called it. She never avoided a duty merely because it was troublesome, and she never gave her signature without knowing why and wherefore. It is easy to be generous; to be just is more difficult and burdensome. Generous by temper, she strove earnestly to be always just as well, and her life was not without those fatigues which a very great fortune brings with it to anyone who regards it as a sacred trust.
She had wide possessions and almost incalculable wealth. She had salt mines in Galicia, she had Vosläuer vineyards in the Salzkammergut, she had vast plains of wheat, and leagues on leagues of green lands, where broods of horses bred and reared away in the steppes of Hungary. She had a palace in the Herrengasse at Vienna, another in the Residenzplatz of Salzburg; she had forests and farms in the Innthal and the Zillerthal; she had a beautiful little schloss on the green Ebensee, which had been the dower-house of the Countesses of Szalras, and she had pine-woods, quarries, vineyards, and even a whole riverain town on the Danube, with a right to take toll on the ferry there, which had been given to her forefathers as far back as the days of Mathias Carvin, a right that she herself had let drop into desuetude. ‘I do not want the poor folks’ copper kreutzer,’ she said to her lawyers when they remonstrated. What did please her was the fact coupled with this right that even the Kaiser could not have entered her little town without his marshal thrice knocking at the gates, and receiving from the warder the permission to pass, in the words, ‘The Counts of Idrac bid you come in peace.’
All these things and places made a vast source of revenue, and the property, whose title-deeds and archives lay in many a chest and coffer in the old city of Salzburg, was one of the largest in Europe. It would have given large portions and dowries to a score of sons and daughters and been none the worse. And it was all accumulating on the single head of one young and lonely woman! She was the last of her race; there were distant collateral branches, but none of them near enough to have any title to Hohenszalras. She could bequeath it where she would, and she had already willed it to her Kaiserin, in a document shut up in an iron chest in the city of Salzburg. She thought the Crown would be a surer and juster guardian of her place and people than any one person, whose caprices she could not foretell, whose extravagance or whose injustice she could not foresee. Sometimes, even to the spiritual mind of the Princess Ottilie, the persistent refusal of her niece to think of any marriage seemed almost a crime against mankind.
What did the Crown want with it?
The Princess was a woman of absolutely; loyal sentiment towards all ancient sovereignties. She believed in Divine right, and was as strong a royalist as it is possible for anyone to be whose fathers have been devoured like an anchovy by M. de Bismarck, and who has the sympathy of fellow feeling with Frohsdorf and Gmünden. But even her devotion to the rights of monarchs failed to induce her to see why the Habsburg should inherit Hohenszalras. The Crown is a noble heir, but it is one which leaves the heart cold. Who would ever care for her people, and her forests, and her animals as she had done? Even from her beloved Kaiserin she could not hope for that. ‘If I had married?’ she thought, the words of the Princess Ottilie coming back upon her memory.
Perhaps, for the sake of her people and her lands, it might have been better.
But there are women to whom the thought of physical surrender of themselves is fraught with repugnance and disgust; a sentiment so strong that only a great passion vanquishes it. She was one of these women, and passion she had never felt.
‘Even for Hohenszalras I could not,’ she thought, as she leaned on the embrasure cushions, and watched the moon, gradually covered with the heavy blue-black clouds. The Crown should be her heir and reign here after her, when she should be laid by the side of Bela in that beautiful dusky chapel beneath the shrines of ivory and silver, where all the dead of the House of Szalras slept. But it was an heir which left her heart cold.
She rose abruptly, left the embrasure, and began to examine the letters of the day and put down heads of replies to them, which her secretary could amplify on the morrow.
One letter her secretary could not answer for her; it was a letter which gave her pain, and which she read with an impatient sigh. It urged her return to the world as the letter of her Empress had done, and it urged with timidity, yet with passion, a love that had been loyal to her from her childhood. It was signed ‘Egon Vàsàrhely.’
‘It is the old story,’ she thought. ‘Poor Egon! If only one could have loved him, how it would have simplified everything; and I do love him, as I once loved Gela and Victor.’
But that was not the love which Egon Vàsàrhely pleaded for with the tenderness of one who had been to her as a brother from her babyhood, and the frankness of a man who knew his own rank so high and his own fortunes so great, that no mercenary motive could be attributed to him even when he sought the mistress of Hohenszalras. It was the old story: she had heard it many times from him and from others in those brilliant winters in Vienna which had preceded Bela’s death. And it had always failed to touch her. Women who have never loved are harsh to love from ignorance.
At that moment a louder crash of thunder reverberated from hill to hill, and the Glöckner domes seemed to shout to the crests of the Venediger.
‘I hope that stranger is housed and safe,’ she thought, her mind reverting to the poacher of whom she had spoken on the terrace at sunset. His face came before her memory: a beautiful face, oriental in feature, northern in complexion, fair and cold, with blue eyes of singular brilliancy.
The forests of Hohenszalras are in themselves a principality. Under enormous trees, innumerable brooks and little torrents dash downwards to lose themselves in the green twilight of deep gorges; broad, dark, still lakes lie like cups of jade in the bosom of the woods; up above, where the Alpine firs and the pinus cembra shelter him, the bear lives and the wolf too; and higher yet, where the glacier lies upon the mountain side, the merry steinbock leaps from peak to peak, and the white-throat vulture and the golden eagle nest. The oak, the larch, the beech, the lime, cover the lower hills, higher grow the pines and firs, the lovely drooping Siberian pine foremost amidst them. In the lower wood grassy roads cross and thread the leafy twilight. A stranger had been traversing these woods that morning, where he had no right or reason to be. Forest-law was sincerely observed and meted out at Hohenszalras, but of that he was ignorant or careless.
Before him, in the clear air, a large, dark object rose and spread huge pinions to the wind and soared aloft. The trespasser lifted his rifle to his shoulder, and in another moment would have fired. But an alpenstock struck the barrel up into the air, and the shot went off harmless towards the clouds. The great bird, startled by the report, flew rapidly to the westward; the Countess Wanda said quietly to the poacher in her forest, ‘You cannot carry arms here,’
He looked at her angrily, and in surprise.
‘You have lost me the only eagle I have seen for years,’ he said bitterly, with a flush of discomfiture and powerless rage on his fair face.
She smiled a little.
‘That bird was not an eagle, sir; it was a white-throated vulture, a kuttengeier. But had it been an eagle — or a sparrow — you could not have killed it on my lands.’
Pale still with anger, he uncovered his head.
‘I have not the honour to know in whose presence I stand,’ he muttered sullenly. ‘But I have Imperial permission to shoot wherever I choose.’
‘His Majesty has no more loyal subject than myself,’ she answered him. ‘But his dominion does not extend over my forests. You are on the ground of Hohenszalras, and your offence — —’
‘I know nothing of Hohenszalras!’ he interrupted, with impatience.
She blew a whistle, and her head forester with three jägers sprang up as if out of the earth, some great wolf-hounds, grinning with their fangs, waiting but a word to spring. In one second the rangers had thrown thems
elves on the too audacious trespasser, had pinioned him, and had taken his rifle.
Confounded, disarmed, humiliated, and stunned by the suddenness of the attack, he stood mute and very pale.
‘You know Hohenszalras now!’ said the mistress of it, with a smile, as she watched his seizure seated on a moss-grown boulder of granite, black Donau and white Neva by her side. He was pale with impotent fury, conscious of an indefensible and absurd position. The jäger looked at their mistress; they had slipped a cord over his wrists, and tied them behind his back; they looked to her for a sign of assent to break his rifle. She stood silent, amused with her victory and his chastisement; a little derision shining in her lustrous eyes.
‘You know Hohenszalras now!’ she said once more. ‘Men have been shot dead for what you were doing. If you be, indeed, a friend of my Emperor’s, of course you are welcome here; but — —’
‘What right have you to offer me this indignity,’ muttered the offender, his fair features changing from white to red, and red to white, in his humiliation and discomfiture.
‘Right!’ echoed the mistress of the forests. ‘I have the right to do anything I please with you! You seem to me to understand but little of forest laws.’
‘Madame, were you not a woman, you would have had bloodshed.’
‘Oh, very likely. That sometimes happens, although seldom, as all the Hohe Tauern knows how strictly these forests are preserved. My men are looking to me for permission to break your rifle. That is the law, sir.’
‘Since ‘Forty-eight,’ said the trespasser, with what seemed to her marvellous insolence, ‘all the old forest laws are null and void. It is scarcely allowable to talk of trespass.’
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 Rudolf of Habsburg never dared meddle with. I am not called on to explain this to you, but you appear to labour under such strange delusions that it is as well to dispel them.’