by Ouida
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 jägers held his gun; his wrists were tied behind him. ‘Are you indeed a friend of the Kaiser?’ she repeated to him.
‘I am no friend of his,’ he answered bitterly and sullenly. ‘I met him a while ago zad-hunting on the Thorstein. His signature is in my pocket; bid your jäger 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 let them set you free and render you up your rifle.’
‘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 or better than a poacher on my lands. Nevertheless, I will trust you.’
Then she gave a sign to the jägers 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 Nibelungen-Lied, whose armour lies in the museum of Vienna.
‘Alas! why have you let him go, my Countess!’ murmured Otto, the head forester.
‘The Kaiser had made him sacred,’ she answered, with a smile; and then she called Donau and Neva, who were roaming, and went on her way through her forest.
‘What strange and cruel creatures we are!’ she thought. ‘The vulture would have dropped into the ravine. He would never have found it. The audacity, too, to fire on a kuttengeier; if it had been any lesser bird one might have pardoned it.’
For the eagle, the gypæte, 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 himself when he came there. So that the crime of the stranger had been more than trespass and almost treason! Her heart was hard to him, and she felt that she had been too lenient. Who could tell but that that rifle would bring down some free lord of the air?
She listened with the keen ear of one used to the solitude of the hills and woods; she thought he would shoot something out of bravado. But all was silent 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 jäger.
‘He must have come over the Hündspitz, my Countess,’ said Otto. ‘Any other way he would have been stopped by our men and lightened of his rifle.’
‘The Hündspitz!’ 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 Glöckner.
‘That must he,’ said the huntsman,’and for sure if an honest man had tried to come that way he would have been hurled headlong down the ice-wall — —’
‘He is the Kaiser’s protégé, Otto,’ said his mistress, with a smile, but the old jäger 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 raising 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 midwinter.
‘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 the thunder and the constantly recurring flashes of lightning.
‘I am troubled for that traveller whom I 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 Engadine, or a seditious heretical colporteur from Geneva, you would have sent him into the kitchens to feast,’ said the Princess, contentiously.
‘I hope he is safe housed,’ repeated Wanda. ‘It is several hours ago; he may very well have reached the posthouse.’
‘You have the satisfaction of thinking the kuttengeier is safe, 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 anyone who does not know them well. Let us look at the weather from the hall; one can see better from there.’
From the Rittersäal, 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 air snow was falling; the great white peaks and pinnacles ever and again flashed strangely into view as the lightning illumined them; the Glöckner-wanda 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’ cauldron.
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 Hubert, 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 attention. ‘It comes from the lake. But no boat could live long in that water, my Countess.’
‘No!’ she said, with a quick sigh, remembering how her brother had died. ‘But we must do what we can. It may be one of the lake fishermen caught in the storm before he could make for home. Ring the alarm-bell, and go out, all of you, to the water stairs. I will come, too.’
In a few moments the deep bell that hung in the chime tower, and which was never sounded except for death or danger, added its sonorous brazen voice to the clang and clamour of the storm. All the household paused, and at the summons, coming from north, south, east, and west of the great pile of buildings, grooms, gardeners, huntsmen, pages, scullions, underlings, all answered to the metal tongue, which told them of some peril at Hohenszalras.
With a hooded cloak thrown over her, she went out into the driving rain, down the terrace to the head of what were called the water stairs; a flight of granite steps leading to the little quay upon the eastward shore of the Szalrassee, where were moored in fair weather
the pleasure boats, the fishing punts, and the canoes which belonged to the castle: craft all now safe in the boat-house.
‘Make no confusion,’ she said to them. ‘There is no danger in the castle. There is some boat, or some swimmer, on the lake. Light the terrace beacon and we shall see.’
She was very pale. There was no storm on those waters that did not bring back to her, as poignant as the first fresh hours of its grief, the death of Bela.
The huge beacon of iron, a cage set on high and filled with tow and tar and all inflammable things, was set on fire, and soon threw a scarlet glare over the scene.
The shouts had ceased.
‘They may be drowned,’ she said, with her lips pressed tightly together. ‘I hear nothing now. Have you the rope and the lifeboat ready? We must wait for more light.’
At that moment the whole of the tar caught, and the beacon blazed at its fiercest in its iron cage, as it had used to blaze in the ages gone by as a war signal, when the Prelates of Salzburg and Birchtesgaden were marching across the marshes of Pinzgau in quarrel or feud with the lords of the strongest fortress in the Hohe Tauern.
In the struggling light which met the blue glance of the lightning they could see the angry waters of the lake as far 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 lifebuoy to the exhausted swimmer, and pushed one of the boats into the seething darkness of the lake. But the swimmer had strength enough to catch hold of the buoy as it was hurled to him by the fischermeister’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 fifty 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 fohn was blowing fiercely 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 Szalrassee 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 prize.
Dripping from head to foot, and drawing deep breaths of exhaustion, the rescued man stood on the terrace steps bareheaded and in his shirt-sleeves, his brown velvet breeches pulled up to his knees, his fair hair lifted by the wind, and soaked with wet.
She recognised the trespasser of the forest.
‘Madame, behold me in your power again!’ he said, with a little smile, though he breathed with labour, 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. You must be faint and bruised.’
‘No, no,’ said the swimmer; but as he spoke his eyes closed, he staggered a little; a deadly faintness and cold had seized him, and cramp came on all his limbs.
The men caught him, and carried him up the stairs; he strove to struggle and protest, but Otto the forester stooped over him.
‘Keep you still,’ he muttered. ‘You have the Countess’s orders. Trespass has cost you dear, my master.’
‘I do not think he is greatly hurt,’ said the mistress of Szaravola to her house physician. ‘But go you to him, doctor, and see that he is warmly housed and has hot drinks. Put him in the Strangers’ Gallery, and pray take care my aunt is 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 favourite blue-room, all capitonnée with turquoise silks as it was; the only chamber in all Szaravola that was entirely modern and French.
‘I do hope Wanda is running no risk,’ she thought, from 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 waterproof 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 further from her drawing-room than the Princess 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 roofs of Hohenszalras, where half a hundred slept already.
The castle, in the wild winters that shut out the Hohe Tauern from the world, was oftentimes a hospice for travellers, though usually those travellers were only pedlars, colporteurs, mule-drivers, clock-makers of the Zillerthal or carpet weavers of the Defreggerthal, too late in the year to pursue their customary 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 flowers in silks on velvet, for a friend in Paris’ The flowers stood in a glass on a table.
‘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 an adventure!’ said the Princess, a little pettishly.
‘There has been no adventure,’ said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. ‘But there is what may do as well — a handsome 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!’
The Princess Ottilie sat up erect in her chair, and her blue eyes brightened like a girl of sixteen.
‘Then there is an adventure! Tell 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 Princess what had occurred that night.
‘And I never knew that a poor soul was in peril!’ cried the Princess, conscious-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 Greswold — 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, humorous, 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 Princess 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 seemed indisposed to speak, shivered a good deal, and was inclined to sleep.
‘He is a gentleman, think you? asked the Princess.
The Herr Professor said that to him it appeared so.
‘And of what rank?’
The physician thought it was impossible to say.
‘It is always possible,’ said the Princess, a little impatiently. ‘Is his linen fine? Is his skin smooth? Are his hands 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 been occupied with his diagnosis of the patient’s state; for, he added, he thought the swimmer had been long in the water, an
d the Szalrassee was of very dangerously low temperature at night, being fed as it Was from the glaciers and snows of the mountains.
‘It is very interesting,’ said the Princess; ‘but pray observe 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 regretfully. To harbour 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 Leipzig 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 impertinent: he almost told me yesterday that my neuralgia was all imagination!’
‘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 Ferdinand to have a mass to-night for Bela. I fancy Bela is glad that no other life has been taken by the lake.’
The Princess rose quickly and kissed her.
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 the crown of the Szalras Counts in gilded bronze above its head, he heard as if in his dream the sound of chanting voices and the deep slow melodies of an organ.