by Ouida
‘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!’
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 undressed, and lie down before the fire. Do not be afraid. You will see me when you awake. I shall not stir.’
He thought as he spoke:
‘No, I shall never stir again; they will bear me 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 — she may love the children.’
When at last Bela, sobbing piteously, had reluctantly obeyed, and when, despite all his struggles, nature, frozen, weary, and worn out, compelled him 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 XLIII.
It was twelve o’clock in the night. Wanda von Szalras paced the Rittersaal with feverish steps and limbs which, whilst they quivered with fear, knew no fatigue. It had been nine in the morning when Greswold and the servants, having searched in vain, came at last to her with the tidings that her 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 organised the search of others 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 unborn? 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 search-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, and 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 those vast forests, those immense hills, all hidden in the impenetrable 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.
She had known nothing of the purport of the child’s disappearance; she had been left 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 Glöckner were discernible by the agitation of the clouds that hid one-half the heights.
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.
As midnight tolled from the clock tower he 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 say that?’ she asked, 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 taken 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!’
The words, uttered in his son’s soft, grave, flute-like voice, pierced her heart. She could not speak.
‘Will he rob me even of my first-born?’ she thought, bitterly.
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! 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 Imperial throne in the Kittersaal, praised God.
Then, when she rose, she cried in very ecstasy:
‘Fetch him; bring him at once! — oh, my child! 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 for ever and for ever! — —’
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 left the hall. She turned to Greswold.
‘Tell me all, now.’
The old man hesitated, then took his courage up and answered.
‘My Lady — his father found your son.’
She put her hand out and clenched the arm of the throne as if to save herself from falling.
‘His father!’ she echoed. ‘How came he there? Answer me, with the truth, the whole truth.’
‘My Countess,’ said Greswold, while his voice shook, ‘your husband has dwelt amidst the Glöckner 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, you say?’
‘He found Count Bela; yes. It seems he had come as near here as some nine miles eastward; near the hut which your Excellency built, not very long after your marriage, on the crest of the Adler Spitze, in consequence of the fatal accident to the Bavarian pedlars. He knew nothing of Count Bela’s loss, but there 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 sheer despair, mounting towards the Adler Spitze, though we did not believe the child could have possibly got so far, when we met one of the keepers descending with the news. The storm is at its height; 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. B
ut 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 dismissal, and sought a refuge in her oratory.
She felt that she must be alone.
She almost forgot the safety of her first-born 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 her to all save the memories of the past, which thronged upon her. If he had repented so greatly was it not her obligation to meet his penitence with pardon? It would be bitter to her to live out her life beside one whose word she would for ever doubt, whose disloyalty had cut to the roots of the pride and purity of her race. Nevermore between them could there be the undoubting faith, the unblemished trust, which are the glorious noonday of a cloudless love. She might forgive, but never, never, she thought, would she be able to command forget fulness.
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 betrayed her, he had loved and honoured 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 not 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 cup
Of the pure 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 beneath love of honour? Had she treasured the ‘grain of gold’ in her hands rather with the Pharisee’s arrogance of purity than with the true humility of the acolyte?
She kneeled there before the carven Christ in an anguish of doubt.
He had given her back her first-born. Should she be less generous to him?
Should she for ever arrogate the right of judgment against him, or should she stretch the palm of pardon even across that great gulf of wrong dividing them as by a bottomless pit?
Tears came like dew to her parched heart. It was the first time that 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 bound 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 her own dishonour. She had laid her heart bare before God and plucked her pride up from its bleeding roots.
All the early hours of her love recurred to her with an aching remembrance, which had lost its shame and was sweet in its very pain. His crime was still dark as the night in 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 endurance of all wrong? What was its hope of eternal life if it had not gathered strength in it enough to rise above human arrogance and human vengeance?
‘Oh, my love, my love!’ she cried aloud. ‘We will live our lives out together!’
Her resolve was taken when she left 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 unchristian, 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 other gazed at her doubting, incredulous, touched to a great hope.
‘Bring him?’ she echoed, ‘your child?’
‘My husband.’
‘You will do that? — ah! mercy is ever blessed; the grace of Heaven will be with you!’
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 was 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 keeper almost midway up the Adler Spitze, yet it took us four hours to make the descent.’
She did not even seem to hear him.
‘May I follow?’ he asked her humbly. She gave a sign of assent, and stood motionless and mute; her thoughts were far away.
When the horse was brought she went out 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 Glöckner. 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 lanterns 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 jägers; 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 followed 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 fatigue and cold, she looked up into the blackness of the air, and thought that those she sought were there, and fancied that already she heard their voices. Then she gathered new strength and crept 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 walking onward alone drew near the heavy door.
She opened it a little way, paused a moment, drawing her breath with effort; then looked into the cabin. It was a mere hut of two chambers made of pitch pine, and lighted by a single win
dow. 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 was stretched 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 Glöckner, and an alpenflühevogel was trilling and tripping on the frozen ground. From a distant unseen hamlet far below there came a faint sound of morning bells.
She thrust the door further open and entered. She made a gesture to the keeper, who started up with a low obeisance, to go without. She fastened the latch 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 shutting 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.
‘I am come to thank you.’
Her voice trembled.
He gave a restless sigh.
‘Ah! 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 except that I once loved you.’
His face grew transfigured with a great joy.
He could not speak; he gazed at her.
‘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 harshness, my cruel, unyielding — pride? Nay, sometimes I have thought of late my fault was darker than your own; more hateful in God’s sight.’