“Excellency, he had his answer as a man loves best to have it—sealed upon his lips, without any witness of word or promise.
“The Count left for Vienna on the first day of Passion Week. Though he had made no declaration of his intention, a rumour of things was abroad in the château, and the whole household was alive with expectation. It was wonderful to see the awakening of those who for ten years and more had walked through life under a burden of sleep. Painters came from Jajce to clean the time-stained rooms. Carpets arrived in waggons from Serajevo. A great dressmaker from Pesth was busy with his fine stuffs and embroidery. Dame Theresa stitched all day, or raved at the maids. The grooms dragged out forgotten coaches from the sheds and sent them to the wheelwright. There were ladders and buckets and beaters in every room. You heard the sound of merry singing in the corridors; bright faces met you in the park. Christine became at once the object of a slavish attention. ‘The Lord Count has wished it,’ were the words on every tongue. The priest alone kept his gloomy voice and muttered his gloomy warnings.
“Spring was early to come that year, excellency. The snow sank through the mountains when March was young, and we gathered violets in the bowers of the park while the Church was still telling us to fast. It was good to see Jajce shining white and glorious in her cup of the hills; good to see the little waves lapping in the lake, and to hear the droning thunders of the Plevna. No more was there danger lurking in the pass. We walked as we listed in the woods and on the heights. Bears gambolled on the sward between the thickets; the wolf hid himself in the depths of the glades. For myself, I felt that twenty years of life had been given to me. The mountain air breathed strength into my lungs. The winds of the hills were iron to my veins. I lived in a garden of dreams, and said surely that the good God was mocking me.
“The Count had left us in Passion Week, but we looked for his return at Low Sunday, and worked the harder to have all things in readiness for him. As for Christine herself, no word of mine could convey a sense of her content and her pleasure. It was more and more astonishing to see, as the days went on, how that little vagrant of the hills began to ape the airs and manners of the fine lady, yet with so gentle a grace that none had offence of it. Eight months of the priest’s books and teaching—added to that she had learnt of me and in the school at Zlarin—had done much for one to whom dignity came as an inheritance, and fine bearing as a birthright. I said it always, and I say it now, that my child was willed by God to sit at the feet of princes. For this was her destiny, and to this destiny was carrying her, as I have told.
“They made her fine dresses, excellency, and the great costumiers clapped their hands when they saw her pretty face, declaring that her figure would have touched the heart of Worth himself. She let them work their will, displaying little of a woman’s joy at the silver and the gold and the embroidery, but glad always that so great a gulf now lay between her and her poverty. Strange the fact may be, yet her new state sat more easily upon her than the vagrant life of the island. The instinct of imitation was strong in her. Once she had seen a thing done, she never forgot how to do it herself. Father Mark declared that an apter pupil had never come to him. She could patter in German in three months; she spoke it with some fluency in six. As a musician she had ever great gifts, and she could get music out of a crazy old fiddle which would set a cripple leaping to the dance. The greater opportunities of her new position robbed her neither of her simplicity nor of her pretty ways of thought. She cared nothing for the tinsel of her frocks, but was glad that fine linen covered her limbs. She put no other value upon jewels beyond the message of love they bore her. Every day while the Lord Count was away in the capital she would ride out upon the Jajce road to fetch the letters he had promised her. I know that she prayed for hours in the chapel, asking the Blessed Virgin and the Saints’ intercession for him she loved. Nothing could come between them now, she thought. Diavolo! if she had foreseen!
“She continued in this pleasant occupation until the week in which Count Paul was to come home again. As the great day approached, she would ride out towards the town more frequently, thinking perchance that the master would surprise us. It was upon such an excursion as this, excellency, that she was brought face to face with the great moment of her life. Though there be many years which I must still live, never may I forget that day of bitterness and of woe. Heaven is my witness that the words in which I tell of it burn my lips. Yet you have asked me for the story of Christine, and I will withhold no page of it.
“She had run down to the great white road, and was standing at the summit of the hill whence Jajce and the fall of the waters is clearly to be observed. The hour was the hour of sunset, and the whole gorge below her shone blood-red and glittering. She could see the white track running like the marrow of the pass, now between, now at the foot of, the surpassingly green hills; the river itself was bubbling over with white waves; the smoke of the hamlets made canopies in the sky. But her thoughts were not for such things as these. She had eyes only for the road; ears open only to the sound of bells and the ring of hoofs. A Turk passed her, his lean pony weighed down with a burden of meal and maize, but she did not notice his salutation; a Bashi-Bazouk rode by, his belt full of knives and pistols in his holster, but she was unconscious of his presence. The white road to Jajce—the path by which her master would come—there was her mind and her heart.
“‘To-morrow,’ she said; ‘he will come to-morrow. Holy Virgin, send him to take me in his arms! Oh, surely he will be here at sunset.’
“She had a rosary in her hand, and she began to finger the beads quickly. Long she stood, never moving her eyes from the silver track in the valley; the sun sank behind a peak of the hills, and she watched yet and waited. Only when the gorge began to be hidden by the mists, and dark veiled the distant town, did she turn swiftly to run back to the great house and to the new surprises she expected there.
“Excellency, it was then that she saw her husband.