'You have a great deal of pride,' said the Princess, discreetly, as she began to take her customary noontide walk up and down the terrace, her tall cane tapping the stones and her little dog running before her, whilst a hood of point-lace and a sunshade of satin kept the wind from her pretty white hair and the sun from her eyes, that were still blue as the acres of mouse-ear that grew by the lake.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
The summer glided away and became autumn, and the Countess Wanda refused obstinately to fill Hohenszalras with house-parties. In vain her aunt spoke of the Lynau, the Windischgrätz, the Hohenlöhe, and the other great families who were their relatives or their friends. In vain she referred continually to the fact that every Schloss in Austria and all adjacent countries was filling with guests at this season, and the woods around it resounding with the hunter's horn and the hound's bay. In vain did she recapitulate the glories of Hohenszalras in an earlier time, and hint that the mistress of so vast a domain owed some duties to society.
Wanda von Szalras opposed to all these suggestions and declarations that indifference which would have seemed obstinacy had it been less mild. As for the hunting parties, she avowed with truth that although a daughter of mighty hunters, she herself regarded all pastimes founded on cruelty with aversion and contempt; the bears and the boars, the wild deer and the mountain chamois, might dwell undisturbed for the whole of their lives so far as she was concerned. When a bear came down and ate off the heads of an acre or two of wheat, she recompensed the peasant who had suffered the loss, but she would not have her jägermeister track the poor beast. The jägermeister sighed as Madame Ottilie did for the bygone times when a score of princes and nobles had ridden out on a wolf-chase, or hundreds of peasants had threshed the woods to drive the big game towards the Kaiser's rifle; but for poachers his place would have been a sinecure and his days a weariness. His mistress was not to be persuaded. She preferred her forests left to their unbroken peace, their stillness filled with the sounds of rushing waters and the calls of birds.
The weeks glided on one after one with the even measured pace of monotonous and unruffled time; her hours were never unoccupied, for her duties were constant and numerous.
She would go and visit the sennerinn in their loftiest cattle-huts, and would descend an ice-slope with the swiftness and security of a practised mountaineer. In her childhood she and Bela had gone almost everywhere the chamois went, and she came of a race which, joined to high courage, had the hereditary habits of a great endurance. In the throne room of Vienna, with her great pearls about her, that had once been sent by a Sultan to a Szalras who fought with Wenceslaus, she was the stateliest and proudest lady of the greatest aristocracy of the world; but on her own mountain sides she was as dauntless as an ibis, as sure-footed as a goat, and would sit in the alpine cabins and drink a draught of milk and break a crust of rye-bread as willingly as though she were a sennerinn herself; so she would take the oars and row herself unaided down the lake, so she would saddle her horse and ride it over the wildest country, so she would drive her sledge over many a German mile of snow, and even in the teeth of a north wind blowing straight from the Russian plains and the Arctic seas.
'Fear nothing!' had been said again and again to her in her childhood, and she had learned that her race transmitted to and imposed its courage no less on its daughters than on its sons. Cato would have admired this mountain brood, even though its mountain lair was more luxurious than he would have deemed was wise.
She knew thoroughly what all her rights, titles, and possessions were. She was never vague or uncertain as to any of her affairs, and it would have been impossible to deceive or to cheat her. No one tried to do so, for her lawyers were men of old-fashioned ways and high repute, and for centuries the vast properties of the Counts von Szalras had been administered wisely and honestly in the same advocates' offices, which were close underneath the Calvarienburg in the good city of Salzburg. Her trustees were her uncle Cardinal Vàsàrhely and her great-uncle Prince George of Lilienhöhe; they were old men, both devoted to her, and both fully conscious that her intelligence was much abler and keener than their own. All these vast possessions gave her an infinite variety of occupation and of interests, and she neglected none of them. Still, all the properties and duties in the world will not suffice to fill up the heart and mind of a woman of four-and-twenty years of age, who enjoys the perfection of bodily health and of physical beauty. The most spiritual and the most dutiful of characters cannot altogether resist the impulses of nature. There were times when she now began to think that her life was somewhat empty and passionless.
But a certain sense of their monotony had begun for the first time to come upon her; a certain vague dissatisfaction stirred in her now and then. The discontent of Sabran seemed to have left a shadow of itself upon her. For the first time she seemed to be listening, as it were, to her life and to find a great silence in it; there was no echo in it of voices she loved.