Wanda, Vol. 1 (of 3)

by Ouida

Here, where the foaming rivers thunder through their rocky channels, and the ice bastions of a thousand glaciers glow in the sunrise and bar the sight of sunset; here, where a thousand torrents bathe in silver the hillsides, and the deep moan of subterranean waters sounds for ever through the silence of the gorges, dark with the serried pines; here, in the green and cloudy Austrian land, the merry trout have many a joyous home, but none is fairer or more beloved by them than this lovely lake of Hohenszalras; so green that it might have been made of emeralds dissolved in sunbeams, so deep that at its centre no soundings can be taken, so lonely that of the few wanderers who pass from S. Johann im Wald or from Lienz to Matrey, even of those few scarce one in a summer will know that a lake lies there, though they see from afar off its great castle standing, many-turreted and pinnacled, with its frowning keep, backed by the vast black forests, clothing slopes whose summits hide themselves in cloud, whilst through the cold clear air the golden vulture and the throated eagle wing their way.

The lake lies like a crystal bedded in rock, lovely and lonely as the little Gosausee when the skies are fair; perilous and terrible as the great Königs-See in storm, when the north wind is racing in from the Bœhmervald and the Polish steppes, and the rain-mists are dark and dense, and the storks leave their home on the chapel roof because the winter draws nigh. It is fed by snow and ice descending from a hundred hills, and by underground streams and headlong-descending avalanches, and in its turn feeds many a mountain waterfall, many a mountain tarn, many a woodland brook, and many a village fountain. The great white summits tower above it, and the dense still woods enshroud it; there are a pier and harbour at either end, but these are only used by the village people, and once a year by pilgrims who come to the Sacred Island in its midst; pilgrims who flock thither from north, south, east, and west, for the chapel of the Szalrassee is as renowned and blessed as the silver shrine of holy Mariazell itself.

On the right bank of its green glancing water, looking towards the ice-peaks of the Glöckner on the east, and on the south towards the Kitchbull mountains and the limestone Alps, a promontory juts out into the lake and soars many hundred feet above it. It is of hard granite rock. Down one of its sides courses a torrent, the other side is clothed with wood; on the summit is the immense building that is called the Hohenszalrasburg, a mass of towers and spires and high metal roofs and frowning battlements, with a huge square fortress at one end of them: it is the old castle of the Counts of Szalras, and the huge donjon keep of it has been there twelve centuries, and in all these centuries no man has ever seen its flag furled or its portcullis drawn up for a conqueror's entry.

The greater part of the Schloss now existing is the work of Meister Wenzel of Klosterneuburg, begun in 1350, but the date of the keep and of the foundations generally are much earlier, and the prisons and clock tower are Romanesque. Majestic, magnificent, and sombre, though not gloomy, by reason of its rude decoration and the brilliant colours of its variegated roofs, it is scarcely changed since its lords dwelt there in the fourteenth century, when their great banner, black vultures on a ground of gold and red, floated then high up amongst the clouds, even as it now shakes its heavy folds out on the strong wind that blew so keenly from the Prussian and the Polish plains due north.

It is a fortress that has wedded a palace; it is majestic, powerful, imposing, splendid, like the great race, of which it so long has been the stronghold and the birthplace. But it is as lonely in the quiet heart of the everlasting hills as any falcon's or heron's nest hung in the oak branches.

And this loneliness seemed its sweetest charm in the eyes of its châtelaine and mistress, the Countess Wanda von Szalras, as she leaned one evening over the balustrade of her terrace, watching for the after-glow to warm the snows of the Glöckner. She held in her hand an open letter from her Kaiserin, and the letter in its conclusion said: 'You have sorrowed and tarried in seclusion long enough—too long; longer than he would have wished you to do. Come back to us and to the world.'

And Wanda von Szalras thought to herself: 'What can the world give me? What I love is Hohenszalras on earth, and Bela in heaven.'

What could the world give her indeed? The world cannot give back the dead. She wanted nothing of the world. She was rich in all that it can ever give.

In the time of Ferdinand the Second those who were then Counts of Szalras had stitched the cloth cross on their sleeves and gone with the Emperor to the Third Crusade. In gratitude for their escape, father and son, from the perils of Palestine and the dangers of the high seas and of the treacherous Danube water, from Moslem steel, and fever of Jaffa, and chains of swarming Barbary corsairs, they, returning at last in safety to their eyrie above the Szalrassee, had raised a chapel on the island in the lake, and made it dedicate to the Holy Cross, a Szalras of the following generation, belonging to the Dominican community, and being a man of such saintly fervour and purity that he was canonised by Innocent, had dwelt on the Holy Isle, and given to it the benediction and the tradition of his sanctity and good works. As centuries went on the holy fame of the shrine where the Crusader had placed a branch from a thorn-tree of Nazareth grew, and gained in legend and in miracle, and became as adored an object, of pilgrimage as the Holy Phial of Heiligenblut. All the Hohe Tauern, and throngs even from Karinthia on the one side and Tirol on the other, came thither on the day of Ascension.

The old faith still lives, very simple, warm, and earnest, in the heart of Austria, and with that day-dawn in midsummer thousands of peasant-folks flock from mountain villages and forest chalets and little remote secluded towns, to speed over the green lake with flaming crucifix and floating banner, and haunted anthem echoed from hill to hill. One of those days of pilgrimage had made her mistress of Hohenszalras.