With a bow of farewell to the standing household, they went by mutual consent their divers ways; the Princess to her favourite blue room and her after-dinner doze, Wanda to her own study, the chamber most essentially her own, where all were hers.
The softness and radiance of the after-glow had given place to night and rain; the mists and the clouds had rolled up from the Zillerthal Alps, and the water was pouring from the skies.
Lamps, wax candles, flambeaux, burning in sconces or upheld by statues or swinging from chains, were illumining the darkness of the great castle, but in her own study only one little light was shining, for she, a daughter of the mystical mountains and forests, loved the shadows of the night.
She seated herself here by the unshuttered casement. The full moon was rising above the Glöckner range, and the rain-clouds as yet did not obscure it, though a film of falling water veiled all the westward shore of the lake, and all the snows on the peaks and crests of the Venediger. She leaned her elbows on the cushioned seat, and looked out into the night.
'Bela, my Bela! are you content with me?' she murmured. To her Bela was as living as though he were present by her side; she lived in the constant belief of his companionship and his sight. Death was a cruel—ah, how cruel!—wall built up between him and her, forbidding them the touch of each other's hands, denying them the smile of each other's eyes; but none the less to her was he there, unseen, but ever near, hidden behind that inexorable, invisible barrier which one day would fall and let her pass and join him.
She sat idle in the embrasure of the oriel window, whilst the one lamp burned behind her. This, her favourite room, had scarcely been changed since Maria Theresa, on a visit there, had made it her bower-room. The window-panes had been painted by Selier of Landshut in 1440; the stove was one of Hirschvögel's; the wood-carvings had been done by Schuferstein; there was silver repoussé work of Kellerthaler, tapestries of Marc de Comans, enamels of Elbertus of Köln, of Jean of Limoges, of Leonard Limousin, of Penicaudius; embroidered stuffs of Isabeau Maire, damascened armour once worn by Henry the Lion, a painted spinet that had belonged to Isabella of Bavaria, and an ivory Book of Hours, once used by Carolus Magnus; and all these things, like the many other treasures of the castle, had been there for centuries; gifts from royal guests, spoils of foreign conquest, memorials of splendid embassies or offices of state held by the lords of Szalras, or marriage presents at magnificent nuptials in the old magnificent ages.
In this room she, their sole living representative, was never disturbed on any pretext. In the adjacent library (a great cedar-lined room, holding half a million volumes, with many missals and early classics, and many an editio princeps of the Renaissance), she held all her audiences, heard all petitions or complaints, audited her accounts, conversed with her tenants or her stewards, her lawyers or her peasants, and laboured earnestly to use to the best of her intelligence the power bequeathed to her.
'I am but God's and Bela's steward, as my steward is mine,' she said always to herself, and never avoided any duty or labour entailed on her, never allowed weariness or self-indulgence to enervate her. Qui facit per alium, facit per se had been early taught to her, and she never forgot it. She never did anything vicariously which concerned those dependent upon her. And she was an absolute sovereign in this her kingdom of glaciers and forests; her frozen sea as she had called it. She never avoided a duty merely because it was troublesome, and she never gave her signature without knowing why and wherefore. It is easy to be generous; to be just is more difficult and burdensome. Generous by temper, she strove earnestly to be always just as well, and her life was not without those fatigues which a very great fortune brings with it to anyone who regards it as a sacred trust.
She had wide possessions and almost incalculable wealth. She had salt mines in Galicia, she had Vosläuer vineyards in the Salzkammergut, she had vast plains of wheat, and leagues on leagues of green lands, where broods of horses bred and reared away in the steppes of Hungary. She had a palace in the Herrengasse at Vienna, another in the Residenzplatz of Salzburg; she had forests and farms in the Innthal and the Zillerthal; she had a beautiful little schloss on the green Ebensee, which had been the dower-house of the Countesses of Szalras, and she had pine-woods, quarries, vineyards, and even a whole riverain town on the Danube, with a right to take toll on the ferry there, which had been given to her forefathers as far back as the days of Mathias Carvin, a right that she herself had let drop into desuetude. 'I do not want the poor folks' copper kreutzer,' she said to her lawyers when they remonstrated. What did please her was the fact coupled with this right that even the Kaiser could not have entered her little town without his marshal thrice knocking at the gates, and receiving from the warder the permission to pass, in the words, 'The Counts of Idrac bid you come in peace.'
All these things and places made a vast source of revenue, and the property, whose title-deeds and archives lay in many a chest and coffer in the old city of Salzburg, was one of the largest in Europe. It would have given large portions and dowries to a score of sons and daughters and been none the worse. And it was all accumulating on the single head of one young and lonely woman! She was the last of her race; there were distant collateral branches, but none of them near enough to have any title to Hohenszalras. She could bequeath it where she would, and she had already willed it to her Kaiserin, in a document shut up in an iron chest in the city of Salzburg. She thought the Crown would be a surer and juster guardian of her place and people than any one person, whose caprices she could not foretell, whose extravagance or whose injustice she could not foresee. Sometimes, even to the spiritual mind of the Princess Ottilie, the persistent refusal of her niece to think of any marriage seemed almost a crime against mankind.