'I am quite sure she has made no resolve of the sort,' But I do not think she will ever alter. She has refused many great alliances. Her temperament is serene, almost cold; and her ideal it would be difficult, I imagine, for any mortal man to realise.'
'But when a woman loves——'
'Oh, of course,' said Herr Joachim, rather drily. 'If the aloe flower!—--Love does not I think possess any part of the Countess Wanda's thoughts or desires. She fancies it a mere weakness.'
'A woman can scarcely be amiable without that weakness.'
'No. Perhaps she is not precisely what we term amiable. She is rather too far also from human emotions and human needs. The women of the house of Szalras have been mostly very proud, silent, brave, and resolute; great ladies rather than lovable wives. Luitgarde von Szalras held this place with only a few archers and spearmen against Heinrich Jasomergott in the twelfth century, and he raised the siege after five months. "She is not a woman, nor human, she is a kuttengeier," he said, as he retreated into his Wiener Wald. All the great monk-vultures and the gyps and the pygargues have been sacred all through the Hohe Tauern since that year.'
'And I was about to shoot a kuttengeier—now I see that my offence was beyond poaching, it was high treason almost!'
'I heard the story from Otto. He would have hanged you cheerfully. But I hope,' said the doctor, with a pang of misgiving, 'that I have not given you any false impression of my Lady, as cold and hard and unwomanly. She is full of tenderness of a high order; she is the noblest, most truthful, and most generous nature that I have ever known clothed in human form, and if she be too proud—well, it is a stately sin, pardonable in one who has behind her eleven hundred years of fearless and unblemished honour.'
'I am a socialist,' said Sabran, a little curtly; then added, with a little laugh, 'Though I believe not in rank, I do believe in race.'
'Bon sang ne peut mentir,' murmured the old physician; the fair face of Sabran changed slightly.
'Will you come and look over the house?' said the Professor, who noticed nothing, and only thought of propitiating the owner of the rare orchid. 'There is almost as much to see as in the Burg at Vienna. Everything has accumulated here undisturbed for a thousand years. Hohenszalras has been besieged, but never deserted or dismantled.