He smiled; he thought there was but little of the hermit in this woman's supreme elegance and dignity as she stood beside her hearth with its ruddy, fitful light playing on the great pearls at her throat and burnishing into gold the bronze shadows of her velvet gown.
'The Princess has told me that you are cruel to the world,' he answered her. 'But it is natural with such a kingdom that you seldom care to leave it.'
'It is a kingdom of snow for seven months out of the year,' said the Princess peevishly, 'and a water kingdom the other five. You see what it is to-day, and this is the middle of May!'
'I think one might well forget the rain and every other ill between these four walls,' said the French Marquis, as he glanced around him, and then slowly let his eyes rest on his châtelaine.
'It is a grand library,' she answered him; 'but I must warn you that there is nothing more recent in it than Diderot and Descartes. The cardinal—Hugo von Szalras—who collected it lived in the latter half of last century, and since his day no Szalras has been bookish save myself. The cardinal, however, had all the MSS. and the black letters, or nearly all, ready to his hand; what he added is a vast library of science and history, and he also got together some of the most beautiful missals in the world. Are you curious in such things?'
She rose as she spoke, and unlocked one of the doors of the oak bookcase and brought out an ivory missal carved by the marvellous Prönner of Klagenfurt, with the arms of the Szalras on one side of it and those of a princely German house on the other.
'That was the nuptial missal of Georg von Szalras and Ida Windisgratz in 1501,' she said; 'and these are all the other marriage-hours of our people, if you care to study them'; and in that case next to this there is a wonderful Evangelistarium, with miniatures of Angelico's. But I see they tell all their stories to you; I see by the way you touch them that you are a connoisseur.'
'I fear I have studied them chiefly at the sales of the Rue Drouot,' said Sabran, with a smile; but he had a great deal of sound knowledge on all arts and sciences, and a true taste which never led him wrong. With an illuminated chronicle in his hand, or a book of hours on his knee, he conversed easily, discursively, charmingly, of the early scribes and the early masters; of monkish painters and of church libraries; of all the world has lost, and of all aid that art had brought to faith.
He talked well, with graceful and well-chosen language, with picturesque illustration, with a memory that never was at fault for name or date, or apt quotation; he spoke fluent and eloquent German, in which there was scarcely any trace of foreign accent; and he disclosed without effort the resources of a cultured and even learned mind.
The antagonism she had felt against the poacher of her woods melted away as she listened and replied to him; there was a melody in his voice and a charm in his manner that it was not easy to resist; and with the pale lights from the Italian lamp which swung near upon the fairness of his face she reluctantly owned that her aunt had been right: he was singularly handsome, with that uncommon and grand cast of beauty which in these days is rarer than it was in the times of Vandyck and of Velasquez—for manners and moods leave their trace on the features, and this age is not great.