'Happy woman!' he thought; 'happy—thrice happy—to possess such dominion, such riches, and such ancestry! If I had had them I would have had the world under my foot as well!'
It was with a sense of pain that he saw the great house disappear behind its screen of mantling woods, as his horses climbed the hilly path beyond, higher and higher at every step, until all that he saw of Hohenszalras was a strip of the green lake—green as an arum leaf—lying far down below, bearing on its waters the grey willows of the Holy Isle.
'When I am very old and weary I will come and die there,' he thought, with a touch of that melancholy which all his irony and cynicism could not dispel from his natural temper. There were moments when he felt that he was but a lonely and homeless wanderer on the face of the earth, and this was one of those moments, as, alone, he went upon his way along the perilous path, cut along the face of precipitous rocks, passing over rough bridges that spanned deep defiles and darkening ravines, clinging to the side of a mountain as a swallow's nest clings to the wall of a house, and running high on swaying galleries above dizzy depths, where nameless torrents plunged with noise and foam into impenetrable chasms. The road had been made in the fifteenth century by the Szalras lords themselves, and the engineering of it was bold and vigorous though rude, and kept in sound repair, though not much changed.
He had left a small roll of paper lying beside the ring in the knight's hall. Hubert took them both to his mistress when, a few hours later, he was admitted to her presence. Opening the paper she saw a roll of a hundred napoleons, and on the paper was written, 'There can be no poor where the Countess von Szalras rules. Let these be spent in masses for the dead.'
'What a delicate and graceful sentiment,' said the Princess Ottilie, with vivacity and emotion.
'It is prettily expressed and gracefully thought of,' her niece admitted.
'Charmingly—admirably!' said the Princess, with a much warmer accent. 'There is delicate gratitude there, as well as a proper feeling towards a merciful God.'
'Perhaps,' said her niece, with a little smile, 'the money was won at play, in giving someone else what they call a culotte; what would you say then, dear aunt? Would it be purified by entering the service of the Church?'
'I do not know why you are satirical,' said the Princess; 'and I cannot tell either how you can bring yourself to use Parisian bad words.'
'I will send these to the Bishop,' said Wanda, rolling up the gold. 'Alas! alas! there are always poor. As for the ring, Hubert, give it to Herr Greswold, and he will transmit it to this gentleman's address in Paris, as though it had been left behind by accident. You were so right not to take it; but my dear people are always faithful.'