He passed his mornings in labour of this sort; at noonday or in the afternoon he rowed across to Hohenszalras, and loitered for an hour or two in the gardens or the library. Little by little they became so accustomed to his coming that it would have seemed strange if more than a day had gone by without the little striped blue boat gliding from the Holy Isle to the castle stairs. He never stayed very long; not so long as the Princess desired.
'Never in my life have I spent weeks so harmlessly!' he said once with a smile to the doctor; then he gave a quick sigh and turned away, for he thought to himself in a sudden repentance that these innocent and blameless days were perhaps but the prelude to one of the greatest sins of a not sinless life.
He came to be looked for quite naturally at the noonday breakfast in the pretty Saxe chamber. He would spend hours playing on the chapel organ, or on the piano in the octagon room which Liszt had chosen. The grand and dreamy music rolled out over the green lake towards the green hills, and Wanda would look often at the marble figure of her brother on his tomb, lying like the statue of the young Gaston de Foix, and think to herself, 'If only Bela were listening, too!'
Sometimes she was startled when she remembered into what continual intimacy she had admitted a man of whom she had no real knowledge.
The Princess, indeed, had said to her, 'I did ask Kaulnitz: Kaulnitz knows him quite well;' but that was hardly enough to satisfy a woman as reserved in her friendships, and as habituated to the observance of a severe etiquette, as was the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. Every day almost she said to herself that she would not see him when he came, or, if she saw him, would show him, by greater chilliness of manner, that it was time he quitted the island. But when he did come, if he did not see her he went to the chapel and played a mass, a requiem, an anthem, a sonata; and Beethoven, Palestrina, Schumann, Wagner, Berlioz, surely allured her from her solitude, and she would come on to the terrace and listen to the waves of melody rolling out through the cool sunless air, through the open door of the place where her beloved dead rested. Then, as a matter of course, he stayed, and after the noonday meal sometimes he rode with her in the forests, or drove the Princess in her pony chair, or received permission to bear his châtelaine company in her mountain walks. They were seldom alone, but they were much together.
'It is much better for her than solitude,' thought the Princess. 'It is not likely that she will ever care anything for him: she is so cold; but if she did, there would be no great harm done. He is of old blood, and she has wealth enough to need no more. Of course any one of our great princes would be better; but, then, as she will never take any one of them——'
And the Princess, who was completely fascinated by the deferential homage to her of Sabran, and the pleasure he honestly found in her society, would do all she could, in her innocent and delicate way, to give her favourite the opportunities he desired of intercourse with the mistress of Hohenszalras. She wanted to see again the life that she had seen in other days at the Schloss; grand parties for the hunting season and the summer season, royal and noble people in the guest-chambers, great gatherings for the chase on the rond-point in the woods, covers for fifty laid at the table in the banqueting hall, and besides—besides, thought the childless and loving old woman—little children with long fair curls and gay voices wakening the echoes in the Rittersäal with their sports and pastimes.
It was noble and austere, no doubt, this life led by Wanda von Szalras amidst the mountains in the Tauern, but it was lonely and monotonous to the Princess, who still loved a certain movement, gossip, and diversion as she liked to nibble a nougat and sip her chocolate foaming under its thick cream. It seemed to her that even to suffer a little would be better for her niece than this unvarying solitude, this eternal calm. That she should have mourned for her brother was most natural, but this perpetual seclusion was an exaggeration of regret.
If the presence of Sabran reconciled her with the world, with life as it was, and induced her to return to the court and to those pleasures natural to her rank and to her years, it would be well done, thought the Princess; and as for him—if he carried away a broken heart it would be a great pity, but persons who like to move others as puppets cannot concern themselves with the accidental injury of one of their toys; and Mme. Ottilie was too content with her success of the moment to look much beyond it.
'The charm of being here is to me precisely what I daresay makes it tiresome to you,' the mistress of Hohenszalras said to him one day, 'I mean its isolation. One can entirely forget that beyond those mountains there is a world fussing, fuming, brewing its storms in saucers, and inventing a quantity of increased unwholesomeness, in noise and stench, which it calls a higher civilisation. No! I would never have a telegraph wire brought here from Matrey. There is nothing I ever particularly care to know about. If there were anyone I loved who was away from me it would be different. But there is no one. There are people I like, of course——