Obey the summons as rapidly as he might, he could not travel by Vienna and Salzburg more quickly than in some thirty hours or more. The time passed to her in a curious confusion and anxiety. Outwardly she was calm enough; she visited the schools, wrote some letters, and took her usual long ride in the now leafless woods, but at heart she was unquiet and ill at ease, troubled more than by anything else at the force of the desire she felt to meet him once more. It was but a month since they had parted on the deck, and it seemed ten years. She had known what he had meant when he had said that he would come if she bade him; she had known that she would only do the sheerest cruelty and treachery if she called him thither only to dismiss him. It had not been a visit of the moment, but all his life that she had consented to take when she had written 'Come to the Island.'
She would never have written it unless she had been prepared to fulfil all to which it tacitly pledged her. She was incapable of wantonly playing with any passion that moved another, least of all with his. The very difference of their position would have made indecision or coyness in her seem cruelty, humiliation. The decision hurt her curiously with a sense of abdication, mortification, and almost shame. To a very proud woman in whom the senses have never asserted their empire, there is inevitably an emotion of almost shame, of self-surrender, of loss of self-respect, in the first impulses of love. It made her abashed and humiliated to feel the excitation that the mere touch of his hand, the mere gaze of his eyes, had power to cause her. 'If this be love,' she thought, 'no wonder the world is lost for it.'
Do what she would, the time seemed very long; the two evenings that passed were very tedious and oppressive. The Princess seemed to observe nothing of what she was perfectly conscious of, and her flute-like voice murmured on in an unending stream of commonplaces to which her niece replied much at random.
In the afternoon of the third day she stood on the terrace looking down the lake and towards the Holy Isle, with an impatience of which she was in turn impatient. She was dressed in white woollen stuff with silver threads in it; she had about her throat an old necklace of the Golden Fleece, of golden shells enamelled, which had been a gift from Charles the Fifth to one of her house; over her shoulders, for the approach of evening was cold, she had thrown a cloak of black Russian sables. She made a figure beautiful, stately, patrician, in keeping with the background of the great donjon tower, and the pinnacled roofs, and the bronze warriors in their Gothic niches.
When she had stood there a few minutes looking down the lake towards the willows of the monastery island, a boat came out from the willow thickets, and came over the mile-and-half of green shadowy water. There was only one person in it. She recognised him whilst he was still far off, and a smile came on her mouth that it was a pity he could not see.
He was a bold man, but his heart stood still with awe of her, and his soul trembled within him at this supreme moment of his fate. For he believed that she would not have bidden him there unless her hand were ready to hold out destiny to him—the destiny of his maddest, of his sweetest, dreams.
She came forward a few paces to meet him; her face was grave and pale, but her eyes had a soft suppressed light.
'I have much for which to thank you,' she said, as she held out her hand to him. Her voice was tremulous though calm.
He kissed her hand, then stood silent. It seemed to him that there was nothing to say. She knew what he would have said if he had been king, or hero, or meet mate for her. His pulses were beating feverishly, his self-possession was gone, his eyes did not dare to meet hers. He felt as if the green woods, the shining waters, the rain-burdened skies were wheeling round him. That dumbness, that weakness, in a man so facile of eloquence, so hardy and even cynical in courage, touched her to a wondering pitifulness.
'After all,' she thought once more, 'if we love one another what is it to anyone else? We are both free.'