He looked, but it was not of that great pile and all which it represented and symbolised that he thought now.
It was of the woman he loved as a woman, not as a great possessor of wealth and lands.
'Almost I wish that she were poor as the saints she resembles!' he thought, with a tender passion that for the hour was true. It seemed to him that had he seen her standing in her shift in the snow, like our Lady of Hungary, discrowned and homeless, he would have been glad. He was honest with the honesty of passion. It was not the mistress of Hohenszalras that he loved, but his own wife.
Such a marriage could not do otherwise than arouse by its announcement the most angry amazement, the most indignant protests from all the mighty houses with which for so many centuries the house of Szalras had allied itself. In a few tranquil sentences she made known her intentions to those of her relations whom she felt bound thus to honour; but she gave them clearly to understand that it was a formula of respect not an act of consultation. When they received her letters they knew that her marriage was already quite as irrevocable as though it had already taken place in the Hof-Kapelle of Vienna.
All her relatives and all her order were opposed to her betrothal; a cold sufferance was the uttermost which any of them extended to Sabran. A foreigner and poor, and, with a troubled and uncertain past behind him, he was bitterly unwelcome to the haughty Prussian, Austrian, and Hungarian nobilities to which she belonged; neither his ancient name nor his recent political brilliancy and military service could place him on an equality with them in their eyes. Her trustees, the Grand Duke of Lilienhöhe and the Cardinal Vàsàrhely, with her cousin Kaulnitz, hurried in person as swiftly as special trains could bring them to the Iselthal, but they were too late to avert the blow.
'It is not a marriage for her,' said Kaulnitz, angrily.
'Why not? It is a very old family,' said the Princess, with no less irritation.
'But quite decayed, long ruined,' he returned. 'This man was himself born in exile.'
'As they exile everybody twice in every ten years in France!
'And there have been stories——'