In a week from that time their nuptials were celebrated in the Court Chapel of the Hofburg at Vienna, with all the pomp and splendour that a brilliant and ceremonious Court could lend to the espousal of one of the greatest ladies of the old Duchy of Austria.
Immediately after the ceremony they left the capital for Hohenszalras.
At the signing of the contract on the previous night, when he had taken up the pen he had grown very pale; he had hesitated a moment, and glanced around him on the magnificent crowd, headed by the Emperor and Empress, with a gleam of fear and of anxiety in his eyes, which Baron Kaulnitz, who was intently watching him, had alone perceived.
'There is something. What is it?' had mused the astute German.
It was too late to seek to know. Sabran had bent down over the parchment, and with a firm hand had signed his name and title.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
It was midsummer once more in the Iselthal, five years and a half after the celebration at the Imperial palace of those nuptials which had been so splendid that their magnificence had been noticeable even at that magnificent Court. The time had seemed to her like one long, happy, cloudless day, and if to him there had come any fatigue, any satiety, any unrest, such as almost always come to the man in the fruition of his passion, he suffered her to see none of them.
It was one of those rare marriages in which no gall of a chain is felt, but a quick and perfect sympathy insures that harmony which passion alone is insufficient to sustain. He devoted himself with ardour to the care of the immense properties that belonged to his wife; he brought to their administration a judgment and a precision that none had looked for in a man of pleasure; he entered cordially into all her schemes for the well-being of her people dependent on her, and carried them out with skill and firmness. The revenues of Idrac he never touched; he left them to accumulate for his younger son, or expended them on the township itself, where he was adored.
If he were still the same man who had been the lover of Cochonette, the terror of Monte Carlo, the hero of night-long baccara and frontier duels, he had at least so banished the old Adam that it appeared wholly dead. Nor was the death of it feigned. He had flung away the slough of his old life with a firm hand, and the peace, the dignity of his present existence were very precious to him. He was glad to steep himself in them, as a tired and fevered wayfarer was glad to bathe his dusty and heated limbs in the cool, clear waters of the Szalrassee. And he loved his wife with a great love, in which reverence, and gratitude, and passion were all blent. Possession had not dulled, nor familiarity blunted it. She was still to him a sovereign, a saint, a half divine creature, who had stooped to become mortal for his sake, and his children's.