'Perhaps he will have forgotten,' he thought, as he strove to shake off his forebodings. 'We were so young then. He was not even as old as I!'
And he rode fast and furiously homewards as the day drew in, and the lighted windows of the great castle seemed to smile at him as lie saw it high up above the darkness of the woods and of the evening mists, his home, beloved, sacred, infinitely dear to him; dear as the soil of the mother country which the wrecked mariner reaches after facing death on the deep sea.
'God save her from suffering by me!' he said, in an unconscious prayer, as he drew rein before the terrace of Hohenszalras. Almost he believed in God through her.
When, after dressing, he went into, the Saxe room, the peace and beauty of the scene had never struck him so strongly as it did now, coming out of the shadows of the wet woods and the gloom of his own anxieties; anxieties the heavier and the more wearing because they could be shared by no one. The soft, full light of the wax candles fell on the Louis Seize embroideries and the white woodwork of the panelling and the china borders of the mirrors. The Princess Ottilie sat making silk-netting for the children's balls; his wife was reading, and Bela and Gela, who were there for their privileged half-hour before dinner, were fitting together on a white bearskin, playing with the coloured balls of the game of solitaire. The soft light from the chandeliers and sconces of the Saxe Royale china fell on the golden heads and the velvet frocks of the children, on the old laces and the tawny-coloured plush of their mothers skirts, on the great masses of flowers in the Saxe bowls, and on the sleeping forms of the big dogs Donau and Neva. It was an interior that would have charmed Chardin, that would have been worthy of Vandyck.
As he looked at it he thought with a sort of ecstasy, 'All that is mine;' and then his heartstrings tightened as he thought again, 'If she knew——?'
She looked up at his entrance with a welcome on her face that needed no words.
'Where have you been in the rain all this long afternoon?' You see we have a fire, even though it is midsummer. Bela, rise, and make your obeisance, and push that chair nearer the hearth.'
The two little boys stood up and kissed his hand, one after another, with the pretty formality; of greeting on which she always insisted; then they went back to their coloured glass balls, and he sank into a low chair beside his wife with a sigh half of fatigue, half of content.
'Yes, I have been riding all the time,' he said to her. 'I am not sure that Siegfried approved it. But it does one good sometimes, and after the blackness and the wetness of that forest how charming it is to come home!'
She looked at him with wistfulness.