'How should you do that? Our hills are between us and all the rest of the world. Perhaps he is gone because he was tired of being here.'
'No,' said Bela, who remembered his father's farewell to him, of which he could never bring himself to speak to any living creature.
Otto was silent too: he could not tell the child what all the household believed—that his father had found too great a charm in the presence of the Countess Brancka.
The weeks and months stole on their course, which in the forest-heart of the old Archduchy seems so leisurely beside the feverish haste of the mad world. The ways of life went on unchanged; the children throve, and studied, and played, and grew apace; the health of the Princess became more delicate, and her strength more feeble; the seasons succeeded each other with monotony; no sound from the cities of men that lay beyond the ramparts of the glaciers broke the silence and the calm of Hohenszalras.
Wanda herself would not have known that one year was different to another had she not been forced to count time by the inches which it added to the stature of her offspring, and the recurrence of the days of their patron saints. They grew as fast as reeds in peaceful waters, and forced her to recognise that the years were dropping into the past. Time for her was shod with lead, and crept tamely, like a cripple upon broken ground. For the children's sake she lived; but for them she knew not why she rose to these long, colourless, lonely hours. But her corporeal life ailed nothing, whilst her spiritual life was sick unto death. Almost she could have wished for the lassitude of weakness to dull her pain; her bodily strength seemed to intensify what she suffered.
In the frosted brilliant winter time she still drove her fiery horses over the snow that was like marble, plunging into the recesses of the woods, seeing above her the ramparts, and bastions, and pinnacles of the great ice-range of the Glöckner glaciers. The intense cold, the rushing air, the whiteness as of a virgin earth, the sense of profound solitude, did her good, cooled the sense of shame that seemed burnt into her life, soothed the anguish of a love fooled, betrayed, and widowed. She felt with horror that the longer she kneeled beside the altar, the longer she prayed before the great Christ in her chapel, the more passionately she rebelled against the fate that had overtaken her. But, alone in the rarefied air, with the vastness of the mountains about her, with the cold wind pouring like spring water down a thirsty throat in its merciful coldness, with the white peaks meeting the starry skies, and the waters hushed in their shroud of ice, she gathered some kind of peace, some power of endurance: consolation neither earth nor heaven could give to her.
Of him she never heard. She could only have heard through her lawyers, and they knew nothing. Neither in Paris nor in Vienna was he seen. By a letter she received from the priest of Romaris she had learned that he was not there. She had sent one of her men of business thither with money and plans, to build on the site of the old house of the Sabrans a Maison de Dieu for the aged and sick fishermen of the coast and their widows.' It will be a chapelle expiatoire,' she had thought bitterly, and she had endowed it richly, so that it should be independent of all those who should come after her. In all the occupations entailed by this and similar projects she was as attentive as of yore to all demands made on her.
When she perused a lawyer's long preamble, or corrected an architect's estimates and drawings, she was the same woman as she had been ere her betrayer had crossed the threshold of her home. Her character had been built on lines too strong, on a base too firm, for the earthquake of calamity, the whirlwind of passion, to undo it. But in her heart there was utter shipwreck. She had given herself and all that was hers with magnificent generosity; and she had received in return betrayal and a dishonour under which day and night all the patrician in her writhed and suffered.
When in the autumn of that year Cardinal Vàsàrhely, travelling in great state from Buda Pesth, arrived at Hohenszalras—a guest whom none could deny, a judge whom none could evade—he did not spare her open interrogation, searching censure, stern rebuke.
The Lilienhöhe she had excused herself from receiving; the Kaulnitz she had also refused; others as nearly related to her had encountered the same resistance to their overtures; but Cardinal Vàsàrhely came to take up his residence at the Holy Isle, with the weight of authority and the sanctity of the Church.