'Forgive me,' said the Princess, 'but it always seems to me that you—noble and generous and pure of mind as you are—yet have met ill the supreme trial, the supreme test of your life. You believed that you loved the man you wedded, but you loved your own pride more. If love be not endless forbearance, endless compassion, endless pity and sympathy, what is it but the mere fever and instincts of carnal passions? What raises it above the self-indulgence of the senses if not its sacrifice of will and its long-suffering? You have said so yourself in other days than these.'
'And what,' she thought passionately as she heard, 'what would it be but the basest indulgence of the senses to let oneself love and be beloved by what one scorned?—to stoop and kiss the lips that lied for mere sake of their sweetness?—to gather in one's arms the coward, the traitor, and persuade oneself that one forgave because one grew blind with amorous remembrance?'
'Is it well,' pursued her companion with soft solemnity, 'to let anyone who is so near to you live his own life when that life may be one of sin? You send him from you, and how can you tell into what extremes of evil or of folly despair may not drive him? A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other is not acquitted of obligation. Pardon me if I seem to censure. Look in your own heart and judge if I err.'
'You do not know! You do not know! If I forgave him I should never forgive myself!'
She turned her head from the roseate and happy light that spoke to her of other days, and went with a swift uneven step into the house, now darkened by the passing of the day.
She flung his memory from her as so much unholiness. Had passion not yet lived in her, the coldness of unforgiving sorrow might not have seemed to her so sovereign a duty.
Some weeks after she had seen the letter in Greswold's hands a small hamlet was burnt down during a high north wind. It belonged to her. Hearing of the calamity she went thither at once. It was some two and a half German miles from the castle. She drove, herself, four young Hungarian horses, whose fretting graces and tempestuous gallop gave her the only pleasure which she was now capable of enjoying. They were harnessed to a carriage light and strong, built on purpose to scour rapidly rough forest roads and steep hill-sides. When she had visited the melancholy scene, given what consolation she could, and distributed money to the homeless peasants, promising to rebuild the houses with her own timber and shingles—for the conflagration had been the fault of no one, but of the wild wind which had scattered the burning embers of a hearth-fire on a neighbouring wood-stack—her horses were rested, and she began her homeward drive as the pale afternoon grew grey and the twilight fell on the little grassy vale, now charred and smoking with the smouldering ruins of the châlets.
'Our Countess never leaves us alone in any trouble,' said the women gathered about the stone statue of S. Florian, their most trusted patron, who, despite their prayers, had refused to save them from the flames. The hamlet was not far from the Maurer glaciers, and was shut in by a complete wall of mountains; it was green, fresh, beautifully cool in summer. Now, in the late spring, it was still dreary, and patches of snow still lay on its sward; it was set high on the mountain side, and dense forests sloped down from it, seldom traversed, and dark early in the afternoon. Her groom lit the lamps of her carriage as she entered the deep woods, through which the road was little more than a timber-track. The long gallops and the steep inclines coming thither had calmed and pacified her young horses. They gave her no trouble to control them, as they trotted rapidly along the shadowy forest ways. In other parts of the country the sun had not then set, but here the gloom was grey, like that of a cloudy dawn. Yet it was not so dark but that she perceived ahead of her, as her horses turned a curve in the moss-grown path, a figure, whose height and outline made her heart stand still. As the animals went past him in their swinging trot the blaze of the lamps fell full upon him. He turned and retreated quickly into the undergrowth beneath the drooping boughs of the Siberian pines, but she saw him, he saw her. Mechanically he uncovered his head and bowed low; she drove onward with a sense of suffocation at her throat and a chill like ice in her veins. She had recognised him in that moment of time. He was changed, aged, and there were threads of grey in his hair. He wore a forester's dress and had a gun on his shoulder.
Where they had met, in these woods that lay under the snow saddle of the Reggen Thörl, it was still twenty English miles away from the burg. It was late when she reached home, but her people were used to those long night drives, and even the Princess had become resigned to them. On the plea of fatigue she went to her own rooms and there remained. A faintness and sense of confusion stayed with her. She had not thought that merely meeting him thus would affect her. She had underrated, the power of the past.
When she had deemed him far away in other countries he was there in her own lands, not twenty miles from her. The knowledge of his vicinity moved her with a mingled sense of unendurable pain, partial anger, reviving love. It seemed horrible to have passed him by as any stranger would have passed, without a sign or word. Yet he was dead to her, whether oceans were between them or only a few leagues of hill and grass and forest.