[CHAPTER XLII.]
The first flush of autumn came upon the woods. Soon it would be three years since Olga Brancka had driven thither, and her work had held good and never been undone. Bela and Gela had grown tall and slender as the young fir trees; and Bela often said to his brother: 'I was ten years old on Easter Day. That is quite old. If ever I am to find him I am old enough now.'
He had not forgotten. He never forgot. Every day he wearied his little brain with thinking what he could do. Every night he asked Heaven to help him. He had read a Bohemian ballad which had fascinated him; the story of how, in the days of chivalry, Wratislaw, the son of Berka, when but twelve years old, had made, all by himself and on foot, a pilgrimage from Prague to Tartary, to release his brother from captivity. Bela knew very well that the world had changed since then, and that if some things were easier some were harder now than then. But if Wratislaw had done so much at twelve, why should he, who was ten, not do something?
He thought himself quite old. He had a big pony, and Folko was ridden by his little brothers. He had been taught to shoot at a target and a running mark; he had become skilful at climbing with crampons and managing a boat. When he rode he had long boots that pulled up to his knees. He could drive three ponies, harnessed in the Russian way, with skill and surety. Perhaps, he thought, the Bohemian boy had not been able to do half as much as this. The ballad spoke of him as a little weakling, and yet he had found his way from Prague, in her dusky plains, to burning Tartary.
Almost he was ready to set forth on a Quixotic search without any clue to where his father dwelt, but his educated sense checked him with the remembrance that, wide as the world was, it would be of no avail to begin a harebrained pilgrimage with no fixed goal. Even Wratislaw, who was his ideal, had been certain that his brother languished in the Tartar tents before he had set his fair face to the southeast. So he remained patient in his impatience, and strove with all his might to perfect himself in all bodily exercises and manly habits, that he might be the better fitted to go on his errand whenever he should have any thread of guidance. No one guessed the resolves and the hopes which fermented like new wine in his pretty golden-haired head. His attendants thought each year that he grew gentler and more serious, and his tutors found him at once more docile and more absent-minded. But no one imagined that he was bent on any unusual enterprise.
His father had not been recognised by the groom who had accompanied his mistress in the drive through the woods of the Reggen Thörl; and no rumour of the near presence of Sabran had reached any of the household. Greswold alone knew that amidst the solitudes of the avalanche and the glacier, in the chill of the air where the eagle and the vulture alone made their home, in a life of absolute isolation, asceticism, and physical denial of every kind, the man who had sinned against her spent his exile, in such self-chosen expiation as was possible to one who had neither the faith nor the humility needful to make him seek refuge and atonement in any religious service. He dwelt in the loneliness of the ice-slopes, leading the life of a common hunter, shunning all men, accepting each monotonous and joyless day as portion of his just punishment; in the perils of winter on the mountains doing what he could to save human or animal life; knowing no solace save such as existed for him in the sense of being near all that he had lost, and the power of watching the distant movements of his wife and children at such rare hours as he ventured to approach the hills of Hohenszalras and turn his telescope on the gardens of his lost home. A hunter or two, a guide or two of the Umbal and the Trojerthal had his confidence, but the loyalty which is the common virtue of all mountaineers made them preserve it faithfully. For the rest, in these unfrequented places, avoidance of all those who might have recognised him was easy; he was clothed like the men of the hills, and lived like them in a châlet, high perched on a ledge of rock at a great altitude in the wild and almost inaccessible region of the Hintere Umbalthörl. Of the future he never dared to think; he took each day as it came; the best he hoped for was a mountaineer's death some hour or another, amidst the clear serene blue ice, the everlasting snows.
When he had gone out from the chamber of his wife, banished and accursed, all his spirit had died in him, and nothing had seemed clear in his memory except that love which had been so insufficient to wash out his sin. The world would no doubt have welcomed him; he was not too old for its distractions and its ambitions to be still possible for him; but he had no courage left to take them up, no energy to make another future for himself. His whole life was consumed in a vain regret, as vain a desire, as vain a penitence. Had he had the faith of those men who dwelt under the willows of the Holy Isle he would have joined them. But he had no belief; he had only a futile, heart-broken, hopeless repentance, which availed him nothing and could atone for nothing.
Perhaps, he thought, if she had known that, it might have changed her. But he did not dare to approach her by any written appeal. It seemed to him as if any words from him would only appear but added falsehood, added insult. He never, even in his own thoughts, reproached her for her separation from him. He recognised that no other path was open to her. The pure daylight of her nature could find no mate in the dusk and shadow of his own; the loyalty of truth could not unite with the servitude and cowardice of falsehood. He knew it, and never rebelled against his chastisement.
Whilst still it was dawn one morning, his young son, just awaking, heard a pebble thrown at his window. He sprang out of bed and ran and looked out. Old Otto stood below.