There never yet had been question of a maiden in the life of Steven Lee, up to this September day. With his Austrian tradition, Austrian pride of race and estate, he had some very clear notions of the noble blood and the territorial importance that would have to be hers who should be honoured some day as the choice of Waldorff-Kielmansegg.
Yet your young patrician, as a rule, is not chary of granting himself that interlude of amusement, dissipation—experience of life before marriage—commonly known as "sowing his wild oats." It was, perhaps, because of his English education, hearty, wholesome, sporting; by reason too, no doubt, of the English deliberation inherited from his mother, joined to his own fastidious self-sufficiency, that he had never felt the want of a woman’s share in his life. The pretty chin of a peasant girl had never tempted his fingers. Little Sidonia of the forest house, had she been ten times more beautiful, had never needed to wield her plaits as flails to beat down his enterprise. Had not the fiddler’s music got into his veins, that strange night; had not the insidious white wine mounted to his head, he had surely never succumbed so rapidly to the fascination of the young Italian. Yet her chief attraction, in his eyes, had been, not the parted, dewy lips, not the violet gaze of her eyes, but the false attribution to her of birth and breeding, born of his own imagination. The moonlight kiss he had suddenly yearned for was to have been snatched from a great lady—faugh! not from a _ballerina_! Here had, indeed, been a lesson, a humiliation—all the more deep-felt because the punishment seemed disproportionate to the single lapse. His mind went back to it sullenly, once and again. There were men, he knew, to whom the true character of the fair traveller would have been an additional allurement. He was not of them.
His fastidiousness revolted, almost as a woman’s might, no less from the thought of any inferiority of status, than from the knowledge that where he condescended to favour, others had already carried their easy victories.
Yet, although the image of the dancer lingered no more pleasantly in his fancy than did that of the little patrician—disdainfully unnoticed in her peasant garb—that night of adventure in the forest had left a deep stamp upon the young man; but the chief memory for him, the one personality towards which his thoughts constantly reverted, was that of the grey-haired roadside fiddler. He had met a king yonder night, but it was the vagrant he longed to see again. He had fought for his life with one of the most notorious rufflers in Europe, but the scenes he re-lived, with the fond dalliance of a slow-thinking youth, was the meeting on the road in the rosy sunset and the parting in the green forest dawn. He was haunted by the man’s smile, by his voice, by the way of his hands—above all, his music.