by Ouida
A little later that morning a jager brought to the Kaiserin hotel a grand golden eagle, shot so that it had died instantaneously, and been picked up upon the snow in all its beauty of plumage, without a feather ruffled. He brought also a large cluster of edelweiss from the summit of Thorstein, and a letter. The letter was to Madame de Sonnaz from Corrèze.
She was sitting opposite to Vere on the balcony that fronted the bridge.
“From Der Freischiitz!” she said with a laugh. “He has not shot his own arm off, like Roger, that is evident.”
Vere did not raise her head from her lace-work.
It had been written in the highest hut under the Dachsteinspitze, and was in pencil. After graceful opening compliments, in which no one knew better than himself how to make the commonplace triviality of formula seem spontaneous and fresh, he said:
“I have shot a nobler creature than myself — men generally do when they shoot at all. Emblematic of the Napoleonic cause to which Madame la Duchesse has dedicated herself — inasmuch as it has lived on carrion, and though golden, it will be rotten in a day, or at best stuffed with straw — I desire to lay it at the feet of Madame Jeanne, where its murderer has ever longed, but never dared, to prostrate himself. I offer the edelweiss to Madame la Princesse Zouroff, as it is well known to be her emblem. It has no other value than that of representing her by living at an altitude where nothing but the snow and the star-rays presume to share its solitude.”
He said, in conclusion, that his hunting trip having taken up the five days which he had allotted himself for lschl, he feared he should see neither of them again until they met in Paris in winter, as his engagements took him at once to the Hague, thence to Dresden, where there were special performances in honour of one of the gods of his old faith — Gluck.
“Very pretty,” reflected the Duchesse Jeanne as she read. “I suppose he reached the edelweiss himself, or he could scarcely have gathered it. I suppose Vera will understand that part of the ‘emblem.’”
But though she thought so she did not say so; she was a courageous woman, but not quite courageous enough for that. She gave the edelweiss and the note together to her companion, and only said, with a little smile, “Corrèze always writes such pretty notes. It is an accomplishment that has its dangers. There is scarcely a good-looking woman in Paris who has not a bundle, more or less big, of his letters; all with that tell-tale suggestive device of his — that silver Love, with one wing caught in a thorn-bush of roses; he drew it himself. You saw it on his flag at the Kermesse. Oh, of course it is not on this paper. He scribbled this in some chalet of the Dachstein. I will have my eagle stuffed, and it shall have real rubies for eyes; and I will put it in my dining-room in Paris, and Corrèze for his sins shall sit underneath it and pledge the Violet and the Bee. Not that he ever will though; if he have any political faith at all he is a Legitimist — if he be not a Communist. But I don’t think he thinks about those things. He told me once that nightingales do not build either in new stucco or in old timber — that they only wanted a bush of rose-laurel. He is a mortel fantasque, you know, and people have spoiled him. He is very vain, and he thinks himself a Sultan.”
At the while the duchesse was studying narrowly her companion as she spoke.
Vere, without any apparent attention to it, put her edelweiss in an old hunting goblet, that she had bought that morning in one of the little dark shops of Ischl; and the duchesse could tell nothing from her face.
In her heart Vere felt a sense of irritation and disappointment. The note seemed to her flippant, the homage of it insincere, and his departure unnecessary and a slight. She did not know that he wanted to turn aside from her the suspicion of a woman in whom he foresaw a perilous foe for her; and that to disarm worldly perils he used worldly weapons. Vere no more understood that than one of Chaucer’s heroines, with straight glaive and simple shield, would have understood the tactics of a game of Kriegspiel.
And why did he go?
She was far from dreaming that he went to avoid her. The song of Heine did not mean to her all that it meant to him. That she had some place in his memory, some hold on his interest, she thought — but nothing more; and even that she almost doubted now; how could he write of her to Jeanne de Sonnaz?
A cold and cruel fear that she had deceived herself in trusting him seized on her; she heard of him always as capricious, as unstable, as vain; who could tell, she thought? Perhaps she had only given him food for vanity and for laughter. Perhaps his seriousness and his sympathy had been but a mere passing mood, an emotion; no more real than those he assumed so perfectly upon his stage.
The doubt hurt her cruelly; and did not stay long with her, for her soul was too noble to harbour distrust. Yet, at her ear Jeanne de Sonnaz perpetually dropped slight words, little stories, shrewd hints, that all made him the centre of adventures as varied and as little noble as those of any hero of amorous comedy. Ever and again a chill sickening doubt touched her — that she, at once the proudest and the humblest woman in the world, had been the amusement of an hour to a brilliant but shallow persifleur.
She carried the gold goblet with the edelweiss of the Thorstein into her own chamber, and, when quite alone, she burst into tears.
She never shed tears now. It had seemed to her as if they were scorched up by the arid desolation of her life. They did her good like dew in drought. So much she owed Corrèze. Corrèze himself at that hour — having taken leave at daybreak of the imperial hunter and his courtly companions, who were returning into Ischl — was walking by his guide’s side down the face of the Dachstein towards the green Rauris range, meaning to go across thence into the beautiful valley of Ens, and descend next day into the Maindling Pass between the Salzkammergut and Styria. He was still at a great elevation; still amidst snow and ice; and the Rauris lay below him like a green billowy sea. There was some edelweiss in his path, and he stooped and plucked a little piece, and put it in his wallet.
“O iceflower, you are not colder than my heart,” he said to himself. “But it is best to go; best for her. I will dedicate myself to you, iceflower, and of the roses I will have no more; no, and no more of the ‘lilies and languor.’ Edelweiss, you shall live with me and be my amulet. You will wither and shrivel and be nothing, but you will remind me of my vow, and if others will rage, let them. To the ice-flower I will be true as far as a man in his weakness can be. Will that denial be love? In the old chivalrous days they read it so. They kept their faith though they never saw their lady’s face. The Duchesse Jeanne would laugh — and others too.”
And he went down over the rugged stony slope, with the snow deep on either side, and the green ice glistening at his feet, and the woods of the Rauris lifting themselves up from the clouds and the grey air below; and there on Dachstein, where never note of nightingale was heard since the world was made, this nightingale, that ladies loved and that roses entangled in their thorns, sang wearily to himself the song of Heine — the song of the palm-tree and the pine.
CHAPTER IX.
The days went on, and the duchesse made them gay enough, being one of those persons who cannot live without excitement, and make it germinate wherever they are. Carried in her chaise-a-porteurs playing chemin de fer on her balcony, waltzing at the little dances of the imperial court, making excursions in the pine-woods or down the lakes, she surrounded herself with officers and courtiers, and created around her that atmosphere of diversion, revelry, and intrigue, without which a woman of our world can no more live than a mockingbird without a globe of water. But, all the while, she never relaxed in a vigilant observation of her companion; and the departure of Corrèze baffled and annoyed her.
She had had a suspicion, and it had gone out in smoke. She had spent much ingenuity in contriving to bring Vere to the Salzkammergut, after having disbursed much in discovering the projects for the summer sojourns of Corrèze; and, with his departure, all her carefully built house of cards fell to pieces. She did not understand it; she was completely bewildered, as h
e had intended her to be, by the airy indifference of his message to her companion, and his failure to return from the glaciers into the valley. She regretted that she had troubled herself to be buried for a month in this green tomb amongst the hills; but it was impossible to change her imprisonment. They had begun the routine of the waters, and she had to solace herself as best she might with the imperial courtesies, and with sending little notes to her friends, the sparkle of which was like the brightness of an acid drink, and contrasted strongly with the few grave constrained lines that were penned by Vere.
One day, when they had but little more time to spend on the Traun banks, she got together a riding and driving party to Old Aussee.
Aussee is quaint, and ancient, and charming, where it stands on its three-branched river; its people are old-fashioned and simple; its encircling mountains and its dark waters are full of peace and solemnity. When the gay world breaks in on these quiet old towns, and deep lakes, and snow-girt hills, there seems a profanity in the invasion. It is only for a very little while. At the first breath of autumn the butterflies flee, and the fishermen and salt-workers, and timber-hewers and chamois-hunters are left alone with their waters and their hills.
The duchesses driving party was very picturesque, very showy, very noisy— “good society” is always very noisy nowadays, and has forgotten that a loud laugh used to be “bad form.” They were all people of very high degree, but they all smoked, they all chattered shrilly, and they all looked very much as if they had been cut out of the Vie Parisienne, and put in motion. Old Aussee, with its legends, its homely Styrian towns-folk, and its grand circle of snowclad summits were nothing to them — they liked the Opern-ring, the Bois, or Pall-Mall.
Vere got away from them, and went by herself to visit the Spitalkirche. The altar is pure old German work of the fourteenth century, and she had heard of it from Kaulbach. In these old Austrian towns the churches are always very reverent places; dark and tranquil; overladen indeed with ornament and images, but too full of shadow for these to much offend; there is the scent of centuries of incense; the ivories are yellow with the damp of ages. Mountain suzerains and bold ritters, whose deeds are still sung of in twilight to the zither, sleep beneath the moss-grown pavement; their shields and crowns are worn flat to the stone they were embossed on by the passing feet of generations of worshippers. High above in the darkness there is always some colossal carved or molded Christ. Through the half-opened iron-studded door there is always the smell of pinewoods, the gleam of water, the greenness of Alpine grass; often, too, there is the silvery falling of rain, and the fresh smell of it comes through the church, by whose black benches and dim lamps there will be sure to be some old bent woman praying.
The little church was more congenial to Vere than the companionship of her friends, who were boating on the Traun, while their servants unpacked their luncheon and their wines. She managed to elude them, and began to sketch the wings of the altar. She sent her servant to wait outside. The place was dreary and dark; the pure Alpine air blew in from an open pane in a stained window, there was the tinkle of a cow-bell, and the sound of running water from without; a dog came and looked at her.
The altar was not an easy one to copy; the candles were not lighted before it, and the daylight, grey and subdued without, as it is so often here, was very faint within.
“After all, what is the use of my copying it,” she thought, with a certain bitterness. “My husband would tell me, if I cared for such an old thing, to send some painter from Munich to do it for me; and perhaps he would be right. It is the only mission we have, to spend money.”
It is a mission that most women think the highest and most blest on earth, but it did not satisfy Vere. She seemed to herself so useless, so stupidly, vapidly, frivolously useless; and her nature was one to want work, and noble work.
She sat still, with her hands resting on her knees, and the colour and oils lying on the stone floor beside her untouched. She looked at the dark bent figure of the old peasant near, who had set a little candle before a side altar, and was praying fervently. She was a grey-headed, brown, wrinkled creature, dressed in the old Styrian way, she looked rapt and peaceful as she prayed. When she rose Vere spoke to her, and the old woman answered willingly. Yes, she was very old; yes, she had always dwelt in Aussee; her husband had worked in the salt mines and been killed in them; her sons had both died, one at Koniggratz, one in a snowstorm upon Dachstein, that was all long ago; she had some grandchildren, they were in the mines and on the timber rafts; one had broken his leg going down the Danube with wood; she had gone to him, he was only a boy; she could not get him home any other way, so she had rowed him back in a little flat boat, rowed and steered herself; it was winter, the Traun flood was strong, but they had come home safe; now he was well again, but he had seen the soldiers in Vienna, and a soldier he would be; there was no keeping him any more on the timber rafts. Vienna was very fine; yes, but herself she thought Aussee was finer; she had lighted that taper for her boy Ulrich; he was going to the army to-morrow; she had begged the saints to watch over him; the saints would let her see them all again one day Had she much to live on? No; the young men gave her what they could, and she spun and knitted, and life was cheap at Aussee, and then one could always pray, that was so much, and the saints did answer, not always, of course, because there were so many people speaking to them all at once, but yet often; God was good.
Vere took her by the hand, the rough gnarled hand like a bit of old oak bough, that had rowed the boat all the way from Vienna, and, having no money with her, slipped into it some gold porte-bonheurs off her wrist.
“If I stay I will come and see you. Tell me the way to find your house.”
“I shall never see you again,” said the old woman with swimming eyes. “One does not see Our Lady twice face to face till one gets up to heaven.” And she went away wondering, feeling the gold circlets on her arm, and telling her gossips, as they knitted in the street, that she had seen either Our Lady or St. Elizabeth — one of the two it must surely have been.
When she had gone leaving her little taper, like a glow-worm, behind her, Vere still sat on, forgetful of the gay people who were carrying their coquetries, their jealousies, and their charms, on to the Traun water. She had everything that in the world’s esteem is worth having; the poor, looking at her, envied her, as one of those who walk on velvet, and never feel the stones. She had youth, she had beauty, she had a great position; yet, as she sat there, she herself envied the life of the poor. It was real; it was in earnest; it had the affections to sustain and solace it. What a noble figure that woman, rowing her sick boy down the river in the autumn rains, looked to her beside her own mother! Unconsciously she stretched out her arms into the vacant air; those slender beautiful white arms, that Paris said were sculpturally faultless, and that her husband liked to see bare to the shoulder at her balls, with a circle of diamonds clasping them; she felt they would have force in them to row through the rains and against the flood, if the boat bore a freight that she loved.
But love was impossible for her.
At the outset of her life the world had given her all things except that one.
They had shut her in a golden cage; what matter if the bird starved within? It would be the bird’s ingratitude to fate.
Even if her offspring lived — she shuddered as she thought of it — they would be his, they would have his passions and his cruelties; they would be taken away from her, reared in creeds and in ways alien to her, they would be Zouroff Princes whose baby tyrannies would find a hundred sycophants, not her little simple children to lead in her own hand up to God.
As she sat there the sound of the organ arose, and rolled softly through the church. It was a time-worn instrument, and of little volume and power, but the rise and fall of the notes sounded solemn and beautiful in this old mountain church. The player was playing the Requiem of Mozart.
When the last cords thrilled away into silence, of that triumph of a mortal over t
he summons of death, a voice rose alone and sang the Minuit Chrétien of Adam.
She started and looked around into the gloom of the grey church. She saw no one; but the voice was that of Corrèze.
Then she sat motionless, following the beauty of the Noël as it rose higher and higher, as though angels were bearing the singer of it away from earth, as the angels of Orcagna bear on their wings the disembodied souls.
For awhile the church was filled with the glory of rejoicing, with the rapture of the earth made the cradle of God — then all at once there was silence. His voice had not seemed to cease, but rather to float farther and farther above until it reached the clouds, and grew still from the fulness of an unimaginable joy, of an unutterable desire fulfilled. One or two minor chords of the organ, faint as sighs, followed, then they too were still.
Vere sat motionless.
Surprise, wonder, curiosity, were far away from her; all minor emotions were lost in that infinite sense of consolation and of immortality; even of him who sang she ceased for the moment to have any memory.
After a little while a lad came to her over the grey stones; a lad of Aussee, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, in the white shirt that served him as a chorister.
He brought her a great bouquet of Alpine roses, and in the midst of the roses was the rare dark-blue Wolfmia Carinthiana which grows upon the slopes of the Gartnerkogel, and nowhere else in all the world they say “The foreigner for whom I blew the organ-bellows bade me bring you this,” said the boy “He sends you his homage.”
“Is he in the church?”
“Yes; he says — may he see you one moment?”
“Yes.”
Vere took the Alpine bouquet in her hands. She was still in a sort of trance.
The Noël was still upon her ears.
She did not even wonder how or why he came there. Since she had heard the song of Heine, it seemed to her so natural to hear his voice.