by Ouida
‘Vassia, do not leave us like that. I do not like to see you so cold, so quiet, so unnaturally indifferent. You are left friendless and nameless — and after all he was your father.’
The boy drew himself away gently, and shrugged his shoulders once more with his slight gesture of contempt.
‘He never called me his son. I wish he had left me by the Volga with the bear-cubs: that is all. Adieu, sir.’
‘But what do you mean to do?’
‘I will do what offers.’
‘But few things offer when one is friendless and you have many faults, Vassia, though you have many talents. I fear for your future.’
‘Adieu, sir.’
The boy bowed low, with composure and grace, and left the room. The old man sat in the shadow by his desk, and blamed himself, and blamed the dead. The young collegian went out from his presence with a firm step and a careless carriage, and ascended the staircase of the college to his dormitory. The large long room, with its whitewashed walls, its barred casements, its rows of camp bedsteads, looked like a barrack-room deserted by the soldiers. The aspen and poplar leaves were quivering outside the grated windows; the rays of the bright August sun streamed through and shone on the floor. The boy sat down on his bed. It was at the top of the row of beds, next one of the casements. The sun-rays touched his head; he was all alone. The clamour, the disputes, the mirth, the wrong-doing with which he and his comrades had consoled themselves for the stern discipline of the day, were all things of the past, and he would know them no more. In a way he had been happy here, being lord and king of the rebellious band that had filled this chamber, and knowing so little of his own fate or of his own future that any greatness or glory might be possible to him.
Three years before he had been summoned to a château on the north coast of France in the full summer season. It had entered into the capricious fancy of Prince Zabaroff that he should like to see what the wild young wolf-cub of the Volga plains had become. He had found in him a youth so handsome, so graceful, so accomplished, that a certain fibre of paternal pride had been touched in him; whilst the coldness, the silence, and the disdainfulness of the boy’s temper had commanded his respect. No word of their relationship had passed between them, but by the guests assembled there it had been assumed that the young Vassia Kazán was near of kin to their host, whose lawfully-begotten sons and daughters were far away in one of his summer palaces of the Krimea.
The boy was beautiful, keen-witted, precocious in knowledge and tact; the society assembled there, which was dissolute enough, dazzled and indulged him. The days had gone by like a tale of magic. There had been always in him the bitter, mortified, rebellious hatred of his own position; but this he had not shown, and no one had suspected it. These three summer months of unbridled luxury and indulgence had made an indelible impression on him. He had felt that life was not worth the living unless it could be passed in the same manner. He had known that away there in Russia there were young Zabaroff princes, his brethren, who would not have owned him; but the remembrance of them had not dwelt on him. He had not known definitely what to expect of the future. Though he was still there only Vassia Kazán, yet he had been treated as though he were a son of the house. When the party had broken up he had been sent back to his college with many gifts and a thousand francs in gold. When he reached Paris he had given the presents to a dancing girl and the money to an old professor of classics who had lost his sight. Not a word had been said as to his future. Measuring both by the indulgences and liberalities that were conceded to him, he had always dreamed of it vaguely but gorgeously, as sure to bring recognition and reverence, pomp and power, to him from the world. He had vaguely built up ambitious hopes. He had been sensible of no ordinary intelligence, of no common powers; and it had seemed legitimate to suppose that so liberal and princely an education meant that some golden gates would open to him at manhood: why should they rear him so if they intended to leave him in obscurity?
This day, as he had sat in the large white courtyard, shadowed by the Parisian poplar trees, he had remembered that he was within a few weeks of the completion of his eighteenth year, and he had wondered what they meant to do with him. He had heard nothing from Prince Zabaroff since those brilliant, vivid, tumultuous months which had left on him a confused sense of dazzling though vague expectation. He had hoped every summer to hear something, but each summer had passed in silence; and now he was told that Paul Zabaroff was dead.
He had been happy, being dowered with facile talents, quick wit, and the great art of being able to charm others without effort to himself. He had been seldom obedient, often guilty, yet always successful. The place had been no prison to him; he had passed careless days and he had dreamed grand dreams there; and now —
He sat on the little iron bed, and knew that in a few nights to come he might have to make his bed with beggars under bridge arches and in the dens of thieves.
Tears gathered in his eyes, and fell slowly one by one. A sort of convulsion passed over his face. He gripped his throat with his hand, to stifle a sob that rose there.
The intense stillness of the chamber was not broken even by the buzzing of a gnat.
He sat quite motionless, and his thoughts went back to the summer day in the cornfields by the Volga; he saw the scene in all its little details: the impatient good-humour of the great lord, the awe of the listening peasants, the blowing wheat, the wooden cross, the stamping horses, the cringing servants; he heard the voice of his father saying, ‘Will you be a jewel or a toad’s eye?’
‘Why could he not leave me there?’ he thought; ‘I should have known nothing; I should have been a hunter; I should have done no harm on the ice and the snow there, with old Maritza.’
He thought of his grandmother, of the little hut, of the nest of skins, of the young bears at play, of the glittering plains in winter, of the low red sun, of the black lonely woods, of the grey icy river, of the bright virgin snow — thought, with a great longing like that of thirst. Why had they not let him be? Why had they not left him ignorant and harmless in the clear, keen, solitary winter world?
Instead of that they had flung him into hell, and now left him in it, alone.
There was a far-off murmur on the sultry summer air, and a far-off gleam of metal beyond the leaves of the poplar trees; it was the murmur of the streets, and the glisten of the roofs of Paris.
About his neck there hung a little silver image of St. Paul. His mother had hung it there at birth, and Maritza had prayed him never to disturb it. Now he took it off, he spat on it, he trod on it, he threw it out to fall into the dust.
He did this insult to the sacred thing coldly, without passion. His tears were no more on his cheeks, nor the sobs in his throat.
He changed his clothes quickly, put together a few necessaries, leaving behind nearly all that he possessed, because he hated everything that the dead man’s money had bought; and then, without noise and without haste, looking back once down the long empty chamber, he went through the house by back ways that he knew and had used in hours of forbidden liberty, and opening the gate of the courtyard, went out into the long dreary highway, white with dust, that stretched before him and led to Paris.
He had made friends, for he was a beautiful bold boy, gay of wit, agile, and strong, and of many talents; but these friends were artists little known in the world, soldiers who liked pleasure, young dramatists without theatres, pretty frail women who had taught him to eat the sweet and bitter apple that is always held out in the hand of Eve. These and their like were all butterfly friends of a summer noon or night; he knew that very well, for he had a premature and unerring knowledge of the value of human words. They would be of no use in such a strait as his; and the colour flushed back for one instant into his pale cheeks, as he thought that he would die in a hospital before he was twenty rather than ask their aid.
As the grey dust, the hot wind, the nauseous smell of streets in summer smote upon him, leaving the poplar-shadowed court of his old
school, he felt once more the same strange yearning of home-sickness for the winter world of his birth, for the steel-grey waters, the darkened skies, the forests of fir, the howl of the wolves on the wind, the joys of the fresh fierce cold, the feel of the ice in the air, the smell of the pines and the river. The bonds of birth are strong.
‘If Maritza were not dead I would go back,’ he thought. But Maritza had been long dead, laid away under the snow by her daughter’s side.
The boy went to Paris.
Would it be any fault of his what he became?
He told himself, No.
It would lie with the dead; and with Paris.
CHAPTER I.
In the heart of the Hohe Tauern, province of lakes and streams, there lies one lake called the Szalrassee: known to the pilgrim, to the fisher, to the hunter, but to the traveller little, for it is shut away from the hum and stir of man by the amphitheatre of its own hills and forests. To the south-east of it lies the Iselthal, and to the north-west the Wilde Gerlos; due east is the great Glöckner group, and due west the Venediger. Farther away are the Alps of Zillerthal, and on the opposite horizon the mountains of Karinthia.
Here, where the foaming rivers thunder through their rocky channels, and the ice bastions of a thousand glaciers glow in the sunrise and bar the sight of sunset; here, where a thousand torrents bathe in silver the hillsides, and the deep moan of subterranean waters sounds for ever through the silence of the gorges, dark with the serried pines; here, in the green and cloudy Austrian land, the merry trout have many a joyous home, but none is fairer or more beloved by them than this lovely lake of Hohenszalras; so green that it might have been made of emeralds dissolved in sunbeams, so deep that at its centre no soundings can be taken, so lonely that of the few wanderers who pass from S. Johann im Wald or from Lienz to Matrey, even of those few scarce one in a summer will know that a lake lies there, though they see from afar off its great castle standing, many-turreted and pinnacled, with its frowning keep, backed by the vast black forests, clothing slopes whose summits hide themselves in cloud, whilst through the cold clear air the golden vulture and the throated eagle wing their way.
The lake lies like a crystal bedded in rock, lovely and lonely as the little Gosausee when the skies are fair; perilous and terrible as the great Königs-See in storm, when the north wind is racing in from the Bœhmervald and the Polish steppes, and the rain-mists are dark and dense, and the storks leave their home on the chapel roof because the winter draws nigh. It is fed by snow and ice descending from a hundred hills, and by underground streams and headlong-descending avalanches, and in its turn feeds many a mountain waterfall, many a mountain tarn, many a woodland brook, and many a village fountain. The great white summits tower above it, and the dense still woods enshroud it; there are a pier and harbour at either end, but these are only used by the village people, and once a year by pilgrims who come to the Sacred Island in its midst; pilgrims who flock thither from north, south, east, and west, for the chapel of the Szalrassee is as renowned and blessed as the silver shrine of holy Mariazell itself.
On the right bank of its green glancing water, looking towards the ice-peaks of the Glöckner on the east, and on the south towards the Kitchbull mountains and the limestone Alps, a promontory juts out into the lake and soars many hundred feet above it. It is of hard granite rock. Down one of its sides courses a torrent, the other side is clothed with wood; on the summit is the immense building that is called the Hohenszalrasburg, a mass of towers and spires and high metal roofs and frowning battlements, with a huge square fortress at one end of them: it is the old castle of the Counts of Szalras, and the huge donjon keep of it has been there twelve centuries, and in all these centuries no man has ever seen its flag furled or its portcullis drawn up for a conqueror’s entry.
The greater part of the Schloss now existing is the work of Meister Wenzel of Klosterneuburg, begun in 1350, but the date of the keep and of the foundations generally are much earlier, and the prisons and clock tower are Romanesque. Majestic, magnificent, and sombre, though not gloomy, by reason of its rude decoration and the brilliant colours of its variegated roofs, it is scarcely changed since its lords dwelt there in the fourteenth century, when their great banner, black vultures on a ground of gold and red, floated then high up amongst the clouds, even as it now shakes its heavy folds out on the strong wind that blew so keenly from the Prussian and the Polish plains due north.
It is a fortress that has wedded a palace; it is majestic, powerful, imposing, splendid, like the great race, of which it so long has been the stronghold and the birthplace. But it is as lonely in the quiet heart of the everlasting hills as any falcon’s or heron’s nest hung in the oak branches.
And this loneliness seemed its sweetest charm in the eyes of its châtelaine and mistress, the Countess Wanda von Szalras, as she leaned one evening over the balustrade of her terrace, watching for the after-glow to warm the snows of the Glöckner. She held in her hand an open letter from her Kaiserin, and the letter in its conclusion said: ‘You have sorrowed and tarried in seclusion long enough — too long; longer than he would have wished you to do. Come back to us and to the world.’
And Wanda von Szalras thought to herself: ‘What can the world give me? What I love is Hohenszalras on earth, and Bela in heaven.’
What could the world give her indeed? The world cannot give back the dead. She wanted nothing of the world. She was rich in all that it can ever give.
In the time of Ferdinand the Second those who were then Counts of Szalras had stitched the cloth cross on their sleeves and gone with the Emperor to the Third Crusade. In gratitude for their escape, father and son, from the perils of Palestine and the dangers of the high seas and of the treacherous Danube water, from Moslem steel, and fever of Jaffa, and chains of swarming Barbary corsairs, they, returning at last in safety to their eyrie above the Szalrassee, had raised a chapel on the island in the lake, and made it dedicate to the Holy Cross, a Szalras of the following generation, belonging to the Dominican community, and being a man of such saintly fervour and purity that he was canonised by Innocent, had dwelt on the Holy Isle, and given to it the benediction and the tradition of his sanctity and good works. As centuries went on the holy fame of the shrine where the Crusader had placed a branch from a thorn-tree of Nazareth grew, and gained in legend and in miracle, and became as adored an object, of pilgrimage as the Holy Phial of Heiligenblut. All the Hohe Tauern, and throngs even from Karinthia on the one side and Tirol on the other, came thither on the day of Ascension.
The old faith still lives, very simple, warm, and earnest, in the heart of Austria, and with that day-dawn in midsummer thousands of peasant-folks flock from mountain villages and forest chalets and little remote secluded towns, to speed over the green lake with flaming crucifix and floating banner, and haunted anthem echoed from hill to hill. One of those days of pilgrimage had made her mistress of Hohenszalras.
It was a martial and mighty race this which in the heart of the green Tauern had made of fealty to God and the Emperor a religion for itself and all its dependants. The Counts of Szalras had always been proud, stern, and noble men: though their records were often stained with fierce crimes, there was never in them any single soil of baseness, treachery, or fear. They had been fierce and reckless in the wild days when they were for ever at war with the Counts of Tirol and the warlike Archbishops of Salzburg. Then with the Renaissance they had become no less powerful, but more lettered, more courtly, and more splendid, and had given alike friendship and service to the Habsburg. Now, of all these princely and most powerful people there was but one descendant, but one representative; and that one was a woman.
Solferino had seen Count Gela fall charging at the head of his own regiment of horse; Magenta had seen Count Victor cut in two by a cannon-shot as he rode with the dragoons of Swartzenberg; and but a few years later the youngest, Count Bela, had been drowned by his own bright lake.
Their father had died of grief for his eldest son; their
mother had been lost to them in infancy; Bela and Wanda had grown up together, loving each other as only two lonely children can. She had been his elder by a few years, and he younger than his age by reason of his innocent simplicity of nature and his delicacy of body. They had always thought to make a priest of him, and when that peaceful future was denied him on his becoming the sole heir, it was the cause of bitter though mute sorrow to the boy who was indeed so like a young saint in church legends that the people called him tenderly der Heilige Graf. He had never quitted Hohenszalras, and he knew every peasant around, every blossom that blew, every mountain path, every forest beast and bird, and every tale of human sorrow in his principality. When he became lord of all after his brother’s death he was saddened and oppressed by the sense of his own overwhelming obligations. ‘I am but the steward of God,’ he would say, with a tender smile, to the poor who blessed him.
One Ascension Day the lake was, as usual, crowded with the boats of pilgrims; the morning was fair and cloudless, but, after noontide, wind arose, the skies became overcast, and one of the sudden storms of the country burst over the green waters. The little lord of Hohenszalras was the first to see the danger to the clumsy heavy boats crowded with country people, and with his household rowed out to their aid. The storm had come so suddenly and with such violence that it smote, in the very middle of the lake, some score of these boats laden with the pilgrims of the Pinzgau and the Innthal, women chiefly; their screams pierced through the noise of the roaring winds, and their terror added fresh peril to the dangers of the lake, which changed in a few moments to a seething whirlpool, and flung them to and fro like coots’ nests in a flood. The young Bela with his servants saved many, crossing and recrossing the furious space of wind-lashed, leaping, foaming water; but on the fourth voyage back the young Count’s boat, over-burdened with trembling peasants, whose fright made them blind and restive, dipped heavily on one side, filled, and sank. Bela could swim well, and did swim, even to the very foot of his own castle rock, where a hundred hands were outstretched to save him; but, hearing a drowning woman’s moan, he turned and tried to reach her. A fresh surge of the hissing water, a fresh gust of the bitter north wind, tossed him back into a yawning gulf of blackness, and drove him headlong, and with no more resistance in him than if he had been a broken bough, upon the granite wall of his own rocks. He was caught and rescued almost on the instant by his own men, but his head had struck upon the stone, and he was senseless. He breathed a few hours, but he never spoke or opened his eyes or gave any sign of conscious life, and before the night had far advanced his innocent body was tenantless and cold, and his sweet spirit lived only in men’s memories. His sister, who was absent at that time at the court of her Empress, became by his death the mistress of Hohenszalras and the last of her line.