by Ouida
When the tidings of his heroic end reached her at the imperial hunting-place of Gödöllö all the world died for her; that splendid pageant of a world, whose fairest and richest favours had been always showered on the daughter of the mighty House of Szalras. She withdrew herself from her friends, from her lovers, from her mistress, and mourned for him with a grief that time could do little to assuage, nothing to efface. She was then twenty years of age.
She was thinking of that death now, four years later, as she stood on the terrace which overhung the cruel rocks that had killed him.
His loss was to her a sorrow that could never wholly pass away.
Her other brothers had been dear to her, but only as brilliant young soldiers are to a little child who sees them seldom. But Bela had been her companion, her playmate, her friend, her darling. From Bela she had been scarce ever parted. Every day and every night, herself, and all her thoughts and all her time, were given to such administration of her kingdom as should best be meet in the sight of God and his angels. ‘I am but Bela’s almoner, as he was God’s steward,’ she said.
She leaned against the parapet, and looked across the green and shining water, the open letter hanging in her hand.
The Countess Wanda von Szalras was a beautiful woman; but she had that supreme distinction which eclipses beauty, that subtle, indescribable grace and dignity which are never seen apart from some great lineage with long traditions of culture, courtesy, and courage. She was very tall, and her movements had a great repose and harmony in them; her figure, richness and symmetry. Her eyes were of a deep brown hue, like the velvety brown of a stag’s throat; they were large, calm, proud, and meditative. Her mouth was very beautiful; her hair was light and golden; her skin exceedingly fair. She was one of the most beautiful women of her country, and one of the most courted and the most flattered; and her imperial mistress said now to her, ‘Come back to us and to the world.’
Standing upon her terrace, in a gown of pale grey velvet that had no ornament save an old gold girdle with an enamelled missal hung to it, with two dogs at her side, one the black hunting-hound of St. Hubert, the other the white sleuth-hound of Russia, she looked like a châtelaine of the days of Mary of Burgundy or Elizabeth of Thuringia. It seemed as if the dark cedar boughs behind her should lift and admit to her presence some lover with her glove against the plume of his hat, and her ring set in his sword-hilt, who would bow down before her feet and not dare to touch her hand unbidden.
But no lover was there. The Countess Wanda dismissed all lovers; she was wedded to the memory of her brother, and to her own liberty and power.
She leaned on the stone parapet of her castle and gazed on the scene that her eyes had rested on since they had first seen the light, yet of which she never wearied. The intense depth of colour, that is the glory of Austria, was deepening with each moment that the sun went nearer to its setting in the dark blue of thunderclouds that brooded in the west, over the Venediger and the Zillerthal Alps. Soon the sun would pass that barrier of stone and ice, and evening would fall here in the mountains of the Iselthal, whilst it would be still day for the plains of the Ober Pinzgau and Salzkammergut. But as yet the radiance was here; and the dark oak woods and birch woods, the purple pine forests, the blue lake waters, and the glaciers of the Glöckner range, had all that grandeur which makes a sunset in these highlands at once so splendid and so peaceful. There is an infinite sense of peace in those cool, vast, unworn mountain solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping like spectral armies over the level lands below, and the sun-rays slanting heavenward, like the spears of an angelic host. There is such abundance of rushing water, of deep grass, of endless shade, of forest trees, of heather and pine, of torrent and tarn; and beyond these are the great peaks that loom through breaking clouds, and the clear cold air, in which the vulture wheels and the heron sails; and the shadows are so deep, and the stillness is so sweet, and the earth seems so green, and fresh, and silent, and strong. Nowhere else can one rest so well; nowhere else is there so fit a refuge for all the faiths and fancies that can find a home no longer in the harsh and hurrying world: there is room for them all in the Austrian forests, from the Erl-King to Ariel and Oberon.
The Countess Wanda leaned against the balustrade of the terrace and watched that banquet of colour on land and cloud and water; watched till the sun sank out of sight behind the Venediger snows, and the domes of the Glöckner, and all the lesser peaks opposite were changing from the warmth, as of a summer rose, to a pure transparent grey, that seemed here and there to be pierced as with fire.
‘How often do we thank God for the mountains?’ she thought; ‘yet we ought every night that we pray.’
Then she sighed as her eyes sank from the hill-tops to the lake water, dark as iron, glittering as steel, now that the radiance of the sun had passed off it. She remembered Bela.
How could she ever forget him, with that murderous water shining for ever at her feet?
The world called her undiminished tenderness for her dead brother a morbid grief, but then to the world at large any fidelity seems so strange and stupid a waste of years: it does not understand that tout casse, tout lasse, tout passe, was not written for strong natures.
‘How could I ever forget him, so long as that water glides there?’ she thought, as her eyes rested on the emerald and sparkling lake.
‘Yet her Majesty is so right! So right and so wise!’ said a familiar voice at her side.
And there came up to her the loveliest little lady in all the empire; an old lady, but so delicate, so charming, so pretty, so fragile, that she seemed lovelier than all the young ones; a very fairy godmother, covered up in lace and fur, and leaning on a gold-headed cane, and wearing red shoes with high gilt heels, and smiling with serene blue eyes, as though she had just stepped down out of a pictured copy of Cinderella, and could change common pumpkins into gilded chariots, and mice into horses, at a wish.
She was the Princess Ottilie of Lilienhöhe, and had once been head of a religious house.
‘Her Majesty is so right!’ she said once more, with emphasis.
The Countess Wanda turned and smiled, rather with her eyes than with her lips.
‘It would not become my loyal affection to say she could be wrong. But still, I know myself, and I know the world very well, and I far prefer Hohenszalras to it.’
‘Hohenszalras is all very well in the summer and autumn,’ said Princess Ottilie, with a glance of anything but love at the great fantastic solemn pile; ‘but for a woman of your age and your possessions to pass your days talking to farmers and fishermen, poring over books, perplexing yourself as to whether it is right for you to accept wealth that comes from such a source of danger to human life as your salt mines — it is absurd, it is ludicrous. You are made for something more than a political economist; you should be in the great world.’
‘I prefer my solitude and my liberty.’
‘Liberty! Who or what could dictate to you in the world? You reigned there once; you would always reign there.’
‘Social life is a bondage, as an empress’s is. It denies one the greatest luxury of life — solitude.’
‘Certainly, if you love solitude so much, you have your heart’s desire here. It is an Alvernia! It is a Mount Athos! It is a snow-entombed paraclete, a hermitage, only tempered by horses!’ said the Princess, with a little angry laugh.
Her grand-niece smiled.
‘By many horses, certainly. Dearest aunt, what would you have? Austrians are all centaurs and amazons. I am only like my Kaiserin in that passion.’
The Princess sighed.
She had never been able to comprehend the forest life, the daring, the intrepidity, the open-air pastimes, and the delight in danger which characterised all the race of Szalras. Daughter of a North German princeling, and with some French blood in her veins also, reared under the formal etiquette of her hereditary court, and at an early age canoness of one of those great semi-religious orders which are only open to the offspring
of royal or of most noble lines, her whole life had been one moulded to form and conventional habit, and only her own sweetness and sprightliness of temper had saved her from the narrowness of judgment and the chilliness of formality which such a life begets. The order of which until late years she had been superior was one for magnificence and wealth unsurpassed in Europe; but, semi-secular in its privileges, it had left her much liberty, and never wholly divorced her from the world, which in an innocent way she had always loved and enjoyed. After Count Victor’s death she had resigned her office on plea of age and delicacy of health, and had come to take up her residence at Hohenszalras with her dead niece’s children. She had done so because she had believed it to be her duty, and her attachment to Wanda and Bela had always been very great; but she had never learned to love the solitude of the Hohe Tauern, or ceased to regard Hohenszalras as a place of martyrdom. After the minute divisions of every hour and observances of every smallest ceremonial that she had been used to at her father’s own little court of Lilienslüst, and in her own religious house, where every member of the order was a daughter of some one of the highest families of Germany or of Austria, the life at Hohenszalras, with its outdoor pastimes, its feudal habits, its vast liberties for man and beast, and its long frozen winters, when not a soul could come near it from over the passes, seemed very terrible to her. She could never understand her niece’s passionate attachment to it, and she in real truth only breathed entirely at ease in those few weeks of the year which to please her niece she consented to pass away from the Hohe Tauern.
‘Surely you will go to Ischl or go to Gödöllö this autumn, since Her Majesty wishes it?’ she said now, with an approving glance at the imperial letter.
‘Her Majesty is so kind as always to wish it,’ answered the Countess Wanda. ‘Let us leave time to show what it holds for us. This is scarcely summer. Yesterday was the fifteenth of May.’
‘It is horribly cold,’ said the Princess, drawing her silver-grey fur about her. ‘It is always horribly cold here, even in midsummer. And when it does not snow it rains; you cannot deny that.’
‘Come, come! we have seen the sun all day to-day. I hope we shall see it many days, for they have begun planting-out, you see — the garden will soon be gorgeous.’
‘When the mist allows it to be seen, it will be, I dare say,’ said Princess Ottilie, somewhat pettishly. ‘It is tolerable here in the summer, though never agreeable; but the Empress is so right, it is absurd to shut yourself longer up in this gloomy place; you are bound to return to the world. You owe it to your position to be seen in it once more.’
‘The world does not want me, my dear aunt; nor do I want the world.’
‘That is sheer perversity — —’
‘How am I perverse? I know the world very well, and I know that no one is necessary to it, unless it be Herr von Bismarck.’
‘I do not see what Herr von Bismarck has to do with your going back to your natural manner of life,’ said the Princess, severely, who abhorred any sort of levity in regard to the mighty minister who had destroyed the Lilienhöhe princes one fine morning, as indifferently as a boy plucks down a cranberry bough. ‘In summer, or even autumn, Hohenszalras is endurable, but in winter it is — hyperborean — even you must grant that. One might as well be jammed in a ship, amidst icebergs, in the midst of a frozen sea.’
‘And you were born on the Elbe, oh fie! But indeed, my dearest aunt, I like the frozen sea. The white months have no terrors for me. What you call, and what calls itself, the great world is far more narrow than the Iselthal. Here one’s fancies, at least, can fly high as the eagles do; in the world who can rise out of the hot-house air of the salons, and see beyond the doings of one’s friends and foes?’
‘Surely one’s own friends and foes — people like oneself, in a word — must be as interesting as Hans, and Peter, and Katte, and Grethel, with their crampons or their milkpails,’ said the Princess, with impatience. ‘Besides, surely in the world there are political movement, influence, interests.’
‘Oh, intrigue? — as useful as Mme. de Laballe’s or Mme. de Longueville’s? No! I do not believe there is even that in our time, when even diplomacy itself is fast becoming a mere automatic factor in a world that is governed by newspapers, and which has changed the tyranny of wits for the tyranny of crowds. The time is gone by when a “Coterie of Countesses” could change ministries, if they ever did do so outside the novels of Disraeli. Drawing-room cabals may still do some mischief perhaps, but they can do no good. Sometimes, indeed, I think that what is called Government everywhere is nothing but a gigantic mischief-making and place-seeking. The State is everywhere too like a mother who sweeps her doorstep diligently, and scolds the neighbours, while her child scalds itself to death unseen within.’
‘In the world,’ interrupted the Princess oppositely, ‘you might persuade them that the sweeping of doorsteps is not sufficient — —’
‘I prefer to keep my own house in order. It is quite enough occupation,’ said the Countess Wanda, with a smile. ‘Dear aunt, here amongst my own folks I can do some real good, I have some tangible influence, I can feel that my life is not altogether spent in vain. Why should I exchange these simple and solid satisfactions, for the frivolities and the inanities of a life of pleasure which would not even please me?’
‘You are very hard to please, I know,’ retorted the Princess. ‘But say what you will, it becomes ridiculous for a person of your age, your great position, and your personal beauty, to immure yourself eternally in what is virtually no better than confinement to a fortress!’
‘A court is more of a prison to me,’ said Wanda von Szalras. ‘I know both lives, and I prefer this life. As for my being very hard to please, I think I was very gay and mirthful before Bela’s death. Since then all the earth has grown grey for me.’
‘Forgive me, my beloved!’ said Princess Ottilie, with quick contrition, whilst moisture sprang into her limpid and still luminous blue eyes.
Wanda von Szalras took the old abbess’s hand in her own, and kissed it.
‘I understand all you wish for me, dear aunt. Believe me, I envy people when I hear them laughing light-heartedly amongst each other. I think I shall never laugh so again.’
‘If you would only marry — —’ said the Princess, with some hesitation.
‘You think marriage amusing?’ she said, with a certain contempt. ‘If you do, it is only because you escaped it.’
‘Amusing!’ said the Princess, a little scandalised. ‘I could speak of no Sacrament of our Holy Church as “amusing.” You rarely display such levity of language. I confess I do not comprehend you. Marriage would give you interests in life which you seem to lack sadly now. It would restore you to the world. It would be a natural step to take with such vast possessions as yours.’
‘It is not likely I shall ever take it,’ said Wanda von Szalras, drawing the soft fine ear of Donau through her fingers.
‘I know it is not likely. I am very sorry that it is not likely. Yet what nobler creature does God’s earth contain than your cousin Egon?
‘Egon? No: he is a good and brave and loyal gentleman, none better; but I shall no more marry him than Donau here will wed a forest doe.’
‘Yet he has loved you for ten years. But if not he there are so many others, men of high enough place to be above all suspicion of mercenary motive. No woman has been more adored than you, Wanda. Look at Hugo Landrassy.’
‘Oh, pray spare me their enumeration. It is like the Catalogue of Ships!’ said the Countess Wanda, with some coldness and some impatience on her face.
At that moment an old man, who was major-domo of Hohenszalras, approached and begged with deference to know whether his ladies would be pleased to dine.
The Princess signified her readiness with alacrity; Wanda von Szalras signed assent with less willingness.
‘What a disagreeable obligation dining is,’ she said, as she turned reluctantly from the evening scene, with the lake sleeping in dusk and
shadow, while the snow summits still shone like silver and glowed with rose.
‘It is very wicked to think so,’ said her great-aunt. ‘When a merciful Creator has appointed our appetites for our consolation and support it is only an ingrate who is not thankful lawfully to indulge them.’
‘That view of them never occurred to me,’ said the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. ‘I think you must have stolen it, aunt, from some abbé galant or some chanoinesse as lovely as yourself in the last century. Alas! if not to care to eat be ungrateful I am a sad ingrate. Donau and Neva are more ready subscribers to your creed.’
Donau and Neva were already racing towards the castle, and Wanda von Szalras, with one backward lingering glance to the sunset, which already was fading, followed them with slow steps to the grand house of which she was mistress.
In the north alone the sky was overcast and of a tawny colour, where the Pinzgau lay, with the green Salzach water rushing through its wooded gorges, and its tracks of sand and stone desolate as any desert.