by Ouida
He stirred and opened his drowsy eyes.
‘Am I in heaven?’ he asked feebly. Yet he was a man who, when he was awake and well, believed not in heaven.
The physician, sitting by his bedside, laid his hand upon his wrist. The pulse was beating strongly but quickly.
‘You are in the Burg of Hohenszalras,’ he answered him. ‘The music you hear comes from the chapel; there is a midnight mass. A mass of thanksgiving for you.’
The heavy lids fell over the eyes of the weary man, and the dreamy sense of warmth and peace that was upon him lulled him into the indifference of slumber.
CHAPTER III
With the morning, though the storm had ceased and passed away, the clouds were dark, the mountains were obscured, and the rain was pouring down upon lake and land.
It was still early in the day when the stranger was aroused to the full sense of awaking in a room unknown to him; he had slept all through the night; he was refreshed and without fever. His left arm was strained, and he had many bruises; otherwise he was conscious of no hurt.
‘Twice in that woman’s power,’ he thought, with anger, as he looked round the great tapestried chamber that sheltered him, and tried to disentangle his actual memories of the past night from the dreams that had haunted him of the Nibelungen Queen, who all night long he had seen in her golden armour, with her eyes which, like those of the Greek nymph, dazzled those on whom they gazed to madness. Dream and fact had so interwoven themselves that it was with an effort he could sever the two, awaking as he did now in an unfamiliar chamber, and surrounded with those tapestries whose colossal figures seemed the phantoms of a spirit world.
He was a man in whom some vein of superstition had outlived the cold reason and the cynical mockeries of the worldly experiences and opinions in which he was steeped. A shudder of cold ran through his blood as he opened his eyes upon that dim, tranquil, and vast apartment, with the stories of the Tannhäuser legend embroidered on the walls.
‘I am he! I am he!’ he thought incoherently, watching the form of the doomed knight speeding through the gloom and snow.
‘How does the most high and honourable gentleman feel himself this morning?’ asked of him, in German, a tall white-haired woman, who might have stepped down from an old panel of Metzu.
The simple commonplace question roused him from the mists of his fancies and fears, and realised to him the bare fact that he was a guest, unbidden, in the walls of Szaravola.
The physician also drew near his bed to question him; and a boy brought on a tray Rhine wine and Tokayer Ausbruck, coffee and chocolate, bread and eggs.
He broke his fast with a will, for he had eaten nothing since the day before at noon; and the Professor Greswold congratulated him on his good night’s rest, and on his happy escape from the Szalrassee.
Then he himself said, with a little confusion:
‘I saw a lady last night?’
‘Certainly, you saw our lady,’ said Greswold, with a smile.
‘What do you call her?’ he asked, eagerly.
The physician answered:
‘She is the Countess Wanda von Szalras. She is sole mistress here. But for her, my dear sir, I fear me you would be now lying in those unfathomed depths that the bravest of us fear.’
The stranger shuddered a little.
‘I was a madman to try the lake with such an overcast sky; but I had missed my road, and I was told that it lay on the other side of the water. Some peasants tried to dissuade me from crossing, but I am a good rower and swimmer too; so I set forth to pull myself over your lake.’
‘With a sky black as ink! I suppose you are used to more serene summers. Midsummer is not so different to midwinter here that you can trust to its tender mercies.’
The stranger was silent.
‘She took my gun from me in the morning,’ he said abruptly. The memory of the indignity rankled in him, and made bitter the bread and wine.
The physician laughed.
‘Were you poaching? Oh, that is almost a hanging matter in the Hohenszalras woods. Had you met Otto without our lady he would most likely have shot you without warning.’
‘Are you savages in the Tauern?’
‘Oh no; but we are very feudal still, and our forest laws have escaped alteration in this especial part of the province.’
‘She has been very hospitable to me, since my crime was so great.’
‘She is the soul of hospitality, and the Schloss is a hospice,’ said the physician. ‘When there is no town nearer than ten Austrian miles, and the nearest posting-house is at Windisch-Matrey, it is very necessary to exercise the primitive virtues; it is our compensation for our feudalism. But take some tokayer, my dear sir; you are weaker than you know. You have had a bath of ice; you had best lie still, and I will send you some journals and books.’
‘I would rather get up and go away,’ said the stranger. ‘These bruises are nothing. I will thank your lady, as you call her, and then go on my way as quickly as I may.’
‘I see you do not understand feudal ways, though you have suffered from them,’ said the doctor. ‘You shall get up if you wish; but I am certain my lady will not let you leave here to-day. The rains are falling in torrents; the roads are dangerous; a bridge has broken down over the Bürgenbach, which you must cross to get away. In a word, if you insist on departure, they will harness their best horses for you, for all the antique virtues have refuge here, and amongst them is a grand hospitality; but you will possibly kill the horses, and perhaps the postillions, and you will not even then get very far upon your way. Be persuaded by me. Wait at least until the morning dawns.’
‘I had better burden your lady with an unbidden guest than kill her horses, certainly,’ said the stranger. ‘How is she sole mistress here? Is there a Count von Szalras? Is she a widow?’
‘She has never married,’ answered Greswold; and gave his patient a brief sketch of the tragic fates of the lords of Hohenszalras, amongst whom death had been so busy.’
‘A very happy woman to be so rich, and so free!’ said the traveller, with a little impatient envy; and he added, ‘She is very handsome also; indeed, beautiful. I now remember to have heard of her in Paris. Her hand has been esteemed one of the great prizes of Europe.’
‘I think she will never marry,’ said the old man.
‘Oh, my dear doctor, who can make such at least she looks young. What age may she be?’
‘She was twenty-four years of age on Easter Day. As for happiness, when you know the Countess Wanda, you will know that she would go out as poor as S. Elizabeth, and self-dethroned like her, most willingly, could she by such a sacrifice see her brothers living around her.’
The stranger gave a little cynical laugh of utter incredulity, which dismayed and annoyed the old professor.
‘You do not know her,’ he said angrily.
‘I know humanity,’ said the other. ‘Will you kindly take all my apologies and regrets to the Countess, and give her my name; the Marquis de Sabran. She can satisfy herself as to my identity at any embassy she may care to consult.’
When he said his name, the professor gave a great cry and started from his seat.
‘Sabran!’ he echoed. ‘You edited the “Mexico”!’ he exclaimed, and gazed over his spectacles in awe and sympathy commingled at the stranger, who smiled and answered ——
‘Long ago, yes. Have you heard of it?’
‘Heard of it!’ echoed Greswold. ‘Do you take us for barbarians, sir?’ It is here, both in my small library, which is the collection of a specialist, and in the great library of the castle, which contains a million of volumes.’
‘I am twice honoured,’ said the stranger, with a smile of some irony. The good professor was a little disconcerted, and his enthusiasm was damped and cooled. He felt as much embarrassment as though he had been the owner of a discredited work.
‘May I not be permitted to congratulate you, sir?’ he said timidly. ‘To have produced that great work is to possess a t
itle to the gratitude and esteem of all educated men.’
‘You are very good,’ said Sabran, somewhat indifferently; ‘but all that is great in that book is the Marquis Xavier’s. I am but the mere compiler.’
‘The compilation, the editing of it, required no less learning than the original writer displayed, and that was immense,’ said the physician, and with all the enthusiasm of a specialist he plunged into discussion of the many notable points of a mighty intellectual labour, which had received the praise of all the cultured world.
Sabran listened courteously, but with visible weariness. ‘You are very good,’ he said at last. ‘But you will forgive me if I say that I have heard so much of the “Mexico” that I am tempted to wish I had never produced it. I did so as a duty; it was all I could do in honour of one to whom I owed far more than mere life itself.’
Greswold bowed and said no more.
‘Give me my belt,’ said the stranger to the man who waited on him; it was a leathern belt, which had been about his loins; it was made to hold gold and notes, a small six-chambered revolver, and a watch; these were all in it, and with his money was the imperial permission to shoot, which had been given, him by Franz Josef the previous autumn on the Thorstein.
‘Your Countess’ will doubtless recognise her Emperor’s signature,’ he said, as he gave the paper to the physician. ‘It will serve at least as a passport, if not as a letter of presentation.’
Réné, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, was one of those persons who illustrate the old fairy tale, of all the good gifts at birth being marred by the malison of one godmother. He had great physical beauty, personal charm, and facile talent; but his very facility was his bane. He did all things so easily and well, that he had never acquired the sterner quality of application. He was a brilliant and even profound scholar, an accomplished musician, a consummate critic of art; and was endowed, moreover, with great natural tact, taste, and correct intuition.
Being, as he was, a poor man, these gifts should have made him an eminent one or a wealthy one, but the perverse fairy who had cursed when the other had blessed him, had contrived to make all these graces and talents barren. Whether it be true or not that the world knows nothing of its greatest men, it is quite true that its cleverest men very often do nothing of importance all their lives long. He did nothing except acquire a distinct repute as a dilettante in Paris, and a renown in the clubs of being always serene and fortunate at play.
He had sworn to himself when he had been a youth to make his career worthy of his name; but the years had slipped away, and he had done nothing. He was a very clever man, and he had once set a high if a cold and selfish aim before him as his goal. But he had done worse even than fail; he had never even tried to reach it.
He was only a boulevardier; popular and admired amongst men for his ready wit and his cool courage, and by women often adored and often hated, and sometimes, by himself, thoroughly despised: never so much despised as when by simple luck at play or on the Bourse he made the money which slid through his fingers with rapidity.
All he had in the world were the wind-torn oaks and the sea-washed rocks of a bleak and lonely Breton village, and a few hundred thousand francs’ worth of pictures, porcelains, arms, and bibelots, which had accumulated in his rooms on the Boulevard Haussmann, bought at the Drouot in the forenoons after successful play at night. Only two things in him were unlike the men whose associate he was: he was as temperate as an Arab, seldom even touching wine; and he was a keen mountaineer and athlete, once off the asphalte of the Boulevards. For the rest, popular though he was in the society he frequented, no living man could boast of any real intimacy with him. He had a thousand acquaintances, but he accepted no friend. Under the grace and suavity of a very courtly manner he wore the armour of a great reserve.
‘At heart you have the taciturnity and the sauvagerie of the Armorican beneath all your polished suavity,’ said a woman of his world to him once; and he did not contradict her.
Men did not quarrel with him for it: he was a fine swordsman and a dead shot: and women were allured all the more surely to him because they felt that they never really entered his life or took any strong hold on it.
Such as he was he lay now half-awake on the great bed under its amber canopy, and gazed dreamily at the colossal figures of the storied tapestry, where the Tuscan idlers of the Decamerone wore the sombre hues and the stiff and stately garb of Flemish fashion of the sixteenth century.
‘I wonder why I tried so hard to live last night! I am not in love with life,’ he thought to himself, as he slowly remembered all that had happened, and recalled the face of the lady who had leaned down to him from over the stone parapet in the play of the torchlight and lightnings. And yet life seemed good and worth having as he recalled that boiling dusky swirl of water which had so nearly swallowed him up in its anger.
He was young enough to enjoy; he was blessed with a fine constitution and admirable health, which even his own excesses had not impaired; he had no close ties to the world, but he had a frequent enjoyment of it, which made it welcome to him. The recovery of existence always enhances its savour; and as he lay dreamily recalling the sharp peril he had run, he was simply and honestly glad to be amongst living men.
He remained still when the physician had left and looked around him; in the wide hearth a fire of oak logs was burning; rain was beating against the painted panes of the oriel casements; there was old oak, old silver, old ivory in the furniture of the chamber, and the tapestries were sombre and gorgeous. It was a room of the sixteenth century; but the wine was in jugs of Bacarat glass, and a box of Turkish cigarettes stood beside them, with the Paris and Vienna newspapers. Everything had been thought of that could contribute to his comfort: he wondered if the doctor had thought of all this, or if it was due to the lady. ‘It is a magnificent hospice,’ he said to himself with a smile, and then he angrily remembered his rifle, his good English rifle, that was now sunk for ever with his little boat in the waters of the Szalrassee. ‘Why did she offer me that outrage?’ he said to himself: it went hard with him to lie under her roof, to touch her wine and bread. Yet he was aching in every limb, the bed was easy and spacious, the warmth and the silence and the aromatic scent of the burning pine-cones were alluring him to rest; he dropped off to sleep again, the same calm sleep of fatigue that had changed into repose, and nothing woke him till the forenoon was passed.
‘Good heavens! how I am trespassing on this woman’s hospitality!’ he thought as he did awake, angry with himself for having been lulled into this oblivion; and he began to rise at once, though he felt his limbs stiff and his head for the moment light.
‘Cannot I get a carriage for S. Johann? My servant is waiting for me there,’ he said to the youth attending on him, when his bath was over.
The lad smiled with amusement.
‘There are no carriages here but our lady’s, and she will not let you stir this afternoon, my lord,’ he answered in German, as he aided the stranger to put on his own linen and shooting breeches, now dry and smoothed out by careful hands.
‘But I have no coat! said the traveller in discomfiture, remembering that his coat was gone with his rifle and his powder-flask.
‘The Herr Professor thought you could perhaps manage with one of these. They were all of Count Gela’s, who was a tall man and about your make,’ said an older man-servant who had entered, and now showed him several unworn or scarcely worn suits.
‘If you could wear one of these, my lord, for this evening, we will send as soon as it is possible for your servant and your clothes to S. Johann; but it is impossible to-day, because a bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.’
‘You are all of you too good,’ said Sabran, as he essayed a coat of black velvet.
Pull of his new acquaintance and all his talents, the good man Greswold had hurried away to obey the summons of his ladies, who had desired to see him. He found them in the white room, a grand salon hung with white satin silver-fringed, and stately with whi
te marble friezes and columns, whence it took its name. It was a favourite room with the mistress of the Schloss; at either end of it immense windows, emblazoned and deeply embayed, looked out over the sublime landscape without, of which at this moment every outline was shrouded in the grey veil of an incessantly falling rain.
With humble obeisances Greswold presented the message and the credentials of her guest to Wanda von Szalras; it was the first occasion that he had had of doing so. She read the document signed by the Kaiser with a smile.
‘This is the paper which this unhappy gentleman spoke of when I arrested him as a poacher,’ she said to her aunt. ‘The Marquis de Sabran. The name is familiar to me: I have heard it before.’
‘Surely you do not forget the Pontêves-Bargême, the Ducs de Sabran?’ said the Princess, with some severity. S. Eleazar was a Comte de Sabran!’
‘I know! But it is of something nearer to us than S. Eleazar that I am thinking; there was surely some work or another which bore that name, and was much read and quoted.’
‘He edited and annotated the great “Mexico”,’ said Herr Greswold, as though all were told in that.
‘A savant?’ murmured the Princess, in some contemptuous chagrin. ‘Pray what is the “Mexico”?’
‘The grandest archæological and botanical work, the work of the finest research and most varied learning that has been produced out of Germany,’ commenced the Professor, with eagerness, but the Princess arrested him midway in his eloquence.
‘The French are all infidels, we know that; but one might have hoped that in one of the old nobility, as his name would imply, some lingering reverence for tradition remained.’
‘It is not a subversive, not a philosophic work,’ said the Professor, eagerly; but she silenced him.
‘It is a book! Why should a Marquis de Sabran write a book?’ said the Princess, with ineffable disdain.
There were all the Fathers for anyone who wanted to read: what need for any other use of printer’s type? So she was accustomed to think and to say when, scandalised, she saw the German, French, and English volumes, of which whole cases were wont to arrive at Hohenszalras for the use of Wanda von Szalras alone: works of philosophy and of science amongst them which had been denounced in the ‘Index.’