by Ouida
‘Dear mother,’ said the Countess Wanda, ‘I have read the “Mexico”: it is a grand monument raised to a dead man’s memory out of his own labours by one of his own descendants — his only descendant, if I remember aright.’
‘Indeed,’ said the Princess, unconvinced. ‘I know those scientific works by repute; they always consider the voyage of a germ of moss, carried on an aerolite through an indefinite space for a billion of ages, a matter much easier of credence than the “Life of St. Jerome.” I believe they call it sporadic transmission; they call typhus fever the same.’
‘There is nothing of that in the “Mexico”: it is a very fine work on the archæology and history of the country, and on its flora.’
‘I should have supposed a Marquis de Sabran a gentleman,’ said the Princess, whom no precedent from the many monarchs who have been guilty of inferior literature could convince that literature was other than a trade much like shoemaking: at its best a sort of clerk’s quill-driving, to be equally pitied and censured.
Here Greswold, who valued his post and knew his place too well to defend either literature or sporadic germs, timidly ventured to suggest that the Marquis might be well known amongst the nobility of western France, although not of that immense distinction which finds its chronicle in the Hof-Kalender. The Princess smiled.
‘Petite noblesse. You mean petite noblesse, my good Greswold? But even the petite noblesse need not write books?’
When, however, the further question arose of inviting the stranger to come to their dinner-table, it was the haughtier Princess who advocated the invitation; the mistress of the house demurred. She thought that all requirements of courtesy and hospitality would be fulfilled by allowing him to dine in his own apartments.
‘We do not know him,’ she urged. ‘No doubt he may very well be what he says, but it is not easy to refer to an embassy while the rains are making an island of the Tauern! Nay, dear mother, I am not suspicious; but I think, as we are two women alone, we can fulfil all obligations of hospitality towards this gentleman without making him personally acquainted with ourselves.’
‘That is really very absurd. It is acting as if Hohenszalras were a gasthof,’ said the Princess, with petulance. ‘It is not so often that we have any relief to the tedium with which you are pleased to surround yourself that we should be required to shut ourselves from any chance break in it. Of course, if you send this person his dinner to his own rooms, he will feel hurt, mortified; he will go away, probably on foot, rather than remain where he is insulted. Breton nobility is not very eminent, but it is very proud; it is provincial, territorial; but every one knows it is ancient, and usually of the most loyal traditions alike to Church and State. I should be the last person to advocate making a friendship, or even an acquaintance, without the fullest inquiry; but when it is a mere question of a politeness for twenty-four hours, which can entail no consequences, then I must confess that I think prejudices should yield before the obligations of courtesy. But of course, my love, decide as you will: you are mistress.’
The Countess Wanda smiled, and did not press her own opposition. She perceived that the mind of her aunt was full of vivid and harmless curiosity.
In the end she suggested that the Princess should represent her, and receive the foreign visitor with all due form and ceremony; but she herself was still indisposed to admit a person of whose antecedents she had no positive guarantee so suddenly and entirely into her intimacy.
‘You are extraordinarily suspicious,’ said the elder lady, pettishly. ‘If he were a pedlar or a colporteur, you would be willing to talk with him.’
‘Pedlars and colporteurs cannot take any social advantage of one’s conversation afterwards,’ replied her niece. ‘We are not usually invaded by men of rank here; so the precedent may not be perilous. Have your own way, mother mine.’
The Princess demurred, but finally accepted the compromise; reflecting that if this stranger were to dine alone with her, she would be able to ascertain much more about him than if Wanda, who had been created void of all natural curiosity, and who would have been capable of living with people twelve months without asking them a single question, would render it possible to do were she present.
Meanwhile, the physician hurried back to his new friend, who had a great and peculiar interest for him as the editor of the “Mexico”, and offered him, with the permission of the Countess von Szalras, to wile away the chill and gloomy day by an inspection of the Schloss.
Joachim Greswold was a very learned and shrewd man, whom poverty and love of tranquil opportunities of study had induced to bury himself in the heart of the Glöckner mountains. He had already led a long, severe, and blameless life of deep devotion and hard privation, when the post of private physician at Hohenszalras in general, and to the Princess Ottilie in especial, had been procured for him by the interest of Prince Lilienhöhe. He had had many sorrows, trials, and disappointments, which made the simple routine and the entire solitude of his existence here welcome to him. But he was none the less delighted to meet any companion of culture and intelligence to converse with, and in his monotonous and lonely life it was a rare treat to be able to exchange ideas with one fresh from the intellectual movements of the outer world.
The Professor found, not to his surprise since he had read the “Mexico”, that his elegant grand seigneur knew very nearly as much as he did of botany and of comparative anatomy; that he had travelled nearly all over the world, and travelled to much purpose, and knew many curious things of the flora of the Rio Grande, whilst it appeared that he possessed in his cabinets in Paris a certain variety of orchid that the doctor had always longed to obtain. He was entirely won over when Sabran, to whom the dried flower was very indifferent, promised to send it to him. The French Marquis had not Greswold’s absolute love of science; he had studied every thing that had come to his hand, because he had a high intelligence, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge; and he had no other kind of devotion to it; when he had penetrated its mysteries, it lost all interest for him.
At any rate he knew enough to make him an enchanting companion to a learned man who was all alone in his learning, and received little sympathy in it from anyone near him.
‘What a grand house to be shut up in the heart of the mountains!’ said Sabran, with a sigh. ‘I do believe what romance there still is in the world does lie in these forests of Austria, which have all the twilight and the solitude that would suit Merlin or the Sleeping Beauty better than anything we have in France, except, indeed, here and there an old château like Chenonceaux, or Maintenon.’
‘The world has not spoilt us as yet,’ said the doctor. ‘We see few strangers. Our people are full of old faiths, old loyalties, old traditions. They are a sturdy and yet tender people. They are as fearless as their own steinbock, and they are as reverent as saints were in monastic days. Our mountains are as grand as the Swiss ones, but, thank Heaven, they are unspoilt and little known. I tremble when I think they have begun to climb the Gross Glöckner; all the mystery and glory of our glaciers will vanish when they become mere points of ascension. The alpenstock of the tourist is to the everlasting hills what railway metals are to the plains. Thank God! the few railroads we have are hundreds of miles asunder.’
‘You are a reactionist, Doctor?’
‘I am an old man, and I have learned the value of repose,’ said Greswold. ‘You know we are called a slow race. It is only the unwise amongst us who have quicksilver in their brains and toes.’
‘You have gold in the former, at least,’ said Sabran, kindly, ‘and I dare say quicksilver is in your feet, too, when there is a charity to be done?’
Herr Joachim, who was simple in the knowledge of mankind, though shrewd in mother-wit, coloured a little with pleasure. How well this stranger understood him!
The day went away imperceptibly and agreeably to the physician and to the stranger in this pleasant rambling talk; whilst the rain poured down in fury on the stone terraces and green lawns without,
and the Szalrassee was hidden under a veil of fog.
‘Am I not to see her at all?’ thought Sabran. He did not like to express his disquietude on that subject to the physician, and he was not sure himself whether he most desired to ride away without meeting the serene eyes of his châtelaine, or to be face to face with her once more.
He stood long before her portrait, done by Carolus Duran; she wore in it a close-fitting gown of white velvet, and held in her hand a great Spanish hat with white plumes; the two hounds were beside her; the attitude had a certain grandeur and gravity in it which were very impressive.
‘This was painted last year,’ said Greswold, ‘at the Princess’s request. It is admirably like — —’
‘It is a noble picture,’ said Sabran. ‘But what a very proud woman she looks!’
‘Blood tells,’ said Greswold, ‘far more than most people know or admit. It is natural that my Lady, with the blood in her of so many mighty nobles, who had the power of judgment and chastisement over whole provinces, should be sometimes disposed to exercise too despotic a will, to be sometimes contemptuous of the dictates of modern society, which sends the princess and the peasant alike to a law court for sole redress of their wrongs. She is at times irreconcilable with the world as it stands; she is the representative and descendant in a direct line of arrogant and omnipotent princes. That she combines with that natural arrogance and instinct of dominion a very beautiful pitifulness and even humility is a proof of the chastening influence of religious faith on the nature of women; we are too apt to forget that, in our haste to destroy the Church. Men might get on perhaps very well without a religion of any kind; but I tremble to think what their mothers and their mistresses would become.’
They passed the morning in animated discussion, and as it drew to a close, the good doctor did not perceive how adroitly his new acquaintance drew out from him all details of the past and present of Hohenszalras, and of the tastes and habits of its châtelaine, until he knew all that there was to be known of that pure and austere life.
‘You may think her grief for her brother Bela’s death — for all her brothers’ deaths — a morbid sentiment,’ said the doctor as he spoke of her. ‘But it is not so — no. It is, perhaps, overwrought; but no life can be morbid that is so active in duty, so untiring in charity, so unsparing of itself. Her lands and riches, and all the people dependent on her, are to the Countess Wanda only as so much trust, for which hereafter she will be responsible to Bela and to God. You and I may smile, you and I, who are philosophers, and have settled past dispute that the human life has no more future than the snail-gnawed cabbage, but yet — yet, my dear sir, one cannot deny that there is something exalted in such a conception of duty; and — of this I am convinced — that on the character of a woman it has a very ennobling influence.’
‘No doubt. But has she renounced all her youth? Does she mean never to go into the world or to marry?’
‘I am quite sure she has made no resolve of the sort,’ But I do not think she will ever alter. She has refused many great alliances. Her temperament is serene, almost cold; and her ideal it would be difficult, I imagine, for any mortal man to realise.’
‘But when a woman loves — —’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Herr Joachim, rather drily. ‘If the aloe flower! —— Love does not I think possess any part of the Countess Wanda’s thoughts or desires. She fancies it a mere weakness.’
‘A woman can scarcely be amiable without that weakness.’
‘No. Perhaps she is not precisely what we term amiable. She is rather too far also from human emotions and human needs. The women of the house of Szalras have been mostly very proud, silent, brave, and resolute; great ladies rather than lovable wives. Luitgarde von Szalras held this place with only a few archers and spearmen against Heinrich Jasomergott in the twelfth century, and he raised the siege after five months. “She is not a woman, nor human, she is a kuttengeier,” he said, as he retreated into his Wiener Wald. All the great monk-vultures and the gyps and the pygargues have been sacred all through the Hohe Tauern since that year.’
‘And I was about to shoot a kuttengeier — now I see that my offence was beyond poaching, it was high treason almost!’
‘I heard the story from Otto. He would have hanged you cheerfully. But I hope,’ said the doctor, with a pang of misgiving, ‘that I have not given you any false impression of my Lady, as cold and hard and unwomanly. She is full of tenderness of a high order; she is the noblest, most truthful, and most generous nature that I have ever known clothed in human form, and if she be too proud — well, it is a stately sin, pardonable in one who has behind her eleven hundred years of fearless and unblemished honour.’
‘I am a socialist,’ said Sabran, a little curtly; then added, with a little laugh, ‘Though I believe not in rank, I do believe in race.’
‘Bon sang ne peut mentir,’ murmured the old physician; the fair face of Sabran changed slightly.
‘Will you come and look over the house?’ said the Professor, who noticed nothing, and only thought of propitiating the owner of the rare orchid. ‘There is almost as much to see as in the Burg at Vienna. Everything has accumulated here undisturbed for a thousand years. Hohenszalras has been besieged, but never deserted or dismantled.
‘It is a grand place!’ said Sabran, with a look of impatience. ‘It seems intolerable that a woman should possess it all, while I only own a few wind-blown oaks in the wilds of Finisterre.’
‘Ah, ah, that is pure socialism!’ said the doctor, with a little chuckle. ‘Ote-toi, que je m’y mette. That is genuine Liberalism all the world over.’
‘You are no communist yourself, doctor?’
‘No,’ said Herr Joachim, simply. ‘All my studies lead me to the conviction that equality is impossible, and were it possible, it would be hideous. Variety, infinite variety, is the beneficent law of the world’s life. Why, in that most perfect of all societies, the beehive, flawless mathematics are found co-existent with impassable social barriers and unalterable social grades.’
Sabran laughed good-humouredly.
‘I thought at least the bees enjoyed an undeniable Republic.’
‘A Republic with helots, sir, like Sparta. A Republic will always have its helots. But come and wander over the castle. Come first and see the parchments.’
‘Where are the ladies?’ asked Sabran, wistfully.
‘The Princess is at her devotions and taking tisane. I visited her this morning; she thinks she has a sore throat. As for our Lady, no one ever disturbs her or knows what she is doing. When she wants any of us ordinary folks, we are summoned. Sometimes we tremble. You know this alone is an immense estate, and then there is a palace at the capital, and one at Salzburg, not to speak of the large estates in Hungary and the mines in Galicia. All these our Lady sees after and manages herself. You can imagine that her secretary has no easy task, and that secretary is herself; for she does not believe in doing anything well by others.’
‘A second Maria Theresa!’ said Sabran.
‘Not dissimilar, perhaps,’ said the doctor, nettled at the irony of the tone. ‘Only where our great Queen sent thousands out to their deaths the Countess von Szalras saves many lives. There are no mines in the world — I will make bold to say — where there is so much comfort and so little peril as those mines of hers in Stanislaw. She visited them three years hence. But I forget, you are a stranger, and as you do not share our cultus for the Grafin, cannot care to hear its Canticles. Come to the muniment-room; you shall see some strange parchments.’
‘Heavens, how it rains!’ said Sabran, as they left his chambers. ‘Is that common here?’
‘Very common, indeed!’ said the doctor, with a laugh. ‘We pass two-thirds of the year between snow and water. But then we have compensation. Where will you see such grass, such forests, such gardens, when the summer sun does shine?’
The Marquis de Sabran charmed him, and as they wandered over the huge castle the physician delightedly displayed his
own erudition, and recognised that of his companion. The Hohenszalrasburg was itself like some black-letter record of old South-German history; it was a chronicle written in stone and wood and iron. The brave old house, like a noble person, contained in itself a liberal education, and the stranger whom through an accident it sheltered was educated enough to comprehend and estimate it at its due value. In his passage through it he won the suffrages of the household by his varied knowledge and correct appreciation. In the stables his praises of the various breeds of horses there commended itself by its accuracy to Ulrich, the stallmeister, not less than a few difficult shots in the shooting gallery proved his skill to his enemy of the previous day, Otto, the jägermeister. Not less did he please Hubert, who was learned in such things, with his cultured admiration of the wonderful old gold and silver plate, the Limoges dishes and bowls, the Vienna and Kronenthal china; nor less the custodian of the pictures, a collection of Flemish and German masters, with here and there a modern capolavoro, hung all by themselves in a little vaulted gallery which led into a much larger one consecrated to tapestries, Flemish, French, and Florentine.
When twilight came, and the greyness of the rain-charged atmosphere deepened into the dark of night, Sabran had made all living things at the castle his firm friends, down to the dogs of the house, save and except the ladies who dwelt in it. Of them he had had no glimpse. They kept their own apartments. He began to feel some fresh embarrassment at remaining another night beneath a roof the mistress of which did not deign personally to recognise his presence. A salon hung with tapestries opened out of the bedchamber allotted to him; he wondered if he were to dine there like a prisoner of state.
He felt an extreme reluctance united to a strong curiosity to meet again the woman who had treated him with such cool authority and indifference as a common poacher in her woods. His cheek tingled still, whenever he thought of the manner in which, at her signal, his hands had been tied, and his rifle taken from him. She was the representative of all that feudal, aristocratic, despotic, dominant spirit of a dead time which he, with his modern, cynical, reckless Parisian Liberalism, most hated, or believed that he hated. She was Austria Felix personified, and he was a man who had always persuaded himself and others that he was a socialist, a Philippe Egalité. And this haughty patrician had mortified him and then had benefited and sheltered him!