by Ouida
He would willingly have gone from under her roof without seeing her, and yet a warm and inquisitive desire impelled him to feel an unreasonable annoyance that the day was going by without his receiving any intimation that he would be allowed to enter her presence, or be expected to make his obeisances to her. When, however, the servants entered to light the many candles in his room, Hubert entered behind them, and expressed the desire of his lady that the Marquis would favour them with his presence: they were about to dine.
Sabran, standing before the mirror, saw himself colour like a boy: he knew not whether he were most annoyed or pleased. He would willingly have ridden away leaving his napoleons for the household, and seeing no more the woman who had made him ridiculous in his own eyes; yet the remembrance of her haunted him as something strange, imperious, magnetic, grave, serene, stately; vague memories of a thousand things he had heard said of her in embassies and at courts came to his mind; she had been a mere unknown name to him then; he had not listened, he had not cared, but now he remembered all he had heard; curiosity and an embarrassment wholly foreign to him struggled together in him. What could he say to a woman who had first insulted and then protected him? It would tax all the ingenuity and the tact for which he was famed. However, he only said to the major-domo, ‘I am much flattered. Express my profound gratitude to your ladies for the honour they are so good as to do me.’ Then he made his attire look as well as it could, and considering that punctuality is due from guests as well as from monarchs, he said that he was ready to follow the servant waiting for him, and did so through the many tapestried and panelled corridors by which the enormous house was traversed.
Though light was not spared at the burg it was only such light as oil and wax could give the galleries and passages; dim mysterious figures loomed from the rooms and shadows seemed to stretch away on every side to vast unknown chambers that might hold the secrets of a thousand centuries. When he was ushered into the radiance of the great white room he felt dazzled and blinded.
He felt his bruise still, and he walked with a slight lameness from a strain of his left foot, but this did not detract from the grace and distinction of his bearing, and the pallor of his handsome features became them; and when he advanced through the opened doors and bent before the chair and kissed the hands of the Princess Ottilie she thought to herself, ‘What a perfectly beautiful person. Even Wanda will have to admit that!’ Whilst Hubert, going backward, said to his regiment of under-servants: ‘Look you! since Count Gela rode out to his death at the head of the White Hussars, so grand a man as this stranger has not set foot in this house.’
He expected to see the Countess Wanda von Szalras. Instead, he saw the loveliest little old lady he had ever seen in his life, clad in a semi-conventual costume, leaning on a gold-headed cane, with clouds of fragrant old lace about her, and a cross of emeralds hung at her girdle of onyx beads, who saluted him with the ceremonious grace of that etiquette which is still the common rule of life amongst the great nobilities of the north. He hastened to respond in the same spirit with an exquisite deference of manner.
She greeted him with affable and smiling words, and he devoted himself to her with deference and gallantry, expressing all his sense of gratitude for the succour and shelter he received, with a few eloquent and elegant phrases which said enough and not too much, with a grace that it is difficult to lend to gratitude which is generally somewhat halting and uncouth.
‘His name must be in the Hof-Kalendar!’ she thought, as she replied to his protestations with her prettiest smile which, despite her sacred calling and her seventy years, was the smile of a coquette.
‘M. le Marquis,’ she said, in her tender and flute-like voice, ‘I deserve none of your eloquent thanks. Age is sadly selfish. I did nothing to rescue you, unless, indeed, Heaven heard my unworthy prayer! — and this house is not mine, nor anything in it; the owner of it, and, therefore, your châtelaine of the moment, is my grand-niece, the Countess Wanda von Szalras.’
‘That I had your intercession with Heaven, however indirectly, was far more than I deserved,’ said Sabran, still standing before her. ‘For the Countess Wanda, I have been twice in her power, and she has been very generous.’
‘She has done her duty, nothing more,’ said the Princess a little primly and petulantly, if princesses and petulance can mingle. ‘We should have scarce been Christians if we had not striven for your life. As to leaving us this day it was out of the question. The storm continues, the passes are torrents; I fear much that it will even be impossible for your servant to come from S. Johann; we could not send to Matrey even this morning for the post-bag, and they tell me the bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.’
‘I have wanted for nothing, and my Parisian rogue is quite as well yawning and smoking his days away at S. Johann,’ said Sabran. ‘Oh, Madame! how can I ever express to you all my sense of the profound obligations you have laid me under, stranger that I am!’
‘At least we were bound to atone for the incivility of the Szalrassee,’ said the Princess, with her pretty smile. ‘It is a very horrible country to live in. My niece, indeed, thinks it Arcadia, but an Arcadia subject to the most violent floods, and imprisoned in snow and frost for so many months, does not commend itself to me; no doubt it is very grand and romantic.’
The ideal of the Princess was neither grand nor romantic: it was life in the little prim, yet gay north German town in the palace of which she and all her people had been born; a little town, with red roofs, green alleys, straight toylike streets, clipped trees, stiff soldiers, set in the midst of a verdant plain; flat and green, and smooth as a card table.
The new comer interested her; she was quickly won by personal beauty, and he possessed this in a great degree. It was a face unlike any she had ever seen; it seemed to her to bear mystery with it and melancholy, and she loved both those things; perhaps because she had never met with either out of the pages of German poets and novelists of France. Those who are united to them in real life find them uneasy bedfellows.
‘Perhaps he is some Kronprinz in disguise,’ she thought with pleasure; but then she sadly recollected that she knew every crown prince that there was in Europe. She would have liked to have asked him many questions, but her high-breeding was still stronger than her curiosity; and a guest could never be interrogated.
Dinner was announced as served.
‘My niece, the Countess Wanda,’ said the Princess, with a little reluctance visible in her hesitation, ‘will dine in her own rooms. She begs you to excuse her; she is tired from the storm last night.’
‘She will not dine with me,’ thought Sabran, with the quick intuition natural to him.
‘You leave me nothing to regret, Princess,’ he said readily, with a sweet smile, as he offered his arm to this lovely little lady, wrapped in laces fine as cobweb, with her great cross of emeralds pendent from her rosary.
A woman is never too old to be averse to the thought that she can charm; very innocent charming was that of the Princess Ottilie, and she thought with a sigh if she had married — if she had had such a son; yet she was not insensible to the delicate compliment which he paid her in appearing indifferent to the absence of his châtelaine and quite content with her own presence.
Throughout dinner in that great hall, he, sitting on her right hand, amused her, flattered her with that subtlest of all flattery, interest and attention; diverted her with gay stories of worlds unknown to her, and charmed her with his willingness to listen to her lament over the degeneracy of mankind and of manners. After a few words of courtesy as to his hostess’s absence he seemed not even to remember that Wanda von Salzras was absent from the head of her table.
‘And I have said that she was tired! She who is never more tired than the eagles are! May heaven forgive me the untruth!’ thought the Princess more than once during the meal, which was long and magnificent, and at which her guest ate sparingly and drank but little.
‘You have no appetite?’ she said regretfully.
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‘Pardon me, I have a good one,’ he answered her; ‘but I have always been content to eat little and drink less. It is the secret of health; and my health is all my riches.’
She looked at him with interest.
‘I should think your riches in that respect are inexhaustible?’
He smiled.
‘Oh yes! I have never had a day’s illness, except once, long ago in the Mexican swamps, a marsh fever and a snake-bite.’
‘You have travelled much?’
‘I have seen most of the known world, and a little of the unknown,’ he answered. ‘I am like Ulysses; only there will be not even a dog to welcome me when my wanderings are done.’
‘Have you no relatives?’
‘None!’ he added, with an effort. Everyone is dead; dead long ago. I have been long alone, and I am very well used to it.’
‘But you must have troops of friends?’
‘Oh! — friends who will win my last napoleon at play, or remember me as long as they meet me every day on the boulevards? Yes, I have many of that sort, but they are not worth Ulysses’ dog.’
He spoke carelessly, without any regard to the truth as far as it went, but no study would have made him more apt to coin words to attract the sympathy of his listeners.
‘He is unfortunate,’ she thought. ‘How often beauty brings misfortune. My niece must certainly see him. I wish he belonged to the Pontêves-Bargêmes!’
Not to have a name that she knew, one of those names that fill all Europe as with the trump of an archangel, was to be as one maimed or deformed in the eyes of the Princess, an object for charity, not for intercourse.
‘Your title is of Brittany, I think?’ she said a little wistfully, and as he answered something abruptly in the affirmative, she solaced herself once more with the remembrance that there was a good deal of petite noblesse, honourable enough, though not in the ‘Almanac de Gotha,’ which was a great concession from her prejudices, invented on the spur of the interest that he excited in her imagination.
‘I never saw any person so handsome,’ she thought, as she glanced at his face; while he in return thought that this silver-haired, soft-cheeked, lace-enwrapped Holy Mother was jolie à croquer in the language of those boulevards, which had been his nursery and his palestrum. She was so kind to him, she was so gracious and graceful, she chatted with him so frankly and pleasantly, and she took so active an interest in his welfare that he was touched and grateful. He had known many women, many young ones and gay ones; he had never known what the charm of a kindly and serene old age can be like in a woman who has lived with pure thoughts, and will die in hope and in faith; and this lovely old abbess, with her pretty touch of worldliness, was a study to him, new with the novelty of innocence, and of a kind of veneration. And he was careful not to let her perceive his mortification that the Countess von Szalras would not deign to dine in his presence. In truth, he thought of little else, but no trace of irritation or of absence of mind was to be seen in him as he amused the Princess, and discovered with her that they had in common some friends amongst the nobilities of Saxony, of Wurtemberg, and of Bohemia.
‘Come and take your coffee in my own room, the blue-room,’ she said to him, and she rose and took his arm. ‘We will go through the library; you saw it this morning, I imagine? It is supposed to contain the finest collection of Black Letter in the empire, or so we think.’
And she led him through the great halls and up a few low stairs into a large oval room lined with oaken bookcases, which held the manuscripts, missals, and volumes of all dates which had been originally gathered together by one of the race who had been also a bishop and a cardinal.
The library was oak-panelled, and had an embossed and emblazoned ceiling; silver lamps of old Italian trasvorato work, hung by silver chains, and shed a subdued clear light; beneath the porphyry sculptures of the hearth a fire of logs was burning, for the early summer evening here is chill and damp; there were many open fireplaces in Hohenszalras, introduced there by a chilly Provençal princess, who had wedded a Szalras in the seventeenth century, and who had abolished the huge porcelain stoves in many apartments in favour of grand carved mantel-pieces, and gilded andirons, and sweet smelling simple fires of aromatic woods, such as made glad the sombre hotels and lonely châteaux of the Prance of the Bourbons.
Before this hearth, with the dogs stretched on the black bearskin rugs, his hostess was seated; she had dined in a small dining-hall opening out of the library, and was sitting reading with a shaded light behind her. She rose with astonishment, and, as he fancied, anger upon her face as she saw him enter, and stood in her full height beneath the light of one of the silver hanging lamps. She wore a gown of olive-coloured velvet, with some pale roses fastened amongst the old lace at her breast; she had about her throat several rows of large pearls, which she always wore night and day that they should not change their pure whiteness by disuse; she looked very stately, cold, annoyed, disdainful, as she stood there without speaking.
‘It is my niece, the Countess von Szalras,’ said the Princess to her companion in some trepidation. ‘Wanda, my love, I was not aware you were here; I thought you were in your own octagon room; allow me to make you acquainted with your guest, whom you have already received twice with little ceremony I believe.’
The trifling falsehoods were trippingly but timidly said; the Princess’s blue eyes sought consciously her niece’s forgiveness with a pathetic appeal, to which Wanda, who loved her tenderly, could not be long obdurate. Had it been any other than Mme. Ottilie who had thus brought by force into her presence a stranger whom she had marked her desire to avoid, the serene temper of the mistress of the Hohenszalrasburg would not have preserved its equanimity, and she would have quitted her library on the instant, sweeping a grand courtesy which should have been greeting and farewell at once to one too audacious. But the shy entreating appeal of the Princess’s regard touched her heart, and the veneration she had borne from childhood to one so holy, and so sacred by years of grace, checked in her any utterance or sign of annoyance.
Sabran, meanwhile, standing by in some hesitation and embarrassment, bowed low with consummate grace, and a timidity not less graceful.
She advanced a step and held her hand out to him.
‘I fear I have been inhospitable, sir,’ she said to him in his own tongue. ‘Are you wholly unhurt? You had a rough greeting from Hohenszalras.’
He took the tip of her fingers on his own and bent over them as humbly as over an empress’s.
Well used to the world as he was, to its ceremonies, courts, and etiquettes, he was awed by her as if he were a youth; he lost his ready aptness of language, and his easy manner of adaptability.
‘I am but a vagrant, Madame!’ he murmured, as he bowed over her hand. ‘I have no right even to your charity!’
For the moment it seemed to her as if he spoke in bitter and melancholy earnest, and she looked at him in a passing surprise that changed into a smile.
‘You were a poacher certainly, but that is forgiven. My aunt has taken you under her protection; and you had the Kaiser’s already: with such a dual shelter you are safe. Are you quite recovered?’ she said, bending her grave glance upon him. ‘I have to ask your pardon for my great negligence in not sending one of my men to guide you over the pass to Matrey.’
‘Nay, if you had done so I should not have enjoyed the happiness of being your debtor,’ he replied, meeting her close gaze with a certain sense of confusion most rare with him; and added a few words of eloquent gratitude, which she interrupted almost abruptly:
‘Pray carry no such burden of imaginary debt, and have no scruples in staying as long as you like; we are a mountain refuge, use it as you would a monastery. In the winter we have many travellers. We are so entirely in the heart of the hills that we are bound by all Christian laws to give a refuge to all who need it. But how came you on the lake last evening? Could you not read the skies?’
He explained his own folly and hardihood,
and added, with a glance at her, ‘The offending rifle is in the Szalrassee. It was my haste to quit your dominions that made me venture on to the lake. I had searched in vain for the high road that you had told me of, and I thought if I crossed the lake I should be off your soil.’
‘No; for many leagues you would not have been off it,’ she answered him. ‘Our lands are very large, and, like the Archbishopric of Berchtesgarten, are as high as they are broad. Our hills are very dangerous for strangers, especially until the snows of the passes have all melted. I repented me too late that I did not send a jäger with you as a guide.’
‘All is well that ends well,’ said the Princess. ‘Monsieur is not the worse for his bath in the lake, and we have the novelty of an incident and of a guest, who we will hope in the future will become a friend.’
‘Madame, if I dared hope that I should have much to live for!’ said the stranger, and the Princess smiled sweetly upon him.
‘You must have very much to live for, as it is. Were I a man, and as young as you, and as favoured by nature, I am afraid I should be tempted to live for — myself.’
‘And I am most glad when I can escape from so poor a companion,’ said he, with a melancholy in the accent and a passing pain that was not assumed.
Before this gentle and gracious old woman in this warm and elegant chamber he felt suddenly that he was a wanderer — perhaps an outcast.