by Ouida
‘You need not use the French language with him, Wanda,’ interrupted the Princess. ‘The Marquis speaks admirable German: it is impossible to speak better.’
‘We will speak our own tongue then,’ said Wanda, who always regarded her aunt as though she were a petted and rather wayward child. ‘Are you quite rested, M. de Sabran? and quite unhurt?’ I did not dine with you. It must have seemed churlish. But I am very solitary in my habits, and my aunt entertains strangers so much better than I do that I grow more hermit-like every year.’
He smiled; he thought there was but little of the hermit in this woman’s supreme elegance and dignity as she stood beside her hearth with its ruddy, fitful light playing on the great pearls at her throat and burnishing into gold the bronze shadows of her velvet gown.
‘The Princess has told me that you are cruel to the world,’ he answered her. ‘But it is natural with such a kingdom that you seldom care to leave it.’
‘It is a kingdom of snow for seven months out of the year,’ said the Princess peevishly, ‘and a water kingdom the other five. You see what it is to-day, and this is the middle of May!’
‘I think one might well forget the rain and every other ill between these four walls,’ said the French Marquis, as he glanced around him, and then slowly let his eyes rest on his châtelaine.
‘It is a grand library,’ she answered him; ‘but I must warn you that there is nothing more recent in it than Diderot and Descartes. The cardinal — Hugo von Szalras — who collected it lived in the latter half of last century, and since his day no Szalras has been bookish save myself. The cardinal, however, had all the MSS. and the black letters, or nearly all, ready to his hand; what he added is a vast library of science and history, and he also got together some of the most beautiful missals in the world. Are you curious in such things?’
She rose as she spoke, and unlocked one of the doors of the oak bookcase and brought out an ivory missal carved by the marvellous Prönner of Klagenfurt, with the arms of the Szalras on one side of it and those of a princely German house on the other.
‘That was the nuptial missal of Georg von Szalras and Ida Windisgratz in 1501,’ she said; ‘and these are all the other marriage-hours of our people, if you care to study them’; and in that case next to this there is a wonderful Evangelistarium, with miniatures of Angelico’s. But I see they tell all their stories to you; I see by the way you touch them that you are a connoisseur.’
‘I fear I have studied them chiefly at the sales of the Rue Drouot,’ said Sabran, with a smile; but he had a great deal of sound knowledge on all arts and sciences, and a true taste which never led him wrong. With an illuminated chronicle in his hand, or a book of hours on his knee, he conversed easily, discursively, charmingly, of the early scribes and the early masters; of monkish painters and of church libraries; of all the world has lost, and of all aid that art had brought to faith.
He talked well, with graceful and well-chosen language, with picturesque illustration, with a memory that never was at fault for name or date, or apt quotation; he spoke fluent and eloquent German, in which there was scarcely any trace of foreign accent; and he disclosed without effort the resources of a cultured and even learned mind.
The antagonism she had felt against the poacher of her woods melted away as she listened and replied to him; there was a melody in his voice and a charm in his manner that it was not easy to resist; and with the pale lights from the Italian lamp which swung near upon the fairness of his face she reluctantly owned that her aunt had been right: he was singularly handsome, with that uncommon and grand cast of beauty which in these days is rarer than it was in the times of Vandyck and of Velasquez — for manners and moods leave their trace on the features, and this age is not great.
The Princess in, her easy-chair, for once not sleeping after dinner, listened to her and thought to herself, ‘She is angry with me; but how much better it is to talk with a living being than to pass the evening over a philosophical treatise, or the accounts of her schools, or her stables!’
Sabran having conquered the momentary reluctance and embarrassment which had overcome him in the presence of the woman to whom he owed both an outrage and a rescue, endeavoured, with all the skill he possessed, to interest and beguile her attention. He knew that she was a great lady, a proud woman, a recluse, and a student, and a person averse to homage and flattery of every kind; he met her on the common ground of art and learning, and could prove himself her equal at all times, even occasionally her master. When he fancied she had enough of such serious themes he spoke of music. There was a new opera then out at Paris, of which the theme was as yet scarcely known. He looked round the library and said to her:
‘Were there an organ here or a piano I could give you some idea of the motive; I can recall most of it.’
‘There are both in my own room. It is near here,’ she said to him. ‘Will you come?’
Then she led the way across the gallery, which alone separated the library from that octagon room which was so essentially her own where all were hers. The Princess accompanied her: content as a child is who has put a light to a slow match that leads it knows not whither. ‘She must approve of him, or she would not take him there,’ thought the wise Princess.
‘Go and play to us,’ said Wanda von Szalras, as her guest entered the sacred room. ‘I am sure you are a great musician; you speak of music as we only speak of what we love.’
‘What do you love?’ he wondered mutely, as he sat down before the grand piano and struck a few chords. He sat down and played without prelude one of the most tender and most grave of Schubert’s sonatas. It was subtle, delicate, difficult to interpret, but he gave it with consummate truth of touch and feeling. He had always loved German music best. He played on and on, dreamily, with a perfection of skill that was matched by his tenderness of interpretation.
‘You are a great artist,’ said his hostess, as he paused.
He rose and approached her.
‘Alas! no, I am only an amateur,’ he answered her. ‘To be an artist one must needs have immense faith in one’s art and in oneself: I have no faith in anything. An artist steers straight to one goal; I drift.’
‘You have drifted to wise purpose — — ‘You must have studied much?’
‘In my youth. Not since. An artist! Ah! how I envy artists! They believe; they aspire; even if they never attain, they are happy, happy in their very torment, and through it, like lovers.’
‘But your talent — —’
‘Ah, Madame, it is only talent; it is nothing else. The feu sacré is wanting.’
She looked at him with some curiosity.
‘Perhaps the habit of the world has put out that fire: it often does. But if even it be only talent, what a beautiful talent it is! To carry all that store of melody safe in your memory — it is like having sunlight and moonlight ever at command.’
Lizst had more than once summoned the spirits of Heaven to his call there in that same room in Hohenszalras; and since his touch no one had ever made the dumb notes speak as this stranger could do, and the subdued power of his voice added to the melody he evoked. The light of the lamps filled with silvery shadows the twilight of the chamber; the hues of the tapestries, of the ivories, of the gold and silver work, of the paintings, of the embroideries, made a rich chiaro-oscuro of colour; the pine cones and the dried thyme burning on the hearth shed an aromatic smell on the air; there were large baskets and vases full of hothouse roses and white lilies from the gardens; she sat by the hearth, left in shadow except where the twilight caught the gleam of her pearls and the shine of her eyes; she listened, the jewels on her hand glancing like little stars as she slowly waved to and fro a feather screen in rhythm with what he sang or played: so might Mary Stuart have looked, listening to Rizzio or Ronsard. ‘She is a queen!’ he thought, and he sang —
‘Si j’étais Roi!’
‘Go on!’ she said, as he paused; he had thrown eloquence and passion into the song.
‘Shall I not tire you?’
‘That is only a phrase! Save when Liszt passes by here I never hear such music as yours.’
‘He obeyed her, and played and sang many and very different things.
At last he rose a little abruptly.
Two hours had gone by since they had entered the octagon chamber.
‘It would be commonplace to thank you,’ she murmured with a little hesitation. ‘You have a great gift; one of all gifts the most generous to others.’
He made a gesture of repudiation, and walked across to a spinet of the fifteenth century, inlaid with curious devices by Martin Pacher of Brauneck, and having a painting of his in its lid.
‘What a beautiful old box,’ he said, as he touched it. ‘Has it any sound, I wonder? If one be disposed to be sad, surely of all sad things an old spinet is the saddest! To think of the hands that have touched, of the children that have danced to it, of the tender old ballads that have been sung to the notes that to us seem so hoarse and so faulty! All the musicians dead, dead so long ago, and the old spinet still answering when anyone calls! Shall I sing you a madrigal to it?’
Very tenderly, very lightly, he touched the ivory keys of the painted toy of the ladies so long dead and gone, and he sang in a minor key the sweet, sad, quaint poem: —
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
That ballad of fair women echoed softly through the stillness of the chamber, touched with the sobbing notes of the spinet, even as it might have been in the days of its writer:
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
The chords of the old music-box seemed to sigh and tremble with remembrance. Where were they, all the beautiful dead women, all the fair imperious queens, all the loved, and all the lovers? Where were they? The snow had fallen through so many white winters since that song was sung — so many! so many!
The last words thrilled sadly and sweetly through the silence.
He rose and bowed very low.
‘I have trespassed too long on your patience, madame; I have the honour to wish you goodnight.’
Wanda von Szalras was not a woman quickly touched to any emotion, but her eyelids were heavy with a mist of unshed tears, as she raised them and looked up from the fire, letting drop on her lap the screen of plumes.
‘If there be a Lorelei in our lake, no wonder from envy she tried to drown you,’ she said, with a smile that cost her a little effort. Good-night, sir; should you wish to leave us in the morning, Hubert will see you reach S. Johann safely and as quickly as can be.’
‘Your goodness overwhelms me,’ he murmured. ‘I can never hope to show my gratitude — —’
‘There is nothing to be grateful for,’ she said quickly. ‘And if there were, you would have repaid it: you have made a spinet, silent for centuries, speak, and speak to our hearts. Good-night, sir; may you have good rest and a fair journey!’
When he had bowed himself out, and the tapestry of the door had closed behind him, she rose and looked at a clock.
‘It is actually twelve!’
‘Acknowledge at least that he has made the evening pass well!’ said the Princess, with a little petulance and much triumph.
‘He has made it pass admirably,’ said her niece. ‘At the same time, dear aunt, I think it would have been perhaps better if you had not made a friend of a stranger.’
‘Why?’ said the Princess with some asperity.
‘Because I think we can fulfil all the duties of hospitality without doing so, and we know nothing of this gentleman.’
‘He is certainly a gentleman,’ said the Princess, with not less asperity. ‘It seems to me, my dear Wanda, that you are for once in your life — if you will pardon me the expression — ill-natured.’
The Countess Wanda smiled a little.
‘I cannot imagine myself ill-natured; but I may be so. One never knows oneself.’
‘And ungrateful,’ added the Princess. ‘When, I should like to know, have you for years reached twelve o’clock at night without being conscious of it?’
‘Oh, he sang beautifully, and he played superbly,’ said her niece, still with the same smile, balancing her ostrich-feathers. ‘But let him go on his way to-morrow; you and I cannot entertain strange men, even though they give us music like Rubenstein’s.’
‘If Egon were here — —’
‘Oh, poor Egon! I think he would not like your friend at all. They both want to shoot eagles — —’
‘Perhaps he would not like him for another reason,’ said the Princess, with a look of mystery. ‘Egon could never make the spinet speak.’
‘No; but who knows? Perhaps he can take better care of his own soul because he cannot lend one to a spinet!’
‘You are perverse, Wanda!’
‘Perverse, inhospitable, and ill-natured? I fear I shall carry a heavy burden of sins to Father Ferdinand in the morning!’
‘I wish you would not send horses to S. Johann in the morning. We never have anything to amuse us in this solemn solitary place.’
‘Dear aunt, one would think you were very indiscreet.’
‘I wish you were more so!’ said the pretty old lady with impatience, and then her hand made a sign over the cross of emeralds, for she knew that she had uttered an unholy wish. She kissed her niece with repentant tenderness, and went to her own apartments.
Wanda von Szalras, left alone in her chamber, stood awhile thoughtfully beside the fire; then she moved away and touched the yellow ivory of the spinet keys.
‘Why could he make them speak,’ she said to herself, ‘when everyone else always failed?’
CHAPTER IV.
Sabran, as he undressed himself and laid himself down under the great gold-fringed canopy of the stately bed, thought: ‘Was I only a clever comedian to-night, or did my eyes really grow wet as I sang that old song and see her face through a mist as if she and I had met in the old centuries long ago?’
He stood and looked a moment at his own reflection in the great mirror with the wax candles burning in its sconces. He was very pale.
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
The burden of it ran through his mind.
Almost it seemed to him long ago — long ago — she had been his lady and he her knight, and she had stooped to him, and he had died for her. Then he laughed a little harshly.
‘I grow that best of all actors,’ he thought, ‘an actor who believes in himself!’
Then he turned from the mirror and stretched himself on the great bed, with its carved warriors at its foot and its golden crown at its head, and its heavy amber tissues shining in the shadows. He was a sound sleeper at all times. He had slept peacefully on a wreck, in a hurricane, in a lonely hut on the Andes, as after a night of play in Paris, in Vienna, in Monaco. He had a nerve of steel, and that perfect natural constitution which even excess and dissipation cannot easily impair. But this night, under the roof of Hohenszalras, in the guest-chamber of Hohenszalras, he could not summon sleep at his will, and he lay long wide awake and restless, watching the firelight play on the figures upon the tapestried walls, where the lords and ladies of Tuscan Boccaccio and their sinful loves were portrayed in stately and sombre guise, and German costumes of the days of Maximilian.
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
The line of the old romaunt ran through his brain, and when towards dawn he did at length fall asleep it was not of Hohenszalras that he dreamed, but of wide white steppes, of a great ice-fed rolling river, of monotonous pine woods, with the gilded domes of a half eastern city rising beyond them in the pale blue air of a northern twilight.
With the early morning he awoke, resolute to get away be the weather what it would. As it chanced, the skies were heavy still, but no rain fell; the sun was faintly struggling through the great black masses of cloud; the roads might be dangerous, but they were not impassable; the bridge over the Bürgenbach might be broken, but at least Matrey could be reached, if it were not possible to go on farther to Taxenbach or S. Johann im Wald. High north,
where far away stretched the wild marshes and stony swamps of the Pinzgau (the Pinzgau so beautiful, where in its hilly district the grand Salzach rolls on its impetuous way beneath deep shade of fir-clad hills, tracks desolate as a desert of sand or stone), the sky was overcast, and of an angry tawny colour that brooded ill for the fall of night. But the skies were momentarily clear, and he desired to rid of his presence the hospitable roof beneath which he was but an alien and unbidden.
He proposed to leave on foot, but of this neither Greswold nor the major-domo would hear: they declared that such an indignity would dishonour the Hohenszalrasburg for evermore. Guests there were masters. ‘Bidden guests, perhaps,’ said Sabran, reluctantly yielding to be sped on his way by a pair of the strong Hungarian horses that he had seen and admired in their stalls. He did not venture to disturb the ladies of the castle by a request for a farewell audience at the early hour at which it was necessary he should depart if he wished to try to reach a railway the same evening, but he left two notes for them, couched in that graceful compliment of which his Parisian culture made him an admirable master, and took a warm adieu of the good physician, with a promise not to forget the orchid of the Spiritù Santo. Then he breakfasted hastily, and left the tapestried chamber in which he had dreamed of the Nibelungen Queen.
At the door he drew a ring of great value from his finger and passed it to Hubert, but the old man, thanking him, protested he dared not take it.
‘Old as I am in her service,’ he said, ‘the Countess would dismiss me in an hour if I accepted any gifts from a guest.’
‘Your lady is very severe,’ said Sabran. ‘It is happy for her she has servitors who subscribe to feudalism. If she were in Paris — —’
‘We are bound to obey,’ said the old man, simply. ‘The Countess deals with us most generously and justly. We are bound, in return, to render her obedience.’
‘All the antique virtues have indeed found refuge here!’ said Sabran; but he left the ring behind him lying on a table in the Rittersäal.