by Ouida
Four instead of two vigorous and half-broke horses from the Magyar plains bore him away in a light travelling carriage towards the Virgenthal; the household, with Herr Joachim at their head, watching with regret the travelling carriage wind up amongst the woods and disappear on the farther side of the lake. He himself looked back with a pang of envy and regret at the stately pile towering towards the clouds, with its deep red banner streaming out on the wind that blew from the northern plains.
‘Happy woman!’ he thought; ‘happy — thrice happy — to possess such dominion, such riches, and such ancestry! If I had had them I would have had the world under my foot as well!’
It was with a sense of pain that he saw the great house disappear behind its screen of mantling woods, as his horses climbed the hilly path beyond, higher and higher at every step, until all that he saw of Hohenszalras was a strip of the green lake — green as an arum leaf — lying far down below, bearing on its waters the grey willows of the Holy Isle.
‘When I am very old and weary I will come and die there,’ he thought, with a touch of that melancholy which all his irony and cynicism could not dispel from his natural temper. There were moments when he felt that he was but a lonely and homeless wanderer on the face of the earth, and this was one of those moments, as, alone, he went upon his way along the perilous path, cut along the face of precipitous rocks, passing over rough bridges that spanned deep defiles and darkening ravines, clinging to the side of a mountain as a swallow’s nest clings to the wall of a house, and running high on swaying galleries above dizzy depths, where nameless torrents plunged with noise and foam into impenetrable chasms. The road had been made in the fifteenth century by the Szalras lords themselves, and the engineering of it was bold and vigorous though rude, and kept in sound repair, though not much changed.
He had left a small roll of paper lying beside the ring in the knight’s hall. Hubert took them both to his mistress when, a few hours later, he was admitted to her presence. Opening the paper she saw a roll of a hundred napoleons, and on the paper was written, ‘There can be no poor where the Countess von Szalras rules. Let these be spent in masses for the dead.’
‘What a delicate and graceful sentiment,’ said the Princess Ottilie, with vivacity and emotion.
‘It is prettily expressed and gracefully thought of,’ her niece admitted.
‘Charmingly — admirably!’ said the Princess, with a much warmer accent. ‘There is delicate gratitude there, as well as a proper feeling towards a merciful God.’
‘Perhaps,’ said her niece, with a little smile, ‘the money was won at play, in giving someone else what they call a culotte; what would you say then, dear aunt? Would it be purified by entering the service of the Church?’
‘I do not know why you are satirical,’ said the Princess; ‘and I cannot tell either how you can bring yourself to use Parisian bad words.’
‘I will send these to the Bishop,’ said Wanda, rolling up the gold. ‘Alas! alas! there are always poor. As for the ring, Hubert, give it to Herr Greswold, and he will transmit it to this gentleman’s address in Paris, as though it had been left behind by accident. You were so right not to take it; but my dear people are always faithful.’
These few words were dearer and more precious to the honest old man than all the jewels in the world could ever have become. But the offer of it and the gift of the gold for the Church’s use had confirmed the high opinion in which he and the whole household of Hohenszalras held the departed guest.
‘Allow at least that this evening will be much duller than last!’ said the Princess, with much irritation.
‘Your friend played admirably,’ said Wanda von Szalras, as she sat at her embroidery frame.
‘You speak as if he were an itinerant pianist! What is your dislike to your fellow creatures, when they are of your own rank, based upon? If he had been a carpet-dealer from the Defreggerthal, as I said before, you would have bidden him stay a month.’
‘Dearest aunt, be reasonable. How was it possible to keep here on a visit a French Marquis of whom we know absolutely nothing, except from himself?’
‘I never knew you were prudish!’
‘I never knew either that I was,’ said the Countess Wanda, with her serene temper unruffled. ‘I quite admit your new friend has many attractive qualities — on the surface at any rate; but if it were possible for me to be angry with you, I should be so for bringing him as you did into the library last night.’
‘You would never have known your spinet could speak if I had not. You are very ungrateful, and I should not be in the least surprised to find that he was a Crown Prince or a Grand Duke travelling incognito.’
‘We know them all, I fear.’
‘It is strange he should not have his name in the Hof-Kalender, beside the Sabran-Pontêves!’ insisted the Princess. ‘He looks prince du sang, if ever anyone did; so — —’
‘There is good blood outside your Hof Kalender, dear mother mine.’
‘Certainly,’ said the Princess, ‘he must surely be a branch of that family, though it would be more satisfactory if one found his record there. One can never know too much or too certainly of a person whom one admits to friendship.’
‘Friendship is a very strong word,’ said Wanda von Szalras, with a smile. ‘This gentleman has only made a hostelry of Hohenszalras for a day or two, and even that was made against his will. But as you are so interested in him, meine Liebe, read this little record I have found.’
She gave the Princess an old leather-bound volume of memoirs, written and published at Lausanne, by an obscure noble in his exile, in the year 1798. She had opened the book at one of the pages that narrated the fates of many nobles of Brittany, relatives or comrades of the writer.
‘And foremost amongst these,’ said this little book, ‘do I ever and unceasingly regret the loss of my beloved cousin and friend, Yvon Marquis de Sabran-Romaris. So beloved was he in his own province that even the Convention was afraid to touch him, and being poor, despite his high descent, as his father had ruined his fortunes in play and splendour at the court of Louis XV., he thought to escape the general proscription, and dwell peaceably on his rock-bound shores with his young children. But the blood madness of the time so grew upon the nation that even the love of his peasantry and his own poverty could not defend him, and one black, bitter day an armed mob from Vannes came over the heath, burning all they saw of ricks, or homesteads, or châteaux, or cots, that they might warm themselves by those leaping fires; and so they came on at last, yelling, and drunk, and furious, with torches flaming and pikes blood-stained, up through the gates of Romaris. Sabran went out to meet them, leading his eldest son by the hand, a child of eight years old. “What seek ye?” he said to them: “I am as poor as the poorest of you, and consciously have done no living creature wrong. What do you come for here?” The calm courage of him, and the glance of his eyes, which were very beautiful and proud, quelled the disordered, mouthing, blood-drunk multitude in a manner, and moved them to a sort of reverence, so that the leader of them, stepping forth, said roughly, ‘Citizen, we come to slit your throat and burn your house; but if you will curse God and the King, and cry ‘Long live the sovereign people!’ we will leave you alone, for you have been the friend of the poor. Come, say it! — come, shout it with both lungs! — it is not much to ask? Sabran put his little boy behind him with a tender gesture, then kissed the hilt of his sword, which he held unsheathed in his hand: “I sorrow for the people,” he said, “since they are misguided and mad. But I believe in my God and I love my King, and even so shall my children do after me;” and the words were scarce out of his mouth before a score of pikes ran him through the body, and the torches were tossed into his house, and he and his perished like so many gallant gentlemen of the time, a prey to the blind fury of an ingrate mob.’
The Princess Ottilie’s tender eyes moistened as she read, and she closed the volume reverently, as though it were a sacred thing.
‘I thank you for sen
ding me such a history,’ she said. ‘It does one’s soul good in these sad, bitter days of spiritless selfishness and utter lack of all impersonal devotion. This gentleman must, then, be a descendant of the child named in this narrative?’
‘The story says that he and his perished,’ replied her niece. ‘But I suppose that child, or some other younger one, escaped the fire and the massacre. If ever we see him again, we will ask him. Such a tradition is as good as a page in the Almanac de Gotha.’
‘It is,’ accented the Princess. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘I read those memoirs when I was a child, with so many others of that time,’ answered the Countess Wanda. ‘When I heard the name of your new friend it seemed familiar to me, and thinking over it, I remembered these Breton narratives.’
‘At least you need not have been afraid to dine with him!’ said the Princess Ottilie, who could never resist having the last word, though she felt that the retort was a little ungenerous, and perhaps undeserved.
Meantime Sabran went on his way through the green valley under the shadow of the Klein and the Kristallwand, with the ice of the great Schaltten Gletscher descending like a huge frozen torrent. When he reached the last stage before Matrey he dismissed his postillions with a gratuity as large as the money remaining in his belt would permit, and insisted on taking his way on foot over the remaining miles. Baggage he had none, and he had not even the weight of his knapsack and rifle. The men remonstrated with him, for they were afraid of their lady’s anger if they returned when they were still half a German mile off their destination. But he was determined, and sent them backwards, whilst they could yet reach home by daylight. The path to Matrey passed across pastures and tracts of stony ground; he took a little goatherd with him as a guide, being unwilling to run the risk of a second misadventure, and pressed on his way without delay.
The sun had come forth from out a watery world of cloud and mist, which shrouded from sight all the domes and peaks and walls of ice of the mountain region in which he was once more a wanderer. But when the mists had lifted, and the sun was shining, it was beautiful exceedingly: all the grasses were full of the countless wild flowers of the late Austrian spring; the swollen brooks were blue with mouse-ear, and the pastures with gentian; clumps of daffodils blossomed in all the mossy nooks, and hyacinths purpled the pine-woods. On the upper slopes the rain-fog still hung heavily, but the sun-rays pierced it here and there, and the white vaporous atmosphere was full of fantastic suggestions and weird half-seen shapes, as pine-trees loomed out of the mist or a vast black mass of rock towered above the clouds. A love of nature, of out-of-door movement, of healthful exercise and sports, resisted in him the enervating influences of the Paris life which he had led. He had always left the gay world at intervals for the simple and rude pleasures of the mountaineer and the hunter. There was an impulse towards that forest freedom which at times mastered him, and made the routine of worldly dissipation and diversion wholly intolerable to him. It was what his fair critic of Paris had called his barbarism, which broke up out of the artificial restraints and habits imposed by the world.
His wakeful night had made him fanciful, and his departure from Hohenszalras had made him regretful; for he, on his way back to Paris and all his habits and associates and pleasures, looking around him on the calm white mountain-sides, and penetrated by the pure, austere mountain silence, suddenly felt an intense desire to stay amidst that stillness and that solitude, and rest here in the green heart of the Tauern.
‘Who knows but one might see her again?’ he thought, as the sound of the fall of the Gschlossbach came on his ear from the distance. That stately figure seated by the great wood fire, with the light on her velvet skirts, and the pearls at her throat, and the hounds lying couched beside her, was always before his memory and his vision.
And he paid and dismissed his goatherd at the humble door of the Zum Rautter in Windisch-Matrey, and that evening began discussing with Christ Rangediner and Egger, the guides there, the ascent of the Kahralpe and the Lasörling, and the pass to Krimml, over the ice crests of the Venediger group.
A mountaineer who had dwelt beneath the shadow of Orizaba was not common in the heart of the Tauern, and the men made much of their new comrade, not the less because the gold pieces rattled in his pouch, and the hunting-watch he earned had jewels at its back.
‘If anyone had told me that in the Mois de Marie I should bury myself under an Austrian glacier!’ he thought, with some wonder at his own decision, for he was one of those foster-sons of Paris to whom parisine is an habitual and necessary intoxication.
But there comes a time when even parisine, like chloral, ceases to have power to charm; in a vague way he had often felt the folly and the hollowness of the life that turned night into day, made the green cloth of the gaming-table the sole field of battle, and offered as all form of love the purchased smile of the belle petite. A sense of repose and of freshness, like the breath of a cool morning blowing on tired eyes, came to him as he sat in the grey twilight amidst the green landscape, with the night coming down upon the eternal snows above, whilst the honest, simple souls around him talked of hill perils and mountaineers’ adventures, and all the exploits of a hardy life; and in the stillness, when their voices ceased, there was no sound but the sound of water up above amidst the woods, tumbling and rippling in a hundred unseen brooks and falls.
‘If they had let me alone,’ he thought, ‘I should have been a hunter all my days; a guide, perhaps, like this Christ and this Egger here. An honest man, at least — —’
His heart was heavy and his conscience ill at ease. The grand, serene glance of Wanda von Szalras seemed to have reached his soul and called up in him unavailing regrets, pangs of doubt long dormant, vague remorse long put to sleep with the opiate of the world-taught cynicism, which had become his second nature. The most impenetrable cynicism will yield and melt, and seem but a poor armour, when it is brought amidst the solemnity and solitude of the high hills.
CHAPTER V.
A few days later there arrived by post the ‘Spiritù Santo’ of Mexico, addressed to the Professor Joachim Greswold.
If he had received the order of the Saint Esprit he would not have been more honoured, more enchanted; and he was deeply touched by the remembrance of him testified by the gift whose donor he supposed was back in the gay world of men, not knowing the spell which the snow mountains of the Tauern had cast on a worldly soul. When he was admitted to the presence of the Princess Ottilie to consult with her on her various ailments, she conversed with him of this passer-by who had so fascinated her fancy, and she even went so far as to permit him to bring her the great volumes of the “Mexico” out of the library, and point her out those chapters which he considered most likely to interest her.
‘It is the work of a true Catholic and gentleman,’ she said with satisfaction, and perused with special commendation the passages which treated of the noble conduct of the Catholic priesthood in those regions, their frequent martyrdom and their devoted self-negation. When she had thoroughly identified their late guest with the editor of these goodly and blameless volumes, she was content to declare that better credentials no man could bear. Indeed she talked so continually of this single point of interest in her monotonous routine of life, that her niece said to her, with a jest that was more than half earnest, ‘Dearest mother, almost you make me regret that this gentleman did not break his neck over the Engelhorn, or sink with his rifle in the Szalrassee.’
‘The spinet would never have spoken,’ said the Princess; ‘and I am surprised that a Christian woman can say such things, even in joke!’
The weather cleared, the sun shone, the gardens began to grow gorgeous, and great parterres of roses glowed between the emerald of the velvet lawns: an Austrian garden has not a long life, but it has a very brilliant one. All on a sudden, as the rains ceased, every alley, group, and terrace were filled with every variety of blossom, and the flora of Africa and India was planted out side by side with the g
entians and the alpine roses natural to the soil. All the northern coniferæ spread the deep green of their branches above the turf, and the larch, the birch, the beech, and the oak were massed in clusters, or spread away in long avenues — deep defiles of foliage through which the water of the lake far down below glistened like a jewel.
‘If your friend had been a fortnight later he would have seen Hohenszalras in all its beauty,’ said its mistress once to the Princess Ottilie. ‘It has two seasons of perfection: one its midsummer flowering, and the other when all the world is frozen round it.’
The Princess shivered in retrospect and in anticipation. She hated winter. ‘I should never live through another winter,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Then you shall not be tried by one; we will go elsewhere,’ said Wanda, to whom the ice-bound world, the absolute silence, the sense of the sleigh flying over the hard snow, the perfect purity of the rarefied air of night and day, made up the most welcome season of the year.
‘I suppose it is dull for you,’ she added, indulgently. ‘I have so many occupations in the winter; a pair of skates and a sleigh are to me of all forms of motion the most delightful. But you, shut up in your blue-room, do no doubt find our winter hard and long.’
‘I hybernate, I do not live,’ said the Princess, pettishly. ‘It is not even as if the house were full.’
‘With ill-assorted guests whose cumbersome weariness one would have to try all day long to dissipate! Oh, my dear aunt, of all wearisome corvées the world holds there is nothing so bad as a house party — even when Egon is here to lead the cotillion and the hunting.’
‘You are very inhospitable!’
‘That is the third time lately you have made that charge against me. I begin to fear that I must deserve it.’
‘You deserve it, certainly. Oh, you are hospitable to the poor. You set pedlars, or mule-drivers, or travelling clockmakers, by the dozen round your hall fires, and you would feed a pilgrimage all the winter long. But to your own order, to your own society, you are inhospitable. In your mother’s time the Schloss had two hundred guests for the autumn parties, and then the winter season, from Carnival to Easter, was always spent in the capital.’