Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The face which had looked on him in the pale sunlight of the pine-woods, and made him think of the Nibelungen queen, had been always present to his thoughts, even during the semi-stupor of sedative-lulled rest in his dull chamber by the lonely Isel stream.

  From this guest-room, where he passed his convalescence, the wide casements all day long showed him the towers and turrets, the metal roofs, the pinnacles and spires of her mighty home, backed by its solemn neighbours of the glacier and the alps, and girdled with the sombre green of the great forests. Once or twice he thought as he looked at it and saw the noon sun make its countless oriels sparkle like diamonds, or the starlight change its stones and marbles into dream-like edifices meet for Arthur’s own Avilion, once or twice he thought to himself, ‘If I owned Hohenszalras, and she Romaris, I would write to her and say: “A moment is enough for love to be born.”’

  But Romaris was his — those aged oaks, torn by sea-winds and splashed with Atlantic spray, were all he had; and she was mistress here.

  When a young man made his first appearance in the society of Paris who was called Réné Philippe Xavier, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, his personal appearance, which was singularly attractive, his manners, which were of extreme distinction, and his talents, which were great, made him at once successful in its highest society. He had a romantic history.

  The son of that Marquis de Sabran who had fallen under the pikes of the mob of Carrier had been taken in secret out of the country by a faithful servant, smuggled on board a chasse-marée, which had carried him to an outward-bound sailing ship destined for the seaboard of America. The chaplain was devoted, the servant faithful. The boy was brought up well at a Jesuit college in Mexico, and placed in full possession, when he reached manhood, of his family papers and of such remnants of the family jewels as had been brought away with him. His identity as his father’s only living son, and the sole representative of the Sabrans of Romaris, was fully established and confirmed before the French Consulate of the city. Instead of returning to his country, as his Jesuit tutors advised and desired, the youth, when he left college, gave the reins to a spirit of adventure and a passion for archæology and natural history. He was possessed beyond all with the desire to penetrate the mystery of the buried cities, and he had conceived a strong attachment to the flowery and romantic land of Guatemozin and of Montezuma. He plunged, therefore, into the interior of that country, and, half as a Jesuit lay-missionary, and half as an archeological explorer, let all his best years slip away under the twilight shadows of the virgin forests, and amidst the flowering wilderness of the banks of the great rivers, making endless notes upon the ancient and natural history of these solitudes, and gathering together an interminable store of tradition from the Indians and the half-breeds with whom he grew familiar. He went further and further away from the cities, and let longer and longer intervals elapse without his old friends and teachers hearing anything of him. All that was known of him was that he had married a beautiful Mexican woman, who was said to have in her the blood of the old royal race, and that he lived far from the steps of white men in the depths of the hills whence the Pacific was in sight. Once he went to the capital for the purpose of registering and baptizing his son by his Mexican wife. After that he was lost sight of by those who cared for him, and it was only known that he was compiling a history of those lost nations whose temples and tombs, amidst the wilderness, had so powerfully attracted his interest as a boy. A quarter of a century passed; his old friends died away one by one, nobody remained in the country who remembered or asked for him. The West is wide, and wild, and silent; endless wars and revolutions changed the surface of the country and the thoughts of men; the scholarly Marquis de Sabran, who only cared for a hieroglyphic, or an orchid, or a piece of archaic sculpture, passed away from the memories of the white men whose fellow student he had been. The land was soaked in blood, the treasures were given up to adventurers; the chiefs that each reigned their little hour, slew, and robbed, and burned, and fell in their turn shot like vultures or stabbed like sheep; and no one in that murderous tohu-bohu had either time or patience to give to the thought of a student of perished altars and of swamp-flora. The college, even, where the Jesuits had sheltered him, had been sacked and set on fire, and the old men and the young men butchered indiscriminately. When six-and-twenty years later he returned to the capital to register the birth of his grandson there was no one who remembered his name. Another quarter of a century passed by, and when his young representative left the Western world for Paris he received a tender and ardent welcome from men and women to whom his name was still a talisman, and found a cordial recognition from that old nobility whose pride is so cautious and impregnable in its isolation and reserve. Everyone knew that the young Marquis de Sabran was the legitimate representative of the old race that had made its nest on the rocks with the sea birds through a dozen centuries: that he had but little wealth was rather to his credit than against it.

  When he gave to the world, in his grandfather’s name, the result of all those long years of study and of solitude in the heart of the Mexican forests, he carried out the task as only a scientific scholar could have done it, and the vast undigested mass of record, tradition, and observation which the elder man had collected together in his many years of observation and abstraction were edited and arranged with so much skill that their mere preparation placed their young compiler in the front frank of culture. That he disclaimed all merit of his own, affirming that he had simply put together into shape all the scattered memoranda of the elder scholar, did not detract from the learning or from the value of his annotations. The volumes became the first authority on the ancient history and the natural history of a strange country, of which alike the past and the present were of rare interest, and their production made his name known where neither rank nor grace would have taken it. To those who congratulated him on the execution of so complicated and learned a work, he only replied: ‘It is no merit of mine: all the learning is his. In giving it to the world I do but pay my debt to him, and I am but a mere instrument of his as the printing-press is that prints it.’

  This modesty, this affectionate loyalty in a young man whose attributes seemed rather to lie on the side of arrogance, of disdainfulness, and of coldness, attracted to him the regard of many persons to whom the mere idler, which he soon became, would have been utterly indifferent. He chose, as such persons thought, most unfortunately, to let his intellectual powers lie in abeyance, but he had shown that he possessed them. No one without large stores of learning and a great variety of attainments could have edited and annotated as he had done the manuscripts bequeathed to him by the Marquis Xavier as his most precious legacy. He might have occupied a prominent place in the world of science; but he was too indolent or too sceptical even of natural facts, or too swayed towards the pleasures of manhood, to care for continued consecration of his life to studies of which he was early a master, and it was the only serious work that he ever carried out or seemed likely ever to attempt. Gradually these severe studies were left further and further behind him; but they had given him a certain place that no future carelessness could entirely forfeit. He grew to prefer to hear a bluette d’amateur praised at the Mirliton, to be more flattered when his presence was prayed for at a première of the Française; but it had carried his name wherever, in remote corners of the earth, two or three wise men were gathered together.

  He had no possessions in France to entail any obligations upon him. The single tower of the manoir which the flames had left untouched, and an acre or two of barren shore, were all which the documents of the Sabrans enabled him to claim. The people of the department were indeed ready to adore him for the sake of the name he bore; but he had the true Parisian’s impatience of the province, and the hamlet of Romaris but rarely saw his face. The sombre seaboard, with its primitive people, its wintry storms, its monotonous country, its sad, hard, pious ways of life, had nothing to attract a man who loved the gaslights of the Champs-Élysées. Women
loved him for that union of coldness and of romance which always most allures them, and men felt a certain charm of unused power in him which, coupled with his great courage and his skill at all games, fascinated them often against their judgment. He was a much weaker man than they thought him, but none of either sex ever discovered it. Perhaps he was also a better man than he himself believed. As he dwelt in the calm of this religious community his sins seemed to him many and beyond the reach of pardon.

  Yet even with remorse, and a sense of shame in the background, this tranquil life did him good. The simple fare, the absence of excitement, the silent lake-dwelling where no sound came, except that of the bells or the organ, or the voices of fishermen on the waters, the ‘early to bed and early to rise,’ which were the daily laws of the monastic life — these soothed, refreshed, and ennobled his life.

  CHAPTER VI.

  The days drifted by; the little boat crossed thrice a day from castle to monastery, bringing the physician, bringing books, food, fruit, wine; the rain came often, sheets of white water sweeping over the lake, and blotting the burg and the hills and the forests from sight; the sunshine came more rarely, but when it came it lit up the amphitheatre of the Glöckner group to a supreme splendour, of solemn darkness of massed pines, of snow-peaks shrouded in the clouds. So the month wore away; he was in no haste to recover entirely; he could pay the monks for his maintenance, and so felt free to stay, not being allowed to know that his food came from the castle as his books did. The simple priests were conquered and captivated by him; he played grand Sistine masses for them, and canticles which he had listened to in Nôtre Dame. Herr Joachim marvelled to see him so passive and easily satisfied; for he perceived that his patient could not be by nature either very tranquil or quickly content; but the doctor thought that perhaps the severe nervous shock of the descent on the Umbal might have shakened and weakened him, and knew that the pure Alpine air, the harmless pursuits, and the early hours were the best tonics and restoratives in the pharmacy of Nature. Therefore he could consistently encourage him to stay, as his own wishes moved him to do; for to the professor the companionship and discussion of a scholarly and cultivated man were rarities, and he had conceived an affectionate interest in one whose life he had in some measure saved; for without skilled care the crevasse of the Iselthal might have been fatal to a mountaineer who had successfully climbed the highest peaks of the Andes.

  ‘No doubt if I passed a year here,’ thought Sabran, ‘I should rebel and grow sick with longing for the old unrest, the old tumult, the old intoxication — no doubt; but just now it is very welcome: it makes me comprehend why De Rancy created La Trappe, why so many soldiers and princes and riotous livers were glad to go out into a Paraclete amongst the hills with S. Bruno or S. Bernard.’

  He said something of the sort to Herr Joachim, who nodded consent; but added: ‘Only they took a great belief with them, and a great penitence, the recluses of that time; in ours men mistake satiety for sorrow, and so when their tired vices have had time to grow again, like nettles that have been gnawed to the root but can spring up with fresh power to sting, then, as their penitence was nothing but fatigue, they get quickly impatient to go out and become beasts again. All the difference between our times and S. Bruno’s lies there; they believed in sin, we do not. I say, “we,” I mean the voluptuaries and idlers of your world.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ answered Sabran, a little gloomily. ‘But we do believe in dishonour.’

  ‘Do you?’ said the doctor, with some irony. ‘Oh, I suppose you do. You may seduce Gretchen: you must not forsake Faustine; you must not lie to a man: you may lie to a woman. You must not steal: you may beggar your friend at baccara. I confess I have never understood the confusion of your unwritten laws on ethics and etiquette.’

  Sabran laughed, but he did not take up the argument; and the doctor thought that he seemed becoming a little morose; since his escape from the tedium of confinement at Pregratten, confinement intolerable to a man of strength and spirit, he had always found his patient of great equability of temper, and of a good-humour and docility that had seemed as charming as they were invariable.

  When he was recovered enough to make movement and change harmless to him, there came to him a note in the fine and miniature writing of the Princess Ottilie, bidding him come over to the castle at his pleasure, and especially inviting him, in her niece’s name, to the noon-day breakfast at the castle on the following day, if his strength allowed.

  He sat a quarter of an hour or more with the note on his knee, looking out at the light green willow foliage as it drooped above the deeper green of the lake.

  ‘Our ladies are not used to refusals,’ said the doctor, seeing his hesitation.

  ‘I should be a churl to refuse,’ said Sabran, with some little effort, which the doctor attributed to a remembered mortification, and so hastened to say:

  ‘You are resentful still that the Countess Wanda took your rifle away? Surely she has made amends?’

  ‘I was not thinking of that. She was perfectly right. She only treated me too well. She placed her house and her household at my disposition with a hospitality quite Spanish. I owe her too much ever to be able to express my sense of it.’

  ‘Then you will come and tell her so?’

  ‘I can do no less.’

  Princess Ottilie and the mistress of Hohenszalras had had a discussion before that note of invitation was sent; a discussion which had ended as usual in the stronger reasoner giving way to the whim and will of the weaker.

  ‘Why should we not be kind to him?’ the Princess had urged; ‘he is a gentleman. You know I took the precaution to write to Kaulnitz; Kaulnitz’s answer is clear enough: and to Frohsdorf, from which it was equally satisfactory. I wrote also to the Comte de la Barée; his reply was everything which could be desired.’

  ‘No doubt,’ her niece had answered for the twentieth time; ‘but I think we have already done enough for Christianity and hospitality; we need not offer him our personal friendship; as there is no master in this house he will not expect to be invited to it.’ We will wish him God-speed when he is fully restored and is going away.’

  ‘You are really too prudish!’ said the Princess, very angrily. ‘I should be the last person to counsel an imprudence, a failure in due caution, in correct reserve and hesitation; but for you to pretend that a Countess von Szalras cannot venture to invite a person to her own residence because that person is of the opposite sex — —’

  ‘That is not the question; the root of the matter is that he is a chance acquaintance made quite informally; we should have been cruel if we had done less than we have done, but there can be no need that we should do more.’

  ‘I can ask more about him of Kaulnitz,’ said Madame Ottilie.

  Kaulnitz was one of her innumerable cousins, and was then minister in Paris.

  ‘Why should you?’ said her niece. ‘Do you think either that it is quite honourable to make inquiries unknown to people? It always savours to me too much of the Third Section.’

  ‘You are so exaggerated in all your scruples; you prefer to be suspicious of a person in silence than to ask a few questions,’ said the Princess. ‘But surely when two ambassadors and the Kaiser guarantee his position you may be content.’

  The answer she had received from Kaulnitz had indeed only moderately satisfied her. It said that there was nothing known to the detriment of the Marquis de Sabran; that he had never been accused of anything unfitting his rank and name; but that he was a viveur, and was said to be very successful at play; he was not known to have any debts, but he was believed to be poor and of precarious fortunes. On the whole the Princess had decided to keep the answer to herself; she had remembered with irritation that her niece had suggested baccara as the source of the hundred gold pieces.

  ‘I never intended to convey that ambassadors would disown him or the Kaiser either, whose signature is in his pocket-book. Only,’ said Wanda, ‘as you and I are all alone, surely it will be as well
to leave this gentleman to the monks and to Greswold. That is all I mean.’

  ‘It is a perfectly unnecessary scruple, and not at all like one of your race. The Szalras have always been hospitable and headstrong.’

  ‘I hope I am the first — I have done my best for M. de Sabran; as for being headstrong — surely that is not a sweet or wise quality that you should lament my loss of it?’

  ‘You need not quarrel with me,’said the Princess, pettishly. ‘You have a terrible habit of contradiction, Wanda: and you never give up your opinion.’

  The mistress of Hohenszalras smiled, and sighed a little.

  ‘Dear mother, we will do anything that amuses you.’

  So the note was sent.

  The Princess had been always eager for such glimpses of the moving world as had been allowed to her by any accidental change. Her temperament would have led her to find happiness in the frivolous froth and fume of a worldly existence; she delighted in gossip, in innocent gaiety, in curiosity, in wonder; all her early years had been passed under repression and constraint, and now in her old age she was as eager as a child for any plaything, as inquisitive as a marmoset, as animated as a squirrel. Her mother had been a daughter of a great French family of the south, and much of the vivacity and sportive malice and quick temper of the Gallic blood was in her still, beneath the primness and the placidity that had become her habit, from long years passed in a little German court and in a stately semi-religious order.

  This stranger whom chance had brought to them was to her idea a precious and providential source of excitement: already a hundred romances had suggested themselves to her fertile mind; already a hundred impossibilities had suggested themselves to her as probable. She did not in the least believe that accident had brought him there. She imagined that he had wandered there for the sake of seeing the mistress of Hohenszalras, who had for so long been unseen by the world, but whose personal graces and great fortune had remained in the memories of many. To the romantic fancy of the Princess, which had never been blunted by contact with harsh facts, nothing seemed prettier or more probable than that the French marquis, when arrested as a poacher, had been upon a pilgrimage of poetic adventure. It should not be her fault, she resolved, if the wounded knight had to go away in sorrow and silence, without the castle gates being swung open once at least.