by Ouida
‘After all, if she would only take an interest in anything human,’ she thought, ‘instead of always horses and mountains, and philosophical treatises and councils, and calculations with the stewards! She ought not to live and die alone. They made me vow to do so, and perhaps it was for the best, but I would never say to anyone — Do likewise.’
And then the Princess felt the warm tears on her own cheeks, thinking of herself as she had been at seventeen, pacing up and down the stiff straight alley of clipped trees at Lilienhöhe with a bright young soldier who had fallen in a duel ere he was twenty. It was all so long ago, so long ago, and she was a true submissive daughter of her princely house, and of her Holy Church; yet she knew that it was not meet for a woman to live and die without a man’s heart to beat by her own, without a child’s hands to close her glazing eyes.
And Wanda von Szalras wished so to live and so to die! Only one magician could change her. Why should he not come?
So on the morrow the little boat that had brought the physician to him so often took him over the two miles of water to the landing stairs at the foot of the castle rock. In a little while he stood in the presence of his châtelaine.
He was a man who never in his life had been confused, unnerved, or at a loss for words; yet now he felt as a boy might have done, as a rustic might; he had a mist before his eyes, his heart beat quickly, he grew very pale.
She thought he was still suffering, and looked at him with interest.
‘I am afraid that we did wrong to tempt you from the monastery,’ she said, in her grave melodious voice; and she stretched out her hand to him with a look of sympathy. I am afraid you are still suffering and weak, are you not?’
He bent low as he touched it.
‘How can I thank you?’ he murmured. ‘You have treated a vagrant like a king!’
‘You were a munificent vagrant to our chapel and our poor,’ she replied with a smile. And what have we done for you? Nothing more than is our commonest duty, far removed from cities or even villages, as we are. Are you really recovered? I may tell you now that there was a moment when Herr Greswold was alarmed for you.’
The Princess Ottilie entered at that moment and welcomed him with more effusion and congratulation. They breakfasted in a chamber called the Saxe room, an oval room lined throughout with lacquered white wood, in the Louis Seize style; the panels were painted in Watteau-like designs; it had been decorated by a French artist in the middle of the eighteenth century, and with its hangings of flowered white satin, and its collection of Meissen china figures, and its great window, which looked over a small garden with velvet grass plots and huge yews, was the place of all others to make an early morning meal most agreeable, whether in summer when the casements were open to the old-fashioned roses that climbed about them, or in winter when on the open hearth great oak logs burned beneath the carved white wood mantelpiece, gay with its plaques of Saxe and its garlands of foliage. The little oval table bore a service of old Meissen, with tiny Watteau figures painted on a ground of palest rose. Watteau figures of the same royal china upheld great shells filled with the late violets of the woods of Hohenszalras.
‘What an enchanting little room!’ said Sabran, glancing round it, and appreciating with the eyes of a connoisseur the Lancret designs, the Riesiner cabinets, and the old china. He was as well versed in the art and lore of the Beau Siècle as Arsène Houssaye or the Goncourts; he talked now of the epoch with skill and grace, with that accuracy of knowledge and that fineness of criticism which had made his observations and his approval treasured and sought for by the artists and the art patrons of Paris.
The day was grey and mild; the casements were open; the fresh, pure fragrance of the forests came in through the aromatic warmth of the chamber; the little gay shepherds and shepherdesses seemed to breathe and laugh.
‘This room was a caprice of an ancestress of mine, who was of your country, and was, I am afraid, very wretched here,’ said Wanda von Szalras. ‘She brought her taste from Marly and Versailles. It is not the finest or the purest taste, but it has a grace and elegance of its own that is very charming, as a change.’
‘It is a madrigal in porcelain,’ he said, looking around him. ‘I am glad that the alouette gauloise has sung here beside the dread and majestic Austrian vulture.’
‘The alouette gauloise always sings in Aunt Ottilie’s heart; it is what keeps her so young always. I assure you she is a great deal younger than I am,’ said his châtelaine, resting a glance of tender affection on the pretty figure of the Princess caressing her Spitz dog Bijou.
She herself, with her great pearls about her throat, and a gown of white serge, looked a stately and almost severe figure beside the dainty picturesque prettiness of the elder lady and the fantastic gaiety and gilding of the porcelain and the paintings. He felt a certain awe of her, a certain hesitation before her, which the habits of the world enabled him to conceal, but which moved him with a sense of timidity, novel and almost painful.
‘One ought to be Dorat and Marmontel to be worthy of such a repast,’ he said, as he seated himself between his hostesses.
‘Neither Dorat nor Marmontel would have enjoyed your very terrible adventure,’ said the Princess, reflecting with satisfaction that it was herself who had saved this charming and chivalrous life, since, at her own risk and loss, she had sent her physicians, alike of body and of soul, to wrestle for him with death by his sick bed at Pregratten.
‘Wanda would never have sent anyone to him,’ thought the Princess: ‘she is so unaccountably indifferent to any human life higher than her peasantry.’
‘Adventures are to the adventurous,’ quoted Sabran.
‘Yes,’ said the Princess; ‘but the pity is that the adventurous are too often the questionable — —’
‘Perhaps that is saying too much,’ said Wanda; ‘but it is certain that the more solid qualities do not often lead into a career of excitement. It has been always conceded — with a sigh — that duty is dull.’
‘I think adventure is like calamity: some people are born to it,’ he added,’and such cannot escape from it. Loyola may cover his head with a cowl: he cannot become obscure. Eugene may make himself an abbé: he cannot escape his horoscope cast in the House of Mars.’
‘What a fatalist you are!’
‘Do you think we ever escape our fate? Alexander slew all whom he suspected, but he did not for that die in his bed of old age.’
‘That merely proves that crime is no buckler.’
Sabran was silent.
‘My life has been very adventurous,’ he said lightly, after a pause; ‘but I have only regarded that as another name for misfortune. The picturesque is not the prosperous; all beggars look well on canvas, whilst Carolus Duran himself can make nothing of a portrait of Dives, roulant carrosse through his fifty millions.’
He had not his usual strength; his loins had had a wrench in the crashing fall from the Umbal which they had not wholly recovered, despite the wise medicaments of Greswold.
He moved with some difficulty, and, not to weary him, she remained after breakfast in the Watteau room, making him recline at length in a long chair beside one of the windows. She was touched by the weakness of a man evidently so strong and daring by nature, and she regretted the rough and inhospitable handling which he had experienced from her beloved hills and waters. She, who spoke to no one all the year through except her stewards and her priests, did not fail to be sensible of the pleasure she derived from the cultured and sympathetic companionship of a brilliant and talented mind.
‘Ah! if Egon had only talent like that!’ she thought, with a sigh of remembrance. Her cousin was a gallant nobleman and soldier, but of literature he had no knowledge; for art he had a consummate indifference; and the only eloquence he could command was a brief address to his troopers, which would be answered by an Eljén! ringing loud and long, like steel smiting upon iron.
Sabran could at all times talk well.
He had the gift of facile a
nd eloquent words, and he had also what most attracted the sympathies of his hostess, a genuine and healthful love of the mountains and forests. All his life in Paris had not eradicated from his character a deep love for Nature in her wildest and her stormiest moods. They conversed long and with mutual pleasure of the country around them, of which she knew every ravine and torrent, and of whose bold and sombre beauty he was honestly enamoured.
The noon had deepened into afternoon, and the chimes of the clock-tower were sounding four when he rose to take his leave, and go on his way across the green brilliancy of the tumbling water to his quiet home with the Dominican brethren. He had still the languor and fatigue about him of recent illness, and he moved slowly and with considerable weakness. She said to him in parting, with unaffected kindness, ‘Come across to us whenever you like; we are concerned to think that one of our own glaciers should have treated you so cruelly. I am often out riding far and wide, but my aunt will always be pleased to receive you.’
‘I am the debtor of the Umbal ice,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘But for that happy fall I should have gone on my way to my old senseless life without ever having known true rest as I know it yonder. Will you be offended, too, if I say that I stayed at Matrey with a vague, faint, unfounded hope that your mountains might be merciful, and let me — —’
‘Shoot a kuttengeier?’ she said quickly, as though not desiring to hear his sentence finished. ‘You might shoot one easily sitting at a window in the monastery, and watching till the vultures flew across the lake; but you will remember you are on parole. I am sure you will be faithful.’
Long, long afterwards she remembered that he shrank a little at the word, and that a flush of colour went over his face.
‘I will,’ he said simply; ‘and it was not the kuttengeier for which I desired to be allowed to revisit Hohenszalras.’
‘Well, if the monks starve you or weary you, you can remember that we are here, and you must not give their organ quite all the music that you bear so wonderfully in your mind and hands.’
‘I will play to you all day, if you will only allow me.’
‘Next time you come — to-morrow, if you like.’
He went away, lying listlessly in the little boat, for he was still far from strong; but life seemed to him very sweet and serene as the evening light spread over the broad, bright water, and the water birds rose and scattered before the plunge of the oars.
Had the sovereign mistress of Hohenszalras ever said before to any other living friend —— to-morrow? Yet he was too clever a man to be vain; and he did not misinterpret the calm kindness of her invitation.
He went thither again the next day, though he left them early, for he had a sensitive fear of wearying with his presence ladies to whom he owed so much.
But the Princess urged his speedy return, and the châtelaine of Szaravola said once more, with that grave smile which was rather in the eyes than on the lips, ‘We shall always be happy to see you when you are inclined to cross the lake.’
He was a great adept at painting, and he made several broad, bold sketches of the landscapes visible from the lake; he was famous for many a drawing brossé dans le vrai, which hung at his favourite club the Mirliton; he could paint, more finely and delicately also, on ivory, on satin, on leather. He sent for some fans and screens from Vienna, and did in gouache upon them exquisite birds, foliage, flowers, legends of saints, which were beautiful enough to be not unworthy a place in those rooms of the burg where the Penicauds, the Fragonards, the Pettitôts, were represented by much of their most perfect work.
He passed his mornings in labour of this sort; at noonday or in the afternoon he rowed across to Hohenszalras, and loitered for an hour or two in the gardens or the library. Little by little they became so accustomed to his coming that it would have seemed strange if more than a day had gone by without the little striped blue boat gliding from the Holy Isle to the castle stairs. He never stayed very long; not so long as the Princess desired.
‘Never in my life have I spent weeks so harmlessly!’ he said once with a smile to the doctor; then he gave a quick sigh and turned away, for he thought to himself in a sudden repentance that these innocent and blameless days were perhaps but the prelude to one of the greatest sins of a not sinless life.
He came to be looked for quite naturally at the noonday breakfast in the pretty Saxe chamber. He would spend hours playing on the chapel organ, or on the piano in the octagon room which Liszt had chosen. The grand and dreamy music rolled out over the green lake towards the green hills, and Wanda would look often at the marble figure of her brother on his tomb, lying like the statue of the young Gaston de Foix, and think to herself, ‘If only Bela were listening, too!’
Sometimes she was startled when she remembered into what continual intimacy she had admitted a man of whom she had no real knowledge.
The Princess, indeed, had said to her, ‘I did ask Kaulnitz: Kaulnitz knows him quite well;’ but that was hardly enough to satisfy a woman as reserved in her friendships, and as habituated to the observance of a severe etiquette, as was the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. Every day almost she said to herself that she would not see him when he came, or, if she saw him, would show him, by greater chilliness of manner, that it was time he quitted the island. But when he did come, if he did not see her he went to the chapel and played a mass, a requiem, an anthem, a sonata; and Beethoven, Palestrina, Schumann, Wagner, Berlioz, surely allured her from her solitude, and she would come on to the terrace and listen to the waves of melody rolling out through the cool sunless air, through the open door of the place where her beloved dead rested. Then, as a matter of course, he stayed, and after the noonday meal sometimes he rode with her in the forests, or drove the Princess in her pony chair, or received permission to bear his châtelaine company in her mountain walks. They were seldom alone, but they were much together.
‘It is much better for her than solitude,’ thought the Princess. ‘It is not likely that she will ever care anything for him: she is so cold; but if she did, there would be no great harm done. He is of old blood, and she has wealth enough to need no more. Of course any one of our great princes would be better; but, then, as she will never take any one of them — —’
And the Princess, who was completely fascinated by the deferential homage to her of Sabran, and the pleasure he honestly found in her society, would do all she could, in her innocent and delicate way, to give her favourite the opportunities he desired of intercourse with the mistress of Hohenszalras. She wanted to see again the life that she had seen in other days at the Schloss; grand parties for the hunting season and the summer season, royal and noble people in the guest-chambers, great gatherings for the chase on the rond-point in the woods, covers for fifty laid at the table in the banqueting hall, and besides — besides, thought the childless and loving old woman — little children with long fair curls and gay voices wakening the echoes in the Rittersäal with their sports and pastimes.
It was noble and austere, no doubt, this life led by Wanda von Szalras amidst the mountains in the Tauern, but it was lonely and monotonous to the Princess, who still loved a certain movement, gossip, and diversion as she liked to nibble a nougat and sip her chocolate foaming under its thick cream. It seemed to her that even to suffer a little would be better for her niece than this unvarying solitude, this eternal calm. That she should have mourned for her brother was most natural, but this perpetual seclusion was an exaggeration of regret.
If the presence of Sabran reconciled her with the world, with life as it was, and induced her to return to the court and to those pleasures natural to her rank and to her years, it would be well done, thought the Princess; and as for him — if he carried away a broken heart it would be a great pity, but persons who like to move others as puppets cannot concern themselves with the accidental injury of one of their toys; and Mme. Ottilie was too content with her success of the moment to look much beyond it.
‘The charm of being here is to me precisely what I da
resay makes it tiresome to you,’ the mistress of Hohenszalras said to him one day, ‘I mean its isolation. One can entirely forget that beyond those mountains there is a world fussing, fuming, brewing its storms in saucers, and inventing a quantity of increased unwholesomeness, in noise and stench, which it calls a higher civilisation. No! I would never have a telegraph wire brought here from Matrey. There is nothing I ever particularly care to know about. If there were anyone I loved who was away from me it would be different. But there is no one. There are people I like, of course ——
‘But political events?’ he suggested.
‘They do not attract me. They are ignoble. They are for the most part contemptibly ill-managed, and to think that after so many thousands of years humanity has not really progressed beyond the wild beasts’ method of settling disputes — —’
‘There is so much of the wild beast in it. With such an opinion of political life why do you counsel me to seek it?’
‘You are a man. There is nothing else for a man who has talent, and who is — who is as you are, désœuvré. Intellectual work would be better, but you do not care for it, it seems. Since your “Mexico” — —’
‘The “Mexico” was no work of mine.’
‘Oh yes, pardon me: I have read it. All your notes, all your addenda, show how the learning of the editor was even superior to that of the original author.’