by Ouida
‘What a charmingly intelligent person he is!’ thought the Princess, as she remarked that in Austria they were happier than the rest of the world: there were peasant costumes still there.
Wanda left them a little later to confer with one of her land stewards. Sabran remained seated by the Princess, in whom he felt that he possessed a friend.
‘What did you think of those schools? said Frau Ottilie. ‘Oh, of course you admire and approve; you must admire and approve when they are the hobby of a beautiful woman, who is also your hostess.’
‘Does that mean, Princess, that you do not?’
‘No doubt the schools are excellent,’ replied the Princess, in a tone which condemned them as ridiculous. ‘But for my own part I prefer those things left to the Church, of which they constitute alike the privilege and the province. I cannot see either why a peasant child requires to know how a tree grows; that a merciful Providence placed it there is all he can need to be told, and that he should be able to cut it down without cutting off his own fingers is all the science that can possibly be necessary to him. However, Wanda thinks otherwise, and she is mistress here.’
‘But the schools surely are eminently practical ones?’
‘Practical! Is it practical to weave a romance as long as “Pamela” about the changes of a chrysalis? I fail to see it. That a grub is a destructive creature is all that any one needs to know; there is nothing practical in making it the heroine of an interminable metempsychosis. But all those ideas of ‘Wanda’s have a taint of that modern poison which her mind, though it is so strong iii many things, has not been strong enough to resist. She does not believe in the efficacy of our holy relics (such as that which I sent you, and which wrought your cure), but she does believe in the fables that naturalists invent about weeds and beetles, and she finds a Kosmos in a puddle!’
‘You are very severe, Princess.’
‘I dislike inconsistency, and my niece is inconsistent, though she imagines that perfect consistency is the staple of her character.’
‘Nay, madame, surely her character is the most evenly balanced, the most harmonious, and consequently the most perfect that is possible to humanity.’
The Princess looked at him with a keen little glance.
‘You admire her very much? Are you sure you understand her?’
‘I should not dare to say that, but I dare to hope it. Her nature seems to me serene and transparent as fine sunlight.’
‘So it is; but she has faults, I can assure you,’ said the Princess, with her curious union of shrewdness and simplicity. ‘My niece is a perfectly good woman, so far as goodness is possible to finite nature; she is the best woman I have ever known out of the cloister. But then there is this to be said — she has never been tempted. True, she might be tempted to be arrogant, despotic, tyrannical; and she is not so. But that is not precisely the temptation to try her. She is mild and merciful out of her very pride; but her character would be sure destruction of her pride were such a thing possible. You think she is not proud because she is so gentle? You might as well say that Her Majesty is not Empress because she washes the feet of the twelve poor men! Wanda is the best woman that I know, but she is also the proudest.’
‘The Countess has never loved anyone?’ said Sabran, who grew paler as he heard.
‘Terrestrial love — no. It has not touched her. But it would not alter her, believe me. Some women lose themselves in their affections; she would not. She would always remain the mistress of it, and it would be a love like her character. Of that I am sure.’
Sabran was silent; he was discouraged.
‘I think the boldest man would always be held at a distance from her,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I think none would ever acquire dominion over her life.’
‘That is exactly what I have said,’ replied the Princess. ‘Your phrase is differently worded, but it comes to the same thing.’
‘It would depend very much — —’
‘On what?’
‘On how much she loved, and perhaps a little on how much she was loved.’
‘Not at all,’ said the Princess, decidedly; ‘you cannot get more out of a nature than there is in it, and there is no sort of passion in the nature of my niece.’
He was silent again.
‘She was admirably educated,’ added the Princess, hastily, conscious of a remark not strictly becoming in herself; ‘and her rare temperament is serene, well balanced, void of all excess. Heaven has mercifully eliminated from her almost all mortal errors.’
‘By pride
Angels have fallen ere thy time!’
suggested Sabran.
‘Angels, perhaps,’ said the Princess, drily. ‘But for women it is an admirable preservative, second only to piety.’
He went home sculling himself across the lake, now perfectly calm beneath the rose and gold of a midsummer sunset. His heart was heavy, and a dull fear seemed to beat at his conscience like a child suddenly awaking who knocks at a long-closed door. Still, as a crime allures men who contemplate it by the fascination of its weird power, so the sin he desired to commit held him with its unholy beguilement, and almost it looked holy to him because it wore the guise of Wanda von Szalras.
He was not insensible to the charm of this interchange of thought. He had had many passions in which his senses alone had been enlisted. There was a more delicate attraction in the gradual and numberless steps by which, only slowly and with patience, could he win any way into her regard. She had for him the puissance that the almost unattainable has for all humanity. When he could feel that he had awakened any sympathy in her, his pride was more flattered than it could have been by the most complete subjection of any other woman. He had looked on all women with the chill, amorous cynicism of the Parisian psychology, as l’éternel féminin, at best as ‘la forme perverse, vaporeuse, langoureuse, souple comme les roseaux, blanche comme les lis, incapable de se mouvoir pendant les deux tiers du jour — sans équilibre, sans but, sans équateur, donnant son corps en pâture à sa tête. He had had no other ideal; no other conception. This psychology, like some other sciences, brutalises as it equalises. In the woman who had risen up before him in the night of storm upon the Szalrassee he had recognised with his intelligence a woman who made his philosophy at fault, who aroused something beyond his mere instincts, who was not to be classified with the Lias, or the Cesarines, or the Jane de Simeroses, who had been in his love, as in his literature, the various types of the éternel féminin. The simplicity and the dignity of her life astonished and convinced him; he began to understand that where he had imagined he had studied the universe in his knowledge of women, he had in reality only seen two phases of it — the hothouse and the ditch. It is a common error to take the forced flower and the slime weed, and think that there is nothing between or beyond the two.
He had the convictions of his school that all women were at heart coquettes or hypocrites, consciously or unconsciously. Wanda von Szalras routed all his theories. Before her candour, her directness and gravity of thought, her serene indifference to all forms of compliment, all his doctrines and all his experiences were useless. She inspired him with reverential and hopeless admiration, which was mingled with an angry astonishment, and something of the bitterness of envy. Sometimes, as he sat and watched the green water of the lake tumble and roll beneath a north wind’s wrath under a cloudy sky which hid the snows of the Glöckner range, he remembered a horrible story that had once fascinated him of Malatesta of Rimini slaying the princess that would have none of his love, striking his sword across her white throat in the dusky evening time, and casting her body upon the silken curtains of her wicked litter. Almost he could have found it in him to do such a crime — almost. Only he thought that at one look of her eyes his sword would have dropped upon the dust.
Her personal beauty had inspired him with a sudden passion, but her character checked it with the sense of fear which it imposed on him; fear of those high and blameless instincts which were an integral
part of her nature, fear of that frank, unswerving truth which was the paramount law of her life. As he rode with her, walked with her, conversed with her in the long, light summer hours, he saw more and more of the purity and nobility of her temper, but he saw or thought he saw also an inexorable pride and a sternness in judgment which made him believe that she would be utterly unforgiving to weakness or to sin.
She remained the Nibelungen Queen to him, clothed in flawless armour and aloof from men.
He lingered on at the Holy Isle, finding a fresh charm each day in this simple and peaceful existence, filled with the dreams of a woman unlike every other he had known. He knew that it could not last, but he was unwilling to end it himself. To rise to the sound of the monks’ matins, to pass his forenoons in art or open-air exercise, to be sure that some hour or another before sunset he would meet her, either in her home or abroad in the woods; to go early to bed, seeing, as he lay, the pile of the great burg looming high above the water, like the citadel of the Sleeping Beauty — all this, together making up an existence so monotonous, harmless, and calm that a few months before he would have deemed it impossible to endure it, was soothing, alluring, and beguiling to him. He had told no one where he was; his letters might lie and accumulate by the hundred in his rooms in Paris for aught that he cared; he had no creditors, for he had been always scrupulously careful to avoid all debt, and he had no friend for whose existence he cared a straw. There were those who cared for him, indeed, but these seldom trouble any man very greatly.
In the last week of August, however, a letter found its way to him; it was written in a very bad hand, on paper gorgeous with gold and silver. It was signed ‘Cochonette.’
It contained a torrent of reproaches made in the broadest language that the slang of the hour furnished, and every third word was misspelt. How the writer had tracked him she did not say. He tore the letter up and threw the pieces into the water flowing beneath his window. Had he ever passionately desired and triumphed in the possession of that woman? It seemed wonderful to him now. She was an idol of Paris; a creature with the voice of a lark and the laugh of a child, with a lovely, mutinous face, and eyes that could speak without words. As a pierrot, as a mousquetaire, as a little prince, as a fairy king of operetta, she had no rival in the eyes of Paris. She blazed with jewels when she played a peasant, and she wore the costliest costume of Felix’s devising when she sung her triplets as a soubrette. She had been constant to no one for three months, and she had been constant to him for three years, or, at the least, had made him believe so; and she wrote to him now furiously, reproachfully, entreatingly — fierce reproaches and entreaties, all misspelt.
The letter which he threw into the lake brought all the memories of his old life before him; it was like the flavour of absinthe after drinking spring water. It was a life which had had its successes, a life, as the world called it, of pleasure; and it seemed utterly senseless to him now as he tore up the note of Cochonette, and looked down the water to where the towers and spires and battlements of Hohenszalras soared upward in the mists. He shook himself as though to shake off the memory of an unpleasant dream as he went out, descended the landing steps, drew his boat from under the willows and sculled himself across towards the water-stairs of the Schloss. In a quarter of an hour he was playing the themes of the ‘Gotterdammerung,’ whilst his châtelaine sat at her spinning-wheel a few yards from him.
‘Good heavens! can she and Cochonette belong to the same human race?’ he thought, as whilst he played his glance wandered to that patrician figure seated in the light from the oriel window, with the white hound leaning against her velvet skirts, and her jewelled fingers plying the distaff and disentangling the flax.
After the noonday breakfast the sun shone, the mists lifted from the water, the clouds drifted from the lower mountains, only leaving the snow-capped head of the Glöckner enveloped in them.
‘I am going to ride; will you come?’ said Wanda von Szalras to him. He assented with ardour, and a hunter, Siegfried, the mount which was always given to him, was led round under the great terrace, in company with her Arab riding-horse Ali. They rode far through the forests and out on the one level road there was, which swept round the south side of the lake; a road, turf-bordered, overhung with huge trees, closed in with a dewy veil of greenery, across which ever and anon some flash of falling water or some shimmer of glacier or of snow crest shone through the dense leafage. They rode too fast for conversation, both the horses racing like greyhounds; but as they returned, towards the close of the afternoon, they slackened their pace in pity to the steaming heaving flanks beneath their saddles, and then they could hear each other’s voices.
‘What a lovely life it is here!’ he said, with a sigh. ‘The world will seem very vulgar and noisy to me after it.’
‘You would soon tire, and wish for the world,’ she answered him.
‘No,’ he said quickly; ‘I have been two months on the Holy Isle, and I have not known weariness for a moment.’
‘That is because it is still summer. If you were here in the winter you would bemoan your imprisonment, like my aunt Ottilie. Even the post sometimes fails us.’
‘I should not lament the post,’ he replied, thinking of the letter he had cast into the lake. ‘My old life seems to me insanity, fever, disease, beside these past two months I have spent with the monks.’
‘You can take the vows,’ she suggested with a smile. He smiled too.
‘Nay: I should not dare to so insult our mother Church. One must not empty ashes into a reliquary.’
‘Your life is not ashes yet.’
He was silent. He could not say to her what he would have said could he have laid his heart bare.
‘When you go away,’ she pursued, ‘remember my words. Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your talents in a napkin — in a napkin that lies on the supper table at Bignon’s. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I dare say, in its way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles.’
‘But they have had a great position.’
‘Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it.’
He grew pale as she spoke.
‘Cannot make a name?’ he said, with forced gaiety. ‘Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the ministries and half the nobilities!’
A great contempt passed over her face. ‘You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency, or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood is blood; nobility can only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meaning and essence of nobility are descent, inherited traditions, instincts, habits, and memories — all that is meant by noblesse oblige.’
‘Would you allow,’ thought her companion, ‘would you allow the same nobility to Falcon-bridge as to Plantagenet?’
But he dared not name the bar sinister to this daughter of princes.
Siegfried started and reared: his rider did not reply, being absorbed in calming him.
‘What frightened him?’ she asked.
‘A hawk flew-by,’ said Sabran.
‘A hawk, flying low enough for a horse to see it? It must be wounded.’
He did not answer, and they quickened their pace, as the sun sunk behind the glaciers of the west.
When he returned to the monastery the evening had closed in; the lantern was lit at his boat’s prow. Dinner was prepared for him, but he ate little. Later the moon rose; golden and round as a bowl. It was a beautiful spectacle as it gave its light to the amphitheatre of the mountains, to the rippling surface of the lake, to the stately, irregular lines of the castle backed by the blacknes
s of its woods. He sat long by the open window lost in thought, pondering on the great race which had ruled there. L’honneur parle: il suffit, had been their law, and she who represented them held a creed no less stern and pure than theirs. Her words spoken in their ride were like a weight of ice on his heart. Never to her, never, could he confess the errors of his past. He was a man bold to temerity, but he was not bold enough to risk the contempt of Wanda von Szalras. He had never much heeded right or wrong, or much believed in such ethical distinctions, only adhering to the conventional honour and good breeding of the world, but before her his moral sense awakened.
‘The Marquis Xavier would bid me go from here,’ he thought to himself, as the night wore on and he heard the footfall of the monks passing down the passages to their midnight orisons.
‘After all these years in the pourriture of Paris, have I such a thing as conscience left?’ he asked his own thoughts, bitterly. The moon passed behind a cloud and darkness fell over the lake and hid the great pile of the Hohenszalrasburg from his sight. He closed the casement and turned away. ‘Farewell!’ he said, to the vanished castle.
‘Will you think of me sometimes, dear Princess, when I am far away?’ said Sabran abruptly the next morning to his best friend, who looked up startled.
‘Away? Are you going away?’
‘Yes,’ said Sabran, abruptly; ‘and you, I think, madame, who have been so good to me, can guess easily why.’
‘You love my niece?’
He inclined his head in silence.
‘It is very natural,’ said the Princess, faintly. ‘Wanda is a beautiful woman; many men have loved her; they might as well have loved that glacier yonder.’
‘It is not that,’ said Sabran, hastily. ‘It is my own poverty — —’
The Princess looked at him keenly.
‘Do you think her not cold?’
‘She who can so love a brother would surely love her lover not less, did she stoop to one,’ he replied evasively. ‘At least I think so; I ought not to presume to judge.’