by Ouida
‘And you care for her?’ The glance her eyes gave him added as plainly as words could have done, ‘It is not only her wealth, her position? Are you sure?’
He coloured very much as he answered quickly: ‘Were she beggared to-morrow, you would see.’
‘It is a pity,’ murmured the Princess. He did not ask her what she regretted; he knew her sympathy was with him.
They were both mute. The Princess pushed the end of her cane thoughtfully into the velvet turf. She hesitated some moments, then said in a low voice: ‘Were I you I would stay.’
‘Do not tempt me! I have stayed too long as it is. What can she think of me?’
‘She does not think about your reasons; she is too proud a woman to be vain. In a measure you have won her friendship. Perhaps — I do not know, I have no grounds to say so — but perhaps in time you might win more.’
She looked at him as she concluded. He grew exceedingly pale.
He stooped over her chair, and spoke very low:
‘It is just because that appears possible that I go. Do not misunderstand me, I am not a coxcomb; je ne me pose pas en vainqueur. But I have no place here, since I have no equality with her from which to be able to say, “I love you!” Absence alone can say it for me without offence as without hope.’
The Princess was silent. She was thinking of the maxim,; L’absence éteint les petites passions et allume les grandes.’ Which was his?
‘You have been so good to me,’ he murmured caressingly, ‘so benevolent, so merciful, I dare to ask of you a greater kindness yet. Will you explain for me to the Countess von Szalras that I am called away suddenly, and make my excuses and my farewell? It will save me much fruitless pain.’
‘And if it give her pain?’
‘I cannot suppose that, and I should not dare to hope it.’
‘I have no reason to suppose it either, but I think you are de guerre las before the battle is decided.’
‘There is no battle possible for me. There is only a quite certain dishonour.’
His face was dark and weary. He spoke low and with effort. She glanced at him, and felt the vague awe with which strong unintelligible emotion always filled her.
‘You must judge the question for yourself,’ she said with a little hesitation. ‘I will express what you wish to my niece if you really desire it.’
‘You are always so good to me,’ he murmured, with some agitation, and he bent down before her and reverently kissed her little white hands.
‘God be with you, sir,’ she said, with tears in her own tender eyes.
‘You have been so good to me,’ he murmured; ‘the purest hours of my worthless life have been spent at Hohenszalras. Here only have I known what peace and holiness can mean. Give me your blessing ere I go.’
In another moment he had bowed himself from her presence, and the Princess sat mute and motionless in the sun. When she looked up at the great feudal pile of the Schloss which towered above her, it was with reproach and aversion to that stone emblem of the great possessions of its châtelaine.
‘If she were a humbler woman,’ she thought, ‘how much happier she would be! What a pity it all is — what a pity! Of course he is right; of course he can do nothing else. If he did do anything else the world would condemn him, and even she very likely would despise him — but it is such a pity! If only she could have a woman’s natural life about her —— This life is not good. It is very well while she is young, but when she shall be no longer young?’
And the tender heart of the old gentlewoman ached for a sorrow not her own; and could she have given him a duchy to make him able to declare his love, she would have done so at all costs.
CHAPTER VII
The sun was setting when the Countess Wanda returned from her distant ride. She dismounted at the foot of the terrace-steps and ascended them slowly, with Donau and Neva behind her, both tired and breathless.
‘You are safe home, my love?’ said the Princess, turning her head towards the steps.
‘Yes, dear mother mine; you always, I know, think that Death gets up on the saddle. Is anything amiss? You looked troubled.’
‘I have a message for you,’ said the Princess with a sigh, and she gave Sabran’s.
Wanda von Szalras heard in silence. She showed neither surprise nor regret.
The Princess waited a little.
‘Well,’ she said, at length, ‘well, you do not even ask me why he goes!’
‘You say he has been called away,’ her niece answered. ‘Surely that is reason enough.’
‘You have no heart, Wanda.’
‘I do not understand you,’ said the Countess von Szalras, very coldly.
‘Do you mean to say you have not seen that he loved you?’
The face of Wanda grew colder still.
‘Did he instruct you to say this also?’
‘No, no,’ said the Princess, hurriedly, perceiving her error. ‘He only bade me say that he was called away and must leave at once, and begged you to accept through me his adieus and the expression of his gratitude. But it is very certain that he does love you, and that because he is too poor and too proud to say so he goes.’
‘You must weave your little romance!’ said her niece, with some impatience, striking the gilt wicker table with her riding-whip. ‘I prefer to think that M. de Sabran is, very naturally, gone back to the world to which he belongs. My only wonder has been that he has borne so long with the solitudes of the Szalrassee.’
‘If you were not the most sincere woman in the world, I should believe you were endeavouring to deceive me. As it is,’ said the Princess, with some temper, ‘I can only suppose that you deceive yourself.’
‘Have you any tea there?’ said her niece, laying aside her gauntlets and her whip, and casting some cakes to the two hounds.
She had very plainly and resolutely closed the subject almost before it was fairly opened. The Princess, a little intimidated and keenly disappointed, did not venture to renew it.
When, the next morning, questioning Hubert, the Princess found that indeed her favourite had left the island monastery at dawn, the landscape of the Hohe Tauern seemed to her more monotonous and melancholy than it had ever done, and the days more tedious and dull.
‘You will miss the music, at least,’ she said, with asperity, to her niece. ‘I suppose you will give him as much regret as you have done at times to the Abbé Liszt?’
‘I shall miss the music, certainly,’ said the Countess Wanda, calmly. ‘Our poor Kapellmeister is very indifferent. If he were not so old that it would be cruel to displace him, I would take another from the Conservatorium.’
The Princess was irritated and even incensed at the reply, but she let it pass. Sabran’s name was mentioned no more between them for many days.
No one knew whither he had gone, and no tidings came of him to Hohenszalras.
One day a foreign journal, amongst the many news-sheets that came by post there, contained his name: ‘The Marquis de Sabran broke the bank at Monte Carlo yesterday,’ was all that it said in its news of the Riviera.
‘A winner at a tripot, what a hero for you, mother mine!’ she said with some bitterness, handing the paper to the Princess. She was surprised at the disgust and impatience which she felt herself. What could it concern her?
That day as she rode slowly through the grass drives of her forests, she thought with pain of her companion of a few weeks, who so late had ridden over these very paths beside her, the dogs racing before them, the wild flowers scenting the air, the pale sunshine falling down across the glossy necks of their horses.
‘He ought to do better things than break a bank at a gaming-place,’ she thought with regret. ‘With such natural gifts of body and mind, it is a sin — a sin against himself and others — to waste his years in those base and trivial follies. When he was here he seemed to feel so keenly the charm of Nature, the beauty of repose, the possibility of noble effort.’
She let the reins droop on her mare’
s throat and paced slowly over the moss and the grass; though she was all alone — for in her own forests she would not be accompanied even by a groom — the colour came into her face as she remembered many things, many words, many looks, which confirmed the assertion Madame Ottilie had made to her.
‘That may very well be,’ she thought; ‘but if it be, I think my memory might have restrained him from becoming the hero of a gambling apotheosis.’
And she was astonished at herself to find how much regret mingled with her disgust, and how much her disgust was intensified by a sentiment of personal offence.
When she reached home it was twilight, and she was told that her cousin Prince Egon Vàsàrhely had arrived. She would have been perfectly glad to see him, if she had been perfectly sure that he would have accepted quietly the reply she had sent to his letter received on the night of the great storm. As it was she met him in the blue-room before the Princess Ottilie, and nothing could be said on that subject.
Prince Egon, though still young, had already a glorious past behind him. He came of a race of warriors, and the Vàsàrhely Hussars had been famous since the days of Maria Theresa. The command of that brilliant regiment was hereditary, and he had led them in repeated charges into the French lines and the Prussian lines with such headlong and dauntless gallantry that he had been called the ‘Wild Boar of Taròc’ throughout the army. His hussars were the most splendid cavalry that ever shook their bridles in the sunlight on the wide Magyar plains. Their uniform remained the same as in the days of Aspern, and he was prodigal of gold, and embroidery, and rich furs, and trappings, with that martial coquetry which has been characteristic of so many great soldiers from Scylla to Michael Skobeleff.
With his regiment in the field, and without it in many adventures in the wilder parts of the Austrian Empire and on the Turkish border, he had become a synonym for heroism throughout the Imperial army, whilst in his manner and mode of life no more magnificent noble ever came from the dim romantic solitudes of Hungary to the court and the capital. He had great personal beauty; he had unrivalled traditions of valour; and he had a character as generous as it was daring: but he failed to awaken more than a sisterly attachment in the heart of his cousin. She had been so used to see him with her brothers that he seemed as near to her as they had been. She loved him tenderly, but with no sort of passion. She wondered that he should care for her in that sense, and grew sometimes impatient of his reiterated prayers.
‘There are so many women who would listen to him and adore him,’ she said. ‘Why must he come to me?
Before Bela’s death, and before she became her own mistress, she had always urged that her own sisterly affection for Egon made any thought of marriage with him out of the question.
‘I am fond of him as I was of Gela and Victor,’ she said often to those who pressed the alliance upon her; ‘but that is not love. I will not marry a man whom I do not love.’
When she became absolutely her own mistress he was for some time silent, fearing to importune her, or to seem mercenary. She had become by Bela’s death one of the greatest alliances in Europe. But at length, confident that his own position exempted him from any possible appearance of covetousness, he gently reminded her of her father’s and her brother’s wishes; but to no effect. She gave him the same answer. ‘You are sure of my affection, but I will not do you so bad a service as to become your wife. I have no love for you.’ From that he had no power to move or change her. He had made her many appeals in his frequent visits to Hohenszalras, but none with any success in inducing her to depart from the frank and placid regard of close relationship. She liked him well, and held him in high esteem; but this was not love; nor, had she consented to call it love, would it ever have contented the impetuous, ardent, and passionate spirit of Egon Vàsàrhely.
They could not be lovers, but they still remained friends, partly through consanguinity, partly because he could bear to see her thus so long as no other was nearer to her than he. They greeted each other now cordially and simply, and talked of the many cares and duties and interests that sprang up daily in the administration of such vast properties as theirs.
Prince Vàsàrhely, though a brilliant soldier and magnificent noble, was simple in his tastes, and occupied himself largely with the welfare of his people.
The Princess yawned discreetly behind her fan many times during this conversation, to her utterly uninteresting, upon villages, vines, harvests, bridges swept away by floods, stewards just and unjust, and the tolls and general navigation of the Danube. Quite tired of all these details and discussion of subjects which she considered ought to be abandoned to the men of business, she said suddenly, in a pause:
‘Egon, did you ever know a very charming person, the Marquis de Sabran?’
Vàsàrhely reflected a moment.
‘No,’ he answered slowly. ‘I have no recollection of such a name.’
‘I thought you might have met him in Paris.’
‘I am so rarely in Paris; since my father’s death I have scarcely passed a month there. Who is he?’
‘A stranger whose acquaintance we made through his being cast adrift here in a storm,’ said the Countess Wanda, with some impatience. ‘My dear aunt is devoted to him, because he has painted her a St. Ottilie on a screen, with the skill of Meissonnier. Since he left us he has become celebrated: he has broken the bank at Monte Carlo.’
Egon Vàsàrhely looked at her quickly.
‘It seems to anger you? Did this stranger stay here any time?’
‘Sometime, yes; he had a bad accident on the Venediger. Herr Greswold brought him to our island to pass his convalescence with the monks. From the monks to Monte Carlo! —— it is at least a leap requiring some elasticity in moral gymnastics.’
She spoke with some irritation, which did not escape the ear of her cousin. He said merely himself:
‘Did you receive him, knowing nothing about him?’
‘We certainly did. It was an imprudence; but if he paint like Meissonnier, he plays like Liszt: who was to resist such a combination of gifts?’
‘You say that very contemptuously, Wanda,’ said the Prince.
‘I am not contemptuous of the talent; I am of the possessor of it, who comprehends his own powers so little that he breaks the bank at Monaco.’
‘I envy him at least his power to anger you,’ said Egon Vàsàrhely.
‘I am angered to see anything wasted,’ she answered, conscious of the impatience she had shown. ‘I was very angry with Otto’s little daughter yesterday; she had gathered a huge bundle of cowslips and thrown it down in the sun; it was ingratitude to God who made them. This friend of my aunt’s does worse; he changes his cowslip into monkshood.’
‘Is he indeed such a favourite of yours, dear mother?’ said Vàsàrhely.
The Princess answered petulantly:
‘Certainly, a charming person. And our cousin Kaulnitz knows him well. Wanda for once talks foolishly. Gambling is, it is true, a great sin at all times, but I do not know that it is worse at public tables than it is in your clubs. I myself am, of course, ignorant of these matters; but I have heard that privately, at cards, whole fortunes have been lost in a night, scribbled away with a pencil on a scrap of paper.’
‘To lose a fortune is better than to win one,’ said her niece, as she rose from the head of her table.
When the Princess slept in her blue-room Egon Vàsàrhely approached his cousin, where she sat at her embroidery frame.
‘This stranger has the power to make you angry,’ he said sadly. ‘I have not even that.’
‘Dear Egon,’ she said tenderly, ‘you have done nothing in your life that I could despise. Why should you be discontented at that?’
‘Would you care if I did?’
‘Certainly; I should be very sorry if my noble cousin did anything that could belie his chivalry; but why should we suppose impossibilities?’
‘Suppose we were not cousins, would you love me then?’
‘How can
I tell? This is mere non-sense — —’
‘No; it is all my life. You know, Wanda, that I have loved you, only you, ever since I saw you as I came back from France — a child, but such a beautiful child, with your hair braided with pearls, and a dress all stiff with gold, and your lap full of red roses.’
‘Oh, I remember,’ she said hastily. ‘There was a child’s costume ball at the Hof; I called myself Elizabeth of Thuringia, and Bela, my own Bela, was my little Louis of Hungary. Oh, Egon, why will you speak of those times?’
‘Because surely they make a kind of tie between us? They — —’
‘They do make one that will last all our lives, unless you strain it to bear a weight it is not made to bear. Dear Egon, you are very dear to me, but not dear so. As my cousin, my gallant, kind, and loyal cousin, you are very precious to me; but, Egon, if you could force me to be your wife I should not be indifferent to you, I should hate you!’
He grew white under his olive skin. He shrank a little, as if he suffered some sharp physical pain.
‘Hate me!’ he echoed in a stupor of surprise and suffering.
‘I believe I should, I could hate. It is a frightful thing to say. Dear Egon, look elsewhere; find some other amongst the many lovely women that you see; do not waste your brilliant life on me. I shall never say otherwise than I say to-night’ and you will compel me to lose the most trusted friend I have.’
He was still very pale. He breathed heavily. There was a mist over his handsome dark eyes, which were cast down. ‘Until you love any other, I shall never abandon hope.’
‘That is unwise. I shall probably love no one all my life long; I have told you so often.’
‘All say so until love finds them out. I will not trouble you; I will be your cousin, your friend, rather than be nothing to you. But it is hard.’
‘Why think of me so? Your career has so much brilliancy, so many charms, so many interests — —’
‘You do not know what it is to love. I talk to you in an unknown tongue, and you have no pity, because you do not understand.’
She did not answer. Over her thoughts passed the memory of the spinet whose music she had said he could not touch and waken.