by Ouida
He remained a week at Hohenszalras, but he did not again speak to her of his own sufferings. He was a proud man, though humble to her.
With a sort of contrition she noticed for the first time that he wearied her; that when he spoke of his departure she was glad. He was a fine soldier, a keen hunter, rather than a man of talents. The life he loved best was his life at home in his great castles, amidst the immense plains and the primeval forests of Hungary and the lonely fastnesses of the Karpathians, or scouring a field of battle with his splendid troopers behind him, all of them his kith and kin, or men of his own soil, whom he ruled with a firm, high hand, in a generous despotism.
When he was with her she missed all the graceful tact, the subtle meanings, the varied suggestions and allusions that had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome to her. Egon Vàsàrhely was no scholar, no thinker, no satirist; he was only brave and generous, as lions are, and, vaguely, a poet without words, from the wild solitudes he loved, and the romance that lies in the nature of the Magyar. ‘He knows nothing!’ she thought, impatiently recalling the stores of most various and recondite knowledge with which her late companion had played so carelessly and with such ease. It seemed to her that never in her life had she weighed her cousin in scales so severe and found him so utterly wanting.
And yet how many others she knew would have found their ideal in that gallant gentleman, with his prowess, and his hardihood, and his gallantry in war, and his winsome temper, so full of fire to men, so full of chivalry for women! When Prince Egon, in his glittering dress, all fur and gold and velvet, passed up the ball-room at the Burg in Vienna, no other man in all that magnificent assembly was so watched, so admired, so sighed for: and he was her cousin, and he only wearied her!
As he was leaving, he paused a moment after bidding her farewell, and after some moments of silence, said in a low voice:
‘Dear, I will not trouble you again until you summon me. Perhaps that will be many years; but whether we meet or not, time will make no change in me. I am your servant ever.’
Then he bowed over her hand once more, once more saluted her, and in a moment or two the quick trot of the horses that bore him away woke the echoes of the green hills.
She looked out of the huge arched entrance door down the green defile that led to the outer world, and felt a pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation.
‘If one could force oneself to love by any pilgrimage or penance,’ she thought, ‘there are none I would not take upon me to be able to love Egon.’
As she stood thoughtfully there on the doorway of her great castle, the sweet linnet-like voice of the Princess Ottilie came on her ear. It said, a little shrilly: ‘You are always looking for a four-leaved shamrock. In that sort of search life slips away unperceived; one is very soon left alone with one’s dead leaves.’
Wanda von Szalras turned and smiled.
‘I am not afraid of being left alone,’ she said. ‘I shall have my people and my forests always.’
Then, apprehensive lest she should have seemed thankless and cold of heart, she turned caressingly to Madame Ottilie.
‘Nay, I could not bear to lose you, my sweet fairy godmother. Think me neither forgetful nor ungrateful.’
‘You could never be one or the other to me. But I shall not live, like a fairy godmother, for ever. Before I die I would fain see you content like others with the shamrocks as nature has made them.’
‘I think there are few people as content as I am,’ said the Countess Wanda, and said the truth.
‘You are content with yourself, not with others. You will pardon me if I say there is a great difference between the two,’ replied the Princess Ottilie, with a little smile that was almost sarcastic on her pretty small features.
‘You mean that I have a great deal of vanity and no sympathy?’
‘You have a great deal of pride,’ said the Princess, discreetly, as she began to take her customary noontide walk up and down the terrace, her tall cane tapping the stones and her little dog running before her, whilst a hood of point-lace and a sunshade of satin kept the wind from her pretty white hair and the sun from her eyes, that were still blue as the acres of mouse-ear that grew by the lake.
CHAPTER VIII.
The summer glided away and became autumn, and the Countess Wanda refused obstinately to fill Hohenszalras with house-parties. In vain her aunt spoke of the Lynau, the Windischgrätz, the Hohenlöhe, and the other great families who were their relatives or their friends. In vain she referred continually to the fact that every Schloss in Austria and all adjacent countries was filling with guests at this season, and the woods around it resounding with the hunter’s horn and the hound’s bay. In vain did she recapitulate the glories of Hohenszalras in an earlier time, and hint that the mistress of so vast a domain owed some duties to society.
Wanda von Szalras opposed to all these suggestions and declarations that indifference which would have seemed obstinacy had it been less mild. As for the hunting parties, she avowed with truth that although a daughter of mighty hunters, she herself regarded all pastimes founded on cruelty with aversion and contempt; the bears and the boars, the wild deer and the mountain chamois, might dwell undisturbed for the whole of their lives so far as she was concerned. When a bear came down and ate off the heads of an acre or two of wheat, she recompensed the peasant who had suffered the loss, but she would not have her jägermeister track the poor beast. The jägermeister sighed as Madame Ottilie did for the bygone times when a score of princes and nobles had ridden out on a wolf-chase, or hundreds of peasants had threshed the woods to drive the big game towards the Kaiser’s rifle; but for poachers his place would have been a sinecure and his days a weariness. His mistress was not to be persuaded. She preferred her forests left to their unbroken peace, their stillness filled with the sounds of rushing waters and the calls of birds.
The weeks glided on one after one with the even measured pace of monotonous and unruffled time; her hours were never unoccupied, for her duties were constant and numerous.
She would go and visit the sennerinn in their loftiest cattle-huts, and would descend an ice-slope with the swiftness and security of a practised mountaineer. In her childhood she and Bela had gone almost everywhere the chamois went, and she came of a race which, joined to high courage, had the hereditary habits of a great endurance. In the throne room of Vienna, with her great pearls about her, that had once been sent by a Sultan to a Szalras who fought with Wenceslaus, she was the stateliest and proudest lady of the greatest aristocracy of the world; but on her own mountain sides she was as dauntless as an ibis, as sure-footed as a goat, and would sit in the alpine cabins and drink a draught of milk and break a crust of rye-bread as willingly as though she were a sennerinn herself; so she would take the oars and row herself unaided down the lake, so she would saddle her horse and ride it over the wildest country, so she would drive her sledge over many a German mile of snow, and even in the teeth of a north wind blowing straight from the Russian plains and the Arctic seas.
‘Fear nothing!’ had been said again and again to her in her childhood, and she had learned that her race transmitted to and imposed its courage no less on its daughters than on its sons. Cato would have admired this mountain brood, even though its mountain lair was more luxurious than he would have deemed was wise.
She knew thoroughly what all her rights, titles, and possessions were. She was never vague or uncertain as to any of her affairs, and it would have been impossible to deceive or to cheat her. No one tried to do so, for her lawyers were men of old-fashioned ways and high repute, and for centuries the vast properties of the Counts von Szalras had been administered wisely and honestly in the same advocates’ offices, which were close underneath the Calvarienburg in the good city of Salzburg. Her trustees were her uncle Cardinal Vàsàrhely and her great-uncle Prince George of Lilienhöhe; they were old men, both devoted to her, and both fully conscious that her intelligence was much abler and keener than their own. All these vast pos
sessions gave her an infinite variety of occupation and of interests, and she neglected none of them. Still, all the properties and duties in the world will not suffice to fill up the heart and mind of a woman of four-and-twenty years of age, who enjoys the perfection of bodily health and of physical beauty. The most spiritual and the most dutiful of characters cannot altogether resist the impulses of nature. There were times when she now began to think that her life was somewhat empty and passionless.
But a certain sense of their monotony had begun for the first time to come upon her; a certain vague dissatisfaction stirred in her now and then. The discontent of Sabran seemed to have left a shadow of itself upon her. For the first time she seemed to be listening, as it were, to her life and to find a great silence in it; there was no echo in it of voices she loved.
Why had she never perceived it before? Why did she become conscious of it now? She asked herself this impatiently as the slight but bitter flavour of dissatisfaction touched her, and the days for once seemed — now and then — over long.
She loved her people and her forests and her mountains, and she had always thought that they would be sufficient for her, and she had honestly told the Princess that of solitude she was not afraid; and yet a certain sense that her life was cold and in a measure empty had of late crept upon her. She wondered angrily why a vague and intangible melancholy stole on her at times, which was different from the sorrow which still weighed on her for her brother’s death. Now and then she looked at the old painted box of the spinet, and thought of the player who had awakened its dumb strings; but she did not suspect for a moment that it was in any sense his companionship which, now that it was lost, made the even familiar tenor of her time appear monotonous and without much interest. In the long evenings, whilst the Princess slumbered and she herself sat alone watching the twilight give way to the night over the broad and solemn landscape, she felt a lassitude which did not trouble her in the open air, in the daylight, or when she was busied indoors over the reports and requirements of her estates. Unacknowledged, indeed, unknown to her, she missed the coming of the little boat from the Holy Isle, and missed the prayer and praise of the great tone-poets rolling to her ear from the organ within. If anyone had told her that her late guest had possessed any such power to make her days look grey and pass tediously she would have denied it, and been quite sincere in her denial. But as he had called out the long mute music from the spinet, so he had touched, if only faintly, certain chords in her nature that until then had been dumb.
‘I am not like you, my dear Olga,’ she wrote to her relative, the Countess Brancka. ‘I am not easily amused. That course effrénée of the great world carries you honestly away with it; all those incessant balls, those endless visits, those interminable conferences on your toilettes, that continual circling of human butterflies round you, those perpetual courtships of half a score of young men; it all diverts you. You are never tired of it; you cannot understand any life outside its pale. All your days, whether they pass in Paris or Petersburg, at Trouville, at Biarritz, or at Vienna or Scheveningen, are modelled on the same lines; you must have excitement as you have your cup of chocolate when you wake. What I envy you is that the excitement excites you. When I was amidst it I was not excited; I was seldom even diverted. See the misfortune that it is to be born with a grave nature! I am as serious as Marcus Antoninus. You will say that it comes of having learned Latin and Greek. I do not think so; I fear I was born unamusable. I only truly care about horses and trees, and they are both grave things, though a horse can be playful enough sometimes when he is allowed to forget his servitude. Your friends, the famous tailors, send me admirably-chosen costumes which please that sense in me which Titians and Vandycks do (I do not mean to be profane); but I only put them on as the monks do their frocks. Perhaps I am very unworthy of them; at least, I cannot talk toilette as you can with ardour a whole morning and every whole morning of your life. You will think I am laughing at you; indeed I am not. I envy your faculty of sitting, as I am sure you are sitting now, in a straw chair on the shore, with a group of boulevardiers around you, and a crowd making a double hedge to look at you when it is your pleasure to pace the planks. My language is involved. I do not envy you the faculty of doing it, of course; I could do it myself to-morrow. I envy you the faculty of finding amusement in doing it, and finding flattery in the double hedge.’
A few days afterwards the Countess Brancka wrote back in reply:
‘The world is like wine; ça se mousse et ça monte. There are heads it does not affect; there are palates that do not like it, yours amongst them. But there is so much too in habit. Living alone amidst your mountains you have lost all taste for the brouhaha of society, which grows noisier, it must be said, every year. Yes, we are noisy: we have lost our dignity. You alone keep yours, you are the châtelaine of the middle ages. Perceforest or Parsifal should come riding to your gates of granite. By the way, I hear you have been entertaining one of our boulevardiers. Réné de Sabran is charming, and the handsomest man in Paris; but he is not Parsifal or Perceforest. Between ourselves, he has an indifferent reputation, but perhaps he has repented on your Holy Isle, They say he is changed; that he has quarrelled with Cochonette, and that he is about to be made deputy for his department, whose representative has just died. Pardon me for naming Cochonette; it is part of our decadence that we laugh about all these naughty things and naughty people who are, after all, not so very much worse than we are ourselves. But you do not laugh, whether at these or at anything else. You are too good, my beautiful Wanda; it is your sole defect. You have even inoculated this poor Marquis, who, after a few weeks upon the Szalrassee, surrenders Cochonette for the Chamber! My term of service comes round next month: if you will have me I will take the Tauern on my road to Gödöllö. I long to embrace you.’
‘Olga will take pity on our solitude,’ said Wanda von Szalras to her aunt. ‘I have not seen her for four years, but I imagine she is little changed.’
The Princess read the letter, frowning and pursing her lips together in pretty rebuke as she came to the name of Cochonette.
‘They have indeed lost all dignity,’ she said with a sigh; ‘and something more than dignity also. Olga was always frivolous.’
‘All her monde is; not she more than another.’
‘You were very unjust, you see, to M. de Sabran; he pays you the compliment of following your counsels.’
Wanda von Szalras rose a little impatiently. ‘He had better have followed them before he broke the bank at Monaco. It is an odd sort of notoriety with which to attract the pious and taciturn Bretons; and when he was here he had no convictions. I suppose he picked them up with the gold pieces at the tables!’
Olga, Countess Brancka, née Countess Seriatine, of a noble Russian family, had been married at sixteen to the young Gela von Szalras, who, a few months after his bridal, had been shot dead on the battlefield of Solferino.
After scarce a year of mourning she had fascinated the brother of Egon Vàsàrhely, a mere youth who bore the title of Count Brancka. There had been long and bitter opposition made to the new alliance on the part of both families, on account of the consanguinity between Stefan Brancka and her dead lord. But opposition had only increased the ardour of the young man and the young widow; they had borne down all resistance, procured all dispensations, had been wedded, and in a year’s time had both wished the deed undone. Both were extravagant, capricious, self-indulgent, and unreasonable; their two egotisms were in a perpetual collision. They met but seldom, and never met without quarrelling violently. The only issue of their union was two little, fantastic, artificial fairies who were called respectively Mila and Marie.
At the time of the marriage of the Branckas, Wanda had been too young to share in opposition to it; but the infidelity to her brother’s memory had offended and wounded her deeply, and in her inmost heart she had never pardoned it, though the wife of Stefan Brancka had been a passing guest at Hohenszalras, where, had Count Gela lived, she would have r
eigned as sovereign mistress. That his sister reigned there in her stead the Countess Olga resented keenly and persistently. Her own portion of the wealth of the Szalras had been forfeited under her first marriage contract by her subsequent alliance. But she never failed to persuade herself that her exclusion from every share in that magnificent fortune was a deep wrong done to herself, and she looked upon Wanda von Szalras as the doer of that wrong.
In appearance, however, she was always cordial, caressing, affectionate, and if Wanda chose to mistrust her affection, it was, she reflected, only because a life of unwise solitude had made a character naturally grave become severe and suspicious.
She did not fail to arrive there a week later. She was a small, slender, lovely woman, with fair skin, auburn hair, wondrous black eyes, and a fragile frame that never knew fatigue. She held a high office at the Imperial Court, but when she was not on service, she spent, under the plea of health, all her time at Paris or les eaux. She came with her numerous attendants, her two tiny children, and a great number of huge fourgons full of all the newest marvels of combination in costume. She was seductive and caressing, but she was capricious, malicious, and could be even violent; in general she was gaily given up to amusement and intrigue, but she had moments of rage that were uncontrollable. She had had many indiscretions and some passions, but the world liked her none the less for that; she was a great lady, and in a sense a happy woman, for she had nerves of steel despite all her maladies, and brought to the pleasures of life an unflagging and even ravenous zest.
When with her perfume of Paris, her restless animation, her children, like little figures from a fashion-plate, her rapid voice that was shrill yet sweet, like a silver whistle, and her eyes that sparkled alike with mirth and with malice, she came on to the stately terraces of Hohenszalras, she seemed curiously discordant with it and its old world peace and gravity. She was like a pen-and-ink sketch of Cham thrust between the illuminated miniatures of a missal.