by Ouida
She felt it herself.
‘It is the Roman de la Rose in stone,’ she said, as her eyes roved over the building, which she had not visited for four years. ‘And you, Wanda, you look like Yseulte of the White Hand or the Marguerite des Marguerites; you must be sorry you did not live in those times.’
‘Yes: if only for one reason. One could make the impress of one’s own personality so much more strongly on the time.’
‘And now the times mould us. We are all horribly alike. There is only yourself who retain any individuality amidst all the women that I know. ‘La meule du pressoir de l’abrutissement might have been written of our world. After all, you are wise to keep out of it. My straw chair at Trouville looks trumpery beside that ivory chair in your Rittersäal. I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant and a sack of bon-bons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year round, morally — metaphorically — how do you say it? It makes us thirsty, and perhaps, I am not sure, perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we nibble the sweetmeats, and don’t know it.
‘Your dinner must lack two things — bread and water.’
‘Yes: we never see either. It is all truffles and caramels and vins frappés.’
‘There is your bread.’
She glanced at the little children, two pretty, graceful little maids of six and seven years old.
‘Ouf!’ said the Countess Zelenka. ‘They are only little bits of puff paste, a couple of petits fours baked on the boulevards. If they be chic, and marry well, I for one shall ask no more of them. If ever you have children, I suppose you will rear them on science and the Antonines?’
‘Perhaps on the open air and Homer,’ said Wanda, with a smile.
The Countess Brancka was silent a moment, then said abruptly:
‘You dismissed Egon again?’
‘Has he made you his ambassadress?’
‘No, oh no; he is too proud: only we all are aware of his wishes. Wanda, do you know that you have some cruelty in you, some sternness?’
‘I think not. The cruelty would be to grant the wishes. With a loveless wife Egon, would be much more unhappy than he is now.’
‘Oh, after a few months he would not care, you know; they never do. To unite your fortunes is the great thing; you could lead your lives as you liked.’
‘Our fortunes do very well apart,’ said the Countess von Szalras, with a patience which cost her some effort.
‘Yours is immense,’ said Madame Brancka, with a sigh, for her own and her husband’s wealth had been seriously involved by extravagance and that high play in which they both indulged. ‘And it must accumulate in your hands. You cannot spend much. I do not see how you could spend much. You never receive; you never go to your palaces; you never leave Hohenszalras; and you are so wise a woman that you never commit any follies.’
Wanda was silent. It did not appear to her that she was called on to discuss her expenditure.
Dinner was announced; their attendants took away the children; the Princess woke up from a little dose, and said suddenly, ‘Olga, is M. de Sabran elected?’
‘Aunt Ottilie,’ said her niece, hastily, ‘has lost her affections to that gentleman, because he painted her saint on a screen and had all old Haydn at his fingers’ ends.’
‘The election does not take place until next month,’ said the Countess. ‘He will certainly be returned, because of the blind fidelity of the department to his name. The odd thing is that he should wish to be so.’
‘Wanda told him it was his duty,’ said Princess Ottilie, with innocent malice.
The less innocent malice of the Countess Brancka’s eyes fell for a passing moment with inquiry and curiosity on the face of her hostess, which, however, told her nothing.
‘Then he was Parsifal or Perceforest!’ she cried, ‘and he has ridden away to find the emerald cup of tradition. What a pity that he paused on his way to break the bank at Monte Carlo. The two do not accord. I fear he is but Lancelot.’
‘There is no reason why he should not pursue an honourable ambition,’ said the Princess, with some offence.
‘No reason at all, even if it be not an honourable one,’ said Madame Brancka, with a curious intonation. ‘He always wins at baccara; he has done some inimitable caricatures which hang at the Mirliton; he is an amateur Rubenstein, and he has been the lover of Cochonette. These are his qualifications for the Chamber, and if they be not as valiant ones as those of les Preux they are at least more amusing.’
‘My dear Olga,’ said the Princess, with a certain dignity of reproof, ‘you are not on your straw chair at Trouville. There are subjects, expressions, suggestions, which are not agreeable to my ears or on your lips.’
‘Cochonette!’ murmured the offender, with a graceful little curtsey of obedience and contrition. ‘Oh, Madame, if you knew! A year ago we talked of nothing else!’
The Countess Brancka wished to talk still of nothing else, and though she encountered a chillness and silence that would have daunted a less bold spirit, she contrived to excite in the Princess a worldly and almost unholy curiosity concerning that heroine of profane history who had begun life in a little bakehouse of the Batignolles, and had achieved the success of putting her name (or her nickname) upon the lips of all Paris.
Throughout dinner she spoke of little save of Cochonette, that goddess of bouffe, and of Parsifal, as she persisted in baptising the one lover to whom alone the goddess had ever been faithful. With ill-concealed impatience her hostess bore awhile with the subject; then dismissed it somewhat peremptorily.
‘We are provincials, my dear Olga,’ she said, with a very cold inflection of contempt in her voice. ‘We are very antiquated in our ways and our views. Bear with our prejudices and do not scare our decorum. We keep it by us as we keep kingfishers’ skins amongst our furs in summer against moth; a mere superstition, I daresay, but we are only rustic people.’
‘How you say that, Wanda,’ said her guest, with a droll little laugh, ‘and you look like Marie Antoinette all the while! Why will you bury yourself? You would only need to be seen in Paris a week, and all the world would turn after you and go back to tradition and ermine, instead of chien and plush. If you live another ten years as you live now you will turn Hohenszalras into a religious house; and even Mme. Ottilie would regret that. You will institute a Carmelite Order, because white becomes you so. Poor Egon, he would sooner have you laugh about Cochonette.’
The evening was chill, but beautifully calm and free of mist. Wanda von Szalras walked out on to the terrace, whilst her cousin and guest, missing the stimulus of her usual band of lovers and friends, curled herself up on a deep chair and fell sound asleep like a dormouse.
There was no sound on the night except the ripple of the lake water below and the splash of torrents falling down the cliffs around; a sense of irritation and of pleasure moved her both in the same moment. What was a French courtesan, a singer of lewd songs, an interpreter of base passions to her? Nothing except a creature to be loathed and pitied, as men in health feel a disgusted compassion for disease. Yet she felt a certain anger stir in her as she recalled all this frivolous, trivial, ill-flavoured chatter of her cousin’s. And what was it to her if one of the many lovers of this woman had cast her spells from about him and left her for a manlier and a worthier arena? Yet she could not resist a sense of delicate distant homage to herself in the act, in the mute obedience to her counsels such as a knight might render, even Lancelot with stained honour and darkened soul.
The silence of it touched her.
He had said nothing: only by mere chance, in the idle circling of giddy rumour, she learned he had remembered her words and followed her suggestion. There was a subtle and flattering reverence in it which pleased the taste of a woman who was always proud but never vain. And to any noble temperament there is a singularly pure and honest joy in the consciousness of having been in any measure the means of raising higher instincts and loftier desires in any human soul that was not dead
but dormant.
The shrill voice of Olga Brancka startled her as it broke in on her musings.
‘I have been asleep!’ she cried, as she rose out of her deep chair and came forth into the moonlight. ‘Pray forgive me, Wanda. You will have all that drowsy water running and tumbling all over the place; it makes one think of the voices in the Sistine in Passion Week; there are the gloom, the hush, the sigh, the shriek, the eternal appeal, the eternal accusation. That water would drive me into hysteria; could you not drain it, divert it, send it underground — silence it somehow?’
‘When you can keep the Neva flowing at New Year, perhaps I shall be able. But I would not if I could. I have had all that water about me from babyhood; when I am away from the sound of it I feel as if some hand had woolled up my ears.’
‘That is what I feel when I am away from the noise of the streets. Oh, Wanda! to think that you can do utterly as you like and yet do not like to have the sea of light of the Champs-Élysées or the Graben before your eyes, rather than that gliding, dusky water!’
‘The water is a mirror. I can see my own soul in it and Nature’s; perhaps one hopes even sometimes to see God’s.’
‘That is not living, my dear, it is dreaming.’
‘Oh, no, my life is very real; it is as real as light to darkness, it is absolute prose.’
‘Make it poetry then; that is very easy.’
‘Poetry is to the poetical; I am by no means poetical. My stud-book, my stewards’ ledgers, my bankers’ accounts, form the chief of my literature; you know I am a practical farmer.’
‘I know you are one of the most beautiful and one of the richest women in Europe, and you live as if you were fifty years old, ugly, and dévote; all this will grow on you. In a few years’ time you will be a hermit, a prude, an ascetic. You will found a new order, and be canonised after death.’
‘My aunt is afraid that I shall die a freethinker. It is hard to please every one,’ replied the Countess Wanda, with unruffled good humour. ‘It is poetical people who found religious orders, enthusiasts, visionaries; I wish I were one of them. But I am not. The utmost I can do is to follow George Herbert’s precept and sweep my own little chambers, so that this sweeping may be in some sort a duty done.’
‘You are a good woman, Wanda, and I dare say a grand one, but you are too grave for me.’
‘You mean that I am dull? People always grow dull who live much alone.’
‘But you could have the whole world at your feet if you only raised a finger.’
‘That would not amuse me at all.’
Her guest gave an impatient movement of her shoulders; after a little she said, ‘Did Réné de Sabran amuse you?’
Wanda von Szalras hesitated a moment.
‘In a measure he interested me,’ she answered, being a perfectly truthful woman. ‘He is a man who has the capacity of great things, but he seems to me to be his own worst enemy; if he had fewer gifts he might probably have more achievement. A waste of power is always a melancholy sight.’
‘He is only a boulevardier, you know.’
‘No doubt your Paris asphalte is the modern embodiment of Circe.’
‘But he is leaving Circe.’
‘So much the better for him if he be. But I do not know why you speak of him so much. He is a stranger to me, and will never, most likely, cross my path again.’
‘Oh, Parsifal will come back,’ said Madame Brancka, with a little smile. ‘Hohenszalras is his Holy Grail.’
‘He can scarcely come uninvited, and who will invite him here?’ said the mistress of Hohenszalras, with cold literalness.
‘Destiny will; the great master of the ceremonies who disposes of us all,’ said her cousin.
‘Destiny!’ said Wanda, with some contempt. ‘Ah, you are superstitious; irreligious people always are. You believe in mesmerism and disbelieve in God.’
‘Oh, most Holy Mother, cannot you make Wanda a little like other people?’ said the Countess Brancka when her hostess had left her alone with Princess Ottilie. ‘She is as much a fourteenth-century figure as any one of those knights in the Rittersäal.’
‘Wanda is a gentlewoman,’ said the Princess drily. ‘You great ladies are not always that, my dear Olga. You are all very piquantes and provocantes, no doubt, but you have forgotten what dignity is like, and perhaps you have forgotten, too, what self-respect is like. It is but another old-fashioned word.’
CHAPTER IX.
The late summer passed on into full autumn, and he never returned to the little isle under the birches and willows. The monks spoke of him often with the wondering admiration of rustic recluses for one who had seemed to them the very incarnation of that world which to them was only a vague name. His talents were remembered, his return was longed for; a silver reliquary and an antique book of plain song which he had sent them were all that remained to them of his sojourn there. As they angled for trout under the drooping boughs, or sat and dosed in the cloister as the rain fell, they talked together of that marvellous visitant with regret. Sometimes they said to one another that they had fancied once upon a time he would have become lord there, where the spires and pinnacles and shining sloping roofs of the great Schloss rose amidst the woods across the Szalrassee. When their grand prior heard them say so he rebuked them.
‘Our lady is a true daughter of the Holy Church,’ he said; ‘all the lands and all the wealth she has will come to the Church. You will see, should we outlive her — which the saints send we may not do — that the burg will be bequeathed by her to form a convent of Ursulines. It is the order she most loves.’
She overheard him say so once when she sat in her boat beneath the willows drifting by under the island, and she sighed impatiently.
‘No, I shall not do that,’ she thought. ‘The religious foundations did a great work in their time, but that time is over. They can no more resist the pressure of the change of thought and habit than I can set sail like S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. Hohenszalras shall go to the Crown; they will do what seems best with it. But I may live fifty years and more.’
A certain sadness came over her as she thought so; a long life, a lonely life, appalled her, even though it was cradled in all luxury and strengthened with all power.
‘If only my Bela were living!’ she said, half aloud; and the water grew dim to her sight as it flowed away green and sparkling into the deep long shadows of its pine-clothed shores, shadows, stretching darkly across its western side, whilst the eastern extremity was still warm in the afternoon light.
The great pile of Hohenszalras seemed to tower up into the very clouds; the evening sun, not yet sunk behind the Venediger range, shone ruddily on all its towers and its gothic spires, and the grim sculptures and the glistening metal, with which it was so lavishly ornamented, were illumined till it looked like some colossal and enchanted citadel, where soon the magic ivory horn of Childe Boland might sound and wake the spell-bound warders.
If only Bela, lord of all, had lived!
But her regret was not only for her brother.
In the October of that year her solitude was broken; her Sovereign signified her desire to see Hohenszalras again. They were about to visit Salzburg, and expressed their desire to pass three days in the Iselthal. There was nothing to be done but to express gratitude for the honour and make the necessary preparations. The von Szalras had been always loyal allies rather than subjects, and their devotion to the Habsburg house had been proved in many ways and with constancy. She felt that she would rather have to collect and equip a regiment of horse, as her fathers had done, than fill her home with the tapage inevitable to an Imperial reception, but she was not insensible to the friendship that dictated this mark of honour.
‘Fate conspires to make me break my resolutions,’ she said to the Princess; who answered with scant sympathy:
‘There are some resolutions much more wisely broken than persevered in; your vows of solitude are amongst them.’
‘Three days will not long
affect my solitude.’
‘Who knows? At all events, Hohenszalras for those three days will be worthy of its traditions — if only it will not rain.’
‘We will hope that it may not. Let us prepare the list of invitations.’
When she had addressed all the invitations to some fifty of the greatest families of the empire for the house party, she took one of the cards engraved ‘To meet their Imperial Majesties,’ and hesitated some moments, then wrote across it the name of Sabran.
‘You will like to see your friend,’ she said as she passed it to her aunt.
‘Certainly, I should like to do so, but I am quite sure he will not come.’
‘Not come?’
‘I think he will not. You will never understand, my dear Wanda, that men may love you.’
‘I certainly saw nothing of love in the conversation of M. de Sabran,’ she answered, with some irritation.
‘In his conversation? Very likely not; he is a proud man and poor.’
‘Since he has ceased to visit Monte Carlo.’
‘You are ungenerous, Wanda.’
‘I?’
The accusation fell on her with a shock of surprise, under which some sense of error stirred. Was it possible she could be ungenerous? She, whose character had always, even in its faults, been cast on lines so broad? She let his invitation go away with the rest in the post-bag to Matrey.
In a week his answer came with others. He was very sensible, very grateful, but the political aspect of the time forbade him to leave France. His election had entailed on him many obligations; the Chamber would meet next month, etc., etc. He laid his homage and regrets at the feet of the ladies of Hohenszalras.
‘I was sure he would say so,’ the Princess observed. It did not lie within her Christian obligations to spare the ‘je vous l’avais bien dit.’
‘It is very natural that he should not jeopardise his public prospects,’ answered Wanda herself, angrily conscious of a disappointment, with which there was mingled also a sense of greater respect for him than she had ever felt.