by Ouida
‘No: but it would be very much brightened by a house-party at Easter, and now and then at midsummer and autumn. In your mother’s time the October parties for the bear-hunts, the wolf-hunts, the boar-hunts, were magnificent. No, I do not think the chase contrary to God’s will; man has power over the beasts of the field and the forest. The archdukes never missed an autumn here; they found the sport finer than in Styria.’
Her niece kissed her hand and went out to where her four black horses were fretting and champing before the great doors, and the winter sun was lighting up the gilded scrollwork, and the purple velvet, and the brown sables of her sleigh, that had been built in Russia and been a gift to her from Egon Vàsàrhely. She felt a little impatience of the Princess Ottilie, well as she loved her; the complacent narrowness of mind, the unconscious cruelty, the innocent egotism, the conventional religion which clipped and fitted the ways of Deity to suit its own habits and wishes: these fretted her, chafed her, oppressed her with a sense of their utter vanity. The Princess would not herself have harmed a sparrow or a mouse, yet it seemed to her that Providence had created all the animal world only to furnish pastime for princes and their jägers. She saw no contradiction in this view of the matter. The small conventional mind of her had been cast in that mould and would never expand: it was perfectly pure and truthful, but it was contracted and filled with formula.
Wanda von Szalras, who loved her tenderly, could not help a certain impatience of this, the sole, companionship she had. A deep affection may exist side by side with a mental disparity that creates an unwilling but irresistible sense of tedium and discordance. A clear and broad intelligence is infinitely patient of inferiority; but its very patience has its reaction in its own fatigue and silent irritation.
This lassitude came on her most in the long evenings whilst the Princess slumbered and she herself sat alone. She was not haunted by it when she was in the open air, or in the library, occupied with the reports or the requirements on her estates. But the evenings were lonely and tedious; they had not seemed so when the little boat had come away from the monastery, and the prayer and praise of Handel and Haydn, and the new-born glory of the Nibelungen tone-poems had filled the quiet twilight hours. It was in no way probable that the musician and she would ever meet again. She understood that his own delicacy and pride must perforce keep him out of Austria, and she, however much the Princess desired it, could never invite him there alone, and would not probably gather such a house-party at Hohenszalras as might again warrant her doing so.
Nothing was more unlikely, she supposed, than that she would ever hear again the touch that had awakened the dumb chords of the old painted spinet.
But circumstance, that master of the ceremonies, as Madame Brancka termed it, who directs the menuet de la cour of life, and who often diverts himself by letting it degenerate into a dance of death, willed it otherwise. There was a dear friend of hers who was a dethroned and exiled queen. Their friendship was strong, tender, and born in childish days. On the part of Wanda, it had been deepened by the august adversity which impresses and attaches all noble natures. Herself born of a great race, and with the instincts of a ruling class hereditary in her, there was something sacred and awful in the fall of majesty. Her friend, stripped of all appanages of her rank, and deserted by nearly all who ‘had so late sworn her allegiance, became more than ever dear; she became holy to her, and she would sooner have denied the request of a reigning sovereign than of one powerless to command or to rebuke. ‘When this friend, who had been so hardly smitten by fate, sent her word that she was ill and would fain see her, she, therefore, never even hesitated as to obedience before the summons. It troubled and annoyed her; it came to her ill-timed and unexpected; and it was above all disagreeable to her, because it would take her to Paris. But it never occurred to her to send an excuse to this friend, who had no longer any power to say, ‘I will,’ but could only say, like common humanity, ‘I hope.’
Within two hours of her reception of the summons she was on her way to Windisch-Matrey. The Princess did not accompany her; she intended to make as rapid a journey as possible without pausing on the way, and her great-aunt was too old and too delicate in health for such exertion.
‘Though I would fain go and see that great Parisian aurist,’ she said plaintively. ‘My hearing is not what it used to be.’
‘The great aurist shall come to you, dear mother,’ said Wanda. ‘I will bring him back with me.’
She travelled with a certain state, since she did not think that the moment of a visit to a dethroned sovereign was a fit time to lay ceremony aside. She took several of her servants and some of her horses with her, and journeyed by way of Munich and Strasburg.
Madame Ottilie was too glad she should go anywhere to offer opposition; and in her heart of hearts she thought of her favourite. He was in Paris; who knew what might happen?
It was midwinter, and the snow was deep on all the country, whether of mountain or of plain, which stretched between the Tauern and the French capital. But there was no great delay of the express, and in some forty hours the Countess von Szalras, with her attendants, and her horses with theirs, arrived at the Hôtel Bristol.
The noise, the movement, the brilliancy of the streets seemed a strange spectacle, after four years spent without leaving the woodland quiet and mountain solitudes of Hohenszalras.
She was angry with herself that, as she stood at the windows of her apartment, she almost unconsciously watched the faces of the crowd passing below, and felt a vague expectancy of seeing amongst them the face of Sabran.
She went that evening, to the modest hired house where the young and beautiful sovereign she came to visit had found a sorry refuge. It was a meeting full of pain to both. When they had last parted at the Hofburg of Vienna, the young queen had been in all the triumph and hope of brilliant nuptials; and at Hohenszalras, the people’s Heilige Bela had been living, a happy boy, in all his fair promise.
Meanwhile, the news-sheets informed all their leaders that the Countess von Szalras was in Paris. Ambassadors and ambassadresses, princes and princesses, and a vast number of very great people, hastened to write their names at the Hôtel Bristol.
Amongst the cards left was that of Sabran. But he sent it; he did not go in person.
She refused all invitations, and declined almost all visits. She had come there only to see her friend, the Queen of Natalia. Paris, which loves anything new, talked a great deal about her; and its street crowds, which admires what is beautiful, began to gather before the doors at the hours when her black horses, driven Russian fashion, came fretting and flashing like meteors over the asphalte.
‘Why did you bring your horses for so short a time?’ said Madame Kaulnitz to her. ‘You could, of course, have had any of ours.’
‘I always like to have some of my horses with me,’ she answered. ‘I would have brought them all, only it would have looked so ostentatious; you know they are my children.’
‘I do not see why you should not have other children,’ said Madame Kaulnitz. ‘It is quite inhuman that you will not marry.’
‘I have never said that I will not. But I do not think it likely.’
Two days after her arrival, as she was driving down the Avenue de l’Impératrice, she saw Sabran on foot. She was driving slowly. She would have stopped her carriage if he had paused in his walk; but he did not, he only bowed low and passed on. It was almost rude, after the hospitality of Hohenszalras, but the rudeness pleased her. It spoke both of pride and of sensitiveness. It seemed scarcely natural, after their long hours of intercourse, that they should pass each other thus as strangers; yet it seemed impossible they should any more be friends. She did not ask herself why it seemed so, but she felt it rather by instinct than by reasoning.
She was annoyed to feel that the sight of him had caused a momentary emotion in her of mingled trouble and pleasure.
No one mentioned his name to her, and she asked no one concerning him. She spent almost all her t
ime with the Queen of Natalia, and there were other eminent foreign personages in Paris at that period whose amiabilities she could not altogether reject, and she had only allowed herself fifteen days as the length of her sojourn, as Madame Ottilie was alone amidst the snow-covered mountains of the Tauern.
On the fifth day after her meeting with Sabran he sent another card of his to the hotel, and sent with it an immense basket of gilded osier filled with white lilac. She remembered having once said to him at Hohenszalras that lilac was her flower of preference. Her rooms were crowded with bouquets, sent her by all sorts of great people, and made of all kinds of rare blossoms, but the white lilac, coming in the January snows, touched her more than all those. She knew that his poverty was no fiction; and that great clusters of white lilac in midwinter in Paris meant much money.
She wrote a line or two in German, which thanked him for his recollection of her taste, and sent it to the Chamber. She did not know where he lived.
That evening she mentioned his name to her godfather, the Duc de Noira, and asked him if he knew it. The Duc, a Legitimist, a recluse, and a man of strong prejudices, answered at once.
‘Of course I know it; he is one of us, and he has made a political position for himself within the last year.’
‘Do you know him personally?’
‘No, I do not. I see no one, as you are aware; I live in greater retirement than ever. But he bears an honourable name, and though I believe that, until lately, he was but a flâneur, he has taken a decided part this session, and he is a very great acquisition to the true cause.’
‘It is surely very sudden, his change of front?’
‘What change? He took no part in politics that ever I heard of; it is taken for granted that a Marquis de Sabran is loyal to his sole legitimate sovereign. I believe he never thought of public life; but they tell me that he returned from some long absence last autumn, an altered and much graver man. Then one of the deputies for his department died, and he was elected for the vacancy with no opposition.’
The Duc de Noira proceeded to speak of the political aspects of the time, and said no more.
Involuntarily, as she drove through the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, she thought of the intuitive comprehension, the half-uttered sympathy, the interchange of ideas, à demi-mots, which had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome to her in the previous summer. They had not always agreed, she often had not even approved him; but they had always understood one another, they had never needed to explain. She was startled to realise how much and how vividly she regretted him.
‘If one could only be sure of his sincerity,’ she thought, ‘there would be few men living who would equal him.’
She did not know why she doubted his sincerity. Some natures have keen instincts like dogs. She regretted to doubt it; but the change in him seemed to her too rapid to be one of conviction. Yet the homage in it to herself was delicate and subtle. She would not have been a woman had it not touched her, and she was too honest with herself not to frankly admit in her own thoughts that she might very well have inspired a sentiment which would go far to change a nature which it entered and subdued. Many men had loved her; why not he?
She drew the whip over the flanks of her horses as she felt that mingled impatience and sadness with which sovereigns remember that they can never be certain they are loved for themselves, and not for all which environs them and lifts them up out of the multitude.
She was angry with herself when she felt that what interested her most during her Parisian sojourn was the report of the debates of the French Chamber in the French journals.
One night the Baron Kaulnitz spoke of Sabran in her hearing.
‘He is the most eloquent of the Legitimist party,’ he said to some one in her hearing. ‘No one supposed that he had it in him; he was a mere idler, a mere man of pleasure, and it was at times said of something worse, but he has of late manifested great talent; it is displayed for a lost cause, but it is none the less admirable as talent goes.’
She heard what he said with pleasure.
Advantage was taken of her momentary return to the world to press on her the choice of a great alliance. Names as mighty as her own were suggested to her, and more than one great prince, of a rank even higher than hers, humbly solicited the honour of the hand which gave no caress except to a horse’s neck, a dog’s head, a child’s curls. But she did not even pause to allow these proposals any consideration; she refused them all curtly, and with a sense of irritation.
‘Have you sworn never to marry?’ said the Duc de Noira, with much chagrin, receiving her answer for a candidate of his own to whom he was much attached.
‘I never swear anything,’ she answered. ‘Oaths are necessary for people who do not know their own minds. I do know my own.’
‘You know that you will never marry?’
‘I hardly say that; but I shall never contract a mere alliance. It is horrible — that union eternal of two bodies and souls without sympathy, without fitness, without esteem, merely for sake of additional position or additional wealth.’
‘It is not eternal! said the Duc, with a smile; ‘and I can assure you that my friend adores you for yourself. You will never understand, Wanda, that you are a woman to inspire great love; that you would be sought for your face, for your form, for your mind, if you had nothing else.’
‘I do not believe it.’
‘Can you doubt at least that your cousin Egon — —’
‘Oh, pray spare me the name of Egon!’ she said with unwonted irritation. ‘I may surely be allowed to have left that behind me at home!’
It was a time of irritation and turbulence in Paris. The muttering of the brooding storm was visible to fine ears through the false stillness of an apparently serene atmosphere. She, who knew keen and brilliant politicians who were not French, saw the danger that was at hand for France which France did not see.
‘They will throw down the glove to Prussia; and they will repent of it as long as the earth lasts,’ she thought, and she was oppressed by her prescience, for war had cost her race dear; and she said to herself, ‘When that liquid fire is set flowing who shall say where it will pause?’
She felt an extreme desire to converse with Sabran as she had done at home; to warn him, to persuade him, to hear his views and express to him her own; but she did not summon him, and he did not come. She did justice to the motive which kept him away, but she was not as yet prepared to go as far as to invite him to lay his scruples aside and visit her with the old frank intimacy which had brightened both their lives at the Hohenszalrasburg. It had been so different there; he had been a wanderer glad of rest, and she had had about her the defence of the Princess’s presence, and the excuse of the obligations of hospitality. She reproached herself at times for hardness, for unkindness; she had not said a syllable to commend him for that abandonment of a frivolous life which was in itself so delicate and lofty a compliment to herself. He had obeyed her quite as loyally as knight ever did his lady, and she did not even say to him, ‘It is well done.’
Wanda von Szalras — a daughter of brave men, and herself the bravest of women — was conscious that she was for once a coward. She was afraid of looking into her own heart.
She said to her cousin, when he paid his respects to her, ‘I should like to hear a debate at the Chamber. Arrange it for me.’
He replied: ‘At your service in that as in all things.’
The next day as she was about to drive out, about four o’clock, he met her at the entrance of her hotel.
‘If you could come with me,’ he said, ‘you might hear something of interest to-day; there will be a strong discussion. Will you accept my carriage or shall I enter yours?’
What she heard when she reached the Chamber did not interest her greatly. There was a great deal of noise, of declamation, of personal vituperation, of verbose rancour; it did not seem to her to be eloquence. She had heard much more stately oratory in both the Upper and Lower Reichsrath, and mu
ch more fiery and noble eloquence at Buda Pesth. This seemed to her poor, shrill mouthing, which led to very little, and the disorder of the Assembly filled her with contempt.
‘I thought it was the country of S. Louis!’ she said, with a disdainful sigh, to Kaulnitz who answered:
‘Cromwell is perhaps more wanted here than S. Louis.’
‘Their Cromwell will always be a lawyer without clients, or a journalist sans le sou!’ retorted the châtelaine of Hohenszalras.
When she had been there an hour or more she saw Sabran enter the hall and take his place. His height, his carriage, and his distinction of appearance made him conspicuous in a multitude, while the extreme fairness and beauty of his face were uncommon and striking.
‘Here is S. Louis,’ said the ambassador, with a little smile, ‘or a son of S. Louis’s crusaders at any rate. He is sure to speak. I think he speaks very well; one would suppose he had done nothing else all his life.’
After a time, when some speakers, virulent, over-eager, and hot in argument, had had their say, and a tumult had risen and been quelled, and the little bell had rung violently for many minutes, Sabran entered the tribune. He had seen the Austrian minister and his companion.
His voice, at all times melodious, had a compass which could fill with ease the large hall in which he was. He appeared to use no more effort than if he were conversing in ordinary tones, yet no one there present lost a syllable that he said. His gesture was slight, calm, and graceful; his language admirably chosen, and full of dignity.
His mission of the moment was to attack the ministry upon their foreign policy, and he did so with exceeding skill, wit, irony, and precision. His eloquence was true eloquence, and was not indebted in any way to trickery, artifice, or over-ornament. He spoke with fire, force, and courage, but his tranquillity never gave way for a moment. His speech was brilliant and serene, in utter contrast to the turbulent and florid declamation which had preceded him. There was great and prolonged applause when he had closed with a peroration stately and persuasive; and when Emile Ollivier rose to reply, that optimistic statesman was plainly disturbed and at a loss.