by Ouida
Sabran resumed his seat without raising his eyes to where the Countess von Szalras sat. She remained there during the speech of the minister, which was a lame and laboured one, for he had been pierced between the joints of his armour. Then she rose and went away with her escort.
‘What do you think of S. Louis?’ said he, jestingly.
‘I think he is very eloquent and very convincing, but I do not think he is at all like a Frenchman.’
‘Well, he is a Breton bretonnant’ rejoined the ambassador. ‘They are always more in earnest and more patrician.’
‘If he be sincere, if he be only sincere,’ she thought: that doubt pursued her. She had a vague sense that it was all only a magnificent comedy after all. Could apathy and irony change all so suddenly to conviction and devotion? Could the scoffer become so immediately the devotee? Could he care, really care, for those faiths of throne and altar which he defended with so much eloquence, so much earnestness? And yet, why not? These faiths were inherited things with him; their altars must have been always an instinct with him; for their sake his fathers had lived and died. What great wonder, then, that they should have been awakened in him after a torpor which had been but the outcome of those drugs with which the world is always so ready to lay asleep the soul?
They had now got out into the corridors, and as they turned the corner of one, they came straight upon Sabran.
‘I congratulate you,’ said Wanda, as she stretched her hand out to him with a smile.
As he took it and bowed over it he grew very pale.
‘I have obeyed you,’ he murmured, ‘with less success than I could desire.’
‘Do not be too modest, you are a great orator. You know how to remain calm whilst you exalt, excite, and influence others.’
He listened in silence, then inquired for the health of his kind friend the Princess Ottilie.
‘She is well,’ answered Wanda, ‘and loses nothing of her interest in you. She reads all your speeches with approval and pleasure; not the less approval and pleasure because her political creed has become yours.’
He coloured slightly.
‘What did you tell me?’ he said. ‘That if I had no convictions, I could do no better than abide by the traditions of the Sabrans? If their cause were the safe and reigning one I would not support it for mere expediency, but as it is — —’
‘Your motives cannot be selfish ones,’ she answered a little coldly. ‘Selfishness would have led you to profess Bakouinism; it is the popular profession, and a socialistic aristocrat is always attracted and flattering to the plebs.’
‘You are severe,’ he said, with a flush on his cheek. ‘I have no intention of playing Philip Egalité now or in any after time.’
She did hot reply; she was conscious of unkindness and want of encouragement in her own words. She hesitated a little, and then said:
‘Perhaps you will have time to come and see me? I shall remain here a few days more.’
The ambassador joined them at that moment, and was too well bred to display any sign of the supreme astonishment he felt at finding the Countess von Szalras and the new deputy already known to each other.
‘He is a favourite of Aunt Ottilie’s,’ she explained to him as, leaving Sabran, they passed down the corridor. ‘Did I not tell you? He had an accident on the Umbal glacier last summer, and in his convalescence we saw him often.’
‘I recollect that your aunt asked me about him. Excuse me; I had quite forgotten,’ said the ambassador, understanding now why she had wanted to go to the Chamber.
The next day Sabran called upon her. There were with her three or four great ladies. He did not stay long, and was never alone with her. She felt an impatience of her friends’ presence, which irritated her as it awoke in her. He sent her a second basket of white lilac in the following forenoon. She saw no more of him.
She found herself wondering about the manner of his life. She did not even know in what street he lived; she passed almost all her time with the Queen of Natalia, who did not know him, and was still so unwell that she received no one.
She was irritated with herself because it compromised her consistency to desire to stay on in Paris, and she did so desire; and she was one of those to whom a consciousness of their own consistency is absolutely necessary as a qualification for self-respect. There are natures that fly contentedly from caprice to caprice, as humming-birds from blossom to bud; but if she had once become changeable she would have become contemptible to herself, she would hardly have been herself any longer. With some anger at her own inclinations she resisted them, and when her self-allotted fifteen days were over, she did not prolong them by so much as a dozen hours. There was an impatience in her which was wholly strange to her serene and even temper. She felt a vague dissatisfaction with herself; she had been scarcely generous, scarcely cordial to him; she failed to approve her own conduct, and yet she scarcely saw where she had been at fault.
The Kaulnitz and many other high persons were at the station in the chill, snowy, misty day to say their last farewells. She was wrapped in silver-fox fur from head to foot; she was somewhat pale; she felt an absurd reluctance to go away from a city which was nothing to her. But her exiled friend was recovering health, and Madame Ottilie was all alone; and though she was utterly her own mistress, far more so than most women, there were some things she could not do. To stay on in Paris seemed to her to be one of them.
The little knot of high personages said their last words; the train began slowly to move upon its way; a hand passed through the window of the carriage and laid a bouquet of lilies of the valley on her knee.
‘Adieu!’ said Sabran very gently, as his eyes met hers once more.
Then the express train rolled faster on its road, and passed out by the north-east, and in a few moments had left Paris far behind it.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER XI.
On her return she spoke of her royal friends, of her cousins, of society, of her fears for the peace of Europe, and her doubts as to the strength of the empire; but she did not speak of the one person of whom, beyond all others, Mdme. Ottilie was desirous to hear. When some hours had passed, and still she had never alluded to the existence of, the Princess could bear silence no longer, and casting prudence to the winds, said boldly and with impatience:
‘And your late guest? Have you nothing to tell me? Surely you have seen him?’
‘He called once,’ she answered, ‘and I heard him speak at the Chamber.’
‘And was that all?’ cried the Princess, disappointed.
‘He speaks very well in public,’ added Wanda, ‘and he said many tender and grateful things of you, and sent you many messages — such grateful ones that my memory is too clumsy a tray to hold such eggshell china.’
She was angered with herself as she spoke, but the fragrance of the white lilac and the remembrance of its donor pursued her — angered with herself, too, because Hohenszalras seemed for the moment sombre, solitary, still, almost melancholy, wrapped in that winter whiteness and stillness which she had always loved so well.
The next morning she saw all her people, visited her schools and her stables, and tried to persuade herself that she was as contented as ever.
The aurist came from Paris shortly after her, and consoled the Princess by assuring her that the slight deafness she suffered from occasionally was due to cold.
‘Of course!’ she said, with some triumph. ‘These mountains, all this water, rain whenever there is not snow, snow whenever there is not rain; it is a miracle, and the mercy of Heaven, if one saves any of one’s five senses uninjured in a residence here.’
She had her satin hood trebly wadded, and pronounced the aurist a charming person. Herr Greswold in an incautious moment had said to her that deafness was one of the penalties of age and did not depend upon climate. A Paris doctor would not have earned his fee of two hundred napoleons if he had only produced so ungallant a truism. She heard a little worse after his visit, perhaps, but if
so, she said that was caused by the additional wadding in her hood. He had told her to use a rose-water syringe, and Herr Greswold was forbidden her presence for a week because he averred that you might as well try to melt the glacier with a lighted pastille.
The aurist gone, life at Hohenszalras resumed its even tenor; and except for, the post, the tea-cups, and the kind of dishes served at dinner, hardly differed from what life had been there in the sixteenth century, save that there were no saucy pages playing in the court, and no destriers stamping in the stalls, and no culverins loaded on the bastions.
‘It is like living between the illuminated leaves of one of the Hours,’ thought the Princess, and though her conscience told her that to dwell so in a holy book like a pressed flower was the most desirable life that could be granted by Heaven to erring mortality, still she felt it was dull. A little gossip, a little movement, a little rolling of other carriage-wheels than her own, had always seemed desirable to her.
Life here was laid down on broad lines. It was stately, austere, tranquil; one day was a mirror of all the rest. The Princess fretted for some little frou-frou of the world to break its solemn silence.
When Wanda returned from her ride one forenoon she said a little abruptly to her aunt:
‘I suppose you will be glad to hear you have convinced me. I have telegraphed to Ludwig to open and air the house in Vienna; we will go there for three months. It is, perhaps, time I should be seen at Court.’
‘It is a very sudden decision!’ said Madame Ottilie, doubting that she could hear aright.
‘It is the fruit of your persuasions, dear mother mine! The only advantage in having houses in half a dozen different places is to be able to go to them without consideration. You think me obstinate, whimsical, barbaric; the Kaiserin thinks so too. I will endeavour to conquer my stubbornness. We will go to Vienna next week. You will see all your old friends, and I all my old jewels.’
The determination once made, she adhered to it. She had felt a vague annoyance at the constancy and the persistency with which regret for the lost society of Sabran recurred to her. She had attributed it to the solitude in which she lived: that solitude which is the begetter and the nurse of thought may also be the hotbed of unwise fancies. It was indeed a solitude filled with grave duties, careful labours, high desires and endeavours; but perhaps, she thought, the world for a while, even in its folly, might be healthier, might preserve her from the undue share which the memory of a stranger had in her musings.
Her people, her lands, her animals, would none of them suffer by a brief absence; and perhaps there were duties due as well to her position as to her order. She was the only representative of the great Counts of Szalras. With the whimsical ingratitude to fate common to human nature, she thought she would sooner have been obscure, unnoticed, free. Her rank began to drag on her with something like the sense of a chain. She felt that she was growing irritable, fanciful, thankless; so she ordered the huge old palace in the Herrengasse to be got ready, and sought the world as others sought the cloister.
In a week’s time she was installed in Vienna, with a score of horses, two score of servants, and all the stir and pomp that attend a great establishment in the most aristocratic city of Europe, and she made her first appearance at a ball at the Residenz covered with jewels from head to foot; the wonderful old jewels that for many seasons had lain unseen in their iron coffers — opals given by Rurik, sapphires taken from Kara Mustafa, pearls worn by her people at the wedding of Mary of Burgundy, diamonds that had been old when Maria Theresa had been young.
She had three months of continual homage, of continual flattery, of what others called pleasure, and what none could have denied was splendour. Great nobles laid their heart and homage before her feet, and all the city looked after her for her beauty as she drove her horses round the Ringstrasse. It left her all very cold and unamused and indifferent.
She was impatient to be back at Hohenszalras, amidst the stillness of the woods, the sound of the waters.
‘You cannot say now that I do not care for the world, because I have forgotten what it was like,’ she observed to her aunt.
‘I wish you cared more,’ said the Princess. ‘Position has its duties.’
‘I never dispute that; only I do not see that being wearied by society constitutes one of them. I cannot understand why people are so afraid of solitude; the routine of the world is quite as monotonous.’
‘If you only appreciated the homage that you receive — —’
‘Surely one’s mind is something like one’s conscience: if one can be not too utterly discontented with what it says one does not need the verdict of others.’
‘That is only a more sublime form of vanity. Really, my love, with your extraordinary and unnecessary humility in some things, and your overweening arrogance in others, you would perplex wiser heads than the one I possess.’
‘No; I am sure it is not vanity or arrogance at all; it may be pride — the sort of pride of the “Rohan je suis.” But it is surely better than making one’s barometer of the smiles of simpletons.’
‘They are not all simpletons.’
‘Oh, I know they are not; but the world in its aggregate is very stupid. All crowds are mindless, the crowd of the Haupt-Allee as well as of the Wurstel-Prater.’
The Haupt-Allee indeed interested her still less than the Wurstel-Prater, and she rejoiced when she set her face homeward and saw the chill white peaks of the Glöckner arise out of the mists. Yet she was angry with herself for the sense of something missing, something wanting, which still remained with her. The world could not fill it up, nor could all her philosophy or her pride do so either.
The spring was opening in the Tauern, slow coming, veiled in rain, and parting reluctantly with winter, but yet the spring, flinging primroses broadcast through all the woods, and filling the shores of the lakes with hepatica and gentian; the loosened snows were plunging with a hollow thunder into the ravines and the rivers, and the grass was growing green and long on the alps between the glaciers. A pale sweet sunshine was gleaming on the grand old walls of Hohenszalras, and turning to silver and gold all its innumerable casements as she returned, and Donau and Neva leaped in rapture on her.
‘It is well to be at home,’ she said, with a smile, to Herr Greswold, as she passed through the smiling and delighted household down the Rittersaal, which was filled with plants from the hothouses, gardenias and gloxianas, palms and ericas, azaleas and camellias glowing between the stern armoured figures of the knights and the time-darkened oak of their stalls.
‘This came from Paris this morning for Her Excellency,’ said Hubert, as he showed his mistress a gilded boat-shaped basket, filled with tea-roses and orchids; a small card was tied to its handle with ‘Willkommen’ written on it.
She coloured a little as she recognised the handwriting of the single word.
How could he have known, she wondered, that she would return home that day? And for the flowers to be so fresh, a messenger must have been sent all the way with them by express speed, and Sabran was poor.
‘That is the Stanhopea tigrina,’ said Herr Greswold, touching one with reverent fingers; ‘they are all very rare. It is a welcome worthy of you, my lady.’
‘A very extravagant one,’ said Wanda von Szalras, with a certain displeasure that mingled with a softened emotion. ‘Who brought it?’
‘The Marquis de Sabran, by extra-poste, himself this morning,’ answered Hubert — an answer she did not expect. ‘But he would not wait; he would not even take a glass of tokayer, or let his horses stay for a feed of corn.’
‘What knight-errantry!’ said the Princess well pleased.
‘What folly!’ said Wanda, but she had the basket of orchids taken to her own octagon room.
It seemed as if he had divined how much of late she had thought of him. She was touched, and yet she was angered a little.
‘Surely she will write to him,’ thought the Princess wistfully very often: but she did not wr
ite. To a very proud woman the dawning consciousness of love is always an irritation, an offence, a failure, a weakness: the mistress of Hohenszalras could not quickly pardon herself for taking with pleasure the message of the orchids.
A little while later she received a letter from Olga Brancka. In it she wrote from Paris:
‘Parsifal is doing wonders in the Chamber, that is, he is making Paris talk; his party will forbid him doing anything else. You certainly worked a miracle. I hear he never plays, never looks at an actress, never does anything wrong, and when a grand heiress was offered to him by her people refused her hand blandly but firmly. What is one to think? That he washed his soul white in the Szalrassee?’
It was the subtlest flattery of all, the only flattery to which she would have been accessible, this entire alteration in the current of a man’s whole life; this change in habit, inclination, temper, and circumstance. If he had approached her its charm would have been weakened, its motive suspected; but aloof and silent as he remained, his abandonment of all old ways, his adoption of a sterner and worthier career, moved her with its marked, mute homage of herself.
When she read his discourses in the French papers she felt a glow of triumph, as if she had achieved some personal success; she felt a warmth at her heart as of something near and dear to her, which was doing well and wisely in the sight of men. His cause did not, indeed, as Olga Brancka had said, render tangible, practical, victory impossible for him, but he had the victories of eloquence, of patriotism, of high culture, of pure and noble language, and these blameless laurels seemed to her half of her own gathering.
‘Will you never reward him?’ the Princess ventured to say at last, overcome by her own impatience to rashness. ‘Never? Not even by a word?’
‘Hear mother,’ said Wanda, with a smile which perplexed and baffled the Princess, ‘if your hero wanted reward he would not be the leader of a lost cause. Pray do not suggest to me a doubt of his disinterestedness. You will do him very ill service.’