by Ouida
The Princess was mute, vaguely conscious that she had said something ill-timed or ill-advised.
Time passed on and brought beautiful weather in the month of June, which here in the High Tauern means what April does in the south. Millions of song-birds were shouting in the woods, and thousands of nests were suspended on the high branches of the forest trees, or hidden in the greenery of the undergrowth; water-birds perched and swung in the tall reeds where the brimming streams tumbled; the purple, the white, and the grey herons were all there, and the storks lately flown home from Asia or Africa were settling in bands by the more marshy grounds beside the northern shores of the Szalrassee.
One afternoon she had been riding far and fast, and on her return a telegram from Vienna had been brought to her, sent on from Lienz. Having opened it, she approached her aunt and said with an unsteady voice:
‘War is declared between France and Prussia!’
‘We expected it; we are ready for it,’ said the Princess, with all her Teutonic pride in her eyes. ‘We shall show her that we cannot be insulted with impunity.’
‘It is a terrible calamity for the world,’ said Wanda, and her face was very pale.
The thought which was present to her was that Sabran would be foremost amidst volunteers. She did not hear a word of all the political exultation with which Princess Ottilie continued to make her militant prophecies. She shivered as with cold in the warmth of the midsummer sunset.
‘War is so hideous always,’ she said, remembering what it had cost her house.
The Princess demurred.
‘It is not for me to say otherwise,’ she objected; ‘but without war all the greater virtues would die out. Your race has been always martial. You should be the last to breathe a syllable against what has been the especial glory and distinction of your forefathers. We shall avenge Jena. You should desire it, remembering Aspern and Wagram.’
‘And Sadowa?’ said Wanda, bitterly.
She did not reply further; she tore up the message, which had come from her cousin Kaulnitz. She slept little that night.
In two days the Princess had a brief letter from Sabran. He said: ‘War is declared. It is a blunder which will perhaps cause France the loss of her existence as a nation, if the campaign be long. All the same I shall offer myself. I am not wholly a tyro in military service. I saw bloodshed in Mexico; and I fear the country will sorely need every sword she has.’
Wanda, herself, wrote back to him:
‘You will do right. When a country is invaded every living man on her soil is bound to arm.’
More than that she could not say, for many of her kindred on her grandmother’s side were soldiers of Germany.
But the months which succeeded those months of the ‘Terrible Year,’ written in letters of fire and iron on so many human hearts, were filled with a harassing anxiety to her for the sake of one life that was in perpetual peril. War had been often cruel to her house. As a child she had suffered from the fall of those she loved in the Italian campaign of Austria. Quite recently Sadowa and Königsgrätz had made her heart bleed, beholding her relatives and friends opposed in mortal conflict, and the empire she adored humbled and prostrated. Now she became conscious of a suffering as personal and almost keener. She had at the first, now and then, a hurried line from Sabran, written from the saddle, from the ambulance, beside the bivouac fire, or in the shelter of a barn. He had offered his services, and had been given the command of a volunteer cavalry regiment, all civilians mounted on their own horses, and fighting principally in the Orléannois. His command was congenial to him; he wrote cheerfully of himself, though hopelessly of his cause. The Prussians were gaining ground every day. Occasionally, in printed correspondence from the scene of war, she saw his name mentioned by some courageous action or some brilliant skirmish. That was all.
The autumn began to deepen into winter, and complete silence covered all his life. She thought with a great remorse — if he were dead? Perhaps he was dead? Why had she been always so cold to him? She suffered intensely; all the more intensely because it was not a sorrow which she could not confess even to herself. When she ceased altogether to hear anything of or from him, she realised the hold which he had taken on her life.
These months of suspense did more to attach her to him than years of assiduous and ardent homage could have done. She, a daughter of soldiers, had always felt any man almost unmanly who had not received the baptism of fire.
Mdme. Ottilie talked of him constantly, wondered frequently if he were wounded, slain, or in prison; she never spoke his name, and dreaded to hear it.
Greswold, who perceived an anxiety in her that, he did not dare to allude to, ransacked every journal that was published in German to find some trace of Sabran’s name. At the first he saw often some mention of the Cuirassiers d’Orléans, and of their intrepid Colonel Commandant: some raid, skirmish, or charge in which they had been conspicuous for reckless gallantry. But after the month of November he could find nothing. The whole regiment seemed to have been obliterated from existence.
Winter settled down on Central Austria with cold silence, with roads blocked and mountains impassable. The dumbness, the solitude around her, which she had always loved so well, now grew to her intolerable. It seemed like death.
Paris capitulated. The news reached her at the hour of a violent snowstorm; the postillion of her post-sledge bringing it had his feet frozen.
Though her cousins of Lilienhöhe were amongst those who entered the city as conquerors, the fate of Paris smote her with a heavy blow. She felt as if the cold of the outer world had chilled her very bones, her very soul. The Princess, looking at her, was afraid to rejoice.
On the following day she wrote to her cousin Hugo of Lilienhöhe, who was in Paris with the Imperial Guard. She asked him to inquire for and tell her the fate of a friend, the Marquis de Sabran.
In due time Prince Hugo answered:
‘The gentleman you asked for was one of the most dangerous of our enemies. He commanded a volunteer cavalry regiment, which was almost cut to pieces by the Bavarian horse in an engagement before Orleans. Two or three alone escaped; their Colonel was severely wounded in the thigh, and had his charger shot dead under him. He was taken prisoner by the Bavarians after a desperate resistance. Whilst he lay on the ground he shot three of our men with his revolver. He was sent to a fortress, I think Ehrenbreitstein, but I will inquire more particularly. I am sorry to think that you have any French friends.
By-and-by she heard that he had been confined not at Ehrenbreitstein but at a more obscure and distant fortress on the Elbe; that his wounds had been cured, and that he would shortly be set free like other prisoners of war. In the month of March in effect she received a brief letter from his own hand, gloomy and profoundly dejected.
‘Our plans were betrayed,’ he wrote. ‘We were surprised and surrounded just as we had hobbled our horses and lain down to rest, after being the whole day in the saddle. Bavarian cavalry, outnumbering us four to one, attacked us almost ere we could mount our worn-out beasts. My poor troopers were cut to pieces. They hunted me down when my charger dropped, and I was made a prisoner. When they could they despatched me to one of their places on the Elbe. I have been here December and January. I am well. I suppose I must be very strong; nothing kills me. They are now about to send me back to the frontier. My beautiful Paris! What a fate! But I forget, I cannot hope for your sympathy; your kinsmen are our conquerors. I know not whether the house I lived in there exists, but if you will write me a word at Romaris, you will be merciful, and show me that you do not utterly despise a lost cause and a vanquished soldier.’
She wrote to him at Romaris, and the paper she wrote on felt her tears. In conclusion she said:
‘Whenever you will, come and make sure for yourself that both the Princess Ottilie and I honour courage and heroism none the less because it is companioned by misfortune.’
But he did not come.
She understood why he did not. An infi
nite pity for him overflowed her heart. His public career interrupted, his country ruined, his future empty, what remained to him? Sometimes she thought, with a blush on her face, though she was all alone: ‘I do.’ But then, if he never came to hear that?
CHAPTER XII.
The little hamlet of Romaris, on the coast of Finisterre, was very dull and dark and silent. A few grave peasant women knitted as they walked down the beach or sat at their doors; a few children did the same. Out on the landes some cows were driven through the heather and broom; out on the sea some fishing-boats with rough, red sails were rocking to and fro. All was melancholy, silent, poor; life was hard at Romaris for all. The weatherbeaten church looked grey and naked on a black rock; the ruins of the old manoir faced it amidst sands and surfs; the only thing of beauty was the bay, and that for the folk of Romaris had no beauty; they had seen it kill so many.
There was never any change at Romaris, unless it were a change in the weather, a marriage, a birth, or a death. Therefore the women and children who were knitting had lifted up their heads as a stranger, accompanied by their priest, had come down over the black rocks, on which the church stood, towards the narrow lane that parted the houses where they clustered together face to face on the edge of the shore.
Their priest, an old man much loved by them, came slowly towards them, conversing in low tones with the stranger, who had been young and handsome, and a welcome sight, since a traveller to Romaris always needed a sailing-boat or a rowing-boat, a guide over the moors, or a drive in an ox-waggon through the deep-cut lanes of the country.
But they had ceased to think of such things as these when the curate, with his hands extended as when he blessed them, had said in bas Breton as he stood beside them:
‘My children, this is the last of the Sabrans of Romaris, come back to us from the far west that lies in the setting of the sun. Salute him, and show him that in Brittany we do not forget — nay, not in a hundred years.’
Many years had gone by since then, and of the last of the old race, Romaris had scarcely seen more than when he had been hidden from their sight on the other side of the heaving ocean. Sabran rarely came thither. There was nothing to attract a man who loved the world and who was sought by it, in the stormy sea coast, the strip of sea-lashed oak forest, that one tall tower with its gaunt walls of stone which was all that was left of what had once been the fortress of his race. Now and then they saw him, chiefly when he had heard that there was wild weather on the western coast, and at such times he would go out in their boats to distressed vessels, or steer through churning waters to reach a fishing-smack in trouble, with a wild courage and an almost fierce energy which made him for the moment one of themselves. But such times had been few, and all that Romaris really knew of the last marquis was that he was a gay gentleman away there in distant Paris.
He had been a mere name to them. Now and then he had sent fifty napoleons, or a hundred, to the old priest for such as were poor or sick amongst them. That was all. Now after the war he came hither. Paris had become hateful to him; his political career was ended, at all events for the time; the whole country groaned in anguish; the vices and follies that had accompanied his past life disgusted him in remembrance. He had been wounded and a prisoner; he had suffered betrayal at unworthy hands; Cochonette had sold him to the Prussians, in revenge of his desertion of her.
He was further removed from the Countess von Szalras than ever. In the crash with which the Second Empire had fallen and sunk out of sight for evermore, his own hopes had gone down like a ship that sinks suddenly in a dark night. All his old associations were broken, half his old friends were dead or ruined; gay châteaux that he had ever been welcome at were smoking ruins or melancholy hospitals; the past had been felled to the ground like the poor avenues of the Bois. It affected him profoundly. As far as he was capable of an impersonal sentiment he loved France, which had been for so many years his home, and which had always seemed to smile at him with indulgent kindness. Her vices, her disgrace, her feebleness, her fall, hurt him with an intense pain that was not altogether selfish, but had in it a nobler indignation, a nobler regret.
When he was released by the Prussians and sent across the frontier, he went at once to this sad sea village of Romaris, to collect as best he might the shattered fragments of his life, which seemed to him as though it had been thrown down by an earthquake. He had resigned his place as deputy when he had offered his sword to France; he had now no career, no outlet for ambition, no occupation. Many of his old friends were dead or ruined; although such moderate means as he possessed were safe, they were too slender to give him any position adequate to his rank. His old life in Paris, even if Paris arose from her tribulations, gay and glorious once more, seemed to him altogether impossible. He had lost taste for those pleasures and distractions which had before the war — or before his sojourn on the Holy Isle — seemed to him the Alpha and Omega of a man’s existence. ‘Que faire?’ he asked himself wearily again and again. He did not even know whether his rooms in Paris had been destroyed or spared; a few thousands of francs which he had made by a successful speculation years before, and placed in foreign funds, were all he had to live on. His keen sense told him that the opportunity which might have replaced the Bourbon throne had been lost through fatal hesitation. His own future appeared to him like a blank dead wall that rose up in front of him barring all progress; he was no longer young enough to select a career and commence it. With passionate self-reproach he lamented all the lost irrevocable years that he had wasted.
Romaris was not a place to cheer a disappointed and dejected soldier who had borne the burning pain of bodily wounds and the intolerable shame of captivity in a hostile land. Its loneliness, its darkness, its storms, its poverty, had nothing in them with which to restore his spirit to hope or his sinews to ambition. In these cold, bleak, windy days of a dreary and joyless spring-time, the dusky moors and the gruesome sea were desolate, without compensating grandeur. The people around him were all taciturn, dull, stupid; they had not suffered by the war, but they understood that, poor as they were, they would have to bear their share in the burden of the nation’s ransom. They barred their doors and counted their hoarded gains in the dark with throbbing hearts, and stole out in the raw, wet, gusty dawns to kneel at the bleeding feet of their Christ. He envied them their faith; he could not comfort them, they could not comfort him; they were too far asunder.
The only solace he had was the knowledge that he had done his duty by France, and to the memory of those whose name he bore; that he had rendered what service he could; that he had not fled from pain and peril; that he had at least worn his sword well and blamelessly; that he had not abandoned his discrowned city of pleasure in the day of humiliation and martyrdom. The only solace he had was that he felt Wanda von Szalras herself could have commanded him to do no more than he had done in this the Année Terrible.
But, though his character had been purified and strengthened by the baptism of fire, and though his egotism had been destroyed by the endless scenes of suffering and of heroism which he had witnessed, he could not in a year change so greatly that he could be content with the mere barren sense of duty done and honour redeemed. He was deeply and restlessly miserable. He knew not where to turn, either for occupation or for consolation. Time hung on his hands like a wearisome wallet of stones.
When all the habits of life are suddenly rent asunder, they are like a rope cut in two. They may be knotted together clumsily, or they may be thrown altogether aside and a new strand woven, but they will never be the same thing again.
Romaris, with its few wind-tortured trees and its leaden-hued dangerous seas, seemed to him, indeed, a champ des trépassés, as it was called, a field of death. The naked, ugly, half-ruined towers, which no ivy shrouded and no broken marble ennobled, as one or the other would have done had it been in England or in Italy, was a dreary residence for a man who was used to all the elegant and luxurious habits of a man of the world, who was also a lover of art
and a collector of choice trifles. His rooms had been the envy of his friends, with all their eighteenth century furniture, and their innumerable and unclassified treasures; when he had opened his eyes of a morning a pastel of La Tour had smiled at him, rose-coloured windows had made even a grey sky smile. Without, there had been the sound of wheels going down the gay Boulevard Haussmann. All Paris had passed by, tripping and talking, careless and mirthful, beneath his gilded balconies bright with canariensis and volubilis; and on a little table, heaped in their hundreds, had been cards that bade him to all the best and most agreeable houses, whilst, betwixt them, slipped coyly in many an amorous note, many an unlooked-for declaration, many an eagerly-desired appointment.
‘Quel beau temps!’ he thought, as he awoke in the chill, bare, unlively chamber of the old tower by the sea; and it seemed to him that he must be dreaming: that all the months of the war had been a nightmare; that if he fully awakened he would find himself once more with the April sunshine shining through the rose glass, and the carriages rolling beneath over the asphalt road. But it was no nightmare, it was a terrible, ghastly reality to him, as to so many thousands. There were the scars on his breast and his loins where the Prussian steel had hacked and the Prussian shot had pierced him; there was his sword in a corner all dinted, notched, stained; there was a crowd of hideous ineffaceable tumultuous memories; it was all true enough, only too true, and he was alone at Romaris, with all his dreams and ambitions faded into thin air, vanished like the blown burst bubbles of a child’s sport.
In time to come he might recover power and nerve to recommence his struggle for distinction, but at present it seemed to him that all was over. His imprisonment had shaken and depressed him as nothing else in the trials of war could have done. He had been shut up for months alone, with his own desperation. To a man of high courage and impatient appetite for action there is no injury so great and in its effect so lasting as captivity. Joined to this he had the fever of a strong, and now perfectly hopeless, passion.