by Ouida
Sin had always seemed a mere superstitious name to him, and if he had abstained from its coarser forms it had been rather from the revolt of the fine taste of a man of culture than from any principle or persuasion of duty. Men he believed were but ephemera, sporting their small hours, weaving their frail webs, and swept away by the great broom of destiny as spiders by the housewife. In the spineless doctrine of altruism he had had too robust a temperament, too clear a reason, to seek a guide for conduct. He had lived for himself, and had seen no cause to do otherwise. That he had not been more criminal had been due partly to indolence, partly to pride. In his love for Wanda von Szalras, a love with which considerable acrimony had mingled at the first, he yet, through all the envy and the impatience which alloyed it, reached a moral height which he had never touched before. Between her and him a great gulf yawned. He abstained from any effort to pass it. It was the sole act of self-denial of a selfish life, the sole obedience to conscience in a character which obeyed no moral laws, but was ruled by a divided tyranny of natural instinct and conventional honour.
The long silent hours of thought in the willow-shaded cloisters of the Holy Isle had not been wholly without fruit. He desired, with passion and sincerity, that she should think well of him, but he did not dare to wish for more; love offered from him to her seemed to him as if it would be a kind of blasphemy. He remembered in his far-off childhood, which at times still seemed so near to him, nearer than all that was around him, the vague, awed, wistful reverence with which he had kneeled in solitary hours before the old dim picture of the Madonna with the lamp burning above it, a little golden flame in the midst of the gloom; he remembered so well how his fierce young soul and his ignorant yearning child’s heart had gone out in a half-conscious supplication, how it had seemed to him that if he only knelt long enough, prayed well enough, she would come down to him and lay her hands on him. It was all so long ago, yet, when he thought of Wanda von Szalras, something of that same emotion rose up in him, something of the old instinctive worship awoke in him. In thought he prostrated himself once more whenever the memory of her came to him. He had no religion; she became one to him.
Meanwhile, he was constantly thinking restlessly to himself, ‘Did I do ill not to go?’
His bodily life was at Romaris, but his mental life was at Hohenszalras. He was always thinking of her as she would look in those days of the Imperial visit; he could see the stately ceremonies of welcome, the long magnificence of the banquets, the great Rittersaal with cressets of light blazing on its pointed emblazoned roofs; he could see her as she would move down the first quadrille which she would dance with her Kaiser: she would wear her favourite ivory-white velvet most probably, and her wonderful old jewels, and all her orders. She would look as if she had stepped down off a canvas of Velasquez or Vandyck, and she would be a little tired, a little contemptuous, a little indifferent, despite her loyalty; she would be glad, he knew, when the brilliant gathering was broken up, and the old house, and the yew terrace, and the green lake were all once more quiet beneath the rays of the watery moon. She was so unlike other women. She would not care about a greatness, a compliment, a success more or less. Such triumphs were for the people risen yesterday, not for a Countess von Szalras.
He knew the simplicity of her life and the pride of her temper, and they moved him to the stronger admiration because he knew also that those mere externals which she held in contempt had for him an exaggerated value. He was scarcely conscious himself of how great a share the splendour of her position, united to her great indifference to it, had in the hold she had taken on his imagination and his passions. He did know that there were so much greater nobilities in her that he was vaguely ashamed of the ascendency which her mere rank took in his thoughts of her. Yet he could not divest her of it, and it seemed to enhance both her bodily and spiritual beauty, as the golden calyx of the lily makes its whiteness seem the whiter by its neighbourhood.
CHAPTER XIII.
In the Iselthal the summer was more brilliant and warm than usual. The rains were less frequent, and the roses on the great sloping lawns beneath the buttresses and terraces of Hohenszalras were blooming freely.
Their mistress did not for once give them much heed. She rode long and fast through the still summer woods, and came back after nightfall. Her men of business, during their interviews with her, found her attention less perfect, her interest less keen. In stormy days she sat in the library, and read Heine and Schiller often, and all the philosophers and men of science rarely. A great teacher has said that the Humanities must outweigh the Sciences at all times, and he is unquestionably true, if it were only for the reason that in the sweet wise lore of ages every human heart in pain and perplexity finds a refuge; whilst in love or in sorrow the sciences seem the poorest and chilliest of mortal vanities that ever strove to measure the universe with a foot-rule.
The Princess watched her with wistful, inquisitive eyes, but dared not name the person of whom they both thought most. Wanda was herself intolerant of the sense of impatience with which she awaited the coming of the sturdy pony that brought the post-bag from Windisch-Matrey. He in his loneliness and emptiness of life on the barren sea-shore of Romaris did not more anxiously await her letters than did the châtelaine of Hohenszalras, amidst all her state, her wealth, and her innumerable occupations, await his. She pitied him intensely; there was something pathetic to her in the earnestness with which he had striven to amend his ways of life, only to have his whole career shattered by an insensate and unlooked-for national war. She understood that his poverty stood in the path of his ambition, and she divined that his unhappiness had broken that spring of manhood in him which would have enabled him to construct a new career for himself out of the ruins of the old. She understood why he was listless and exhausted.
There were moments when she was inclined to send him some invitation more cordial, some bidding more clear; but she hesitated to take a step which would bind her in her own honour to so much more. She knew that she ought not to suggest a hope to him to which she was not prepared to give full fruition. And again, how could he respond? It would be impossible for him to accept. She was one of the great alliances of Europe, and he was without fortune, without career, without a future. Even friendship was only possible whilst they were far asunder.
Two years had gone by since he had come across from the monastery in the green and gold of a summer afternoon. The monks had not forgotten him; throughout the French war they had prayed for him. When their Prior saw her, he said anxiously sometimes: ‘And the Markgraf von Sabran, will he never come to us again? Were we too dull for him? Will your Excellency remember us to him, if ever you can?’ And she had answered with a strange emotion at her heart: ‘His country is in trouble, holy father; a good son cannot leave his land in her adversity. No: I do not think he was dull with you; he was quite happy, I believe. Perhaps he may come again some day, who knows? He shall be told what you say.’
Then a vision would rise up to her of herself and him, as they would be perhaps when they should be quite old. Perhaps he would retire into this holy retreat of the Augustines, and she would be a grave sombre woman, not gay and pretty and witty, as the Princess was. The picture was gloomy; she chased it away, and galloped her horse long and far through the forests.
The summer had been so brilliant that the autumn which followed was cold and severe, earlier than usual, and heavy storms swept over the Tauern, almost ere the wheat harvest could be reaped. Many days were cheerless and filled only with the sound of incessant rains. In the Pinzgau and the Salzkammergut floods were frequent. The Ache and the Szalzach, with all their tributary streams and wide and lonely lakes, were carrying desolation and terror into many parts of the land which in summer they made beautiful. Almost every day brought her some tidings of some misfortunes in the villages on the farms belonging to her in the more distant parts of Austria; a mill washed away, a bridge down, a dam burst, a road destroyed, a harvest swept into the water, some damage or other
done by the swollen river and torrents, she heard of by nearly every communication that her stewards and her lawyers made to her at this season.
‘Our foes the rivers are more insidious than your mighty enemy the salt water,’ she wrote to Romaris. ‘The sea deals open blows, and men know what they must expect if they go out on the vasty deep. But here a little brook that laughed and chirped at noon-day as innocently as a child may become at nightfall or dawn a roaring giant, devouring all that surrounds him. We pay heavily for the glory of our mountain waters.’
These autumn weeks seemed very dreary to her. She visited her horses chafing at inaction in their roomy stalls, and attended to her affairs, and sat in the library or the octagon room hearing the rain beat against the emblazoned leaded panes, and felt the days, and above all the evenings, intolerably dull and melancholy. She had never heeded rain before, or minded the change of season.
One Sunday a messenger rode through the drenching storm, and brought her a telegram from her lawyer in Salzburg. It said: ‘Idrac flooded: many lives lost: great distress: fear town wholly destroyed. Please send instructions.’
The call for action roused her as a trumpet sounding rouses a cavalry charger.
‘Instructions!’ she echoed as she read. ‘They write as if I could bid the Danube subside, or the Drave shrink in its bed!’
She penned a hasty answer.
‘I will go to Idrac myself.’
Then she sent a message also to S. Johann im Wald for a special train to be got in readiness for her, and told one of her women and a trusty servant to be ready to go with her to Vienna in an hour. It was still early in the forenoon.
‘Are you mad?’ cried Madame Ottilie, when she was informed of the intended journey.
Wanda kissed her hand.
‘There is no madness in what I shall do, dear mother, and Bela surely would have gone.’
‘Can you stay the torrents of heaven? Can you arrest a river in its wrath?’
‘No; but lives are often lost because poor people lose their senses in fright. I shall be calmer than anyone there. Besides, the place belongs to us; we are bound to share its danger. If only Egon were not away from Hungary!’
‘But he is away. You have driven him away.’
‘Do not dissuade me, dearest mother. It would be cowardice not to go.’
‘What can women do in such extremities?’
‘But we of Hohenszalras must not be mere women when we are wanted in any danger. Remember Luitgarde von Szalras, the kuttengeier.’
The Princess sighed, prayed, even wept, but Wanda was gently inflexible. The Princess could not see why a precious life should be endangered for the sake of a little half barbaric, half Jewish town, which was remarkable for nothing except for shipping timber and selling salbling. The population was scarcely Christian, so many Hebrews were there, and so benighted were the Sclavonian poor, who between them made up the two thousand odd souls that peopled Idrac. To send a special messenger there, and to give any quantity of money that the distress of the moment might demand, would be all right and proper; indeed, an obligation on the owner of the little feudal river-side town. But to go! A Countess von Szalras to go in person where not one out of a hundred of the citizens had been properly baptized or confirmed! The Princess could not view this Quixotism in any other light than that of an absolute insanity.
‘Bela lost his life in just such a foolish manner!’ she pleaded.
‘So did the saints, dear mother,’ said his sister, gently.
The Princess coloured and coughed.
‘Of course, I am aware that many holy lives have been — have been — what appears to our finite senses wasted,’ she said, with a little asperity. ‘But I am also aware, Wanda, that the duties most neglected are those which lie nearest home and have the least display; consideration for me might be better, though less magnificent, than so much heroism for Idrac.’
‘It pains me that you should put it in that light, dearest mother,’ said Wanda, with inexhaustible patience. ‘Were you in any danger I would stay by you first, of course; but you are in none. These poor, forlorn, ignorant, cowardly creatures are in the very greatest. I draw large revenues from the place; I am in honour bound to share its troubles. Pray do not seek to dissuade me. It is a matter not of caprice but of conscience. I shall be in no possible peril myself. I shall go down the river in my own vessel, and I will telegraph to you from every town at which I touch.’
The Princess ceased not to lament, to oppose, to bemoan her own powerlessness to check intolerable follies. Sitting in her easy chair in her warm blue-room, sipping her chocolate, the woes of a distant little place on the Danube, whose population was chiefly Semitic, were very bearable and altogether failed to appeal to her.
Wanda kissed her, asked her blessing humbly, and took her way in the worst of a blinding storm along the unsafe and precipitous road which went over the hills to Windisch-Matrey.
‘What false sentiment it all is!’ thought the Princess, left alone. ‘She has not seen this town since she was ten years old. She knows that they are nearly all Jews, or quite heathenish Sclavonians. She can do nothing at all — what should a woman do? — and yet she is so full of her conscience that she goes almost to the Iron Gates in quest of a duty in the wettest of weather, while she leaves a man like Egon and a man like Sabran wretched for want of a word! I must say,’ thought the Princess, ‘false sentiment is almost worse than none at all!’
The rains were pouring down from leaden skies, hiding all the sides of the mountains and filling the valleys with masses of vapour. The road was barely passable; the hill torrents dashed across it; the little brooks were swollen to water-courses; the protecting wall on more than one giddy height had been swept away; the gallop of the horses shook the frail swaying galleries and hurled the loosened stones over the precipice with loud resounding noise. The drive to Matrey and thence with post-horses to S. Johann im Wald, the nearest railway station, was in itself no little peril, but it was accomplished before the day had closed in, and the special train she had ordered being in readiness left at once for Vienna, running through the low portions of the Pinzgau, which were for the most part under water.
All the way was dim and watery, and full of the sound of running or of falling water. The Ache and the Szalsach, both always deep and turbulent rivers, were swollen and boisterous, and swirled and thundered in their rocky beds; in the grand Pass of Lueg the gloom, always great, was dense as at midnight, and when they reached Salzburg the setting sun was bursting through ink-black clouds, and shed a momentary glow as of fire upon the dark sides of the Untersberg, and flamed behind the towers of the great castle on its rocky throne. All travellers know the grandeur of that scene; familiar as it was to her she looked upward at it with awe and pleasure commingled. Salzburg in the evening light needs Salvator Rosa and Rembrandt together to portray it.
The train only paused to take in water; the station was crowded as usual, set as it is between the frontiers of empire and kingdom, but in the brief interval she saw one whom she recognised amongst the throng, and she felt the colour come into her own face as she did so.
She saw Sabran; he did not see her. Her train moved out of the station rapidly, to make room for the express from Munich; the sun dropped down into the ink-black clouds; the golden and crimson pomp of Untersberg changed to black and grey; the ivory and amber and crystal of the castle became stone and brick and iron, that frowned sombrely over a city sunk in river-mists and in rain-vapours. She felt angrily that there was an affinity between the landscape and herself; that so, at sight of him, a light had come into her life which had no reality in fact, prismatic colours baseless as a dream.
She had longed to speak to him; to stretch out her hand to him; to say at least how her thoughts and her sympathies had been with him throughout the war. But her carriage was already in full onward movement, and in another moment had passed at high speed out of the station into that grand valley of the Szalzach where Hohensalzburg seems to
tower as though Friederich Barbarossa did indeed sleep there. With a sigh she sank backward amongst her furs and cushions, and saw the soaring fortress pass, into the clouds.
The night had now closed in; the rain fell heavily. As the little train, oscillating greatly from its lightness, swung over the iron rails, there was a continual sound of splashing water audible above the noise of the wheels and the throb of the engine. She had often travelled at night and had always slept soundly; this evening she could not sleep. She remained wide awake watching the swaying of the lamp, listening to the shrill shriek of the wheels as they rushed through water where some hillside brook had broken bounds and spread out in a shallow lagoon. The skies were overcast in every direction; the rain was everywhere unceasing; the night seemed to her very long.
She pondered perpetually on his presence at Salzburg, and wondered if he were going to the Holy Isle. Three months had gone by since she had sent him the semi-invitation to her country.
The train sped on; the day dawned; she began to get glimpses of the grand blue river, now grey and ochre-coloured and thick with mud, its turbid waves heaving sullenly under the stormy October skies. She had always loved the great Donau; she knew its cradle well in the north land of the Teutons. She had often watched the baby-stream rippling over the stones, and felt the charm, as of some magical transformation, as she thought of the same stream stretching broadly under the monastic walls of Klosterneuberg, rolling in tempest by the Iron Gates, and gathering its mighty volume higher and deeper to burst at last into the sunlight of the eastern sea. Amidst the levelled monotony of modern Europe the Danube keeps something of savage grandeur, something of legendary power, something of oriental charm; it is still often tameless, a half-barbaric thing, still a Tamerlane amidst rivers: and yet yonder at its birthplace it is such a slender thread of rippling water! She and Bela had crossed it with bare feet to get forget-me-nots in Taunus, talking together of Chriemhilde and her pilgrimage to the land of the Huns.