by Ouida
‘He is a gambler.’
‘He has renounced gambling.’
‘He is a duellist.’
‘Society was of much better constitution when the duel was its habitual phlebotomy.’
‘He has been the lover of many women.’
‘I am afraid that is nothing singular.’
‘He is hardly more than an adventurer.’
‘He counts his ancestry in unbroken succession from the clays of Dagobert.
‘He has nothing but a pignon sur rue in Paris, and a league or two of rocks and sand in Brittany; yet, though so poor, he made money enough by cards and speculation to be for three years the amant en titre of Cochonette.’
Madame Ottilie rose with a little frown.
‘I think we will say no more, my dear Baron; the matter is, after all, not yours or mine to decide. Wanda will assuredly do as she likes.’
‘But you have so much influence with her.’
‘I have none; no one has any: and I think you do not understand her in the least. It may cost her very much to avow to him that she loves him, but once having done that, it will cost her nothing at all to avow it to the world. She is much too proud a woman to care for the world.’
‘He is gentilhomme de race, I grant,’ admitted with reluctance the Grand Duke of Lilienhöhe.
‘When has a noble of Brittany been otherwise?’ asked the Princess Ottilie.
‘I know,’ said the Prince; ‘but you will admit that he occupies a difficult position — an invidious one.’
‘And he carries himself well through it. It is a difficult position which is the test of breeding,’ said the Princess, triumphantly, ‘and I deny entirely that it is what you call an invidious one. It is you who have the idea of the crowd when you lay so much stress on the mere absence of money.’
‘It is the idea of the crowd that dominates in this age.’
‘The more reason for us to resist it, if it be so.’
‘I think you are in love with him yourself, my sister!’
‘I should be were I forty years younger.’
The Countess Brancka alone wrote with any sort of sympathy and pleasure to congratulate them both.
‘I was sure that Parsifal would win soon or late,’ she said. ‘Only remember that he is a Parsifal doublé by a de Morny.’
Wanda read that line with contracted brows. It angered her more than the outspoken remonstrances of the Vàsàrhely, of the Lilienhöhe, of the Kaulnitz, of the many great families to whom she was allied. De Morny! — a bastard, an intriguer, a speculator, a debaucher! The comparison had an evil insinuation, and displeased her!
She was not a woman, however, likely either for insinuation or remonstrance to change her decisions or abandon her wishes. She had so much of the ‘éternel féminin’ in her that she was only the more resolved in her own course because others, by evil prophecy and exaggerated fears, sought to turn her from it. What they said was natural, she granted, but it was unjust and would be unjustified. All the expostulation, diplomatically hinted or stoutly outspoken, of those who considered that they had the right to make such remonstrances produced not the smallest effect upon the mind of the woman whom, as Baron Kaulnitz angrily expressed it, Sabran had magnetised. Once again Love was a magician, against whom wisdom, prudence, and friendship had no power of persuasion.
The melancholy that she observed in him seemed to her only the more graceful; there was no vulgar triumph in his own victory, such as might have suggested that the material advantages of that triumph were present to him. That he loved her greatly she could not doubt, and that he had striven to conceal it from her she could not doubt either. The sadness which at times overcame him was but natural in a proud man, whose fortunes were unequal to his birth, and who was also sensible of many brilliant gifts, intellectual, that he had wasted, which, had they been fully utilised, would have justified his aspiration to her hand.
‘Try and persuade him,’ she said to Mdme. Ottilie, ‘to think less of this mere accident of difference between us. If it were difference of birth it might be insurmountable or intolerably painful; but a mere difference of riches matters no more than the colour of one’s eyes, or the inches of one’s stature.’
The Princess shook her head.
‘If he did not feel it as he does, he would not be the man that he is. A marriage contract to which the lover brings nothing must always be humiliating to himself. Besides, it seems to him that the world at large must condemn him as a mere fortune-hunter.’
‘Since I am convinced of the honesty and purity of his motives, what matters the opinion of others?’
‘How can he tell that the world may not some day induce you to doubt those motives?’
Wanda did not reply.
‘But he will cease to think of any disparity when all that is mine has been his a year or two,’ she thought. ‘All the people shall look to him as their lord, since he will be mine; even if I think differently to him on any matter I will not say it, lest I should remind him that the power lies with me; he shall be no prince consort, he shall be king.’
As the generous resolve passed dreamily through her mind she was listening to the Coronation Mass of Liszt, as he played it on the organ within. It sounded to her like the hymn of the future; a chorus of grave and glorious voices shouting welcome to the serene and joyous years to come.
When she was next alone with him she said to him very tenderly:
‘I want you to promise me one thing.’
‘I promise you all things. What is this one?’
‘It is this: you are troubled at the thought that I have one of those great fortunes which form the acte d’accusation of socialists against society, and that you have lost all except the rocks and salt beach of Romans. Now I want you to promise me never to think of this fact. It is beneath you. Fortune is so precarious a thing, so easily destroyed by war or revolution, that it is not worth contemplation as a serious barrier between human beings. A treachery, a sin, even a lie, any one of those may be a wall of adamant, but a mere fortune! — Promise me that you will never think of mine, except inasmuch, my beloved, as it may enhance my happiness by ministering to yours.’
He had grown very pale as she spoke, and his lips had twice parted to speak without words coming from them. When she had ceased he still remained silent.
‘I do not like the world to come between us, even in a memory; it is too much flattery to it,’ she continued. ‘Surely it is treason against me to be troubled by what a few silly persons will or will not say in a few salons? You have too little vanity, I think, where others have too much!’
He stooped and kissed her hand.
‘Could any man live and fail to be humble before you?’ he said with passionate tenderness. ‘Yes, the world will say, and say rightly, that I have done a base thing, and I cannot forget that the world will be right; yet since you honour me with your divine pity, can I turn away from it? Could a dying man refuse a draught of the water of life?’
A great agitation mastered him for the moment. He hid his face upon her hands as he held them clasped in his.
‘We will drink that wafer together, and as long as we are together it will never be bitter, I think,’ she said very softly.
Her voice seemed to sink into his very soul, so much it said of faith, so much it aroused of remorse.
Then the great joy which had entered his life, like a great dazzling flood of light suddenly let loose into a darkened chamber, so blinded consumed, and intoxicated him, that he forgot all else; all else save this one fact — she would be his, body and soul, night and day, in life and in death for ever; his children borne by her, his life spent with her, her whole existence surrendered to him.
For some days after that she mused upon the possibility of rendering him entirely independent of herself, without insulting him by a direct offer of a share in her possessions. At last a solution occurred to her. The whole of the fiefs of Idrac constituted a considerable appanage apart; its title went with i
t. When it had come into the Szalras family by marriage, as far back as the fifteenth century, it had been a principality; it was still a seigneurie, and many curious feudal privileges and distinctions went with it.
It was Idrac now that she determined to abandon to her lover.
‘He will be seigneur of Idrac,’ she thought, ‘and I shall be so glad for him to bear an Austrian name.’
‘She herself would always retain her own name, and would take no other.
‘We will go and revisit it together,’ she thought, and though she was all alone’ at that moment, a soft warmth came into her face, and a throb of emotion to her heart, as she remembered all that would lie in that one word ‘together,’ all the tender and intimate union of the years to come.
Her trustees were furious, and sought the aid of the men of law to enable them to step in and arrest her in what they deemed a course of self-destruction, but the law could not give them so much power; she was her own mistress, and as sole inheritrix had received her possessions singularly untrammelled by restrictions. In vain Prince Lilienhöhe spent his severe and chilly anger, Kaulnitz his fine sarcasm and delicate insinuations, and the Cardinal his stately and authoritative wrath. She was not to be altered in her decision.
Austrian law allowed her to give away an estate to her husband if she chose, and there was nothing in the private settlements of her property to prevent her availing herself of the law.
Strenuous opposition was encountered by her to this project, by every one of her relatives, hardly excluding the Princess Ottilie; ‘for,’ said that sagacious recluse, ‘your horses may show you, my dear, the dangers of a rein too loose.’
‘I want no rein at all,’ said Wanda. ‘You forget that, to my thinking, marriage should never be bondage; two people with independent wills, tastes, and habits should mutually concede a perfect independence of action to each other. When one must yield, it must be the woman.’
‘Those are very fine theories,’ the Princess remarked with caution.
‘I hope we shall put them in practice,’ said Wanda, with unruffled good humour. ‘Dear mother, I am sure you can understand that I want him to feel he is wholly independent of me. To what I love best on earth shall I dole out a niggard largesse from my wealth? If I were capable of doing so he would grow in time to hate me, and his hatred would be justified.’
‘I never should have supposed you would become so romantic,’ said the Princess.
‘It will make him independent of you,’ objected Prince Lilienhöhe.
‘That is what, beyond all, I desire him to be,’ she answered.
‘It is an infatuation,’ sighed Cardinal Vàsàrhely, out of her hearing, ‘when Egon would have brought to her a fortune as large as her own.’
‘You think water should always run to the sea,’ said Princess Ottilie; ‘surely that is great waste sometimes?’
‘I think you are as infatuated as she is,’ murmured the Cardinal. ‘You forget that had she not been inspired with this unhappy sentiment she would have most probably left Hohenszalras to the Church.’
‘She would have done nothing of the kind. Your Eminence mistakes,’ answered Madame Ottilie, sharply. ‘Hohenszalras and everything else, had she died unmarried, would have certainly gone to the Habsburgs.’
That would have been better than to an adventurer.’
‘How can you call a Breton noble ah adventurer? It is one of the purest aristocracies of the world, if poor.’
‘Ce que femme veut,’ sighed his Eminence, who knew how often even the Church had been worsted by women.
The Countess von Szalras had her way, and although when the marriage-deeds were drawn up they all set aside completely any possibility of authority or of interference on the part of her husband, and maintained in the clearest and firmest manner her entire liberty of action and enjoyment of inalienable properties and powers, she had the deed of gift of Idrac locked up in her cabinet, and thought to herself, as the long dreary preamble and provisions of the law were read aloud to her, ‘So will he be always his own master. What pleasure that your hawk stays by you if you chain him to your wrist? If he love you he will sail back uncalled from the longest flight. I think mine always will. If not — if not — well, he must go!’
One morning she came to him with a great roll of yellow parchment emblazoned and with huge seals bearing heraldic arms and crowns. She spread it out before him as they stood alone in the Rittersaal. He looked scarcely at it, always at her. She wore a gown of old gold plush that gleamed and glowed as she moved, and she had a knot of yellow tea-roses at her breast, fastened in with a little dagger of sapphires. She had never looked more truly a great lady, more like a châtelaine of the Renaissance, as she spread out the great roll of parchment before him on one of the tables of the knights’ hall.
‘Look!’ she said to him. ‘I had the lawyers bring this over for you to see. It is the deed by which Stephen, first Christian King of Hungary, confirmed to the Counts of Idrac in the year 1001 all their feudal rights to that town and district, as a fief. They had been lords there long before. Look at it; here, farther down you see is the reconfirmation of the charter under the Habsburg seal, when Hungary passed to them; but you do not attend, where are your eyes?’
‘On you! Carolus Duran must paint you again in that dead gold with those roses.’
‘They are only hothouse roses; who cares for them? I love no forced flowers either in nature or humanity. Come, study this old parchment. It must have some interest for you. It is what makes you lord of Idrac.’
‘What have I to do with Idrac? It is one of the many jewels of your coronet, to which I can add none!’
But to please her he bent over the crabbed black letter and the antique blazonings of the great roll to which the great dead men had set their sign and seal. She watched him as he read it, then after a little time she put her hand with a caressing movement on his shoulder.
‘My love, I can do just as I will with Idrac. The lawyers are agreed on that, and the Kaiser will confirm whatever I do. Now I want to give you Idrac, make you wholly lord of it; indeed, the thing is already done. I have signed all the documents needful, and, as I say, the Emperor will confirm any part of them that needs his assent. My Réné, you are a very proud man, but you will not be too proud to take Idrac and its title from your wife. But for that town who can say that our lives might not have been passed for ever apart? Why do you look so grave? The Kaiser and I both want you to be Austrian. When I transfer to you the fief of Idrac you are its Count for evermore.’
He drew a quick deep breath as if he had been struck a blow, and stood gazing at her. He did not speak, his eyes darkened as with pain. For the moment she was afraid that she had wounded him. With exquisite softness of tone and touch she took his hand and said to him tenderly:
‘Why will you be so proud? After all, what are these things? Since we love one another, what is mine is yours; a formula more or less is no offence. It is my fancy that you should have the title and the fief. The people know you there, and your heroic courage will be for ever amongst their best traditions. Dear! once I read that it needs a greater soul to take generously than to give. Be great so, now, for my sake!’
‘Great!’ he echoed the word hoarsely, and a smile of bitter irony passed for a moment over his features. But he controlled the passionate self-contempt that rose in him. He knew that whatever else he was, he was her lover, and her hero in her sight. If the magnitude and magnanimity of her gifts overwhelmed and oppressed him, he was recalled to self-control by the sense of her absolute faith in him. He pressed her hands against his heavily-beating heart.
‘All the greatness is with you, my beloved,’ he said with effort. ‘Since you delight to honour me, I can but strive my utmost to deserve your honour. It is like your beautiful and lavish nature to be prodigal of gifts. But when you give yourself, what need is there for aught else?’
‘But Idrac is my caprice. You must gratify it.’
‘I will take the titl
e gladly at your hands then. The revenues — No.’
‘You must take it all, the town and the title, and all they bring,’ she insisted. ‘In truth, but for you there would possibly be no town at all. Nay, my dear, you must do me this little pleasure; it will become you so well that Countship of Idrac: it is as old a place as Vindobona itself.’
‘Do you not understand?’ she added, with a flush on her face. ‘I want you to feel that it is wholly yours; that if I die, or if you leave me, it remains yours still. Oh, I do not doubt you; not for one moment. But liberty is always good. And Idrac will make you an Austrian noble in your own right. If you persist in refusing it I will assign it to the Crown; you will pain me and mortify me.’
‘That is enough! Never wittingly in my life will I hurt you. But if you wish me to be lord of Idrac, invest me with the title, my Empress. I will take it and be proud of it; and as for the revenues — well, we will not quarrel for them. They shall go to make new dykes and new bastions for the town, or pile themselves one on another in waiting for your children.’
She smiled and her face grew warm as she turned aside and took up one of the great swords with jewelled hilts and damascened scabbards, which were ranged along the wall of the Rittersaal with other stands of arms.
She drew the sword, and as he fell on his knee before her smote him lightly on the shoulder with its blade.
‘Rise, Graf von Idrac!’ she said, stooping and touching his forehead with the bouquet that she wore at her breast. He loosened one of the roses and held it to his lips.
‘I swear my fealty now and for ever,’ he said with emotion, and his face was paler and his tone was graver than the playfulness of the moment seemed to call for in him.
‘Would to Heaven I had had no other name than this one you give me,’ he murmured as he rose. ‘Oh, my love, my lady, my guardian angel! Forget that ever I lived before, forget all my life when I was unworthy you; let me live only from the day that will make me your vassal and your — —’