by Ouida
‘That will make you my lord!’ she said softly; then she stooped, and for the first time kissed him.
What caused her the only pain that disturbed the tranquillity of these cloudless days was the refusal of her cousin Egon to be present at her marriage. He sent her, with some great jewels that had come from Persia, a few words of sad and wistful affection.
‘My presence,’ he added in conclusion, ’is no more needed for your happiness than are these poor diamonds and pearls needed in your crowded jewel-cases. You will spare me a trial, which it could be of no benefit to you for me to suffer. I pray that the Marquis de Sabran may all his life be worthy of the immense trust and honour which you have seen fit to give to him. For myself, I have been very little always in your life. Henceforth I shall be nothing. But if ever you call on me for any service — which it is most unlikely you ever will do — I entreat you to remember that there is no one living who will more gladly or more humbly do your bidding at all cost than I, your cousin Egon.’
The short letter brought tears to her eyes. She said nothing of it to Sabran. He had understood from Mdme. Ottilie that Prince Vàsàrhely had loved his cousin hopelessly for many years, and could not be expected to be present at her marriage.
In a week from that time their nuptials were celebrated in the Court Chapel of the Hofburg at Vienna, with all the pomp and splendour that a brilliant and ceremonious Court could lend to the espousal of one of the greatest ladies of the old Duchy of Austria.
Immediately after the ceremony they left the capital for Hohenszalras.
At the signing of the contract on the previous night, when he had taken up the pen he had grown very pale; he had hesitated a moment, and glanced around him on the magnificent crowd, headed by the Emperor and Empress, with a gleam of fear and of anxiety in his eyes, which Baron Kaulnitz, who was intently watching him, had alone perceived.
‘There is something. What is it?’ had mused the astute German.
It was too late to seek to know. Sabran had bent down over the parchment, and with a firm hand had signed his name and title.
CHAPTER XVI.
It was midsummer once more in the Iselthal, five years and a half after the celebration at the Imperial palace of those nuptials which had been so splendid that their magnificence had been noticeable even at that magnificent Court. The time had seemed to her like one long, happy, cloudless day, and if to him there had come any fatigue, any satiety, any unrest, such as almost always come to the man in the fruition of his passion, he suffered her to see none of them.
It was one of those rare marriages in which no gall of a chain is felt, but a quick and perfect sympathy insures that harmony which passion alone is insufficient to sustain. He devoted himself with ardour to the care of the immense properties that belonged to his wife; he brought to their administration a judgment and a precision that none had looked for in a man of pleasure; he entered cordially into all her schemes for the well-being of her people dependent on her, and carried them out with skill and firmness. The revenues of Idrac he never touched; he left them to accumulate for his younger son, or expended them on the township itself, where he was adored.
If he were still the same man who had been the lover of Cochonette, the terror of Monte Carlo, the hero of night-long baccara and frontier duels, he had at least so banished the old Adam that it appeared wholly dead. Nor was the death of it feigned. He had flung away the slough of his old life with a firm hand, and the peace, the dignity of his present existence were very precious to him. He was glad to steep himself in them, as a tired and fevered wayfarer was glad to bathe his dusty and heated limbs in the cool, clear waters of the Szalrassee. And he loved his wife with a great love, in which reverence, and gratitude, and passion were all blent. Possession had not dulled, nor familiarity blunted it. She was still to him a sovereign, a saint, a half divine creature, who had stooped to become mortal for his sake, and his children’s.
The roses were all aglow on the long lawns and under the grey walls and terraces; the sunbeams were dancing on the emerald surface of the Szalrassee.
‘What a long spell of fair weather,’ said Sabran, as they sat beneath the great yews beside the keep.
‘It is like our life,’ said his wife, who was doing nothing but watching the clouds circle round the domes and peaks, which, white as ivory, dazzling and clear, towered upward in the blue air like a mighty amphitheatre.
She had borne him three children in these happy years, the eldest of whom, Bela, played amidst the daisies at her feet, a beautiful fair boy with his father’s features and his father’s luminous blue eyes. The other two, Gela and the little Ottilie, who had seen but a few months of life, were asleep within doors in their carved ivory cots. They were all handsome, vigorous, and of perfect promise.
‘Have I deserved to be so happy?’ she would often think, she whom the world called so proud.
‘Bela grows so like you!’ she said now to his father, who stood near her wicker chair.
‘Does he?’ said Sabran, with a quick glance that had some pain in it, at the little face of his son. ‘Then if the other one be more like you it will be he who will be dearest to me.’
As he spoke he bowed his head down and kissed her hand.
She smiled gravely and sweetly in his eyes.
‘That will be our only difference, I think! It is time, perhaps, that we began to have one. Do you think there are two other people in all the world who have passed five years and more together without once disagreeing?’
‘In all the world there is not another Countess Wanda!’
‘Ah! that is your only defect; you will always avoid argument by escaping through the side-door of compliment. It is true, to be sure, that your flattery is a very high and subtle art.’
‘It is like all high art then, based on what is eternally true.’
‘You will always have the last word, and it is always so graceful a one that it is impossible to quarrel with it. But, Réné, I want you to speak without compliment to me for once. Tell me, are you indeed never — never — a little weary of being here?’
He hesitated a moment and a slight flush came on his face.
She observed both signs, slight as they were, and sighed; it was the first sigh she had ever breathed since her marriage.
‘Of course you are, of course you must be,’ she said quickly. ‘It has been selfish and blameable of me never to think of it before. It is paradise to me, but no doubt to you, used as you have been to the stir of the world, there, must be some tedium, some dulness in this mountain isolation. I ought to have remembered that before.’
‘You need do nothing of the kind, now,’ he said. ‘Who has been talking to you? Who has brought this little snake into our Eden?’
‘No one; and it is not a snake at all, but a natural reflection. Hohenszalras and you are the world to me, but I cannot expect that Hohenszalras and I can be quite as much to yourself. It is always the difference between the woman and the man. You have great talents; you are ambitious.’
‘Were I as ambitious as Alexander, surely I have gained wherewithal to be content!’
‘That is only compliment again, or if truth it is only a side of the truth. Nay, love, I do not think for a moment you are tired of me; I am too self-satisfied for that! But I think it is possible that this solitude may have grown, or may grow, wearisome to you; that you desire, perhaps without knowing it, to be more amidst the strife, the movement, and the pleasures of men. Aunt Ottilie calls this “confinement to a fortress;” now that is a mere pleasantry, but if ever you should feel tempted to feel what she feels, have confidence enough in my good sense and in my affection to say so to me, and then —— .’
‘And then? We will suppose I have this ingratitude and bad taste, what then?’
‘Why then, my own wishes should not stand for one instant in the way of yours, or rather I would make yours mine. And do not use the word ingratitude, my dearest; there can be no question of that betwixt you and me.’
A warmth of pleasure flushed her cheek for a moment, and she smiled happily.
‘You shall not beg the question so,’ she said, with gentle insistence after a moment’s pause. ‘I have not forgotten your eloquence in the French Chamber.’ You are that rare thing a born orator. You are not perhaps fitted to be a statesman, for I doubt if you would have the application or bear the tedium necessary, but you have every qualification for a diplomatist, a foreign minister.’
‘I have not the first qualification, I have no country!’
She looked at him, in surprise — he spoke with bitterness and self-contempt; but in a moment he had added quickly: —
‘France is nothing to me now, and though I am Austrian by all ties and affections, I am not an Austrian before the law.’
‘That is hardly true,’ she answered, satisfied with the explanation. ‘Since France is little to you you could be naturalised here whenever you chose, even if Idrac have not made you a Croat noble, as I believe the lawyers would say it had; and the Emperor, who knows and admires you, would, I think, at once give you gladly any mission you preferred; you would make so graceful, so perfect, so envied an ambassador! Diplomacy has indeed little force now, yet tact still tells wherever it be found, and it is as rare as blue roses in the unweeded garden of the world. I do not speak for myself, dear; that you know. Hohenszalras is my beloved home, and it was enough for me before I knew you, and nowhere else could life ever seem to me so true, so high, so simple, and so near to God as here. But I do remember that men weary even of happiness when it is unwitnessed, and require the press and stir of emulation and excitation; and, if you feel that want, say so. Have confidence enough in me to believe that your welfare will be ever my highest law. Promise me this.’
He changed colour slightly at her generous and trustful words, but he answered without a moment’s pause:
‘Whenever I am so thankless to fate I will confess it. No; the world and I never valued one another much. I am far better here in the heart of your mountains. Here only have I known peace and rest.’
He spoke with a certain effort and emotion, and he stooped over his little son and raised him on her knees.
‘These children shall grow up at Hohenszalras,’ he continued, ‘and you shall teach them your love of the open air, the mountain solitudes, the simple people, the forest creatures, the influences and the ways of nature. You care for all those things, and they make up true wisdom, true contentment. As for myself, if you always love me I shall ask no more of fate.’
‘If! Can you be afraid?’
‘Sometimes. One always fears to lose what one has never merited.’
‘Ah, my love, do not be so humble! If you saw yourself as I see you, you would be very proud.’
She smiled as she spoke, and stretched her hand out to him over the golden head of her child.
He took it and held it against his heart, clasped in both his own. Bela, impatient, slipped off his mother’s lap to pursue his capture of the daisies; the butterflies were forbidden joys, and he was obedient, though in his own little way he was proud and imperious. But there was a blue butterfly just in front of him, a Lycœna Adonis, like a little bit of the sky come down and dancing about; he could not resist, he darted at it. As he was about to seize it she caught his fingers.
‘I have told you, Bela, you are never to touch anything that flies or moves. You are cruel.’
He tried to get away, and his face grew very warm and passionate.
‘Bela will be cruel, if he like,’ he said, knitting his pretty brows.
Though he was not more than four years old he knew very well that he was the Count Bela, to whom all the people gave homage, crowding to kiss his tiny hand after Mass on holy-days. He was a very beautiful child, and all the prettier for his air of pride and resolution; he had been early put on a little mountain pony, and could ride fearlessly down the forest glades with Otto. All the imperiousness of the great race which had dealt out life and death so many centuries at their caprice through the Hohe Tauern seemed to have been inherited by him, coupled with a waywardness and a vanity that were not traits of the house of Szalras. It was impossible, even though those immediately about him were wise and prudent, to wholly prevent the effects of the adulation with which the whole household was eager to wait on every whim of the little heir.
‘Bela wishes it!’ he would say, with an impatient frown, whenever his desire was combated or crossed: he had already the full conviction that to be Bela was to have full right to rule the world, including in it his brother Gela, who was of a serious, mild, and yielding disposition, and gave up to him in all things. As compensating qualities he was very affectionate and sensitive, and easily moved to self-reproach.
With a step Sabran reached him. ‘You dare to disobey your mother?’ he said, sternly. ‘Ask her forgiveness at once. Do you hear?’
Bela, who had never heard his father speak in such a tone, was very frightened, and lost all his colour; but he was resolute, and had been four years old on Ascension Day. He remained silent and obstinate.
Sabran put his hand heavily on the child’s shoulder.
‘Do you hear me, sir? Ask her pardon this moment.’
Bela was now fairly stunned into obedience.
‘Bela is sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Bela begs pardon.’
Then he burst into tears.
‘You alarmed him rather too much. He is so very young,’ she said to his father, when the child, forgiven and consoled, had trotted off to his nurse, who came for him.
‘He shall obey you, and find his law in your voice, or I will alarm him more,’ he said, with some harshness. ‘If I thought he would ever give you a moment’s sorrow I should hate him!’
It was not the first time that Sabran had seen his own more evil qualities look at him from the beautiful little face of his elder son, and at each of those times a sort of remorse came upon him. ‘I was unworthy to beget her children,’ he thought, with the self-reproach that seldom left him, even amidst the deep tranquility of his satisfied passions, and his perfect peace of life. Who could tell what trials, what pains, what shame even, might not fall on her in the years to come, with the errors that her offspring would have in them from his blood?
‘It is foolish,’ she murmured, ‘he is but a baby; yet it hurts one to see the human sin, the human wrath, look out from the infant eyes. It hurts one to remember, to realise, that one’s own angel, one’s own little flower, has the human curse born with it. I express myself ill; do you know what I mean? No, you do not, dear; you are a man. He is your son, and because he will be handsome and brave you will be proud of him; but he is not a young angel, not a blossom from Eden to you.’
‘You are my religion,’ he answered, ‘you shall be his. When he grows older he shall learn that to be born of such a mother as you is to enter the kingdom of heaven by inheritance. Shall he be unworthy that inheritance because he bears in him also the taint of my sorry passions, of my degraded humanity?’
‘Dear! I too am only an erring creature. I am not perfect as you think me.’
‘As I know you and as my children shall know you to be.’
‘You love me too well,’ she said again; ‘but it is a beau défaut, and I would not have you lose it.’
‘I shall never lose it whilst I have life,’ he said, with truth and passion. ‘I prize it more because most unworthy it.’
She looked at him surprised, and vaguely troubled at the self-reproach and the self-scorn of his passionate utterance. Seeing that surprise and trouble in her glance, he controlled the emotion that for the moment mastered him.
‘Ah, love!’ he said quickly and truly, ‘if you could but guess how gross and base a man’s life seems to
him contrasted with the life of a pure and noble woman! Being born of you, those children, I think, should be as faultless and as soilless as those pearls that lie on your breast. But then they are mine also; so already on that boy’s face one sees the sins of revolt, of self-will, of cruelty — being mine also, your living pearls are dulled and stained!’
A greater remorse than she dreamed of made his heart ache as he said these words; but she heard in them only the utterance of that extreme and unwavering devotion to her which he had shown in all his acts and thoughts from the first hours of their union.
CHAPTER XVII.
The Princess Ottilie was scarcely less happy than they in the realisation of her dreams and prophecies. Those who had been most bitterly opposed to her alliance with him could find no fault in his actions and his affections.
‘I always said that Wanda ought to marry, since she had plainly no vocation for the cloister,’ she said a hundred times a year. ‘And I was certain that M. de Sabran was the person above all others to attract and to content her. She has much more imagination than she would be willing to allow and he is capable at once of fascinating her fancy and of satisfying her intellect. No one can be dull where he is; he is one of those who make la pluie et le beau temps by his absence or presence; and, besides that, no commonplace affection would have ever been enough for her. And he loves her like a poet, which he is at once whenever he leaves the world for Beethoven and Bach. I cannot imagine why you should have opposed the marriage, merely because he had not two millions in the Bank of France.’
‘Not for that,’ answered the Grand Duke; ‘rather because he broke the bank of Monte Carlo, and other similar reasons. A great player of baccara is scarcely the person to endow with the wealth of the Szalras.’
‘The wealth is tied up tightly enough at the least, and you will admit that he was yet more eager than you that it should be so.’
‘Oh, yes! he behaved very well. I never denied it. But she has placed it in his power to make away with the whole of Idrac, if he should ever choose. That was very unwise, but we had no power to oppose.’