by Ouida
‘You may be quite sure that Idrac will go intact to the second son, as it has always done; and I believe but for his own exertions Idrac would now be beneath the Danube waters. Perhaps you never heard all that story of the flood?’
‘I only hope that if I have detractors you will defend me from them,’ said Prince Lilienhöhe, giving up argument.
Fair weather is always especially fair in the eyes of those who have foretold at sunset that the morrow would be fine; and so the married life of Wanda von Szalras was especially delightful as an object of contemplation, as a theme of exultation, to the Princess, who alone had been clear-sighted enough to foresee the future. She really also loved Sabran like a son, and took pride and pleasure in the filial tenderness he showed her, and in his children, with the beautiful blue eyes that had gleams of light in them like sapphires. The children themselves adored her; and even the bold and wilful Bela was as quiet as a startled fawn beside this lovely little lady, with her snow-white hair and her delicate smile, whose cascades of lace always concealed such wonderful bon-bon boxes, and gilded cosaques, and illuminated stories of the saints.
Almost all their time was spent at Hohenszalras. A few winter months in Vienna was all they had ever passed away from it, except one visit to Idrac and the Hungarian estates. The children never left it for a day. He shared her affection for the place, and for the hardy and frank mountain people around them. He seemed to her to entirely forget Romaris, and beyond the transmission of moneys to its priest, he took no heed of it. She hesitated to recall it to him, since to do so might have seemed to remind him that it was she, not he, who was suzerain in the Hohe Tauern. Romaris was but a bleak rock, a strip of sea-swept sand; it was natural that it should have no great hold on his affections, only recalling as it did all that its lords had lost.
‘I hate its name,’ he said impetuously once; and seeing the surprise upon her face, he added: ‘I was very lonely and wretched there; I tried to take interest in it because you bade me, but I failed; all I saw, all I thought of, was yourself, and I believed you as far and for ever removed from me as though you had dwelt in some other planet. No! perhaps I am superstitious: I do not wish you to go to Romaris. I believe it would bring us misfortune. The sea is full of treachery, the sands are full of graves.’
She smiled.
‘Superstition is a sort of parody of faith; I am sure you are not superstitious. I do not care to go to Romaris; I like to cheat myself into the belief that you were born and bred in the Iselthal. Otto said to me the other day, “My lord must be a son of the soil, or how could he know our mountains so well as he does, and how could he anywhere have learned to shoot like that?”’
‘I am very glad that Otto does me so much honour. When he first met me, he would have shot me like a fox, if you had given the word. Ah, my love! how often I think of you that day, in your white serge, with your girdle of gold, and your long gold-headed staff, and your little ivory horn. You were truly a châtelaine of the old mystical German days. You had some Schlüsselblumen in your hand. They were indeed the key flower to my soul, though, alas! treasures, I fear, you found none on your entrance there.’
‘I shall not answer you, since to answer would be to flatter you, and Aunt Ottilie already, does that more than is good for you,’ she said smiling, as she passed her fingers over the waves of his hair. ‘By the way, whom shall we invite to meet the Lilienhöhe? Will you make out a list?’
‘The Grand Duke does not share Frau Ottilie’s goodness for me.’
‘What would you? He has been made of buckram and parchment; besides which; nothing that is not German has, to his mind, any right to exist. By the way, Egon wrote to me this morning; he will be here at last.’
He looked up quickly in unspoken alarm: ‘Your cousin Egon? Here?’
‘Why are you so surprised? I was sure that sooner or later he would conquer that feeling of being unable to meet you. I begged him to come now; it is eight whole years since I have seen him. When once you have met you will be friends — for my sake.’
He was silent; a look of trouble and alarm was still upon his face.
‘Why should you suppose it any easier to him now than then?’ he said at length. ‘Men who love you do not change. There are women who compel constancy, sans le vouloir. The meeting can but be painful to Prince Vàsàrhely.’
‘Dear Réné,’ she answered in some surprise, ‘my nearest male relative and I cannot go on for ever without seeing each other. Even these years have done Egon a great deal of harm. He has been absent from the Court for fear of meeting us. He has lived with his hussars, or voluntarily confined to his estates, until he grows morose and solitary. I am deeply attached to him. I do not wish to have the remorse upon me of having caused the ruin of his gallant and brilliant life. When he has been once here he will like you: men who are brave have always a certain sympathy. When he has seen you here he will realise that destiny is unchangeable, and grow reconciled to the knowledge that I am your wife.’
Sabran gave an impatient gesture of denial, and began to write the list of invitations for the autumn circle of guests who were to meet the Prince and Princess of Lilienhöhe.
Once every summer and every autumn Hohenszalras was filled with a brilliant house-party, for she sacrificed her own personal preferences to what she believed to be for the good of her husband. She knew that men cannot always live alone; that contact with the world is needful to their minds and bracing for it. She had a great dread lest the ghost ennui should show his pale face over her husband’s shoulder, for she realised that from the life of the asphalte of the Champs-Élysées to the life amidst the pine forests of the Iselthal was an abrupt transition that might easily bring tedium in its train. And tedium is the most terrible and the most powerful foe love ever encounters.
Sabran completed the list, and when he had corrected it into due accordance with all Lilienhöhe’s personal and political sympathies and antipathies, despatched the invitations, ‘for eight days,’ written on cards that bore the joint arms of the Counts of Idrac and the Counts of Szalras. He had adopted the armorial bearings of the countship of Idrac as his own, and seemed disposed to abandon altogether those of the Sabrans of Romaris.
When they were written he went out by himself and rode long and fast through the mists of a chilly afternoon, through dripping forest ways and over roads where little water-courses spread in shining shallows. The coming of Egon Vàsàrhely troubled him and alarmed him. He had always dreaded his first meeting with the Magyar noble; and as the years had dropped by one after another, and her cousin had failed to find courage to see her again, he had begun to believe that they and Vàsàrhely would remain always strangers. His wish had begotten his thought. He knew that she wrote at intervals to her cousin, and he to her; he knew that at the birth of each of their children some magnificent gift, with a formal letter of felicitation, had come from the Colonel of the White Hussars; but as time had gone on and Prince Egon had avoided all possibility of meeting them, he had grown to suppose that the wound given her rejected lover was too profound ever to close; nor did he wonder that it was so: it seemed to him that any man who loved her must do so for all eternity, if eternity there should be. To learn suddenly that within another month Vàsàrhely would be his guest, distressed and alarmed him in a manner she never dreamed. They had been so happy. On their cloud less heaven there seemed to him to rise a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, but bearing with it disaster and a moonless night.
‘Perhaps he will have forgotten,’ he thought, as he strove to shake off his forebodings. ‘We were so young then. He was not even as old as I!’
And he rode fast and furiously homewards as the day drew in, and the lighted windows of the great castle seemed to smile at him as lie saw it high up above the darkness of the woods and of the evening mists, his home, beloved, sacred, infinitely dear to him; dear as the soil of the mother country which the wrecked mariner reaches after facing death on the deep sea.
‘God save her from
suffering by me!’ he said, in an unconscious prayer, as he drew rein before the terrace of Hohenszalras. Almost he believed in God through her.
When, after dressing, he went into, the Saxe room, the peace and beauty of the scene had never struck him so strongly as it did now, coming out of the shadows of the wet woods and the gloom of his own anxieties; anxieties the heavier and the more wearing because they could be shared by no one. The soft, full light of the wax candles fell on the Louis Seize embroideries and the white woodwork of the panelling and the china borders of the mirrors. The Princess Ottilie sat making silk-netting for the children’s balls; his wife was reading, and Bela and Gela, who were there for their privileged half-hour before dinner, were fitting together on a white bearskin, playing with the coloured balls of the game of solitaire. The soft light from the chandeliers and sconces of the Saxe Royale china fell on the golden heads and the velvet frocks of the children, on the old laces and the tawny-coloured plush of their mothers skirts, on the great masses of flowers in the Saxe bowls, and on the sleeping forms of the big dogs Donau and Neva. It was an interior that would have charmed Chardin, that would have been worthy of Vandyck.
As he looked at it he thought with a sort of ecstasy, ‘All that is mine;’ and then his heartstrings tightened as he thought again, ‘If she knew —— ?’
She looked up at his entrance with a welcome on her face that needed no words.
‘Where have you been in the rain all this long afternoon?’ You see we have a fire, even though it is midsummer. Bela, rise, and make your obeisance, and push that chair nearer the hearth.’
The two little boys stood up and kissed his hand, one after another, with the pretty formality; of greeting on which she always insisted; then they went back to their coloured glass balls, and he sank into a low chair beside his wife with a sigh half of fatigue, half of content.
‘Yes, I have been riding all the time,’ he said to her. ‘I am not sure that Siegfried approved it. But it does one good sometimes, and after the blackness and the wetness of that forest how charming it is to come home!’
She looked at him with wistfulness.
‘I wish you were not vexed that Egon is coming! I am sure you have been thinking of it as you rode.’
‘Yes, I have; but I am ashamed of doing so. He is your cousin, that shall be enough for me. I will do my best to make him welcome. Only there is this difficulty; a welcome from me to him will seem in itself an insult.’
‘An insult! when you are my husband? One would think you were my jägermeister. Dear mother mine, help me to scold him.’
‘I am a stranger,’ he said, under his breath.
She smiled a little, but she said with a certain hauteur:
‘You are master of Hohenszalras, as your son will be when our places shall know us no more. Do not let the phantom of Egon come between us, I beseech you. His real presence never will do so, that is certain.’
‘Nothing shall come between us,’ said Sabran, as his hand took and closed upon hers. ‘Forgive me if I have brought some gloomy nix out of the dark woods with me; he will flee away in, the light of this beloved white-room. No evil spirits could dare stay by your hearth.’
‘There are nixes in the forests,’ said Bela in a whisper to his brother.
‘Ja!’ said Gela, not comprehending.
‘We will kill them all when we are big,’ said Bela.
‘Ja! ja!’ said Gela.
Bela knew very well what a nix was. Otto had told him all about kobolds and sprites, as his pony trotted down the drives.
‘Or we will take them prisoners,’ he added, remembering that his mother never allowed anything to be killed, not even butterflies.
‘Ja!’ said Gela again, rolling the pretty blue and pink and amber balls about in the white fur of the bearskin.
Gela’s views of life were simplified by the disciple’s law of imitation; they were restricted to doing whatever Bela did, when that was possible, when it was not possible he remained still adoring Bela, with his little serious face as calm as a god’s.
She used to think that when they should grow up Bela would be a great soldier like Wallenstein or Condé, and Gela would stay at home and take care of his people here in the green, lone, happy Iselthal.
Time ran on and the later summer made the blooming hay grow brown on all the alpine meadows, and made the garden of Hohenszalras blossom with a million autumnal glories; it brought also the season of the first house-party. Egon Vàsàrhely was to arrive one day before the Lilienhöhe and the other guests.
‘I want Egon so much to see Bela!’ she said, with the thoughtless cruelty of a happy mother forgetful of the pain of a rejected lover.
‘I fear Bela will find little favor in your cousin’s eyes, since he is mine too,’ said Sabran.
‘Oh, Egon is content to be only our cousin by this — —’
‘You think so? You do not know yourself if you imagine that.’
‘Egon is very loyal. He would not come here if he could not greet you honestly.’
Sabran’s face flushed a little, and he turned away. He vaguely dreaded the advent of Egon Vàsàrhely, and there were so many innocent words uttered in the carelessness of intimate intercourse which stabbed him to the quick; she had so wounded him all unconscious of her act.
‘Shall we have a game of billiards?’ he asked her as they stood in the Rittersaal, whilst the rain fell fast without. She played billiards well, and could hold her own against him, though his game was one that had often been watched by a crowded galerie in Paris with eager speculation and heavy wager. An hour afterwards they were still playing when the clang of a great bell announced the approach of the carriage which had been sent to Windisch-Matrey.
‘Come!’ she said joyously, as she put back her cue in its rest; but Sabran drew back.
‘Receive your cousin first alone,’ he said. ‘He must resent my presence here. I will not force it on him on the threshold of your house.’
‘Of our house! Why will you use wrong pronouns? Believe me, dear, Egon is too generous to bear you the animosity you think.’
‘Then he never loved you,’ said Sabran, somewhat impatiently, as he sent one ball against another with a sharp collision. ‘I will come if you wish it,’ he added; ‘but I think it is not in the best taste to so assert myself.’
‘Egon is only my cousin and your guest. You are the master of Hohenszalras. Come! you were not so difficult when you received the Emperor.’
‘I had done the Emperor no wrong,’ said Sabran, controlling the impatience and the reluctance he still felt.
‘You have done Egon none. I should not have been his wife had I never been yours.’
‘Who knows?’ murmured Sabran, as he followed her into the entrance hall. The stately figure of Egon Vàsàrhely enveloped in furs was just passing through the arched doorway.
She went towards him with a glad welcome and both hands outstretched.
Prince Egon bowed to the ground: then took both her hands in his and kissed her on the cheek.
Sabran, who grew very pale, advanced and greeted him with ceremonious grace.
‘My wife has bade me welcome you, Prince, but it would be presumptuous in me, a stranger, to do that. All her kindred must be dear and sacred here.’
Egon Vàsàrhely, with an effort to which he had for years been vainly schooling himself, stretched out his hand to take her husband’s; but as he did so, and his glance for the first time dwelt on Sabran, a look surprised and indefinitely perplexed came on his own features. Unconsciously he hesitated a moment; then, controlling himself, he replied with a few fitting words of courtesy and friendship. That there should be some embarrassment, some constraint, was almost inevitable, and did not surprise her: she saw both, but she also saw that both were hidden under the serenity of high breeding and worldly habit. The most difficult moment had passed: they went together into the Rittersaal, talked together a little on a few indifferent topics, and in a little space Prince Egon withdrew to h
is own apartments to change his travelling clothes. Sabran left him on the threshold of his chamber.
Vàsàrhely locked the doors, locking out even his servant, threw off his furs and sat down, leaning his head on his hands. The meeting had cost him even more than he had feared that it would do. For five years he had dreaded this moment, and its pain was as sharp and as fresh to him as though it had been unforeseen. To sleep under the same roof with the husband of Wanda von Szalras! He had overrated his power of self-control, underrated his power of suffering, when to please her he had consented after five years to visit Hohenszalras. What were five years? — half a century would not have changed him.
Under the plea of fatigue, he, who had sat in his saddle eighteen hours at a stretch, and was braced to every form of endurance in the forest chase and in the tented field, sent excuses to his host for remaining in his own rooms until the Ave Maria rung. When he at length went down to the blue-room where she was, he had recovered, outwardly at least, his tranquillity and his self-possession, though here, in this familiar, once beloved chamber, where every object had been dear to him from his boyhood, a keener trial than any he had passed through awaited him, as she led forward to meet him a little boy clad in white velvet, with a cloud of light golden hair above deep blue luminous eyes, and said to him:
‘Egon, this is my Bela. You will love him a little, for my sake?’
Vàsàrhely felt a chill run through him like the cold of death as he stooped towards the child; but he smiled and touched the boy’s forehead with his lips.
‘May the spirit of our lost Bela be with him and dwell in his heart,’ he murmured; ‘better I cannot wish him.’
With an effort he turned to Sabran.
‘Your little son is a noble child; you may with reason be proud of him. He is very like you in feature. I see no trace of the Szalras.’