by Ouida
‘The other boy is more like Wanda,’ replied Sabran, sensible of a certain tenacity of observation with which Vàsàrhely was gazing at him. ‘As for my daughter, she is too young for anyone to say whom she will resemble. All I desire is that she should be like her mother, physically and spiritually.’
‘Of course,’ said the Prince, absently, still looking from Sabran to the child, as if in the endeavour to follow some remembrance that eluded-him. The little face of Bela was a miniature of his father’s, they were as alike as it is possible for a child and a man to be so, and Egon Vàsàrhely perplexedly mused and wondered at vague memories which rose up to him as he gazed on each.
‘And what do you like best to do, my little one?’ he asked of Bela, who was regarding him with curious and hostile eyes.
‘To ride,’ answered Bela at once, in his pretty uncertain German.
‘There you are a true Szalras at least. And your brother Gela, can he ride yet? Where is Gela, by the way?’
‘He is asleep,’ said Bela, with some contempt. ‘He is a little thing. Yes; he rides, but it is in a chair-saddle. It is not real riding.’
‘I see. Well, when you come and see me you shall have some real riding, on wild horses if you like;’ and he told the child stories of the great Magyar steppes, and the herds of young horses, and the infinite delight of the unending gallop over the wide hushed plain; and all the while his heart ached bitterly, and the sight of the child — who was her child, yet had that stranger’s face — was to him like a jagged steel being turned and twisted inside a bleeding wound. Bela, however, was captivated by the new visions that rose before him.
‘Bela will come to Hungary,’ he said with condescension, and then with an added thought, continued: ‘I think Bela has great lands there. Otto said so.’
‘Bela has nothing at all,’ said Sabran, sternly. ‘Bela talks great nonsense sometimes, and it would be better he should go to sleep with his brother.’
Bela looked up shyly under his golden cloud of hair. ‘Folko is Bela’s,’ he said under his breath. Folko was his pony.
‘No,’ said Sabran; ‘Folko belongs to your mother. She only allows you to have him so long as you are good to him.’
‘Bela is always good to him,’ he said decidedly.
‘Bela is faultless in his own estimation,’ said his mother, with a smile. ‘He is too little to be wise enough to see himself as he is.’
This view made Bela’s blue eyes open very wide and fill very sorrowfully. It was humiliating. He longed to get back to Gela, who always listened to him dutifully, and never said anything in answer except an entirely acquiescent ‘Ja! ja!’ which was indeed about the limitation of Gela’s lingual powers. In a few moments, indeed, his governess came for him and took him away, a little dainty figure in his ivory velvet and his blue silk stockings, with his long golden curls hanging to his waist.
‘It is so difficult to keep him from being spoilt,’ she said, as the door closed on him. ‘The people make a little prince, a little god, of him. He believes himself to be something wonderful. Gela, who is so gentle and quiet, is left quite in the shade.’
‘I suppose Gela takes your title?’ said Vàsàrhely to his host. ‘It is usual with the Austrian families for the second son to have some distant appellation?’
‘They are babies,’ said Sabran, impatiently.
‘It will be time enough to settle those matters when they are old enough to be court-pages or cadets. They are Bela and Gela at present. The only real republic is childhood.’
‘I am afraid Bela is the tyrannus to which all republics succumb,’ said Wanda, with a smile. He is extremely autocratic in his notions, and in his family. In all his “make believe” games he is crowned.’
‘He is a beautiful child,’ said her cousin, and she answered, still smiling:
‘Oh, yes: he is so like Réné!’
Egon Vàsàrhely turned his face from her. The dinner was somewhat dull, and the evening seemed tedious, despite the efforts of Sabran to promote conversation, and the écarté which he and his guest played together. They, were all sensible that some chord was out of tune, and glad that on the morrow a large house-party would be there to spare them a continuation of this difficult intercourse.
‘Your cousin will never forgive me,’ said Sabran to her when they were alone. ‘I think, beside his feeling that I stand for ever between you and him there is an impatience of me as a stranger and one unworthy you.’
‘You do yourself and him injustice,’ she answered. ‘I shall be unhappy if you and he be not friends.’
‘Then unhappy you will be, my beloved. We both adore you.’
‘Do not say that. He would not be here if it were so.’
‘Ah! look at him when he looks at Bela!’
She sighed; she had felt a strong emotion on the sight of her cousin, for Egon Vàsàrhely was much changed by these years of pain. His grand carriage and his martial beauty were unaltered, but all the fire and the light of earlier years were gone out of his face, and a certain gloom and austerity had come there. To all other women he would have been the more attractive for the melancholy which was in such apt contrast with the heroic adventures of his life, but to her the change in him was a mute reproach which filled her with remorse though she had done no wrong.
Meantime Prince Egon, throwing open his window, leaned out into the cold rainy night, as though a hand were at his throat and suffocating him. And amidst all the tumult of his pain and revolt, one dim thought was incessantly intruding itself; he was always thinking, as he recalled the face of Sabran and of Sabran’s little son, ‘Where have I seen those blue eyes, those level brows, those delicate curved lips?’
They were so familiar, yet so strange to him. When he would have given a name to them they receded into the shadows of some far away past of his own, so far away he could not follow them. He sat up half the night letting the wind beat and the rain fall on him. He could not sleep.
CHAPTER XVIII.
In the morrow thirty or forty people arrived, amongst them Baron Kaulnitz en congé from his embassy.
‘What think you of Sabran?’ he asked of Egon Vàsàrhely, who answered:
‘He is a perfect gentleman. He is a charming companion. He plays admirably at écarté.
‘Écarté! I spoke of his moral worth: what is your impression of that?’
‘If he had not satisfied her as to that, Wanda would not be his wife,’ answered the Prince gravely. ‘He has given her beautiful children, and it seems to me that he renders her perfectly happy. We should all be grateful to him.’
‘The children are certainly very beautiful,’ said Baron Kaulnitz, and said no more.
‘The people all around are unfeignedly attached to him,’ Vàsàrhely continued with generous effort. ‘I hear nothing but his praise. Nor do I think it the conventional compliment which loyalty leads them to pay the husband of their Countess; it is very genuine attachment. The men of the old Archduchy are not easily won; it is only qualities of daring and manliness which appeal to their sympathies. That he has gained their affections is as great testimony to his character in one way as that he has gained Wanda’s is in another. At Idrac also the people adore him, and Croats are usually slow to see merit in strangers.’
‘In short, he is a paragon,’ said the ambassador, with a little dubious smile. ‘So much the better, since he is irrevocably connected with us.’
Sabran was at no time seen to greater advantage than when he was required to receive and entertain a large house-party. Always graceful, easily witty, endowed with that winning tact which is to society as cream is to the palate, the charm he possessed for women and the ascendency he could, at times, exercise over men — even men who were opposed to him — were never more admirably displayed than when he was the master of Hohenszalras, with crowned heads, and princes, and diplomatists, and beauties gathered beneath his roof. His mastery, moreover, of all field sports, and his skill at all games that demanded either intelligence or audacity, made him
popular with a hardy and brilliant nobility; his daring in a boar hunt at noon was equalled by his science at whist in the evening. Strongly prejudiced against him at the onset, the great nobles who were his guests had long ceased to feel anything for him except respect and regard; whilst the women admired him none the less for that unwavering devotion to his wife which made even the conventionalities of ordinary flirtation wholly impossible to him. With all his easy gallantry and his elegant homage to them, they all knew that, at heart, he was as cold as the rocks to all women save one.
‘It is really the knight’s love for his lady,’ said the Countess Brancka once; and Sabran, overhearing, said: ‘Yes, and, I think that if there were more like my lady on earth, knighthood might revive on other scenes than Wagner’s.’
Between him and the Countess Brancka there was a vague intangible enmity, veiled under the perfection of courtesy. They could ill have told why they disliked each other; but they did so. Beneath their polite or trivial or careless speech they often aimed at each other’s feelings or foibles with accuracy and malice. She had stayed at Hohenszalras more or less time each year in the course of her flight between France and Vienna, and was there now. He admired his wife’s equanimity and patience under the trial of Mdme. Olga’s frivolities, but he did not himself forbear from as much sarcasm as was possible in a man of the world to one who was his guest, and by marriage his relative, and he was sensible of her enmity to himself, though she paid him many compliments, and sometimes too assiduously sought his companionship. ‘Elle fait le ronron, mais gare à ses pattes!’ he said once to his wife concerning her.
Sabran appraised her indeed with unflattering accuracy. He knew by heart all the wiles and wisdom of such a woman as she was. Her affectations did not blind him to her real danger, and her exterior frivolity did not conceal from him the keen and subtle self-interest and the strong passions which laboured beneath it.
She felt that she had an enemy in him, and partly in self-protection, partly in malice, she set herself to convert a foe into a friend, perhaps, without altogether confessing it to herself, into a lover as well.
The happiness that prevailed at Hohenszalrasburg annoyed her for no other reason than that it wearied her to witness it. She did not envy it, because she did not want happiness at all; she wanted perpetual change, distraction, temptation, passion, triumph — in a word, excitement, which becomes the drug most unobtainable to those who have early exhausted all the experiences and varieties of pleasure.
Mdme. Brancka had always an unacknowledged resentment against her sister-in-law, for being the owner of all the vast possessions of the Szalras. ‘If Gela had lived!’ she thought constantly. ‘If I had only had a son by him before he died, this woman would have had her dower and nothing more.’ That his sister should possess all, whilst she had by her later marriage lost her right even to a share in that vast wealth, was a perpetual bitterness to her.
Stefan Brancka was indeed rich, but he was an insensate gambler. She was extravagant to the last degree, with all the costly caprices of a cocodette who reigned in the two most brilliant capitals of the world. They were often troubled by their own folly, and again and again the generosity of his elder brother had rescued them from humiliating embarrassments. At such moments she had almost hated Wanda von Szalras for these large possessions, of which, according to her own views, her sister-in-law made no use whatever. Meantime, she wished Egon Vàsàrhely to die childless, and to that end had not been unwilling for the woman he loved to marry anyone else. She had reasoned that the Szalras estates would go to the Crown or the Church if Wanda did not marry; whilst all the power and possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely must, if he had no sons, pass in due course to his brother. She had the subtle acuteness of her race, and she had the double power of being able at once to wait very patiently and to spring with swift rage on what she needed. To her sister-in-law she always appeared a mere flutterer on the breath of fashion. The grave and candid nature of the one could not follow or perceive the intricacies of the other.
‘She is a cruel woman and a perilous one,’ Sabran said one day to his wife’s surprise.
She answered him that Olga Brancka had always seemed to her a mere frivolous mondaine, like so many others of their world.
‘No,’ he persisted. ‘You are wrong; she is not a butterfly. She has too much energy. She is a profoundly immoral woman also. Look at her eyes.’
‘That is Stefan’s affair,’ she answered, ‘not ours. He is indifferent.’
‘Or unsuspicious? Did your brother care for her?’
‘He was madly in love with her. She was only sixteen when he married her. He fell at Solferino half a year later. When she married my cousin it shocked and disgusted me. Perhaps I was foolish to take it thus, but it seemed such a sin against Gela. To die so, and not to be even remembered!’
‘Did your cousin Egon approve this second marriage?’
‘No,’ he opposed it; he had our feeling about it. But Stefan, though very young, was beyond any control. He had the fortune as he had the title of his mother, the Countess Brancka, and Olga bewitched him as she had done my brother.’
‘She is a witch, a wicked witch,’ said Sabran.
The great autumn party was brilliant and agreeable. All things went well, and the days were never monotonous. The people were well assorted, and the social talent of their host made their outdoor sports and their indoor pastimes constantly varied, whilst Hungarian musicians and Viennese comedians played waltzes that would have made a statue dance, and represented the little comedies for which he himself had been famous at the Mirlitons.
He was not conscious of it, but he was passionately eager for Egon Vàsàrhely to be witness, not only of his entire happiness, but of his social powers. To Vàsàrhely he seemed to put forward the perfection of his life with almost insolence; with almost exaggeration to exhibit the joys and the gifts with which nature and chance had so liberally dowered him. The stately Magyar soldier, sitting silent and melancholy apart, watched him with a curious pang, that in a lesser nature would have been a consuming envy. Now and then, though Sabran and his wife spoke rarely to each other in the presence of others, a glance, a smile, a word passed between them that told of absolute unuttered tenderness, profound and inexhaustible as the deep seas; in the very sound of their laughter, in the mere accent of their voices, in a careless caress to one of their children, in a light touch of the hand to one another as they rode, or as they met in a room, there was the expression of a perfect joy, of a perfect faith between them, which pierced the heart of the watcher of it. Yet would he not have had it otherwise at her cost.
‘Since she has chosen him as the companion of her life, it is well that he should be what she can take pride in, and what all men can praise,’ he thought, and yet the happiness of this man seemed to him an audacity, an insolence. What human lover could merit her?
Between himself and Sabran there was the most perfect courtesy, but no intimacy. They both knew that if for fifty years they met continually they would never be friends. All her endeavours to produce sympathy between them failed. Sabran was conscious of a constant observation of him by her cousin, which seemed to him to have a hostile motive, and which irritated him extremely, though he did not allow his irritation any visible vent. Olga Brancka perceived, and with the objectless malice of women of her temperament, amused herself with fanning, the slumbering enmity, as children play at fire.
‘You cannot expect Egon to love you,’ she said once to her host. ‘You know he was the betrothed of Wanda from her childhood — at least in his own hopes, and in the future sketched for them by their families.’
‘I was quite aware of that before I married,’ he answered her indifferently. ‘But those family arrangements are tranquil disposals of destiny which, if they be disturbed, leave no great trace of trouble. The Prince is young still, and a famous soldier as well as a great noble. He has no lack of consolation if he need it, and I cannot believe that he does.’
Mdme.
Olga laughed.
‘You know as well as I do that Egon adores the very stirrup your wife’s foot touches!’
‘I know he is her much beloved cousin,’ said Sabran, in a tone which admitted of no reply.
To Vàsàrhely his sister-in-law said confidentially:
‘Dear Egon, why did you not stay on the pusztas or remain with your hussars? You make le beau Sabran jealous.’
‘Jealous!’ asked Vàsàrhely, with a bitter smile. ‘He has much cause, when she has neither eye nor ear, neither memory nor thought of any kind for any living thing except himself and those children who are all his very portraits! Why do you say these follies, Olga? You know that my cousin Wanda chose her lord out of all the world, and loves him as no one would have supposed she had it in her to love any mortal creature.’
He spoke imperiously, harshly, and she was silenced.
‘What do you think of him?’ she said with hesitation.
‘Everyone asks me that question. I am not his keeper!’
‘But you must form some opinion. He is virtual lord of Hohenszalras, and I believe she has made over to him all the appanages of Idrac, and his children will have everything.’
‘Are they not her natural heirs? Who should inherit from her if not her sons?’
‘Of course, of course they will inherit, only they inherit nothing from him. It was certainly a great stroke of fortune for a landless gentleman to make. Why does the gentilhomme pauvre always so captivate women?’
‘What do you mean to insinuate, Olga?’ he asked her, with a stern glance of his great black eyes.’
‘Oh, nothing; only his history was peculiar. I remember his arrival in France, his first appearance in society; it is many years ago now. All the Faubourg received him, but some said at the time that it was too romantic to be true — those Mexican forests, that long exile of the Sabran, the sudden appearance of this beautiful young marquis; you will grant it was romantic. I suppose it was the romance that made even Wanda’s clear head turn a little. It is a vin capiteux for many women. And then such a life in Paris after it — duels, baccara, bonnes fortunes, clever comedies, a touch like Liszt’s, a sudden success in the Chamber — it was all so romantic; it was bound to bring him at last to his haven, the Prince Charmant of an enchanted castle! Only enchanted castles sometimes grow dull, and Princes Charmants are not always amusable by the same châtelaine!’