Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The intellectual powers and accomplishments of Sabran dazzled Vàsàrhely with a saddened sense of inferiority. Like most great soldiers he had a genuine humility in his measurement of himself. He knew that he had no talents except as a leader of cavalry. ‘It is natural that she never looked at me,’ he thought, ‘when she had once seen this man, with his wit, his grace, his facility.’ He could not even regard the skill of Sabran in the arts, in the salon, in the theatre with the contempt which the ‘Wild Boar of Taróc’ might have felt for a mere maker of music, a squire of dames, a writer of sparkling little comedies, a painter of screens, because he knew that both at Idrac and in France Sabran had showed himself the possessor of those martial and virile qualities, by the presence or the absence of which the Hungarian noble measured all men. He himself could only love well and live well: he reflected sadly that honesty and honour are not alone enough to draw love in return.

  As the weeks passed on, his host grew so accustomed to his presence there that it ceased to give him offence or cause him anxiety.

  ‘He is not amusing, and he is not always polite,’ he said to his wife, ‘but if he likes to consume his soul in gazing at you, I am not jealous, my Wanda; and so taciturn a rival would hardly ever be a dangerous one.’

  ‘Do not jest about it,’ she answered him, with some real pain. ‘I should be very vexed at his remaining here, were it not that I feel sure he will in time learn to live down his regrets, and to esteem and appreciate you.’

  ‘Who knows but his estimation of me may not be the right one?’ said Sabran, with a pang of sad self-knowledge. And although he did not attach any significance to the prolonged sojourn of the lord of Taróc and Mohacs, he began to desire once more that his guest would return to the solitudes of the Carlowitz vineyards, or of the Karpathian mountains and gorges of snow.

  When over seven weeks had passed by, Vàsàrhely himself began to think that to stay in the Iselthal was useless and impossible, and he had heard from Taróc tidings which annoyed him — that his brother Stefan and his wife, availing themselves of his general permission to visit any one of his places when they chose had so strained the meaning of the permission that they had gone to his castle, with a score of their Parisian friends, and were there keeping high holiday and festival, to the scandal of his grave old stewards, and their own exceeding diversion. Hospitable to excess as he was, the liberty displeased him, especially as his, men wrote him word that his favourite horses; were being ruined by over-driving, and in the list of the guests which they sent him were the names of more than one too notorious lady, against whose acquaintance he had repeatedly counselled Olga Brancka. He would not have cared much what they had done at any other of his houses, but at Taróc, his mother, whom he had adored, had lived and died, and the place was sacred to him.

  He determined to tear himself away from Hohenszalras, and go and scatter these gay unbidden revellers in the dusky Karpathian ravines. ‘I cannot stay here for ever,’ he thought, ‘and I might be here for years without acquiring any more certainty than my own conviction. Either I am wrong, or he has nothing to conceal, or if I be right he is too wary to betray himself. If only I could see his shoulder where I struck the dagger — but I cannot go into his bath-room and say to him, “You are Vassia Kazán!”’

  He resolved to leave on the day after the morrow. For the next day there was organised on a large scale a hunting party, to which the nobility of the Tauern had been bidden. There were only some half-dozen men then staying in the Burg, most of them Austrian soldiers. The delay gave him the chance he longed for, which but for an accident he might never have had, though he had tarried there half a century.

  Early in the morning there was a great breakfast in the Rittersaal, at which Wanda did not appear. Sabran received the nobles and gentry of the province, and did the honours of his table with his habitual courtliness and grace. He was not hospitable in Vàsàrhely’s sense of the word: he was too easily wearied by others, and too contemptuous of ordinary humanity; but he was alive to the pleasure of being lord of Hohenszalras, and sensible of the favour with which he was looked upon by a nobility commonly so exclusive and intolerant of foreign invasion.

  Breakfast over, the whole party went out and up into the high woods. The sport at Hohenszalras always gave fair play to beast and bird. In deference to the wishes of his wife, Sabran would have none of those battues which make of the covert or the forest a slaughterhouse. He himself disdained that sort of sport, and liked danger and adventure to mingle with his out-of-door pastimes. Game fairly found by the spaniel or the pointer; the boar, the wolf, the bear, honestly started and given its fair chance of escape or revenge; the steinbock stalked in a long hard day with peril and effort — these were all delightful to him on occasion; but for the crowded drive, the horde of beaters, the terrified bewildered troop of forest denizens driven with sticks on to the very barrels of the gunners, for this he had the boundless contempt of a man who had chased the buffalo over the prairie, and lassoed the wild horse and the wild bull leaning down from the saddle of his mustang. The day passed off well, and his guests were all content: he alone was not, because a large brown bear which he had sighted and tired at twice had escaped him, and roused that blood-lust in him which is in the hearts of all men.

  ‘Will you come out alone with me to-morrow and try for that grand brute?’ he said to Vàsàrhely, as the last of his guests took their departure.

  Vàsàrhely hesitated.

  ‘I intended to leave to-morrow; I have been here too long. But since you are so good, I will stay twenty-four hours longer.’

  He was ashamed in his own heart of the willingness with which he caught at the excuse to remain within sight of his cousin and within watch of Sabran.

  ‘I am charmed,’ said his host, in himself regretful that he had suggested a reason for delay; he had not known that the other had intended to leave so soon. They remained together on the terrace giving directions to the jägermeister for the next day.

  Vàsàrhely looked at his successful rival and said to himself: ‘It is impossible. I must be mad to dream it. I am misled by a mere chance resemblance, and even my own memory may have deceived me; I was but a child.

  In the forenoon they both went out into the high hills again, where the wild creatures had their lairs and were but seldom troubled by a rifle-shot. They brought down some black grouse and hazel grouse and mountain partridges on their upward way. The jägers were scattered in the woods; the day was still and cloudy, a true sportsman’s day, with no gleam of sun to shine in their eyes and on the barrels of their rifles. Sabran shooting to the right, Vàsàrhely to the left, they went through the grassy drives that climbed upward and upward, and many a mountain hare was rolled over in their path, and many a ptarmigan and capercailzie. But when they reached the high pine forests where the big game harboured, they ceased to shoot, and advanced silently, waiting and reserving their fire for any large beast the jägers might start and drive towards them from above. In the greyness of the day the upper woods were almost dusky, so thickly, stood the cembras and the Siberian pines. There was everywhere the sound of rushing waters, some above some underground.

  ‘The first beast to you, the second to me,’ said Sabran, in a whisper to his companion, who demurred and declared that the first fire should be his host’s.

  ‘No,’ said Sabran. ‘I am at home. Permit me so small a courtesy to my guest.’

  Vàsàrhely flushed darkly. In his very politeness this man seemed to him to contrive to sting and wound him.

  Sabran, however, who had meant nothing more than he had said, did not observe the displeasure he had caused, and paused at the spot agreed upon with Otto, a grassy spot where four drives met. There they both in absolute silence waited and watched for what the hunter’s patron, good S. Hubert, might vouchsafe to send them. They had so waited about a quarter of an hour, when down one of the drives made dusky by the low hanging arolla boughs, there came towards them a great dark beast, and would have gone
by them had not Vàsàrhely fired twice as it approached. The bear rolled over, shot through the head and heart.

  ‘Well done,’ cried Sabran, but scarcely were the words off his lips when another bear burst through the boughs ahead of him by fifty yards. He levelled his rifle and received its approach with two bullets in rapid succession. But neither had entered a vital part, and the animal, only rendered furious by pain, reared and came towards him with deadliest intent, its great fangs grinning. He fired again, and this shot struck home. The poor brute fell with a crash, the blood pouring from its mouth. It was not dead and its agony was great.

  ‘I will give it the coup de grâce,’ said Sabran, who, for his wife’s sake’, was as humane as any hunter ever can be to the beasts he slew.

  ‘Take care,’ said Vàsàrhely. ‘It is dangerous to touch a wounded bear. I have known one that looked stone dead rise up and kill a man.’

  Sabran did not heed. He went up to the poor, panting, groaning mass of fur and flesh, and drew his hunting-knife to give it the only mercy that it was now possible for it to receive. But as he stooped to plunge the knife into its heart the bear verified the warning he had been given. Gathering all its oozing strength in one dying effort to avenge its murder, it leaped on him, dashed him to the earth, and clung to him with claw and tooth fast in his flesh. He freed his right arm from its ponderous weight, its horrible grip, and stabbed it with his knife as it clung to and lacerated him where he lay upon the grass. In an instant, Vàsàrhely and the jäger who was with them were by his side, freed him from the animal, and raised him from the ground. He was deluged with its blood and his own. Vàsàrhely, for one moment of terrible joy, for which he loathed himself afterwards, thought, ‘Is he dead?’ Men had died of lesser things than this.

  He stood erect and smiled, and said that it was nothing, but even as he spoke a faintness came over him, and his lips turned grey.

  The jäger supported him tenderly, and would have had him sit down upon a boulder of rock, but he resisted.

  ‘Let me get to that water, he said feebly, looking to a spot a few yards off, where one of the many torrents of the Hohe Tauern tumbled from the wooded cliff above through birch and beechwood, and rushing underground left a clear round brown pool amongst the ferns. He took a draught from the flask of brandy; tendered him by the lad, and leaning on the youth, and struggling against the sinking swoon that was coming on him, walked to the edge of the pool, and dropped down there on one of the mossy stones which served as a rough chair.

  ‘Strip me, and wash the blood away, he said to the huntsman, whilst the green wood and the daylight, and the face of the man grew dim to him, and seemed to recede further and further in a misty darkness. The youth obeyed, and cut away the velvet coat, the cambric shirt, till he was naked to his waist; then, making sponges of handkerchiefs, the jäger began to wash the blood from him and staunch it as best he could.

  Egon Vàsàrhely stood by, without offering any aid; his eyes were fastened on the magnificent bust of Sabran, as the sunlight fell on the fair blue-veined flesh, the firm muscles, the symmetrical throat, the slender, yet sinewy arms, round one of which was clasped a bracelet of fair hair. He had the chance he needed.

  He approached and told the lad roughly to leave the Marquis to him, he was doing him more harm than good; he himself had seen many battle-fields, and many men bleeding to death upon their mother earth. By this time Sabran’s eyes were closed; he was hardly conscious of anything, a great numbness and infinite exhaustion had fallen upon him; his lips moved feebly. ‘Wanda!’ he said once or twice,’Wanda!’

  The face of the man who leaned above him grew dark as night; he gnashed his teeth as he begun his errand of mercy.

  Leave me with your lord,’ he said to the young jäger. ‘Go you to the castle. Find Herr Greswold, bring him; do not alarm the Countess, and say nothing to the household.’

  The huntsman went, fleet as a roe. Vàsàrhely remained alone with Sabran, who only heard the sound of the rushing water magnified a million times on his dulled ear.

  Vàsàrhely tore the shirt in shreds, and laved and bathed the wounds, and then began to bind them with the skill of a soldier who had often aided his own wounded troopers. But first of all, when he had washed the blood away, he searched with keen and eager eyes for a scar on the white skin — and found it.

  On the right shoulder was a small triangular mark; the mark of what, to a soldier’s eyes, told of an old wound. When he saw it he smiled a cruel smile, and went on with his work of healing.

  Sabran leaned against the rock behind him; his eyes were still closed, the pulsations of his heart were irregular. He had lost a great quantity of blood, and the pool at his feet was red. They were but flesh wounds, and there was no danger in them themselves, but great veins had been severed, and the stream of life had hurried forth in torrents. Vàsàrhely thrust the flask between his lips, but he could not swallow.

  All had been done that could be for the immediate moment. The stillness of the deep woods was around them; the body of the brown bear lay on the soaked grass; a vulture scenting death, was circling above against the blue sky. Over the mind of his foe swept at the sight of them one of those hideous temptations which assail the noblest natures in an hour of hatred. If he tore the bandages he had placed there off the rent veins of the unconscious man whom he watched, the blood would leap out again in floods, and so weaken the labouring heart that in ten minutes more its powers would fall so low that all aid would be useless. Never more would the lips of Sabran meet his wife! Never more would his dreams be dreamed upon her breast! For the moment the temptation seemed to curl about him like a flame; he shuddered, and crossed himself. Was he a soldier to slay in cold blood by treachery a powerless rival?

  He leaned over Sabran again, and again tried to force the mouthpiece of his wine-flask through his teeth. A few drops passed them, and he revived a little, and swallowed a few drops more. The blood was arrested in its escape, and the pulsations of the heart were returning to their normal measure; after a while he unclosed his eyes, and looked up at the green leaves, at the blue sky.

  ‘Do not alarm Wanda,’ he said feebly. ‘It is a scratch; it will be nothing. Take me home.’

  With his left hand he felt for the hair bracelet on his right arm, between the shoulder and the wrist. It was stiff with his own blood.

  Then Vàsàrhely leaned over him and met his upward gaze, and said in his ear, that seemed still filled with the rushing of many waters, ‘You are Vassia Kazán!’

  When a little later the huntsman returned, bringing the physician, whom he had met a mile nearer the house in the woods, and some peasants bearing a litter made out of pine branches and wood moss, they found Sabran stretched insensible beside the water-pool; and Egon Vàsàrhely, who stood erect beside him, said in a strange tone:

  ‘I have stanched the blood, and he has swooned, you see. I commit him to your hands. I am not needed.’

  And, to their surprise, he turned and walked away with swift steps into the green gloom of the dense forest.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  Sabran was still insensible when he was carried to the house.

  When he regained consciousness he was on his own bed, and his wife was bending over him. A convulsion of grief crossed his face as he lifted his eyelids and looked at her.

  ‘Wanda,’ he murmured feebly, ‘Wanda, you will forgive — —’

  She kissed him passionately, while her tears fell like rain upon his forehead. She did not hear his words distinctly; she was only alive to the intense joy of his recovered consciousness, of the sound of his voice, of the sense of his safety. She kneeled by his bed, covering his hands with caresses, prodigal of a thousand names of love, given up to an abandonment of terror and of hope which broke down all the serenity and self-command of her habitual temper. She was not even aware of the presence of others. The over-mastering emotions of anguish and of joy filled her soul, and made her seem deaf, indifferent to all living things save one.

&n
bsp; Sabran lay motionless. He felt her lips, he heard her voice; he did not look up again, nor did he speak again. He shut his eyes, and slowly remembered all that had passed. Greswold approached him and held his fingers on his wrist, and held a little glass to his mouth. Sabran put it away. ‘It is an opiate,’ he said feebly; ‘I will not have it.’

  He was resolute; he closed his teeth, he thrust the calming draught away.

  He was thinking to himself: ‘Sometimes in unconsciousness one speaks.’

  ‘You are not in great pain?’ asked the physician. He made a negative movement of his head. What were the fire and the smart of his lacerated flesh, of his torn muscles, to the torments of his fears, to the agony of his long stifled conscience?

  ‘Do not torment him, let him be still,’ she said to the physician; she held his hand in both her own and pressed it to her heart. His languid eyes thanked her, then closed again.

  Herr Greswold withdrew to a little distance and waited. It seemed to him strange that a man of the high courage and strong constitution of Sabran should be thus utterly broken down by any wound that was not mortal; should be thus sunk into dejection and apathy, making no effort to raise himself, even to console and reassure his wife. It was not like his careless and gallant temper, his virile and healthful strength.

  It was true, the doctor reflected, that he had lost a great amount of blood. Such a loss he knew sometimes affects the heart and shatters the nervous system in many unlooked-for ways. Yet, he thought, there was something beyond this; the attitude and the regard of Egon Vàsàrhely had been unnatural at such an hour of peril. ‘When he said just now “forgive,” what did he mean?’ reflected the old man, whose ear had caught the word which had escaped that of Wanda, who had been only alive to the voice she adored.