Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  He himself had left the capital, after affirming to the minister that private reasons, which he could not enter into, had induced him to entreat the Imperial pardon for so sudden a change of resolve, and to solicit permission to decline the high honour that had been vouchsafed to him.

  ‘What shall I say to Wanda?’ he asked himself incessantly, as the express train swung through the grand green country towards Salzburg.

  She was sitting on the lake terrace with the Princess, when a telegram from her cousin Kunst was brought to her. Bela and Gela were playing near with squadrons of painted cuirassiers, and the great dogs were lying on the marble pavement at her feet. It was a golden close to a sunless but fine day; the snow peaks were growing rosy as the sun shone for an instant behind the Venediger range, and the lake was calm and still and green, one little boat going noiselessly across it from the Holy Isle to the further side.

  ‘What a pity to leave it all!’ she thought as she took the telegram.

  The Minister’s message was curt and angered:

  ‘Your husband has resigned; he makes himself and me ridiculous. Unable to guess his motive, I am troubled and embarrassed beyond expression.’

  The other, from Sabran, said simply: ‘I am coming home. I give up Russia.’

  ‘Any bad news?’ the Princess asked, seeing the seriousness of her face. Her niece rose and gave her the papers.

  ‘Is Réné mad!’ she exclaimed as she read. His wife, who was startled and dismayed at the affront to her cousin and to her sovereign, yet had been unable to repress a movement of personal gladness, hastened to say in his defence:

  ‘Be sure he has some grave, good reason, dear mother. He knows the world too well to commit a folly. Unexplained, it looks strange, certainly; but he will be home to-night or in the early morning; then we shall know; and be sure we shall find him right.’

  ‘Right!’ echoed the Princess, lifting the little girl who was her namesake off her knee, a child white as a snowdrop, with golden curls, who looked as if she had come out of a band of Correggio’s baby angels.

  ‘He is always right,’ said his wife, with a gesture towards Bela, who had paused in his play to listen, with a leaden cuirassier of the guard suspended in the air.

  ‘You are an admirable wife, Wanda,’ said the Princess, with extreme displeasure on her delicate features. ‘You defend your lord when through him you are probably brouillée with your Sovereign for life.’

  She added, her voice tremulous with astonishment and anger: ‘It is a caprice, an insolence, that no Sovereign and no minister could pardon. I am most truly your husband’s friend, but I can conceive no possible excuse for such a change at the very last moment in a matter of such vast importance.’

  ‘Let us wait, dear mother,’ said Wanda softly. ‘It is not you who would condemn Réné unheard?’

  ‘But such a breach of etiquette! What explanation can ever annul it?’

  ‘Perhaps none. I know it is a very grave offence that he has committed, and yet I cannot help being happy,’ said his wife with a smile, as she lifted up the little Ottilie, and murmured over the child’s fair curls, ‘Ah, my dear little dove! We are not going to Russia after all. You little birds will not leave your nest!’

  ‘Bela is not going to the snow palace?’ said he, whose ears were very quick, and to whom his attendants had told marvellous narratives of an utterly imaginary Russia.

  ‘No; are not you glad, my dear?’

  He thought very gravely for a moment.

  ‘Bela is not sure. Marc says Bela would have slaves in Russia, and might beat them.’

  ‘Bela would be beaten himself if he did, and by my own hand, said his mother very gravely. ‘Oh, child! where did you get your cruelty?’

  ‘He is not cruel,’ said the Princess. ‘He is only masterful.’

  ‘Alas! it is the same thing.’

  She sent the children indoors, and remained after the sun-glow had all faded, and Mdme. Ottilie had gone away to her own rooms, and paced to and fro the length of the terrace, troubled by an anxiety which she would have owned to no one. What could have happened to make him so offend alike the State and the Court? She tormented herself with wondering again and again whether she had used any incautious expression in her letters which could have betrayed to him the poignant regret the coming exile gave her. No! she was sure she had not done so. She had only written twice, preferring telegrams as quicker, and, to a man, less troublesome than letters. She knew courts and cabinets too well not to know that the step her husband had taken was one which would wholly ruin the favour he enjoyed with the former, and wholly take away all chance of his being ever called again to serve the latter. Personally she was indifferent to that kind of ambition; but her attachment to the Imperial house was too strong, and her loyalty to it too hereditary, for her not to be alarmed at the idea of losing its good-will. Disquieted and afraid of all kinds of formless unknown ills, she went with a heavy heart into the Rittersaal to a dinner for which she could find no appetite. The Princess also, so talkative and vivacious at other times, was silent and pre-occupied. The evening passed tediously. He did not come.

  It was past midnight, and she had given up all hope of his arrival, when she heard the returning trot of the horses, who had been sent over to Matrey in the evening on the chance of his being there. She was in her own chamber, having dismissed her women, and was trying in vain to keep her thoughts to nightly prayer. At the sound of the horses’ feet without, she threw on a négligé of white satin and lace, and went, out on to the staircase to meet him. As he came up the broad stairs, with Donau and Neva gladly leaping on him, he looked up and saw her against the background of oak and tapestry and old armour, with the light of a great Persian lamp in metal that swung above shed full upon her. She had never looked more lovely to him than as she stood so, her eyes eagerly searching the dim shadow for him, and the loose white folds embroidered in silk with pale roses flowing downward from her throat to her feet. He drew her within her chamber, and took her in his arms with a passionate gesture.

  ‘Let us forget everything,’ he murmured, ‘except that we have been parted nearly a month!’

  CHAPTER XXV.

  In the morning, after breakfast in the little Saxe room, she said to him with gentle firmness: ‘Réné, you must tell me now — why have you refused Russia?’

  He had known that the question must come, and all the way on his homeward journey he had been revolving in his mind the answer he would give to it. He was very pale, but otherwise he betrayed no agitation as he turned and looked at her.

  ‘That is what I cannot tell you,’ he replied.

  She could not believe she heard aright.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked him. ‘I have had a message from Kunst; he is deeply angered. I understand that, after all was arranged, you abruptly resigned the Russian mission. I ask your reasons. It is a very grave step to have taken. I suppose your motives must be very strong ones?’

  ‘They are so,’ said Sabran; and he continued in the forced and measured tone of one who recites what he has taught himself to say: ‘It is quite natural that your cousin Kunst should be offended; the Emperor also. You perhaps will be the same when I say to you that I cannot tell you, as I cannot tell them, the grounds of my withdrawal. Perhaps you, like them, will not forgive it.’

  Her nostrils dilated and her breast heaved: she was startled, mortified, amazed. ‘You do not choose to tell me!’ she said in stupefaction.

  ‘I cannot tell you.’

  ‘She gazed at him with the first bitterness of wrath that he had ever seen upon her face. She had been used to perfect submission of others all her life. She had the blood in her of stern princes, who had meted out rule and justice against which there had been no appeal. She was accustomed even in him to deference, homage, consideration, to be consulted always, deferred to often. His answer for the moment seemed to her an unwarrantable insult.

  Her influence, her relatives, her sovereign, had given him one of
the highest honours conceivable, and he did not choose to even say why he was thankless for it! Passionate and withering words rose to her lips, but she restrained their utterance. Not even in that moment could she bring herself to speak what might seem to rebuke him with the weight of all his debt to her. She remained silent, but he understood all the intense indignation that held her speechless there. He approached her more nearly, and spoke with emotion, but with a certain sternness in his voice ——

  ‘I know very well that I must offend and even outrage you. But I cannot tell you my motives. It is the first time that I have ever acted independently of you or failed to consult your wishes. I only venture to remind you that marriage does give to the man the right to do so, though I have never availed myself of it. Nay, even now, I owe you too much to be ingrate enough to take refuge in my authority as your husband. I prefer to owe more, as I have owed so much, to your tenderness. I prefer to ask of you, by your love for me, not to press me for an answer that I am not in a position to make; to be content with what I say — that I have relinquished the Russian mission because I have no choice but to do so.’

  He spoke firmly, because he spoke only the truth, although not all the truth.

  A great anger rose up in her, the first that she had ever been moved to by him. All the pride of her temper and all her dignity were outraged by this refusal to have confidence in her. It seemed incredible to her. She still thought herself the prey of some dream, of some hallucination. Her lips parted to speak, but again she withheld the words she was about to utter. Her strong justice compelled her to admit that he was but within his rights, and her sense of duty was stronger than her sense of self-love.

  She did not look at him, nor could she trust her voice. She turned from him without a syllable, and left the room. She was afraid of the violence of the anger that she felt.

  ‘If it had been only to myself I would pardon it,’ she thought; ‘but an insult to my people, to my country, to my sovereign! — an insult without excuse, or explanation, or apology — —’

  She shut herself alone within her oratory and passed the most bitter hour of her life. The imperious and violent temper of the Szalras was dormant in her character, though she had chastened and tamed it, and the natural sweetness and serenity of her disposition had been a counterpoise to it so strong that the latter had become the only thing visible in her. But all the wrath of her race was now aroused and in arms against what she loved best on earth.

  ‘If it had been anything else,’ she thought; ‘but a public act like this — an ingratitude to the Crown itself! A caprice for all the world to chatter of and blame!’

  It would have been hard enough to bear, difficult enough to explain away to others, if he had told her his reasons, however captious, unwise, or selfish they might be; but to have the door of his soul thus shut upon her, his thoughts thus closed to her, hurt her with intolerable pain, and filled her with a deep and burning indignation.

  She passed all the early morning hours alone in her little temple of prayer, striving in vain against the bitterness of her heart; above her the great ivory Crucifixion, the work of Angermayer, beneath which so many generations of the women of the House of Szalras had knelt in their hours of tribulation or bereavement.

  When she left the oratory she had conquered herself. Though she could not extinguish the human passions that smarted and throbbed within her, she knew her duty well enough to know that it must lie in submission and in silence.

  She sought for him at once. She found him in the library: he was playing to himself a long dreamy concerto of Schubert’s, to soothe the irritation of his own nerves and pass away a time of keen suspense. He rose as she came into the room, and awaited her approach with a timid anxiety in his eyes, which she was too absorbed by her own emotions to observe. He had assumed a boldness that he had not, and had used his power to dominate her rather in desperation than in any sense of actual mastery. In his heart it was he who feared her.

  ‘You were quite right,’ she said simply to him. ‘Of course, you are master of your own actions, and owe no account of them to me. We will say no more about it. For myself, you know I am content enough to escape exile to any embassy.’

  He kissed her hand with an unfeigned reverence and humility.

  ‘You are as merciful as you are great,’ he murmured. ‘If I be silent it is my misfortune.’ He paused abruptly.

  A sudden thought came over her as he spoke.

  ‘It is some State secret that he knows and cannot speak of, and that has made him unwilling to go. Why did I never think of that before?’

  An explanation that had its root in honour, a reticence that sprang from conscience, were so welcome to her, and to her appeared so natural, that they now consoled her at once, and healed the wounds to her own pride.

  ‘Of course, if it be so, he is right not to speak even to me,’ she mused, and her only desire was now to save him from the insistence and the indignation of the Princess, and the examination which these were sure to entail upon him when he should meet her at the noon breakfast now at hand.

  To that end she sought out her aunt in her own apartments, taking with her the tiny Ottilie, who always disarmed all irritation in her godmother by the mere presence of her little flower-like face.

  ‘Dear mother,’ she said softly, when the child had made her morning obeisance, ‘I am come to ask of you a great favour and kindness to me. Réné returned last night. He has done what he thought right. I do not even ask his reasons. He has acted from force majeure by dictate of his own honour. Will you do as I mean to do? Will you spare him any interrogation? I shall be so grateful to you, and so will he.’

  Mdme. Ottilie, opening her bonbonnière for her namesake, drew up her fragile figure with a severity unusual to her.

  ‘Do I hear you aright? You do not even know the reasons of the insult M. de Sabran has passed upon the Crown and Cabinet, and you do not even mean to ask them?’

  ‘I do mean that; and what I do not ask I feel sure you will admit no one else has any right to ask of him.’

  ‘No one certainly except His Majesty.’

  ‘I presume His Majesty has had all information due to him as our Imperial master. All I entreat of you, dearest mother, is to do as I have done; assume, as we are bound to assume, that Réné has acted wisely and rightly, and not weary him with questions to which it will be painful to him not to respond.’

  ‘Questions! I never yet indulged in anything so vulgar as curiosity, that you should imagine I shall be capable of subjecting your husband to a cross-examination. If you be satisfied, I can have no right to be more exacting than yourself. The occurrence is to me lamentable, inexcusable, unintelligible; but if explanation be not offered me you may rest assured I shall not intrude my request for it.’

  ‘Of that I am sure; but I am not contented only with that. I want you to feel no dissatisfaction, no doubt, no anger against him. You may be sure that he has acted from conviction, because he was most desirous to go to Russia, as you saw when you urged him to accept the mission.’

  ‘I have said the utmost that I can say,’ replied the Princess, with a chill light in her blue eyes. ‘This little child is no more likely to ask questions than I am, after what you have stated. But you must not regard my silence as any condonation of what must always appear to me a step disrespectful to the Crown, contrary to all usages of etiquette, and injurious to his own future and that of his children. His scruples of conscience came too late.’

  ‘I did not say they were exactly that. I believe he learned something which made him consider that his honour required him to withdraw.’

  ‘That may be,’ said the Princess, frigidly. ‘As I observed, it came lamentably late. You will excuse me if I breakfast in my own rooms this morning.’

  Wanda left her, gave the child to a nurse who waited without, and returned to the library. She had offended and pained Mdme. Ottilie, but she had saved her husband from annoyance. She knew that though the Princess was by no
means as free from curiosity as she declared herself, she was too high-bred and too proud to solicit a confidence withheld from her.

  Sabran was seated at the piano where she had left him, but his forehead rested on the woodwork of it, and his whole attitude was suggestive of sad and absorbed thought and abandonment to regrets that were unavailing.

  ‘It has cost him so much,’ she reflected as she looked at him. ‘Perhaps it has been a self-sacrifice, a heroism even; and I, from mere wounded feeling, have been angered against him and almost cruel!’

  With the exaggeration in self-censure of all generous natures, she was full of remorse at having added any pain to the disappointment which had been his portion; a disappointment none the less poignant, as she saw, because it had been voluntarily, as she imagined, accepted.

  As he heard her approach he started and rose, and the expression of his face startled her for a moment; it was so full of pain, of melancholy, almost (could she have believed it) of despair. What could this matter be to affect him thus, since being of the State it could be at its worst only some painful and compromising secret of political life which could have no personal meaning for him? It was surely impossible that mere disappointment —— a disappointment self-inflicted —— could bring upon him such suffering? But she threw these thoughts away. In her great loyalty she had told herself that she must not even think of this thing, lest she should let it come between them once again and tempt her from her duty and obedience. Her trust in him was perfect.

  The abandonment of a coveted distinction was in itself a bitter disappointment, but it seemed to him as nothing beside the sense of submission and obedience compelled from him to Vàsàrhely. He felt as though an iron hand, invisible, weighed on his life, and forced it into subjection. When he had almost grown secure that his enemy’s knowledge was a buried harmless thing, it had risen and barred his way, speaking with an authority which it was not possible to disobey. With all his errors he was a man of high courage, who had always held his own with all men. How the old forgotten humiliation of his earliest years revived, and enforced from him the servile timidity of the Slav blood which he had abjured. He had never for an instant conceived it possible to disregard the mandate he received; that an apparently voluntary resignation was permitted to him was, his conscience acknowledged, more mercy than he could have expected. That Vàsàrhely would act thus had not occurred to him; but before the act he could not do otherwise than admit its justice and obey.