by Ouida
‘Why?’
He hesitated; he could not tell her what he had felt at the ball of the Hofburg. ‘She reminds me of a woman who drew me into a thousand follies, and to cap her good deeds betrayed me to the Prussians. If you must let her come I will go away. I will go and see your haras on the Pusztas.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Quite serious. Were I not ashamed of such a weakness, I should use a feminine expression. I should say “elle me donne des nerfs.”’
‘I think she has a great admiration for you, and she does not conceal it.’
‘Merely because she is sensible that I do not like her. Such women as she are discontented if only one person fail to admit their charm. She is accustomed to admiration, and she is not scrupulous as to how she obtains it.’
‘My dear! pray remember that she is our guest, and doubly our relative.’
‘I will try and remember it; but, believe me, all honour is wholly wasted upon Mdme. Olga. You offer her a coin of which the person and the superscription are alike unknown to her.’
‘You are very severe,’ said his wife.
She looked at him, and perceived that he was not jesting, that he was on the contrary disturbed and annoyed, and she remembered the persistence with which Olga Brancka had sought his companionship and accompanied him on his sport in the summer of her visit there.
‘If she had not married first my brother and then my cousin, she would never have been an intimate friend of mine,’ she continued. ‘She is of a world wholly opposed to all my tastes. For you to be absent, if she came, would be too marked, I think; but we can both leave, if you like. I am well enough for any movement now, and I can leave the child with his nurse. Shall we make a tour in Hungary? The haras will interest you. There are the mines, too, that one ought to visit.’
He received her assent with gratitude and delight. He felt that he would have gone to the uttermost ends of the earth rather than run the risk of spending long lonely summer days in the excitation of Mdme. Brancka’s presence. He detested her, he would always detest her; and yet when he shut his eyes he saw her so clearly, with the malicious light in her dusky glance, and the jewelled butterfly trembling about her breasts.
‘She shall never come under Wanda’s roof if I can prevent it,’ he thought, remembering her as she had been that night.
A few days later the Countess Brancka, much to her rage, had a note from the Hohenszalrasburg, which said that they were on the point of leaving for Hungary and Galicia, but that if she would come there in their absence, the Princess Ottilie, who remained, would be charmed to receive her. Of course she excused herself, and did not go. A visit to the solitudes of the Iselthal, where she would, see no one but a lady of eighty years old and four little children, had few attractions for the adventurous and vivacious wife of Stefan Brancka.
‘It is only Wanda’s jealousy,’ she thought, and was furious; but she looked at herself in the mirror, and was almost consoled as she thought also, ‘He avoids me. Therefore he is afraid of me!’
She went to her god, le monde, and worshipped at all its shrines and in all its fashions; but in the midst of the turmoil and the triumphs, the worries and the intoxications of her life, she did not lose her hold on her purpose, nor forget that he had slighted her. His beautiful face, serene and scornful, was always before her. He might have been at her feet, and he chose to dwell beside his wife under those solitary forests, amongst those solitary mountains of the High Tauern!
‘With a woman he has lived with all these eight years!’ she thought, with furious impatience. ‘With a woman who has grafted the Lady of La Garaye on Libussa, who never gives him a moment’s jealousy, who is as flawless as an ivory statue or a marble throne, who suckles her children and could spin their clothes if she wanted, who never cares to go outside the hills of her own home —— the Teuton Hausfrau to her finger-tips.’ And she was all the more bitter and the more angered because, always as she tried to think thus, the image of Wanda rose up before her, as she had seen her so often at Vienna or Hohenszalras, with the great pearls on her hair and on her breast.
A planet at whose passing, lo!
All lesser stars recede, and night
Grows clear as day thus lighted up
By all her loveliness, which burns
With pure white flame of chastity;
And fires of fair thought....
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER XXIX.
When they came home from their tour amidst the mines of Galicia and the plains of Hungary, and from their reception amongst the adoring townsfolk of restored Idrac, the autumn was far advanced, and the long rains and the wild winds of October had risen, making of every brook a torrent.
On their return she found intelligence from Paris that a friend of her father’s, and her own godfather, the Duc de Noira, had died, bequeathing her his gallery of pictures, and his art collection of the eighteenth century, which were both famous. The Duc had been a Legitimist and a hermit. He had been unmarried, and had spent all the latter years of his life in amassing treasures of art, for which he had no heir of his own blood to care a jot. The bequest was a very precious one, and her presence in Paris was requested. Regretful for herself to leave Hohenszalras, she perceived that to Sabran the tidings were welcome. Moved by an unselfish impulse she said at once:
‘Go alone; go instead of me; your presence will be the same as mine. Paris will amuse you more if you are by yourself, and you will be so happy amongst all those Lancrets and Fragonards, those Reiseiners and Gauthières. The collection is a marvel, but entirely of the Beau Siècle. You never saw it? No! I think the Duc never opened his doors to anyone save to half a dozen old tried friends, and he had a horror of turning his salons into showrooms. If you think well, we will leave it all as it is, buying the house if we can. All that eighteenth century bibeloterie would not suit this place, and I should like to keep it all as he kept it; that is the only true respect to show to a legacy.’
Sabran hesitated; he was tempted, yet he was half reluctant to yield to the temptation. He felt that he would willingly be by himself awhile, yet he loved his wife too passionately to quit her without pain. His own conscience made her presence at times oppress and trouble him, yet he had never lost the half-religious adoration with which she had first inspired him. He suggested a compromise — why should they not winter in Paris?
She was about to dissent, for of all seasons in the Tauern she loved the winter best; but when she looked at him she saw such eager anticipation on his face that she suppressed her own wishes unuttered.
‘We will go, if you like,’ she said, without any hesitation or reluctance visible. ‘I dare say we can find some pretty house. Aunt Ottilie will be pleased; there is nothing here which cannot do without us for a time, we have such trusty stewards; only I think it would be more change for you if you went alone.’
‘No!’ he said; ‘separation is a sort of death; do not let us tempt fate by it. Life is so short at its longest; it is ingratitude to lose an hour that we can spend together.’
‘There was never such a lover since Petrarca,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Nay, you eclipse him: he was never tried by marriage.’
But though he jested at it, his great love for her seemed like a beautiful light about her life. What did his state-secret matter? What did it matter what cause had led him to avoid political life? — he loved her so well.
The following month they were in Paris, having found an hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great sunny garden; and when they were fairly installed there, the Princess and the children and the horses followed them, and their arrival made an event of great interest and importance in the city which of all others in the world it is hardest thus to impress.
The Countess von Szalras, a notability always, was celebrated just then as the inheritress of the coveted Noira collection, which it had been fondly hoped would have gone to the hammer: and Sabran, popular always, and not forgotten here, where most things and
people are forgotten in a week, was courted, flattered, and welcomed by men and by women; and as he rode down the Allée des Acacias, or entered the Mirlitons, he felt himself at home. His beautiful wife, his beautiful children, his incomparable horses, his marvellous good fortune were the talk of all those who had already left their country-houses for the winter rentrée, and attained a publicity, beginning with the great Szalras pearls and ending with the babies’ white donkeys, which was the greatest of all possible offences to her; she abhorred and contemned publicity with the sensitiveness of a delicate temper and the contempt of a scornful patrician.
To Sabran it was not so offensive; there was the Slav in him, which loved display, and was not ill-pleased by notoriety. All this admiration around them made him feel that his life after all had been a great success, that he had drawn prizes in the lottery of fate which all men envied him; it helped him to forget Egon Vàsàrhely. He had never so nearly felt affection for Bela as when lines of men and women stood still to watch the handsome child gallop on his pony down the avenues of the Bois.
‘Life is after all like baccara or billiards,’ he said to himself. ‘It is of no use winning unless there be a galerie to look on and applaud.’
And then he felt ashamed of the poorness and triviality of the thought, which was not one he would have expressed to his wife. That very morning, when she had read a long flattery of herself in a journal of fashion, she had cast the sheet from her with disgust on every line of her face.
‘We are safe from that, at least, in the Iselthal,’ she had said. ‘Cannot you make them understand that we are not public artists to need réclames, nor yet sovereigns to be compelled to submit to the microscope? Is this the meaning of civilisation — to make privacy impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?’
He had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not done so. He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.
‘They will put this in the papers!’ said Bela, when the snow came and he had his sledge out for the first time with four little Hungarian ponies.
‘That is the poison of cities!’ said Wanda, as she heard him. ‘Who can have been so foolish as to tell him of the papers?’
‘Your heir, my dear, will never want for reporters of any flattery,’ said his father. ‘It is as well he should run the gauntlet of them early.’
Bela listened, and said to his brother a little later: ‘I like Paris. Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the print, and then they want to see us.’
‘What good is that?’ said Gela. ‘I like home. They all of them know us; they don’t want to see us. That is much better.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Bela. ‘One drives all day long at home, and there is nothing but the trees; here the trees are all people, and the people talk of us, and the people want to be us.’
‘But they love us at home,’ said Gela.
‘That does not matter,’ said Bela with hauteur.
Wanda called the children to her.
‘Bela,’ she said gently, ‘do you know that once, not so very long ago, there was a little boy here in Paris very much like you, with golden hair and velvet coat like yours, and he was called the Dauphin, and when he went out with his servants, as you do, the people envied him, and talked of him, and put in print what he did each day? The people wanted to be him, as you say, but they did not love him — poor little child! — because they envied him so. And in a very little while — a very, very little while — because it was envy and not love, they put the Dauphin in prison, and they cut off his golden hair, and gave him nothing but bread and water and filthy straw, and locked him up all alone till he died. That is the use of being envied in Paris — or anywhere else. Gela is right. It is better when people love us.’
The next day, as Bela drove in his sledge down the white avenues through the staring crowds, his little fair face was very grave under its curls; he thought of the Dauphin.
When the weather opened, Wanda took him and his brother to Versailles and Trianon, and told them more of that saddest of all earthly histories of fallen greatness. Gela sobbed aloud; Bela was silent and grew pale.
‘I hate Paris,’ he said very slowly, as they went back to it in the red close of the wintry afternoon.
‘Do not hate Paris. Do not hate anything or anyone,’ said his mother softly; ‘but love your own home and your own people, and be grateful for them.’
Bela lifted his little cap and made the sign of the Cross, as he did when he saw anything holy. ‘I am the Dauphin at home,’ he thought; and he felt the tears in his eyes, though he never would cry as Gela did.
So she gave them her simples as antidotes to the city’s poison, and occupied herself with her children, with the poor around her, with the various details of her distant estates, and paid but little heed to that artificial world which, when she heeded it, offended and irritated her. To please Sabran she went to a few great houses and to the opera, and gave many entertainments herself, happy that he was happy in it, but not otherwise interested in the life around her, or moved by the homage of it.
‘It is much more my jewels than it is myself that they stare at,’ she assured him, when he told her of the admiration which she elicited wherever she appeared. ‘Believe me, if you put my pearls or my diamonds on Madame Chose or Baroness Niemand, they would gather and gaze quite as much.’
He laughed.
‘Last night I think you wore no ornaments except a few tea-roses, and I saw them follow you just the same. It is very odd that you never seem to understand that you are a beautiful woman.’
‘I am glad to be so in your eyes, if I never shall be in my own. As for that popularity of society, it never commended itself to me. It has too strong a savour of the mob.’
‘When you are so proud to the world why are you so humble to me?’
She was silent a moment, then said:
‘I think when one loves any other very much, one becomes for him altogether unlike what one is to the world. As for being proud, I have never fairly made out whether my pride is humility or my humility pride, and none of my confessors have ever been able to tell me. I assure you I have searched my heart in vain.’
A shadow passed over his face; he thought that there even would be pride enough to send him out for ever from her side if she knew ——
One day she suggested to him that he should visit Romaris.
‘Now you are near for so long a time, surely you should go,’ she urged. ‘It is not well never to see your poor people. The priest is a good man, indeed; but he cannot altogether make up for your absence.’
He answered with some irritation that they were not his people. All the land had been parcelled out, and nothing remained to the name of Sabran except a strip of the sea-shore and one old half ruined tower: he could not see that he had any duties or obligations there. She did not insist, because she never pursued a theme which appeared unwelcome; but in herself she wondered at the dislike which was in him towards his Breton hamlet, wondered that he did not wish one of his sons to bear its title, wondered that he did not desire the children to see once, at least, the sea-nest of his forefathers. It was more effort to her than usual to restrain herself from pressing questions upon him. But she did forbear; and as a consolation to her conscience sent to the Curé of Romaris a sum of money for the poor, which was so large that it astounded and bewildered the holy man by the weight of responsibility it laid on him.
The indifference shocked her the more because of the profound conviction, in which she had been reared, of the duties of the noble to his poorer brethren, and the ties of mutual affection which bound together her and her people’s interests.
‘The weapon of our order against the Socialist is duty,’ she had once said to him.
He, more sceptical, had told her that no weapon, not even that anointed one, can turn aside the devilish hate of envy. But she held to her creed, and strove to rear her children in its tenets. It always seemed to her that the Cross before
which the fiend shrinks cowering in ‘Faust’ is but a symbol of the power of a noble life to force even hatred to its knees.
She did not care for this season in Paris, but she did not let him perceive any dissatisfaction in her. She made her own interests out of the arts and charity; she bought the Hôtel Noira, and left everything as the Duc had left it; she found pleasure in intercourse with her royal exiled friends, and left her husband his own entire liberty of action.
‘Are you never jealous?’ said her royal friend to her once. ‘He is so much liked — so much made love to — I wonder you are not jealous!’
‘I?’ she echoed: and it seemed to her friend as if in that one pronoun she had said volumes. ‘Jealous!’
She repeated the word as she drove home alone that day, and almost wondered what it meant. Who could be to him what she was? Who could dethrone her from that ‘great white throne’ to which his adoration had raised her? If his senses ever strayed, his soul would never swerve from its loyalty.
When she reached home that afternoon she found a card, on which was written with a pencil, in German:
‘So sorry not to find you. I am in Paris to see my doctor. Zdenka has taken my service at Court. I will come to you to-morrow.’
The card was Madame Brancka’s.
CHAPTER XXX.
Sabran, that same afternoon, as he had walked down the Rue de la Paix, had been signalled and stopped by a pretty woman wrapped to the eyes in blue fox furs, who was being driven in a low carriage by Hungarian horses, glorious in silver chains and trappings.
‘My dear Réné,’ had cried Madame Olga, ‘do you not know me, that you compel me to flourish my parasol? Yes: I am come to Paris. My sister-in-law, Zdenka, will do my waiting. I wanted to consult my physician; I am very unwell, though you look so incredulous. So Wanda has all the Noira collection? What a fortunate woman she is. The eighteenth century is the least suited to her taste. She will heartily despise all those shepherdesses en panier and those smiling deities on lacquer. How could the Duc leave such frivolities to so serious a person? What is her doubled rose-leaf amidst all her good luck? She must have one. I suppose it is you? Well, you will find me at home in an hour. I am only a stone’s throw from your hotel. Have you brought all the homespun virtues with you from Hohenszalras? I am afraid they will wither in the air of the boulevards. Au revoir!