XI
Fessenden stood for a few moments at the window before entering, although he had danced the Chardash many times and was arrayed as one of the elect. The deserted street of the village, and the muffled strains of a gypsy band, had informed him as he approached that it was a day of dancing and feasting, and he had despatched a casual boy to summon the tallest young man of the village. From the genial peasant he had borrowed a native costume, and without the aid of gold—for he carried a love potion in his indifferent command of the Magyar tongue. Another New-Yorker might have been daunted by the white divided skirt, which looked like anything but trousers, and the white blouse hanging free above it, but not Fessenden. He would indeed have preferred the Sunday best which the man had offered him to his own undoing, but had generously refused it. The men all looked very fine in their gay cloth or leathern jackets, embroidered, inlaid, their bright sashes, loose shirts and flapping trousers, embroidered with worsted or silk; but the women, after decorating their lords and brothers, would appear to have had no time left to enhance their own charms, for they wore common cotton frocks and had made no attempt at adornment beyond a ribbon or a string of glass beads.
The room in which they danced evidently belonged to the rich man of the village. It was of fair size for a peasant’s house, and its prints of saints and Mary were draped with embroidered towels. The older folk sat against the wall, and some sixty young people danced inwhat at first sight looked to be a solid mass. The Chardash was near its finish, and the couples were executing the vigorous and intricate figures, even separating for a second and flying together again, without the collision of an elbow or the twitch of a facial muscle.
Suddenly Fessenden swore in three languages and clutched the arm of his host.
“Who is that girl?” he demanded.
“I do not know her name. The Count came two hours ago with two—Austrian peasants,” he said, “but we doubt—who wished to learn the Chardash. We know nothing further, except that they speak Hungarian well and are virgins, for they wear their braids hanging; but we are curious, for that one you admire is very pretty and lively, and the other is as beautiful and queenlike as a Roumanian peasant—observe her, my friend.”
The music had ceased and the crowd was melting towards the open. The girl worthy to be compared to a Roumanian stood almost in the middle of the room talking with pleasing humility to a young man who, even in his peasant’s costume, was plainly the lord of the village. She wore a common blue cotton gown a size too small for her, and a kerchief pinned so tightly about her head that only half an inch of hair brushed flatly backward was visible. But the figure was magnificent; the hands were small, pointed, white; the skin of face and throat had never been exposed to a peasant sun, and the visible hair was red. The girl suddenly raised her eyes, and Fessenden screwed up his own and left the window.
So he had seen the Archduchess!—was about to meet her at last! The fountain burst its bonds and flew to his head. His deep, almost passionate love of adventure shook him slightly from head to foot. The colorcame into his face, and his nostrils quivered. If he could only corner his sister and warn her before she betrayed him by a feminine scream. She was standing just within the door arranging the ribbon at the end of her long plait of hair, which, like many another, had been disordered by the energy of the dance; and the hanging tresses brought forward for reconstruction by herself and several other maidens may possibly have fetched a sigh from lips too soon surrendered. Fessenden entered and placed his back between her face and Ranata.
“Now don’t even raise your eyes,” he said rapidly. “I want to be unknown here. I want you to introduce me to her and not tell her who I am.”
Fessenden had underestimated his sister’s accomplishments. “I won’t do anything of the sort,” she replied, smoothing her kerchief with steady fingers. “It is just one thing I should never dare to do. The responsibility shall be entirely your own.”
“Very well. I can manage it if you do not betray me. What on earth does this mean, anyhow? Are you and she here alone? I don’t see the ghost of a chaperon.”
“Our first idea was merely to look on, but we had no sooner arrived at Count Zrinyi’s castle this morning than Sarolta was attacked by the gout—or pretended she was; she is an angel—and ordered us to our rooms. We made Zrinyi borrow clothes from two of his servants—and here we are. I’ve never had so much fun in my life—neither has Ranata.” She looked him over. “You are not a bad imitation,” she admitted. “So many of them are fair, and luckily they all wear their hats. Pull your brim a little lower; your eyes are hopelessly American. Of course you’ll fall in love with her—I’ve seen it coming for years; but don’t propose on the spot and spoil all our fun.”
“What do you take me for?” and Fessenden left her to an admiring peasant and sought his host.
“That girl is very pretty,” he said discontentedly, “but I can’t dance with a girl so much shorter than myself; I am always swinging her off her feet. Will you introduce me to the other Austrian—or Roumanian, did you say?”
“What is your name, my friend?”
“Árpád Hunyadi will do as well as any other.”
The peasant embraced him on both cheeks. “A great name,” he said solemnly. “All I have is yours.”
A moment later Fessenden was standing before the Archduchess, while Zrinyi’s willing eyes were diverted by Alexandra.
“You will dance this with me?” he asked in Magyar, his eyes bashfully lowered.
“You are not a Hungarian!” she exclaimed.
“Alas, that your first word should be so cruel! It is true that I speak the German tongue better—I have been much away—but my children shall speak only Hungarian.”
“It is to be hoped so.”
“You will dance with me?”
“I do not know. I am tired.”
“One is never too tired for the Chardash. It would raise a Hungarian from the grave.” This was uttered with simple fervor. He felt her powerful gaze and dared not raise his eyes. But the majestic beauty of her figure was in the direct line of his vision, and involuntarily he lifted his hands to tuck in his shirt, but bethought himself in time.
“I don’t know,” repeated the Archduchess coldly, “I am tired, and I do not happen to be a Hungarian.”
“A Roumanian? We have all said it; you are so beautiful.”
“No.”
The leader of the gypsy band struck his cymbal. His brothers drew the first long wail from their fiddles. The crowd thronged in.
Fessenden raised his hands and placed them firmly about the slender waist of the Archduchess. “Put your hands on my shoulders,” he said. “I shall not let you go.”
She drew herself up rigidly for a moment, then obeyed him.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“So much the better,” replied Fessenden.
“This is a great moment in the history of Hungary!” said Zrinyi solemnly.
“It is!” said Alexandra.
“A daughter of the Emperor of Austria and a Hungarian peasant! What a symbol! It is full of portent!”
“If you only knew how much!”
“Ah, you dream of a universal democracy, I suppose. I fear I dream only of the independence of Hungary—with William as enlightened overlord—and the humiliation of Austria.”
“I can’t talk politics and dance the Chardash.”
Fessenden summoned to his eyes a far and impassive stare. Ranata pointed her lashes to her cheeks. They were the tallest couple in the room, and those who sat had much to say in comment. There was little to criticise, for their natural grace and beauty of form diverted the eye from their few mistakes; and in truth those whose blood is quick must learn the Chardash easily. For a time the music is a wail of almost hopeless longing, and the feet and body move hesitatingly, monotonously, the man and woman at arm’s-length; gradually it grows sweeter, more inspiring, and the feet move faster—lifeseems to awaken. The music swells and the man takes the girl’s left hand and raises it high; then, as it becomes triumphant and peremptory, he swings her faster and faster, executes wild and rapid figures, stamps his feet, snaps his fingers in the air, increases his speed to that of the whirlwind, flings his partner from him and catches her again, to whirl and whirl and whirl in a circle scarcely larger than his feet; and all without a moment of forgetfulness, a rude embrace, a change of expression. “It is the story of elementary passion before man was created to express it,” Ranata had said to Alexandra before they had ventured to take part; and certainly the Hungarian peasant, intelligent and gay, but polite and dignified to his marrow, is worthy of a place beside the impersonal artists of any civilization.
Nevertheless, the Chardash is so intoxicating that no one can dance it perfunctorily, no matter how self-conscious at starting; and there was nothing here to distract the attention of the most fastidious: the air was pure, for the windows were open, and the Hungarian peasant is clean. No matter what the pressure of the speed, not a foot was trodden, not a temper shaken. Fessenden had danced half the native dances of the world, sometimes in hours of greater abandon than this, and Ranata had a natural love of the dance and indulged it whenever possible. As she had recognized and intuitively obeyed her friend’s brother, she realized in a flash that for sixteen years he had occupied a silent but permanent place in a shadowy realm that was hers alone. He had been Alexandra’s favorite theme from childhood, and Ranata’s interest had never flagged. His sister was as truthful as most women, but in her extreme youth she had possessed a violent imagination, and her unknown brother, dwelling in the wilderness, had inspired it to deeds which had caused the little Archduchess to sitopen-mouthed for hours as she drank in his blood-curdling and heroic adventures with Indian tribes, robber bands, pirates, and wild beasts of every variety whose pictures were to be found in Alexandra’s natural history. He had seemed to her the most splendid and picturesque of living creatures, and although the reduction of Alexandra’s allowance for a year to the wages of a footman by her perturbed father had cured her of the habit of exaggeration, she still could tell a pretty tale, and there had been much to recount during Fessenden’s sojourn in South America and after his return. To a princess living the most conventional and restricted of earthly lives he represented all that the world, beyond palace walls, held of romance, of freedom, of the grand free play of personality. As she grew older she forbade her fancy to lead him into the backwaters of sentiment, that being a part of the necessary discipline of self; but there had been times when the effort had exhausted her. Two thoughts had flashed through her mind as she realized that she stood face to face with him at last: the one came from depths she did not pause to analyze—“If I had suddenly heard that he was dead, instead of meeting him like this, I should have been appalled by a sense of personal loss.” The other thought flew straight from superstition and made her for the moment the sister of the peasant-women about her—“This colored frock! I might have known it would bring me bad luck!”
In a moment she had angrily dismissed both suggestions, but she endeavored to nurse a general resentment. She had been taken abominable advantage of. He had known who she was and dared to treat her like any ordinary girl masquerading. That royalty, or aristocracy for that matter, moves on unselfconscious heights is one of the fictions of fiction. The aristocracies of Europemay not, in the manner of the American, carry their ancestors like a bunch of chips on their shoulder, but like royalty, they are “simple and unaffected” only so long as they are not expected to be humble and are not approached by the wrong sort of people. The intense dramatic moments of William of Germany might alone convince the unthinking of royalty’s sense of its own value.
Ranata was not dramatic, or at all events had wanted opportunity; but had she inherited the simplicity of her mother, which assuredly she had not, she would have found it a difficult task to forget that she was the daughter of an emperor. But she had experienced no such inclination. She might sigh for liberty, and in erratic moments wish she had been born an American, but to her composition had gone the haughtiest particles of Europe. She was not only the last born of an ancient line of kings who had exercised despotic rule over vast possessions, but who had built about themselves a triple golden wall of ceremony. No court had ever been so uncomplaisant, no royal favor so difficult to gain; to-day no house in Europe was so tenacious of its ancient formalities. Every act of Ranata’s life to which the least importance could be attached had been the combined result of her active consciousness that she was the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, and of instinctive ancestral tribute.
Therefore did the Archduchess Ranata Theresia feel that her sacred self had been trifled with, and was filled with wrath against her friend and her friend’s brother. But it is both difficult and anomalous to nurse the severer passions while moving one’s body and feet to the cry of the Chardash for the fulfilment of human happiness. A mist rose to and diffused itself through the historic tiers of Ranata’s brain, and created an illusion.The music of the Chardash, older than the House of Hapsburg, as old, perhaps, as that mysterious gypsy people who brought it to Hungary, was the song of the wind among peaks about a wild and lovely valley high in the Eastern Alps. She was primeval woman dancing with primeval man. A silver hammer rang on the distant rocks, the wind drew its bow on the young branches of the trees; all the new world moved in measure about her, groping towards its birthright. The vague melancholy promise of Nature grew ever more distinct in its utterance, swelled in fuller volume from the heights and passes. The man felt it and swung her with swifter assurance, clasped her surrendered waist more firmly; then in the wild and breathless whirl, where the male, inspired by the reckless adhortation of the music, expresses the insolent triumph of his manhood, and the woman alone hears the persistent note of sadness, the warning of the unfulfilment of mortal desire, the heroine of this tale was the creature of another will. In that dizzying circle she followed his every motion, the peremptory guiding of his hand, with neither thought nor desire of resistance; and when he flung her scornfully from him she leaped back to his embrace as automatically as the meanest peasant in the room. At the end she was conscious of nothing but that the mountain-tops were flying about her in a furious attempt to meet and crash together; the shouting of the men, the abrupt loud stamping of their feet, as the musicians played like madmen, came to her confused senses as the forces of the earth bursting their bonds; and when the illusion abruptly finished and she found herself on the veranda she leaned heavily against the wall and sought for nothing but her breath.
Fessenden mopped his streaming face. “By Jove!” he remarked, “that was warm work! But it’s a greatdance—and you—you—were simply magnificent! When I get my breath I’ll tell you how grateful I am.”
Ranata lifted her head and assumed an expression of frigid severity, which shone oddly from a face that was wet and red from hair to throat.
“Would you like to walk up and down the road for a change?” asked Fessenden.
“No!” exclaimed Ranata, still short of breath. “I should not.”
“You are not ready for another?”
“No, I am not ready for another!” She spoke with an asperity quite unnatural in a princess who never forgot to be gracious, lest she wound theamour propreof those at her mercy. The tumult within her had soured and fermented into a sudden hatred of the colossal wealth, the constant exercise of a power greater than her father’s, and the habit of republican independence, which enabled this man to stand before her as unconcernedly as if she were a girl of his own class. Her wrath might be unreasonable, but she was in no mood to admit it, and she was divided between a desire to relieve her tension with tears and for power to humiliate the man.
Fessenden, who was too hot and thirsty to be sentimental, much less conscious of outraged royalty that he had been swinging in the Chardash, glanced about longingly. “I think there must be wine in that shed,” he said. “Where there is a crowd after the Chardash there usually is wine; and doubtless the Count has set up a barrel of his own. If you will wait here I’ll fetch you some.”
As he walked away, his white blouse and skirts flapping in the breeze, Ranata sank upon a bench. For the first time in her life she was nonplussed, at a loss what to do. Her long experience with Alexandra did nothelp her in the least. Not only had she always regarded the American girl assui generis, but it had been her royal pleasure that she should be so. She suddenly became aware that her friend was standing before her.
“Of course you are angry,” said Miss Abbott contritely. “And I must confess at once that I knew he was here, and might have warned you. But Fessenden is Fessenden, and I knew that he would do what he wanted in spite of me or any one else. Would you rather go at once?”
The Archduchess rose with alacrity. “Yes,” she said, “let us go as quickly as possible.”