'Do you never praise them or reward them?' he asked in surprise.
'Santa Claus rewards them. As for praise, they know when I smile that all is well.'
'But surely they have shown very unusual musical talent?'
'They sing well because they are well taught. But they are not any of them going to become singers. Those zithers and part-songs will all serve to enliven the long nights of the farmhouse or the summer solitude of the cattle-hut. We do not cultivate music one-half enough among the peasantry. It lightens labour; it purifies and strengthens the home-life; it sweetens black-bread. Do you remember that happy picture of Jordaens' "Where the old sing, the young chirp," where the old grandfather and grandmother, and the baby in its mother's arms, and the hale five-year-old boy, and the rough servant, are all joining in the same melody, while the goat crops the vine-leaves off the table? I should like to see every cottage interior like that when the work was done. I would hang up an etching from Jordaens where you would hang up, perhaps, the programme of Proudhon.'
Then she walked back with him through the green sun-gleaming woods.
'I hope that I teach them content,' she continued. 'It is the lesson most neglected in our day. "Niemand will ein Schuster seyn; Jederman ein Dichter." It is true we are very happy in our surroundings. A mountaineer's is such a beautiful life; so simple, healthful, hardy, and fine; always face to face with nature. I try to teach them what an inestimable joy that alone is. I do not altogether believe in the prosaic views of rural life. It is true that the peasant digging his trench sees the clod, not the sky but then when he does lift his head the sky is there, not the roof, not the ceiling. That is so much in itself. And here the sky is an everlasting grandeur: clouds and domes of snow are blent together. When the stars are out above the glaciers how serene the night is, how majestic! even the humblest creature feels lifted up into that eternal greatness. Then you think of the home-life in the long winters as dreary; but it is not so. Over away there, at Lahn, and other places on the Hallstadtersee, they do not see the sun for five months; the wall of rock behind them shuts them from all light of day; but they live together, they dance, they work. The young men recite poems, and the old men tell tales of the mountains and the French war, and they sing the homely songs of theSchnaderhupfeln.Then when winter passes, when the sun comes again up over the wall of rocks, when they go out into the light once more, what happiness it is! One old man said to me, 'It is like being born again!' and another said, 'Where it is always warm and light I doubt they forget to thank God for the sunshine;' and quite a young child said, all of his own accord, 'The primroses live in the dusk all the winter, like us, and then when the sun comes up we and they run out together, and the Mother of Christ has set the waters and the little birds laughing.' I would rather have the winter of Lahn than the winter of Belleville.'
'But they do go away from their mountains a good deal? One meets them——'
'My own people never do, but from the valleys around they go—yes, sometimes; but then they always come back. The Defereggenthal men, over yonder where you see those ice summits, constantly go elsewhere on reaching manhood; but as soon as they have made a little money they return to dwell at home for the remainder of their days. I think living amidst the great mountains creates a restfulness, a steadfastness in the character. If Paris were set amidst Alps you would have had Lamartine, you would not have had Rochefort.'
When she spoke thus of her own country, of her own people, all her coldness vanished, her eyes grew full of light, her reserve was broken up into animation. They were what she truly loved, what touched her affections and her sympathies.
When he heard her speak thus, he thought if any man should succeed in arousing in her the love and the loyalty that she gave her Austrian Alps, what treasures he would win, into what a kingdom he would enter! And then something that was perhaps higher than vanity and deeper than egotism stirring in him whispered. 'If any, why not you?'
Herr Joachim had at a message from her joined them. He talked of the flowers around them and of the culture and flora of Mexico. Sabran answered him with apparent interest, and with that knowledge which he had always the presence of mind to recall at need, but his heart was heavy and his mind absent.
She had spoken to him of Romaris, and he had once known Egon Vàsàrhely.
Those two facts overshadowed the sweetness and sunshine of the day; yet he knew very well that he should have been prepared for both.
The Princess Ottilie, seated in her gilt wickerwork chair under the great yew on the south side of the house, saw them approach with pleasure.
'Come and have a cup of tea,' she said to them. 'But, my beloved Wanda, you should not let the doctor walk beside you. Oh, I saw him in the distance; of course he left you before you joinedme.He is a worthy man, a most worthy man; but so is Hubert, and you do not walk with Hubert and converse with him about flowers.'
'Are you so inexorable as to social grades, madame? murmured Sabran, as he took his cup from her still pretty hand.
'Most certainly!' said the Princess, with a little, a very little, asperity. 'The world was much happier when distinctions and divisions were impassable. There are no sumptuary laws now. What is the consequence? That, your bourgeoise ruins her husband in wearing gowns fit only for a duchess, and your prince imagines it makes him popular to look precisely like a cabman or a bailiff.'
'And even in the matter of utility,' said Sabran, who always agreed with her, 'those sumptuary laws had much in their favour. If one look through the chronicles and miniatures, say of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, how much more sensible for the change of seasons and the ease of work seems the costume of the working people? Thecotte hardiewas a thousand times more comfortable and more becoming than anything we have. If we could dress once more as all did under Louis Treize gentle and simple would alike benefit.'
'What a charmingly intelligent person he is!' thought the Princess, as she remarked that in Austria they were happier than the rest of the world: there were peasant costumes still there.
Wanda left them a little later to confer with one of her land stewards. Sabran remained seated by the Princess, in whom he felt that he possessed a friend.
'What did you think of those schools? said Frau Ottilie. 'Oh, of course you admire and approve; you must admire and approve when they are the hobby of a beautiful woman, who is also your hostess.'
'Does that mean, Princess, that you do not?'
'No doubt the schools are excellent,' replied the Princess, in a tone which condemned them as ridiculous. 'But for my own part I prefer those things left to the Church, of which they constitute alike the privilege and the province. I cannot see either why a peasant child requires to know how a tree grows; that a merciful Providence placed it there is all he can need to be told, and that he should be able to cut it down without cutting off his own fingers is all the science that can possibly be necessary to him. However, Wanda thinks otherwise, and she is mistress here.'
'But the schools surely are eminently practical ones?'
'Practical! Is it practical to weave a romance as long as "Pamela" about the changes of a chrysalis? I fail to see it. That a grub is a destructive creature is all that any one needs to know; there is nothing practical in making it the heroine of an interminable metempsychosis. But all those ideas of 'Wanda's have a taint of that modern poison which her mind, though it is so strong iii many things, has not been strong enough to resist. She does not believe in the efficacy of our holy relics (such as that which I sent you, and which wrought your cure), but she does believe in the fables that naturalists invent about weeds and beetles, and she finds a Kosmos in a puddle!'
'You are very severe, Princess.'
'I dislike inconsistency, and my niece is inconsistent, though she imagines that perfect consistency is the staple of her character.'
'Nay, madame, surely her character is the most evenly balanced, the most harmonious, and consequently the most perfect that is possible to humanity.'
The Princess looked at him with a keen little glance.
'You admire her very much? Are you sure you understand her?'
'I should not dare to say that, but I dare to hope it. Her nature seems to me serene and transparent as fine sunlight.'
'So it is; but she has faults, I can assure you,' said the Princess, with her curious union of shrewdness and simplicity. 'My niece is a perfectly good woman, so far as goodness is possible to finite nature; she is the best woman I have ever known out of the cloister. But then there is this to be said—she has never been tempted. True, she might be tempted to be arrogant, despotic, tyrannical; and she is not so. But that is not precisely the temptation to try her. She is mild and merciful out of her very pride; but her character would be sure destruction of her pride were such a thing possible. You think she is not proud because she is so gentle? You might as well say that Her Majesty is not Empress because she washes the feet of the twelve poor men! Wanda is the best woman that I know, but she is also the proudest.'
'The Countess has never loved anyone?' said Sabran, who grew paler as he heard.
'Terrestrial love—no. It has not touched her. But it would not alter her, believe me. Some women lose themselves in their affections; she would not. She would always remain the mistress of it, and it would be a love like her character. Of that I am sure.'
Sabran was silent; he was discouraged.
'I think the boldest man would always be held at a distance from her,' he said, after a pause. 'I think none would ever acquire dominion over her life.'
'That is exactly what I have said,' replied the Princess. 'Your phrase is differently worded, but it comes to the same thing.'
'It would depend very much——'
'On what?'
'On how much she loved, and perhaps a little on how much she was loved.'
'Not at all,' said the Princess, decidedly; 'you cannot get more out of a nature than there is in it, and there is no sort of passion in the nature of my niece.'
He was silent again.
'She was admirably educated,' added the Princess, hastily, conscious of a remark not strictly becoming in herself; 'and her rare temperament is serene, well balanced, void of all excess. Heaven has mercifully eliminated from her almost all mortal errors.'
'By prideAngels have fallen ere thy time!'
suggested Sabran.
'Angels, perhaps,' said the Princess, drily. 'But for women it is an admirable preservative, second only to piety.'
He went home sculling himself across the lake, now perfectly calm beneath the rose and gold of a midsummer sunset. His heart was heavy, and a dull fear seemed to beat at his conscience like a child suddenly awaking who knocks at a long-closed door. Still, as a crime allures men who contemplate it by the fascination of its weird power, so the sin he desired to commit held him with its unholy beguilement, and almost it looked holy to him because it wore the guise of Wanda von Szalras.
He was not insensible to the charm of this interchange of thought. He had had many passions in which his senses alone had been enlisted. There was a more delicate attraction in the gradual and numberless steps by which, only slowly and with patience, could he win any way into her regard. She had for him the puissance that the almost unattainable has for all humanity. When he could feel that he had awakened any sympathy in her, his pride was more flattered than it could have been by the most complete subjection of any other woman. He had looked on all women with the chill, amorous cynicism of the Parisian psychology, asl'éternel féminin, at best as 'la forme perverse, vaporeuse, langoureuse, souple comme les roseaux, blanche comme les lis, incapable de se mouvoir pendant les deux tiers du jour—sans équilibre, sans but, sans équateur, donnant son corps en pâture à sa tête.He had had no other ideal; no other conception. This psychology, like some other sciences, brutalises as it equalises. In the woman who had risen up before him in the night of storm upon the Szalrassee he had recognised with his intelligence a woman who made his philosophy at fault, who aroused something beyond his mere instincts, who was not to be classified with the Lias, or the Cesarines, or the Jane de Simeroses, who had been in his love, as in his literature, the various types of theéternel féminin.The simplicity and the dignity of her life astonished and convinced him; he began to understand that where he had imagined he had studied the universe in his knowledge of women, he had in reality only seen two phases of it—the hothouse and the ditch. It is a common error to take the forced flower and the slime weed, and think that there is nothing between or beyond the two.
He had the convictions of his school that all women were at heart coquettes or hypocrites, consciously or unconsciously. Wanda von Szalras routed all his theories. Before her candour, her directness and gravity of thought, her serene indifference to all forms of compliment, all his doctrines and all his experiences were useless. She inspired him with reverential and hopeless admiration, which was mingled with an angry astonishment, and something of the bitterness of envy. Sometimes, as he sat and watched the green water of the lake tumble and roll beneath a north wind's wrath under a cloudy sky which hid the snows of the Glöckner range, he remembered a horrible story that had once fascinated him of Malatesta of Rimini slaying the princess that would have none of his love, striking his sword across her white throat in the dusky evening time, and casting her body upon the silken curtains of her wicked litter. Almost he could have found it in him to do such a crime—almost. Only he thought that at one look of her eyes his sword would have dropped upon the dust.
Her personal beauty had inspired him with a sudden passion, but her character checked it with the sense of fear which it imposed on him; fear of those high and blameless instincts which were an integral part of her nature, fear of that frank, unswerving truth which was the paramount law of her life. As he rode with her, walked with her, conversed with her in the long, light summer hours, he saw more and more of the purity and nobility of her temper, but he saw or thought he saw also an inexorable pride and a sternness in judgment which made him believe that she would be utterly unforgiving to weakness or to sin.
She remained the Nibelungen Queen to him, clothed in flawless armour and aloof from men.
He lingered on at the Holy Isle, finding a fresh charm each day in this simple and peaceful existence, filled with the dreams of a woman unlike every other he had known. He knew that it could not last, but he was unwilling to end it himself. To rise to the sound of the monks' matins, to pass his forenoons in art or open-air exercise, to be sure that some hour or another before sunset he would meet her, either in her home or abroad in the woods; to go early to bed, seeing, as he lay, the pile of the great burg looming high above the water, like the citadel of the Sleeping Beauty—all this, together making up an existence so monotonous, harmless, and calm that a few months before he would have deemed it impossible to endure it, was soothing, alluring, and beguiling to him. He had told no one where he was; his letters might lie and accumulate by the hundred in his rooms in Paris for aught that he cared; he had no creditors, for he had been always scrupulously careful to avoid all debt, and he had no friend for whose existence he cared a straw. There were those who cared for him, indeed, but these seldom trouble any man very greatly.
In the last week of August, however, a letter found its way to him; it was written in a very bad hand, on paper gorgeous with gold and silver. It was signed 'Cochonette.'
It contained a torrent of reproaches made in the broadest language that the slang of the hour furnished, and every third word was misspelt. How the writer had tracked him she did not say. He tore the letter up and threw the pieces into the water flowing beneath his window. Had he ever passionately desired and triumphed in the possession of that woman? It seemed wonderful to him now. She was an idol of Paris; a creature with the voice of a lark and the laugh of a child, with a lovely, mutinous face, and eyes that could speak without words. As a pierrot, as a mousquetaire, as a little prince, as a fairy king of operetta, she had no rival in the eyes of Paris. She blazed with jewels when she played a peasant, and she wore the costliest costume of Felix's devising when she sung her triplets as a soubrette. She had been constant to no one for three months, and she had been constant to him for three years, or, at the least, had made him believe so; and she wrote to him now furiously, reproachfully, entreatingly—fierce reproaches and entreaties, all misspelt.
The letter which he threw into the lake brought all the memories of his old life before him; it was like the flavour of absinthe after drinking spring water. It was a life which had had its successes, a life, as the world called it, of pleasure; and it seemed utterly senseless to him now as he tore up the note of Cochonette, and looked down the water to where the towers and spires and battlements of Hohenszalras soared upward in the mists. He shook himself as though to shake off the memory of an unpleasant dream as he went out, descended the landing steps, drew his boat from under the willows and sculled himself across towards the water-stairs of the Schloss. In a quarter of an hour he was playing the themes of the 'Gotterdammerung,' whilst his châtelaine sat at her spinning-wheel a few yards from him.
'Good heavens! can she and Cochonette belong to the same human race?' he thought, as whilst he played his glance wandered to that patrician figure seated in the light from the oriel window, with the white hound leaning against her velvet skirts, and her jewelled fingers plying the distaff and disentangling the flax.
After the noonday breakfast the sun shone, the mists lifted from the water, the clouds drifted from the lower mountains, only leaving the snow-capped head of the Glöckner enveloped in them.
'I am going to ride; will you come?' said Wanda von Szalras to him. He assented with ardour, and a hunter, Siegfried, the mount which was always given to him, was led round under the great terrace, in company with her Arab riding-horse Ali. They rode far through the forests and out on the one level road there was, which swept round the south side of the lake; a road, turf-bordered, overhung with huge trees, closed in with a dewy veil of greenery, across which ever and anon some flash of falling water or some shimmer of glacier or of snow crest shone through the dense leafage. They rode too fast for conversation, both the horses racing like greyhounds; but as they returned, towards the close of the afternoon, they slackened their pace in pity to the steaming heaving flanks beneath their saddles, and then they could hear each other's voices.
'What a lovely life it is here!' he said, with a sigh. 'The world will seem very vulgar and noisy to me after it.'
'You would soon tire, and wish for the world,' she answered him.
'No,' he said quickly; 'I have been two months on the Holy Isle, and I have not known weariness for a moment.'
'That is because it is still summer. If you were here in the winter you would bemoan your imprisonment, like my aunt Ottilie. Even the post sometimes fails us.'
'I should not lament the post,' he replied, thinking of the letter he had cast into the lake. 'My old life seems to me insanity, fever, disease, beside these past two months I have spent with the monks.'
'You can take the vows,' she suggested with a smile. He smiled too.
'Nay: I should not dare to so insult our mother Church. One must not empty ashes into a reliquary.'
'Your life is not ashes yet.'
He was silent. He could not say to her what he would have said could he have laid his heart bare.
'When you go away,' she pursued, 'remember my words. Choose some career; make yourself some aim in life; do not fold your talents in a napkin—in a napkin that lies on the supper table at Bignon's. That idle, aimless life is very attractive, I dare say, in its way, but it must grow wearisome and unsatisfactory as years roll on. The men of my house have never been content with it; they have always been soldiers, statesmen, something or other beside mere nobles.'
'But they have had a great position.'
'Men make their own position; they cannot make a name (at least, not to my thinking). You have that good fortune; you have a great name; you only need, pardon me, to make your manner of life worthy of it.'
He grew pale as she spoke.
'Cannot make a name?' he said, with forced gaiety. 'Surely in these days the beggar rides on horseback in all the ministries and half the nobilities!'
A great contempt passed over her face. 'You mean that Hans, Pierre, or Richard becomes a count, an excellency, or an earl? What does that change? It alters the handle; it does not alter the saucepan. No one can be ennobled. Blood is blood; nobility can only be inherited; it cannot be conferred by all the heralds in the world. The very meaning and essence of nobility are descent, inherited traditions, instincts, habits, and memories—all that is meant bynoblesse oblige.'
'Would you allow,' thought her companion, 'would you allow the same nobility to Falcon-bridge as to Plantagenet?'
But he dared not name the bar sinister to this daughter of princes.
Siegfried started and reared: his rider did not reply, being absorbed in calming him.
'What frightened him?' she asked.
'A hawk flew-by,' said Sabran.
'A hawk, flying low enough for a horse to see it? It must be wounded.'
He did not answer, and they quickened their pace, as the sun sunk behind the glaciers of the west.
When he returned to the monastery the evening had closed in; the lantern was lit at his boat's prow. Dinner was prepared for him, but he ate little. Later the moon rose; golden and round as a bowl. It was a beautiful spectacle as it gave its light to the amphitheatre of the mountains, to the rippling surface of the lake, to the stately, irregular lines of the castle backed by the blackness of its woods. He sat long by the open window lost in thought, pondering on the great race which had ruled there.L'honneur parle: il suffit, had been their law, and she who represented them held a creed no less stern and pure than theirs. Her words spoken in their ride were like a weight of ice on his heart. Never to her, never, could he confess the errors of his past. He was a man bold to temerity, but he was not bold enough to risk the contempt of Wanda von Szalras. He had never much heeded right or wrong, or much believed in such ethical distinctions, only adhering to the conventional honour and good breeding of the world, but before her his moral sense awakened.
'The Marquis Xavier would bid me go from here,' he thought to himself, as the night wore on and he heard the footfall of the monks passing down the passages to their midnight orisons.
'After all these years in thepourritureof Paris, have I such a thing as conscience left?' he asked his own thoughts, bitterly. The moon passed behind a cloud and darkness fell over the lake and hid the great pile of the Hohenszalrasburg from his sight. He closed the casement and turned away. 'Farewell!' he said, to the vanished castle.
'Will you think of me sometimes, dear Princess, when I am far away?' said Sabran abruptly the next morning to his best friend, who looked up startled.
'Away? Are you going away?'
'Yes,' said Sabran, abruptly; 'and you, I think, madame, who have been so good to me, can guess easily why.'
'You love my niece?'
He inclined his head in silence.
'It is very natural,' said the Princess, faintly. 'Wanda is a beautiful woman; many men have loved her; they might as well have loved that glacier yonder.'
'It is not that,' said Sabran, hastily. 'It is my own poverty——'
The Princess looked at him keenly.
'Do you think her not cold?'
'She who can so love a brother would surely love her lover not less, did she stoop to one,' he replied evasively. 'At least I think so; I ought not to presume to judge.'
'And you care for her?' The glance her eyes gave him added as plainly as words could have done, 'It is not only her wealth, her position? Are you sure?'
He coloured very much as he answered quickly: 'Were she beggared to-morrow, you would see.'
'It is a pity,' murmured the Princess. He did not ask her what she regretted; he knew her sympathy was with him.
They were both mute. The Princess pushed the end of her cane thoughtfully into the velvet turf. She hesitated some moments, then said in a low voice: 'Were I you I would stay.'
'Do not tempt me! I have stayed too long as it is. What can she think of me?'
'She does not think about your reasons; she is too proud a woman to be vain. In a measure you have won her friendship. Perhaps—I do not know, I have no grounds to say so—but perhaps in time you might win more.'
She looked at him as she concluded. He grew exceedingly pale.
He stooped over her chair, and spoke very low:
'It is just because that appears possible that I go. Do not misunderstand me, I am not a coxcomb;je ne me pose pas en vainqueur.But I have no place here, since I have no equality with her from which to be able to say, "I love you!" Absence alone can say it for me without offence as without hope.'
The Princess was silent. She was thinking of the maxim,;L'absence éteint les petites passions et allume les grandes.' Which was his?
'You have been so good to me,' he murmured caressingly, 'so benevolent, so merciful, I dare to ask of you a greater kindness yet. Will you explain for me to the Countess von Szalras that I am called away suddenly, and make my excuses and my farewell? It will save me much fruitless pain.'
'And if it give her pain?'
'I cannot suppose that, and I should not dare to hope it.'
'I have no reason to suppose it either, but I think you arede guerre lasbefore the battle is decided.'
'There is no battle possible for me. There is only a quite certain dishonour.'
His face was dark and weary. He spoke low and with effort. She glanced at him, and felt the vague awe with which strong unintelligible emotion always filled her.
'You must judge the question for yourself,' she said with a little hesitation. 'I will express what you wish to my niece if you really desire it.'
'You are always so good to me,' he murmured, with some agitation, and he bent down before her and reverently kissed her little white hands.
'God be with you, sir,' she said, with tears in her own tender eyes.
'You have been so good to me,' he murmured; 'the purest hours of my worthless life have been spent at Hohenszalras. Here only have I known what peace and holiness can mean. Give me your blessing ere I go.'
In another moment he had bowed himself from her presence, and the Princess sat mute and motionless in the sun. When she looked up at the great feudal pile of the Schloss which towered above her, it was with reproach and aversion to that stone emblem of the great possessions of its châtelaine.
'If she were a humbler woman,' she thought, 'how much happier she would be! What a pity it all is—what a pity! Of course he is right; of course he can do nothing else. If he did do anything else the world would condemn him, and even she very likely would despise him—but it is such a pity! If only she could have a woman's natural life about her——This life is not good. It is very well while she is young, but when she shall be no longer young?'
And the tender heart of the old gentlewoman ached for a sorrow not her own; and could she have given him a duchy to make him able to declare his love, she would have done so at all costs.
The sun was setting when the Countess Wanda returned from her distant ride. She dismounted at the foot of the terrace-steps and ascended them slowly, with Donau and Neva behind her, both tired and breathless.
'You are safe home, my love?' said the Princess, turning her head towards the steps.
'Yes, dear mother mine; you always, I know, think that Death gets up on the saddle. Is anything amiss? You looked troubled.'
'I have a message for you,' said the Princess with a sigh, and she gave Sabran's.
Wanda von Szalras heard in silence. She showed neither surprise nor regret.
The Princess waited a little.
'Well,' she said, at length, 'well, you do not even ask me why he goes!'
'You say he has been called away,' her niece answered. 'Surely that is reason enough.'
'You have no heart, Wanda.'
'I do not understand you,' said the Countess von Szalras, very coldly.
'Do you mean to say you have not seen that he loved you?'
The face of Wanda grew colder still.
'Did he instruct you to say this also?'
'No, no,' said the Princess, hurriedly, perceiving her error. 'He only bade me say that he was called away and must leave at once, and begged you to accept through me his adieus and the expression of his gratitude. But it is very certain that he does love you, and that because he is too poor and too proud to say so he goes.'
'You must weave your little romance!' said her niece, with some impatience, striking the gilt wicker table with her riding-whip. 'I prefer to think that M. de Sabran is, very naturally, gone back to the world to which he belongs. My only wonder has been that he has borne so long with the solitudes of the Szalrassee.'
'If you were not the most sincere woman in the world, I should believe you were endeavouring to deceive me. As it is,' said the Princess, with some temper, 'I can only suppose that you deceive yourself.'
'Have you any tea there?' said her niece, laying aside her gauntlets and her whip, and casting some cakes to the two hounds.
She had very plainly and resolutely closed the subject almost before it was fairly opened. The Princess, a little intimidated and keenly disappointed, did not venture to renew it.
When, the next morning, questioning Hubert, the Princess found that indeed her favourite had left the island monastery at dawn, the landscape of the Hohe Tauern seemed to her more monotonous and melancholy than it had ever done, and the days more tedious and dull.
'You will miss the music, at least,' she said, with asperity, to her niece. 'I suppose you will give him as much regret as you have done at times to the Abbé Liszt?'
'I shall miss the music, certainly,' said the Countess Wanda, calmly. 'Our poor Kapellmeister is very indifferent. If he were not so old that it would be cruel to displace him, I would take another from the Conservatorium.'
The Princess was irritated and even incensed at the reply, but she let it pass. Sabran's name was mentioned no more between them for many days.
No one knew whither he had gone, and no tidings came of him to Hohenszalras.
One day a foreign journal, amongst the many news-sheets that came by post there, contained his name: 'The Marquis de Sabran broke the bank at Monte Carlo yesterday,' was all that it said in its news of the Riviera.
'A winner at atripot, what a hero for you, mother mine!' she said with some bitterness, handing the paper to the Princess. She was surprised at the disgust and impatience which she felt herself. What could it concern her?
That day as she rode slowly through the grass drives of her forests, she thought with pain of her companion of a few weeks, who so late had ridden over these very paths beside her, the dogs racing before them, the wild flowers scenting the air, the pale sunshine falling down across the glossy necks of their horses.
'He ought to do better things than break a bank at a gaming-place,' she thought with regret. 'With such natural gifts of body and mind, it is a sin—a sin against himself and others—to waste his years in those base and trivial follies. When he was here he seemed to feel so keenly the charm of Nature, the beauty of repose, the possibility of noble effort.'
She let the reins droop on her mare's throat and paced slowly over the moss and the grass; though she was all alone—for in her own forests she would not be accompanied even by a groom—the colour came into her face as she remembered many things, many words, many looks, which confirmed the assertion Madame Ottilie had made to her.
'That may very well be,' she thought; 'but if it be, I think my memory might have restrained him from becoming the hero of a gambling apotheosis.'
And she was astonished at herself to find how much regret mingled with her disgust, and how much her disgust was intensified by a sentiment of personal offence.
When she reached home it was twilight, and she was told that her cousin Prince Egon Vàsàrhely had arrived. She would have been perfectly glad to see him, if she had been perfectly sure that he would have accepted quietly the reply she had sent to his letter received on the night of the great storm. As it was she met him in the blue-room before the Princess Ottilie, and nothing could be said on that subject.
Prince Egon, though still young, had already a glorious past behind him. He came of a race of warriors, and the Vàsàrhely Hussars had been famous since the days of Maria Theresa. The command of that brilliant regiment was hereditary, and he had led them in repeated charges into the French lines and the Prussian lines with such headlong and dauntless gallantry that he had been called the 'Wild Boar of Taròc' throughout the army. His hussars were the most splendid cavalry that ever shook their bridles in the sunlight on the wide Magyar plains. Their uniform remained the same as in the days of Aspern, and he was prodigal of gold, and embroidery, and rich furs, and trappings, with that martial coquetry which has been characteristic of so many great soldiers from Scylla to Michael Skobeleff.
With his regiment in the field, and without it in many adventures in the wilder parts of the Austrian Empire and on the Turkish border, he had become a synonym for heroism throughout the Imperial army, whilst in his manner and mode of life no more magnificent noble ever came from the dim romantic solitudes of Hungary to the court and the capital. He had great personal beauty; he had unrivalled traditions of valour; and he had a character as generous as it was daring: but he failed to awaken more than a sisterly attachment in the heart of his cousin. She had been so used to see him with her brothers that he seemed as near to her as they had been. She loved him tenderly, but with no sort of passion. She wondered that he should care for her in that sense, and grew sometimes impatient of his reiterated prayers.
'There are so many women who would listen to him and adore him,' she said. 'Why must he come to me?
Before Bela's death, and before she became her own mistress, she had always urged that her own sisterly affection for Egon made any thought of marriage with him out of the question.
'I am fond of him as I was of Gela and Victor,' she said often to those who pressed the alliance upon her; 'but that is not love. I will not marry a man whom I do not love.'
When she became absolutely her own mistress he was for some time silent, fearing to importune her, or to seem mercenary. She had become by Bela's death one of the greatest alliances in Europe. But at length, confident that his own position exempted him from any possible appearance of covetousness, he gently reminded her of her father's and her brother's wishes; but to no effect. She gave him the same answer. 'You are sure of my affection, but I will not do you so bad a service as to become your wife. I have no love for you.' From that he had no power to move or change her. He had made her many appeals in his frequent visits to Hohenszalras, but none with any success in inducing her to depart from the frank and placid regard of close relationship. She liked him well, and held him in high esteem; but this was not love; nor, had she consented to call it love, would it ever have contented the impetuous, ardent, and passionate spirit of Egon Vàsàrhely.
They could not be lovers, but they still remained friends, partly through consanguinity, partly because he could bear to see her thus so long as no other was nearer to her than he. They greeted each other now cordially and simply, and talked of the many cares and duties and interests that sprang up daily in the administration of such vast properties as theirs.
Prince Vàsàrhely, though a brilliant soldier and magnificent noble, was simple in his tastes, and occupied himself largely with the welfare of his people.
The Princess yawned discreetly behind her fan many times during this conversation, to her utterly uninteresting, upon villages, vines, harvests, bridges swept away by floods, stewards just and unjust, and the tolls and general navigation of the Danube. Quite tired of all these details and discussion of subjects which she considered ought to be abandoned to the men of business, she said suddenly, in a pause:
'Egon, did you ever know a very charming person, the Marquis de Sabran?'
Vàsàrhely reflected a moment.
'No,' he answered slowly. 'I have no recollection of such a name.'
'I thought you might have met him in Paris.'
'I am so rarely in Paris; since my father's death I have scarcely passed a month there. Who is he?'
'A stranger whose acquaintance we made through his being cast adrift here in a storm,' said the Countess Wanda, with some impatience. 'My dear aunt is devoted to him, because he has painted her a St. Ottilie on a screen, with the skill of Meissonnier. Since he left us he has become celebrated: he has broken the bank at Monte Carlo.'
Egon Vàsàrhely looked at her quickly.
'It seems to anger you? Did this stranger stay here any time?'
'Sometime, yes; he had a bad accident on the Venediger. Herr Greswold brought him to our island to pass his convalescence with the monks. From the monks to Monte Carlo!—--it is at least a leap requiring some elasticity in moral gymnastics.'
She spoke with some irritation, which did not escape the ear of her cousin. He said merely himself:
'Did you receive him, knowing nothing about him?'
'We certainly did. It was an imprudence; but if he paint like Meissonnier, he plays like Liszt: who was to resist such a combination of gifts?'
'You say that very contemptuously, Wanda,' said the Prince.
'I am not contemptuous of the talent; I am of the possessor of it, who comprehends his own powers so little that he breaks the bank at Monaco.'
'I envy him at least his power to anger you,' said Egon Vàsàrhely.
'I am angered to see anything wasted,' she answered, conscious of the impatience she had shown. 'I was very angry with Otto's little daughter yesterday; she had gathered a huge bundle of cowslips and thrown it down in the sun; it was ingratitude to God who made them. This friend of my aunt's does worse; he changes his cowslip into monkshood.'
'Is he indeed such a favourite of yours, dear mother?' said Vàsàrhely.
The Princess answered petulantly:
'Certainly, a charming person. And our cousin Kaulnitz knows him well. Wanda for once talks foolishly. Gambling is, it is true, a great sin at all times, but I do not know that it is worse at public tables than it is in your clubs. I myself am, of course, ignorant of these matters; but I have heard that privately, at cards, whole fortunes have been lost in a night, scribbled away with a pencil on a scrap of paper.'
'To lose a fortune is better than to win one,' said her niece, as she rose from the head of her table.
When the Princess slept in her blue-room Egon Vàsàrhely approached his cousin, where she sat at her embroidery frame.
'This stranger has the power to make you angry,' he said sadly. 'I have not even that.'
'Dear Egon,' she said tenderly, 'you have done nothing in your life that I could despise. Why should you be discontented at that?'
'Would you care if I did?'
'Certainly; I should be very sorry if my noble cousin did anything that could belie his chivalry; but why should we suppose impossibilities?'
'Suppose we were not cousins, would you love me then?'
'How can I tell? This is mere non-sense——'
'No; it is all my life. You know, Wanda, that I have loved you, only you, ever since I saw you as I came back from France—a child, but such a beautiful child, with your hair braided with pearls, and a dress all stiff with gold, and your lap full of red roses.'
'Oh, I remember,' she said hastily. 'There was a child's costume ball at the Hof; I called myself Elizabeth of Thuringia, and Bela, my own Bela, was my little Louis of Hungary. Oh, Egon, why will you speak of those times?'
'Because surely they make a kind of tie between us? They——'
'They do make one that will last all our lives, unless you strain it to bear a weight it is not made to bear. Dear Egon, you are very dear to me, but not dearso.As my cousin, my gallant, kind, and loyal cousin, you are very precious to me; but, Egon, if you could force me to be your wife I should not be indifferent to you, I should hate you!'
He grew white under his olive skin. He shrank a little, as if he suffered some sharp physical pain.
'Hate me!' he echoed in a stupor of surprise and suffering.
'I believe I should, Icouldhate. It is a frightful thing to say. Dear Egon, look elsewhere; find some other amongst the many lovely women that you see; do not waste your brilliant life on me. I shall never say otherwise than I say to-night' and you will compel me to lose the most trusted friend I have.'
He was still very pale. He breathed heavily. There was a mist over his handsome dark eyes, which were cast down. 'Until you love any other, I shall never abandon hope.'
'That is unwise. I shall probably love no one all my life long; I have told you so often.'
'All say so until love finds them out. I will not trouble you; I will be your cousin, your friend, rather than be nothing to you. But it is hard.'
'Why think of me so? Your career has so much brilliancy, so many charms, so many interests——'
'You do not know what it is to love. I talk to you in an unknown tongue, and you have no pity, because you do not understand.'
She did not answer. Over her thoughts passed the memory of the spinet whose music she had said he could not touch and waken.
He remained a week at Hohenszalras, but he did not again speak to her of his own sufferings. He was a proud man, though humble to her.
With a sort of contrition she noticed for the first time that he wearied her; that when he spoke of his departure she was glad. He was a fine soldier, a keen hunter, rather than a man of talents. The life he loved best was his life at home in his great castles, amidst the immense plains and the primeval forests of Hungary and the lonely fastnesses of the Karpathians, or scouring a field of battle with his splendid troopers behind him, all of them his kith and kin, or men of his own soil, whom he ruled with a firm, high hand, in a generous despotism.
When he was with her she missed all the graceful tact, the subtle meanings, the varied suggestions and allusions that had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome to her. Egon Vàsàrhely was no scholar, no thinker, no satirist; he was only brave and generous, as lions are, and, vaguely, a poet without words, from the wild solitudes he loved, and the romance that lies in the nature of the Magyar. 'He knows nothing!' she thought, impatiently recalling the stores of most various and recondite knowledge with which her late companion had played so carelessly and with such ease. It seemed to her that never in her life had she weighed her cousin in scales so severe and found him so utterly wanting.
And yet how many others she knew would have found their ideal in that gallant gentleman, with his prowess, and his hardihood, and his gallantry in war, and his winsome temper, so full of fire to men, so full of chivalry for women! When Prince Egon, in his glittering dress, all fur and gold and velvet, passed up the ball-room at the Burg in Vienna, no other man in all that magnificent assembly was so watched, so admired, so sighed for: and he was her cousin, and he only wearied her!
As he was leaving, he paused a moment after bidding her farewell, and after some moments of silence, said in a low voice:
'Dear, I will not trouble you again until you summon me. Perhaps that will be many years; but whether we meet or not, time will make no change in me. I am your servant ever.'
Then he bowed over her hand once more, once more saluted her, and in a moment or two the quick trot of the horses that bore him away woke the echoes of the green hills.
She looked out of the huge arched entrance door down the green defile that led to the outer world, and felt a pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation.
'If one could force oneself to love by any pilgrimage or penance,' she thought, 'there are none I would not take upon me to be able to love Egon.'
As she stood thoughtfully there on the doorway of her great castle, the sweet linnet-like voice of the Princess Ottilie came on her ear. It said, a little shrilly: 'You are always looking for a four-leaved shamrock. In that sort of search life slips away unperceived; one is very soon left alone with one's dead leaves.'
Wanda von Szalras turned and smiled.
'I am not afraid of being left alone,' she said. 'I shall have my people and my forests always.'
Then, apprehensive lest she should have seemed thankless and cold of heart, she turned caressingly to Madame Ottilie.
'Nay, I could not bear to lose you, my sweet fairy godmother. Think me neither forgetful nor ungrateful.'
'You could never be one or the other to me. But I shall not live, like a fairy godmother, for ever. Before I die I would fain see you content like others with the shamrocks as nature has made them.'
'I think there are few people as content as I am,' said the Countess Wanda, and said the truth.
'You are content with yourself, not with others. You will pardon me if I say there is a great difference between the two,' replied the Princess Ottilie, with a little smile that was almost sarcastic on her pretty small features.
'You mean that I have a great deal of vanity and no sympathy?'
'You have a great deal of pride,' said the Princess, discreetly, as she began to take her customary noontide walk up and down the terrace, her tall cane tapping the stones and her little dog running before her, whilst a hood of point-lace and a sunshade of satin kept the wind from her pretty white hair and the sun from her eyes, that were still blue as the acres of mouse-ear that grew by the lake.
The summer glided away and became autumn, and the Countess Wanda refused obstinately to fill Hohenszalras with house-parties. In vain her aunt spoke of the Lynau, the Windischgrätz, the Hohenlöhe, and the other great families who were their relatives or their friends. In vain she referred continually to the fact that every Schloss in Austria and all adjacent countries was filling with guests at this season, and the woods around it resounding with the hunter's horn and the hound's bay. In vain did she recapitulate the glories of Hohenszalras in an earlier time, and hint that the mistress of so vast a domain owed some duties to society.
Wanda von Szalras opposed to all these suggestions and declarations that indifference which would have seemed obstinacy had it been less mild. As for the hunting parties, she avowed with truth that although a daughter of mighty hunters, she herself regarded all pastimes founded on cruelty with aversion and contempt; the bears and the boars, the wild deer and the mountain chamois, might dwell undisturbed for the whole of their lives so far as she was concerned. When a bear came down and ate off the heads of an acre or two of wheat, she recompensed the peasant who had suffered the loss, but she would not have herjägermeistertrack the poor beast. Thejägermeistersighed as Madame Ottilie did for the bygone times when a score of princes and nobles had ridden out on a wolf-chase, or hundreds of peasants had threshed the woods to drive the big game towards the Kaiser's rifle; but for poachers his place would have been a sinecure and his days a weariness. His mistress was not to be persuaded. She preferred her forests left to their unbroken peace, their stillness filled with the sounds of rushing waters and the calls of birds.
The weeks glided on one after one with the even measured pace of monotonous and unruffled time; her hours were never unoccupied, for her duties were constant and numerous.
She would go and visit the sennerinn in their loftiest cattle-huts, and would descend an ice-slope with the swiftness and security of a practised mountaineer. In her childhood she and Bela had gone almost everywhere the chamois went, and she came of a race which, joined to high courage, had the hereditary habits of a great endurance. In the throne room of Vienna, with her great pearls about her, that had once been sent by a Sultan to a Szalras who fought with Wenceslaus, she was the stateliest and proudest lady of the greatest aristocracy of the world; but on her own mountain sides she was as dauntless as an ibis, as sure-footed as a goat, and would sit in the alpine cabins and drink a draught of milk and break a crust of rye-bread as willingly as though she were a sennerinn herself; so she would take the oars and row herself unaided down the lake, so she would saddle her horse and ride it over the wildest country, so she would drive her sledge over many a German mile of snow, and even in the teeth of a north wind blowing straight from the Russian plains and the Arctic seas.
'Fear nothing!' had been said again and again to her in her childhood, and she had learned that her race transmitted to and imposed its courage no less on its daughters than on its sons. Cato would have admired this mountain brood, even though its mountain lair was more luxurious than he would have deemed was wise.
She knew thoroughly what all her rights, titles, and possessions were. She was never vague or uncertain as to any of her affairs, and it would have been impossible to deceive or to cheat her. No one tried to do so, for her lawyers were men of old-fashioned ways and high repute, and for centuries the vast properties of the Counts von Szalras had been administered wisely and honestly in the same advocates' offices, which were close underneath the Calvarienburg in the good city of Salzburg. Her trustees were her uncle Cardinal Vàsàrhely and her great-uncle Prince George of Lilienhöhe; they were old men, both devoted to her, and both fully conscious that her intelligence was much abler and keener than their own. All these vast possessions gave her an infinite variety of occupation and of interests, and she neglected none of them. Still, all the properties and duties in the world will not suffice to fill up the heart and mind of a woman of four-and-twenty years of age, who enjoys the perfection of bodily health and of physical beauty. The most spiritual and the most dutiful of characters cannot altogether resist the impulses of nature. There were times when she now began to think that her life was somewhat empty and passionless.
But a certain sense of their monotony had begun for the first time to come upon her; a certain vague dissatisfaction stirred in her now and then. The discontent of Sabran seemed to have left a shadow of itself upon her. For the first time she seemed to be listening, as it were, to her life and to find a great silence in it; there was no echo in it of voices she loved.
Why had she never perceived it before? Why did she become conscious of it now? She asked herself this impatiently as the slight but bitter flavour of dissatisfaction touched her, and the days for once seemed—now and then—over long.
She loved her people and her forests and her mountains, and she had always thought that they would be sufficient for her, and she had honestly told the Princess that of solitude she was not afraid; and yet a certain sense that her life was cold and in a measure empty had of late crept upon her. She wondered angrily why a vague and intangible melancholy stole on her at times, which was different from the sorrow which still weighed on her for her brother's death. Now and then she looked at the old painted box of the spinet, and thought of the player who had awakened its dumb strings; but she did not suspect for a moment that it was in any sense his companionship which, now that it was lost, made the even familiar tenor of her time appear monotonous and without much interest. In the long evenings, whilst the Princess slumbered and she herself sat alone watching the twilight give way to the night over the broad and solemn landscape, she felt a lassitude which did not trouble her in the open air, in the daylight, or when she was busied indoors over the reports and requirements of her estates. Unacknowledged, indeed, unknown to her, she missed the coming of the little boat from the Holy Isle, and missed the prayer and praise of the great tone-poets rolling to her ear from the organ within. If anyone had told her that her late guest had possessed any such power to make her days look grey and pass tediously she would have denied it, and been quite sincere in her denial. But as he had called out the long mute music from the spinet, so he had touched, if only faintly, certain chords in her nature that until then had been dumb.
'I am not like you, my dear Olga,' she wrote to her relative, the Countess Brancka. 'I am not easily amused. Thatcourse effrénéeof the great world carries you honestly away with it; all those incessant balls, those endless visits, those interminable conferences on your toilettes, that continual circling of human butterflies round you, those perpetual courtships of half a score of young men; it all diverts you. You are never tired of it; you cannot understand any life outside its pale. All your days, whether they pass in Paris or Petersburg, at Trouville, at Biarritz, or at Vienna or Scheveningen, are modelled on the same lines; you must have excitement as you have your cup of chocolate when you wake. What I envy you is that the excitement excites you. When I was amidst it I was not excited; I was seldom even diverted. See the misfortune that it is to be born with a grave nature! I am as serious as Marcus Antoninus. You will say that it comes of having learned Latin and Greek. I do not think so; I fear I was born unamusable. I only truly care about horses and trees, and they are both grave things, though a horse can be playful enough sometimes when he is allowed to forget his servitude. Your friends, the famous tailors, send me admirably-chosen costumes which please that sense in me which Titians and Vandycks do (I do not mean to be profane); but I only put them on as the monks do their frocks. Perhaps I am very unworthy of them; at least, I cannot talk toilette as you can with ardour a whole morning and every whole morning of your life. You will think I am laughing at you; indeed I am not. I envy your faculty of sitting, as I am sure you are sitting now, in a straw chair on the shore, with a group ofboulevardiersaround you, and a crowd making a double hedge to look at you when it is your pleasure to pace the planks. My language is involved. I do not envy you the faculty of doing it, of course; I could do it myself to-morrow. I envy you the faculty of finding amusement in doing it, and finding flattery in the double hedge.'
A few days afterwards the Countess Brancka wrote back in reply:
'The world is like wine;ça se mousse et ça monte.There are heads it does not affect; there are palates that do not like it, yours amongst them. But there is so much too in habit. Living alone amidst your mountains you have lost all taste for thebrouhahaof society, which grows noisier, it must be said, every year. Yes, we are noisy: we have lost our dignity. You alone keep yours, you are the châtelaine of the middle ages. Perceforest or Parsifal should come riding to your gates of granite. By the way, I hear you have been entertaining one of ourboulevardiers.Réné de Sabran is charming, and the handsomest man in Paris; but he is not Parsifal or Perceforest. Between ourselves, he has an indifferent reputation, but perhaps he has repented on your Holy Isle, They say he is changed; that he has quarrelled with Cochonette, and that he is about to be made deputy for his department, whose representative has just died. Pardon me for naming Cochonette; it is part of our decadence that we laugh about all these naughty things and naughty people who are, after all, not so very much worse than we are ourselves. But you do not laugh, whether at these or at anything else. You are too good, my beautiful Wanda; it is your sole defect. You have even inoculated this poor Marquis, who, after a few weeks upon the Szalrassee, surrenders Cochonette for the Chamber! My term of service comes round next month: if you will have me I will take the Tauern on my road to Gödöllö. I long to embrace you.'
'Olga will take pity on our solitude,' said Wanda von Szalras to her aunt. 'I have not seen her for four years, but I imagine she is little changed.'
The Princess read the letter, frowning and pursing her lips together in pretty rebuke as she came to the name of Cochonette.
'They have indeed lost all dignity,' she said with a sigh; 'and something more than dignity also. Olga was always frivolous.'
'All hermondeis; not she more than another.'
'You were very unjust, you see, to M. de Sabran; he pays you the compliment of following your counsels.'
Wanda von Szalras rose a little impatiently. 'He had better have followed them before he broke the bank at Monaco. It is an odd sort of notoriety with which to attract the pious and taciturn Bretons; and when he was here he had no convictions. I suppose he picked them up with the gold pieces at the tables!'
Olga, Countess Brancka,néeCountess Seriatine, of a noble Russian family, had been married at sixteen to the young Gela von Szalras, who, a few months after his bridal, had been shot dead on the battlefield of Solferino.
After scarce a year of mourning she had fascinated the brother of Egon Vàsàrhely, a mere youth who bore the title of Count Brancka. There had been long and bitter opposition made to the new alliance on the part of both families, on account of the consanguinity between Stefan Brancka and her dead lord. But opposition had only increased the ardour of the young man and the young widow; they had borne down all resistance, procured all dispensations, had been wedded, and in a year's time had both wished the deed undone. Both were extravagant, capricious, self-indulgent, and unreasonable; their two egotisms were in a perpetual collision. They met but seldom, and never met without quarrelling violently. The only issue of their union was two little, fantastic, artificial fairies who were called respectively Mila and Marie.
At the time of the marriage of the Branckas, Wanda had been too young to share in opposition to it; but the infidelity to her brother's memory had offended and wounded her deeply, and in her inmost heart she had never pardoned it, though the wife of Stefan Brancka had been a passing guest at Hohenszalras, where, had Count Gela lived, she would have reigned as sovereign mistress. That his sister reigned there in her stead the Countess Olga resented keenly and persistently. Her own portion of the wealth of the Szalras had been forfeited under her first marriage contract by her subsequent alliance. But she never failed to persuade herself that her exclusion from every share in that magnificent fortune was a deep wrong done to herself, and she looked upon Wanda von Szalras as the doer of that wrong.
In appearance, however, she was always cordial, caressing, affectionate, and if Wanda chose to mistrust her affection, it was, she reflected, only because a life of unwise solitude had made a character naturally grave become severe and suspicious.
She did not fail to arrive there a week later. She was a small, slender, lovely woman, with fair skin, auburn hair, wondrous black eyes, and a fragile frame that never knew fatigue. She held a high office at the Imperial Court, but when she was not on service, she spent, under the plea of health, all her time at Paris orles eaux.She came with her numerous attendants, her two tiny children, and a great number of hugefourgonsfull of all the newest marvels of combination in costume. She was seductive and caressing, but she was capricious, malicious, and could be even violent; in general she was gaily given up to amusement and intrigue, but she had moments of rage that were uncontrollable. She had had many indiscretions and some passions, but the world liked her none the less for that; she was a great lady, and in a sense a happy woman, for she had nerves of steel despite all her maladies, and brought to the pleasures of life an unflagging and even ravenous zest.
When with her perfume of Paris, her restless animation, her children, like little figures from a fashion-plate, her rapid voice that was shrill yet sweet, like a silver whistle, and her eyes that sparkled alike with mirth and with malice, she came on to the stately terraces of Hohenszalras, she seemed curiously discordant with it and its old world peace and gravity. She was like a pen-and-ink sketch of Cham thrust between the illuminated miniatures of a missal.
She felt it herself.
'It is the Roman de la Rose in stone,' she said, as her eyes roved over the building, which she had not visited for four years. 'And you, Wanda, you look like Yseulte of the White Hand or the Marguerite des Marguerites; you must be sorry you did not live in those times.'
'Yes: if only for one reason. One could make the impress of one's own personality so much more strongly on the time.'
'And now the times mould us. We are all horribly alike. There is only yourself who retain any individuality amidst all the women that I know. 'La meule du pressoir de l'abrutissementmight have been written of our world. After all, you are wise to keep out of it. My straw chair at Trouville looks trumpery beside that ivory chair in your Rittersäal. I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant and a sack of bon-bons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year round, morally—metaphorically—how do you say it? It makes us thirsty, and perhaps, I am not sure, perhaps it leaves us half starved, though we nibble the sweetmeats, and don't know it.
'Your dinner must lack two things—bread and water.'
'Yes: we never see either. It is all truffles and caramels andvins frappés.'
'There is your bread.'
She glanced at the little children, two pretty, graceful little maids of six and seven years old.
'Ouf!' said the Countess Zelenka. 'They are only little bits of puff paste, a couple ofpetits foursbaked on the boulevards. If they bechic, and marry well, I for one shall ask no more of them. If ever you have children, I suppose you will rear them on science and the Antonines?'
'Perhaps on the open air and Homer,' said Wanda, with a smile.
The Countess Brancka was silent a moment, then said abruptly:
'You dismissed Egon again?'
'Has he made you his ambassadress?'
'No, oh no; he is too proud: only we all are aware of his wishes. Wanda, do you know that you have some cruelty in you, some sternness?'
'I think not. The cruelty would be to grant the wishes. With a loveless wife Egon, would be much more unhappy than he is now.'
'Oh, after a few months he would not care, you know; they never do. To unite your fortunes is the great thing; you could lead your lives as you liked.'
'Our fortunes do very well apart,' said the Countess von Szalras, with a patience which cost her some effort.
'Yours is immense,' said Madame Brancka, with a sigh, for her own and her husband's wealth had been seriously involved by extravagance and that high play in which they both indulged. 'And it must accumulate in your hands. You cannot spend much. I do not see how you could spend much. You never receive; you never go to your palaces; you never leave Hohenszalras; and you are so wise a woman that you never commit any follies.'
Wanda was silent. It did not appear to her that she was called on to discuss her expenditure.
Dinner was announced; their attendants took away the children; the Princess woke up from a little dose, and said suddenly, 'Olga, is M. de Sabran elected?'
'Aunt Ottilie,' said her niece, hastily, 'has lost her affections to that gentleman, because he painted her saint on a screen and had all old Haydn at his fingers' ends.'
'The election does not take place until next month,' said the Countess. 'He will certainly be returned, because of the blind fidelity of the department to his name. The odd thing is that he should wish to be so.'
'Wanda told him it was his duty,' said Princess Ottilie, with innocent malice.
The less innocent malice of the Countess Brancka's eyes fell for a passing moment with inquiry and curiosity on the face of her hostess, which, however, told her nothing.
'Then hewasParsifal or Perceforest!' she cried, 'and he has ridden away to find the emerald cup of tradition. What a pity that he paused on his way to break the bank at Monte Carlo. The two do not accord. I fear he is but Lancelot.'
'There is no reason why he should not pursue an honourable ambition,' said the Princess, with some offence.
'No reason at all, even if it be not an honourable one,' said Madame Brancka, with a curious intonation. 'He always wins at baccara; he has done some inimitable caricatures which hang at the Mirliton; he is an amateur Rubenstein, and he has been the lover of Cochonette. These are his qualifications for the Chamber, and if they be not as valiant ones as those ofles Preuxthey are at least more amusing.'
'My dear Olga,' said the Princess, with a certain dignity of reproof, 'you are not on your straw chair at Trouville. There are subjects, expressions, suggestions, which are not agreeable to my ears or on your lips.'
'Cochonette!' murmured the offender, with a graceful little curtsey of obedience and contrition. 'Oh, Madame, if you knew! A year ago we talked of nothing else!'
The Countess Brancka wished to talk still of nothing else, and though she encountered a chillness and silence that would have daunted a less bold spirit, she contrived to excite in the Princess a worldly and almost unholy curiosity concerning that heroine of profane history who had begun life in a little bakehouse of the Batignolles, and had achieved the success of putting her name (or her nickname) upon the lips of all Paris.
Throughout dinner she spoke of little save of Cochonette, that goddess ofbouffe, and of Parsifal, as she persisted in baptising the one lover to whom alone the goddess had ever been faithful. With ill-concealed impatience her hostess bore awhile with the subject; then dismissed it somewhat peremptorily.
'We are provincials, my dear Olga,' she said, with a very cold inflection of contempt in her voice. 'We are very antiquated in our ways and our views. Bear with our prejudices and do not scare our decorum. We keep it by us as we keep kingfishers' skins amongst our furs in summer against moth; a mere superstition, I daresay, but we are only rustic people.'
'How you say that, Wanda,' said her guest, with a droll little laugh, 'and you look like Marie Antoinette all the while! Why will you bury yourself? You would only need to be seen in Paris a week, and all the world would turn after you and go back to tradition and ermine, instead ofchienand plush. If you live another ten years as you live now you will turn Hohenszalras into a religious house; and even Mme. Ottilie would regret that. You will institute a Carmelite Order, because white becomes you so. Poor Egon, he would sooner have you laugh about Cochonette.'
The evening was chill, but beautifully calm and free of mist. Wanda von Szalras walked out on to the terrace, whilst her cousin and guest, missing the stimulus of her usual band of lovers and friends, curled herself up on a deep chair and fell sound asleep like a dormouse.
There was no sound on the night except the ripple of the lake water below and the splash of torrents falling down the cliffs around; a sense of irritation and of pleasure moved her both in the same moment. What was a French courtesan, a singer of lewd songs, an interpreter of base passions to her? Nothing except a creature to be loathed and pitied, as men in health feel a disgusted compassion for disease. Yet she felt a certain anger stir in her as she recalled all this frivolous, trivial, ill-flavoured chatter of her cousin's. And what was it to her if one of the many lovers of this woman had cast her spells from about him and left her for a manlier and a worthier arena? Yet she could not resist a sense of delicate distant homage to herself in the act, in the mute obedience to her counsels such as a knight might render, even Lancelot with stained honour and darkened soul.