The silence of it touched her.
He had said nothing: only by mere chance, in the idle circling of giddy rumour, she learned he had remembered her words and followed her suggestion. There was a subtle and flattering reverence in it which pleased the taste of a woman who was always proud but never vain. And to any noble temperament there is a singularly pure and honest joy in the consciousness of having been in any measure the means of raising higher instincts and loftier desires in any human soul that was not dead but dormant.
The shrill voice of Olga Brancka startled her as it broke in on her musings.
'I have been asleep!' she cried, as she rose out of her deep chair and came forth into the moonlight. 'Pray forgive me, Wanda. You will have all that drowsy water running and tumbling all over the place; it makes one think of the voices in the Sistine in Passion Week; there are the gloom, the hush, the sigh, the shriek, the eternal appeal, the eternal accusation. That water would drive me into hysteria; could you not drain it, divert it, send it underground—silence it somehow?'
'When you can keep the Neva flowing at New Year, perhaps I shall be able. But I would not if I could. I have had all that water about me from babyhood; when I am away from the sound of it I feel as if some hand had woolled up my ears.'
'That is what I feel when I am away from the noise of the streets. Oh, Wanda! to think that you can do utterly as you like and yet do not like to have the sea of light of the Champs-Élysées or the Graben before your eyes, rather than that gliding, dusky water!'
'The water is a mirror. I can see my own soul in it and Nature's; perhaps one hopes even sometimes to see God's.'
'That is not living, my dear, it is dreaming.'
'Oh, no, my life is very real; it is as real as light to darkness, it is absolute prose.'
'Make it poetry then; that is very easy.'
'Poetry is to the poetical; I am by no means poetical. My stud-book, my stewards' ledgers, my bankers' accounts, form the chief of my literature; you know I am a practical farmer.'
'I know you are one of the most beautiful and one of the richest women in Europe, and you live as if you were fifty years old, ugly, anddévote; all this will grow on you. In a few years' time you will be a hermit, a prude, an ascetic. You will found a new order, and be canonised after death.'
'My aunt is afraid that I shall die a freethinker. It is hard to please every one,' replied the Countess Wanda, with unruffled good humour. 'It is poetical people who found religious orders, enthusiasts, visionaries; I wish I were one of them. But I am not. The utmost I can do is to follow George Herbert's precept and sweep my own little chambers, so that this sweeping may be in some sort a duty done.'
'You are a good woman, Wanda, and I dare say a grand one, but you are too grave for me.'
'You mean that I am dull? People always grow dull who live much alone.'
'But you could have the whole world at your feet if you only raised a finger.'
'That would not amuse me at all.'
Her guest gave an impatient movement of her shoulders; after a little she said, 'Did Réné de Sabran amuse you?'
Wanda von Szalras hesitated a moment.
'In a measure he interested me,' she answered, being a perfectly truthful woman. 'He is a man who has the capacity of great things, but he seems to me to be his own worst enemy; if he had fewer gifts he might probably have more achievement. A waste of power is always a melancholy sight.'
'He is only aboulevardier, you know.'
'No doubt your Paris asphalte is the modern embodiment of Circe.'
'But he is leaving Circe.'
'So much the better for him if he be. But I do not know why you speak of him so much. He is a stranger to me, and will never, most likely, cross my path again.'
'Oh, Parsifal will come back,' said Madame Brancka, with a little smile. 'Hohenszalras is his Holy Grail.'
'He can scarcely come uninvited, and who will invite him here?' said the mistress of Hohenszalras, with cold literalness.
'Destiny will; the great master of the ceremonies who disposes of us all,' said her cousin.
'Destiny!' said Wanda, with some contempt. 'Ah, you are superstitious; irreligious people always are. You believe in mesmerism and disbelieve in God.'
'Oh, most Holy Mother, cannot you make Wanda a little like other people?' said the Countess Brancka when her hostess had left her alone with Princess Ottilie. 'She is as much a fourteenth-century figure as any one of those knights in the Rittersäal.'
'Wanda is a gentlewoman,' said the Princess drily. 'You great ladies are not always that, my dear Olga. You are all verypiquantesandprovocantes, no doubt, but you have forgotten what dignity is like, and perhaps you have forgotten, too, what self-respect is like. It is but another old-fashioned word.'
The late summer passed on into full autumn, and he never returned to the little isle under the birches and willows. The monks spoke of him often with the wondering admiration of rustic recluses for one who had seemed to them the very incarnation of that world which to them was only a vague name. His talents were remembered, his return was longed for; a silver reliquary and an antique book of plain song which he had sent them were all that remained to them of his sojourn there. As they angled for trout under the drooping boughs, or sat and dosed in the cloister as the rain fell, they talked together of that marvellous visitant with regret. Sometimes they said to one another that they had fancied once upon a time he would have become lord there, where the spires and pinnacles and shining sloping roofs of the great Schloss rose amidst the woods across the Szalrassee. When their grand prior heard them say so he rebuked them.
'Our lady is a true daughter of the Holy Church,' he said; 'all the lands and all the wealth she has will come to the Church. You will see, should we outlive her—which the saints send we may not do—that the burg will be bequeathed by her to form a convent of Ursulines. It is the order she most loves.'
She overheard him say so once when she sat in her boat beneath the willows drifting by under the island, and she sighed impatiently.
'No, I shall not do that,' she thought. 'The religious foundations did a great work in their time, but that time is over. They can no more resist the pressure of the change of thought and habit than I can set sail like S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. Hohenszalras shall go to the Crown; they will do what seems best with it. But I may live fifty years and more.'
A certain sadness came over her as she thought so; a long life, a lonely life, appalled her, even though it was cradled in all luxury and strengthened with all power.
'If only my Bela were living!' she said, half aloud; and the water grew dim to her sight as it flowed away green and sparkling into the deep long shadows of its pine-clothed shores, shadows, stretching darkly across its western side, whilst the eastern extremity was still warm in the afternoon light.
The great pile of Hohenszalras seemed to tower up into the very clouds; the evening sun, not yet sunk behind the Venediger range, shone ruddily on all its towers and its gothic spires, and the grim sculptures and the glistening metal, with which it was so lavishly ornamented, were illumined till it looked like some colossal and enchanted citadel, where soon the magic ivory horn of Childe Boland might sound and wake the spell-bound warders.
If only Bela, lord of all, had lived!
But her regret was not only for her brother.
In the October of that year her solitude was broken; her Sovereign signified her desire to see Hohenszalras again. They were about to visit Salzburg, and expressed their desire to pass three days in the Iselthal. There was nothing to be done but to express gratitude for the honour and make the necessary preparations. The von Szalras had been always loyal allies rather than subjects, and their devotion to the Habsburg house had been proved in many ways and with constancy. She felt that she would rather have to collect and equip a regiment of horse, as her fathers had done, than fill her home with thetapageinevitable to an Imperial reception, but she was not insensible to the friendship that dictated this mark of honour.
'Fate conspires to make me break my resolutions,' she said to the Princess; who answered with scant sympathy:
'There are some resolutions much more wisely broken than persevered in; your vows of solitude are amongst them.'
'Three days will not long affect my solitude.'
'Who knows? At all events, Hohenszalras for those three days will be worthy of its traditions—if only it will not rain.'
'We will hope that it may not. Let us prepare the list of invitations.'
When she had addressed all the invitations to some fifty of the greatest families of the empire for the house party, she took one of the cards engraved 'To meet their Imperial Majesties,' and hesitated some moments, then wrote across it the name of Sabran.
'You will like to see your friend,' she said as she passed it to her aunt.
'Certainly, I should like to do so, but I am quite sure he will not come.'
'Not come?'
'I think he will not. You will never understand, my dear Wanda, that men may love you.'
'I certainly saw nothing of love in the conversation of M. de Sabran,' she answered, with some irritation.
'In his conversation? Very likely not; he is a proud man and poor.'
'Since he has ceased to visit Monte Carlo.'
'You are ungenerous, Wanda.'
'I?'
The accusation fell on her with a shock of surprise, under which some sense of error stirred. Was it possible she could be ungenerous? She, whose character had always, even in its faults, been cast on lines so broad? She let his invitation go away with the rest in the post-bag to Matrey.
In a week his answer came with others. He was very sensible, very grateful, but the political aspect of the time forbade him to leave France. His election had entailed on him many obligations; the Chamber would meet next month, etc., etc. He laid his homage and regrets at the feet of the ladies of Hohenszalras.
'I was sure he would say so,' the Princess observed. It did not lie within her Christian obligations to spare the 'je vous l'avais bien dit.'
'It is very natural that he should not jeopardise his public prospects,' answered Wanda herself, angrily conscious of a disappointment, with which there was mingled also a sense of greater respect for him than she had ever felt.
'He cares nothing at all about those,' said the Princess, sharply. 'If he had the position of Egon he would come. His political prospects! Do you pretend to be ignorant that he only went to the Chamber as he went to Romaris, because you recommended ambition and activity?'
'If that be the case he is most wise not to come,' answered, with some coldness, the châtelaine of Hohenszalras; and she went to visit the stables, which would be more important in the eyes of her Imperial mistress than any other part of the castle.
'She will like Cadiga,' she thought, as she stroked the graceful throat of an Arab mare which she had had over from Africa three months before, a pure bred daughter of the desert 'shod with lightning.'
She conversed long with herstallmeisterUlrich, and gave him various directions.
'We are all grown very rustic and old-fashioned here,' she said with a smile. 'But the horses at least will not disgrace us.'
Ulrich asked his most high countess if the Margraf von Sabran would be of the house party, and when she answered 'No,' said, with regret, that no one had ever looked so well on Siegfried as he had done.
'He did ride very well,' she said, and turned to the stall where the sorrel Siegfried stood. She sighed unconsciously as she drew the tufted hair hanging over-the horse's forehead through her fingers with tenderness. What if she were to make Siegfried and all else his, if it were true that he loved her? She thrust the thought away almost before it took any real shape.
'I do not even believe it,' she said half aloud, and yet in her innermost heart she did believe it.
The Imperial visit was made and became a thing of the past.
The state apartments were opened, the servants wore their state liveries, the lake had its banners and flags, its decorated landing-stairs and velvet-cushioned boats; the stately and silent place was full for three days and nights of animated and brilliant life, and great hunting parties rejoiced the soul of old Otto, and made the forests ring with sound of horn and rifle. The culverins on the keep fired their salutes, the chimes of the island monastery echoed the bells of the clock tower of the Schloss, the schools sang with clear fresh voices the Kaiser's Hymn, the sun shone, the jäger were in full glory, the castle was filled with guests and their servants,' the long-unused theatre had a troop of Viennese to play comedies on its bijou stage, the ball-room, lined with its Venetian mirrors and its Reseiner gilding, was lit up once more after many years of gloom; the nobles of the provinces came from far and wide at the summons of the lady of Hohenszalras, and the greater nobles who formed the house-party were well amused and well content, whilst the Imperial guests were frankly charmed with all things, and honestly reluctant to depart.
When she accompanied them to the foot of the terrace stairs, and there took leave of them, she could feel that their visit had been one of unfeigned enjoyment, and her farewell gift to her Kaiserin was Cadiga. They had left early on the morning of the fourth day, and the remainder of the day was filled till sunset by the departure of the other guests; it was fatiguing and crowded. When the last visitor had gone she dropped down on a great chair in the Rittersäal, and gave a long-drawn sigh of relief.
'What a long strain on one's powers of courtesy!' she murmured. 'It is more exhausting than to climb Gross Glöckner!'
'It has been perfectly successful!' said the Princess, whose cheeks were warm and whose eyes were bright with triumph.
'It has been only a matter of money,' said the Countess von Szalras, with some contempt. 'Nothing makes one feel sobourgeoiseas a thing like this. Any merchant or banker could do the same. It is impossible to put any originality into it. It is like diamonds. Any one only heard of yesterday could do as much if they had only the money to do it with; you do not seem to see what I mean?'
'I see that, as usual, you are discontented when any other woman would be in paradise,' answered the Princess, a little tartly. 'Pray, could thebourgeoisehave a residence ten centuries old?'
'I am afraid she could buy one easily,'
'Would that be the same thing?'
'Certainly not, but it would enable her to do all I have done for the last three days, if she had only money enough; she could even give away Cadiga.'
'She could not get Cadiga accepted!' said Mme. Ottilie, drily. 'You are tired, my love, and so do not appreciate your own triumphs. It has been a very great success.'
'They were very kind; they are always so kind. But all the time I could not help thinking, were they not horribly fatigued. It wearied me so myself, I could not believe that they were otherwise than weary too.'
'It has been a great success,' repeated the Princess. 'But you are always discontented.'
Wanda did not reply; she leaned back against the Cordovan leather back of the chair, crushing her chestnut hair against the emblazoned scutcheon of her house; she was very fatigued, and her face was pale. For three whole days and evenings to preserve an incessant vigilance of courtesy, a continual assumption of interest, an unremitting appearance of enjoyment, a perpetual smile of welcome, is very tedious work: those in love with social successes are sustained by the consciousness of them, but she was not. An Imperial visit more or less could add not one hair's breadth to the greatness of the house of Szalras.
And there was a dull, half conscious pain at the bottom of her heart. She was thinking of Egon Vàsàrhely, who had said he could not leave his regiment; of Réné de Sabran, who had said he could not leave his country. Even to those who care nothing for society, and dislike the stir and noise of the world about them, there is still always a vague sense of depression in the dispersion of a great party; the house seems so strangely silent, the rooms seem so strangely empty, servants flitting noiselessly here and there, a dropped flower, a fallen jewel, an oppressive scent from multitudes of fading blossoms, a broken vase perhaps, or perhaps a snapped fan—these are all that are left of the teeming life crowded here one little moment ago. Though one may be glad they are all gone, yet there is a certain sadness in it. 'Le lendemain de la fête' keeps its pathos, even though the fête itself has possessed no poetry and no power to amuse.
The Princess, who was very fatigued too, though she would not confess that social duties could ever exhaust anyone, went softly away to her own room, and Wanda sat alone in the great Rittersäal, with the afternoon light pouring through the painted casements on to the damascened armour, and the Flemish tapestries, and the great dais at the end of the hall, with its two-headed eagle that Dante cursed, its draperies of gold-coloured velvet, its escutcheons in beaten and enamelled metal.
Discontented! The Princess had left that truthful word behind her like a little asp creeping upon a marble floor. It stung her conscience with a certain reproach, her pride with a certain impatience. Discontented! She who had always been so equable of temper, so enamoured of solitude, so honestly loyal to her people and her duties, so entirely grateful to the placid days that came and went as calmly as the breathing of her breast!
Was it possible she was discontented?
How all the great world that had just left her would have laughed at her, and asked what doubled rose-leaf made her misery?
No one hardly on earth could be more entirely free than she was, more covered with all good gifts of fortune and of circumstances; and she had always been so grateful to her life until now. Would she never cease to miss the coming of the little boat across from the Holy Isle? She was angry that this memory should have so much power to pursue her thought and spoil the present hours. Had he but been there, she knew very well that the pageantry of the past three days would not have been the mere empty formalities, the mere gilded tedium that they had appeared to be to her.
On natures thoughtful and profound, silence has sometimes a much greater power than speech. Now and then she surprised herself in the act of thinking how artificial human life had become, when the mere accident of a greater or lesser fortune determined whether a man who respected himself could declare his feeling for a woman he loved. It seemed lamentably conventional and unreal, and yet had he not been fettered by silence he would have been no gentleman.
Life resumed its placid even tenor at Hohenszalras after this momentary disturbance. Autumn comes early in the Glöckner and Venediger groups. Madame Ottilie with a shiver heard the north winds sweep through the yellowing forests, and watched the white mantle descend lower and lower down the mountain sides. Another winter was approaching, a winter in which she would see no one, hear nothing, sit all day by her wood fire, half asleep for sheer want of interest to keep her awake; the very postboy was sometimes detained by the snowfall for whole days together in his passage to and from Matrey.
'It is all very well for you,' she said pettishly to her niece. 'You have youth, you have strength, you like to have four mad horses put in your sleigh and drive them like demoniacs through howling deserts of frozen pine forests, and come home when the great stars are all out, with your eyes shining like the planets, and the beasts all white with foam and icicles. You like that; you can do it; you prefer it before anything, but I—what have I to do? One cannot eat nougats for ever, nor yet read one's missal. Even you will allow that the evenings are horribly long. Your horses cannot help you there. You embroider very artistically, but they would do that all for you at any convent; and to be sure you write your letters and audit your accounts, but you might just as well leave it all to your lawyers. Olga Brancka is quite right, though I do not approve of her mode of expression, but she is quite right—you should be in the world.'
But she failed to move Wanda by a hair's breadth, and soon the hush of winter settled down on Hohenszalras, and when the first frost had hardened the ground the four black horses were brought out in the sleigh, and their mistress, wrapped in furs to the eyes, began those headlong gallops through the silent forests which stirred her to a greater exhilaration than any pleasures of the world could have raised in her. To guide those high-mettled, half-broken, high-bred creatures, fresh from freedom on the plains of the Danube, was like holding the reins of the winds.
One day at dusk as she returned from one of these drives, and went to see the Princess Ottilie before changing her dress, the Princess received her with a little smile and a demure air of triumph, of smiling triumph. In her hand was an open letter which she held out to her niece.
'Read!' she said with much self-satisfaction. 'See what miracles you and the Holy Isle can work.'
Wanda took the letter, which she saw at a glance was in the writing of Sabran. After some graceful phrases of homage to the Princess, he proceeded in it to say that he had taken his seat in the French Chamber, as deputy for his department.
'I do not deceive myself,' he continued. 'The trust is placed in me for the sake of the memories of the dead Sabran, not because I am anything in the sight of these people; but I will endeavour to be worthy of it. I am a sorry idler and of little purpose and strength in life, but I will endeavour to make my future more serious and more deserving of the goodness which was showered on me at Hohenszalras. It grieved me to be unable to profit by the permission so graciously extended to me at the time of their Imperial Majesties' sojourn with you, but it was impossible for me to come. My thoughts were with you, as they are indeed every hour. Offer my homage to the Countess von Szalras, with the renewal of my thanks.'
Then, with some more phrases of reverence and compliment blent in one to the venerable lady whom he addressed, he ended an epistle which brought as much pleasure to the recipient as though she had been seventeen instead of seventy.
She watched the face of Wanda during the perusal of these lines, but she did not learn anything from its expression.
'He writes admirably,' she said, when she had read it through; 'and I think he is well fitted for a political career. They say that it is always best in politics not to be burdened with convictions, and he will be singularly free from such impediments, for he has none!'
'You are very harsh and unjust,' said the Princess, angrily. 'No person can pay you a more delicate compliment than lies in following your counsels, and yet you have nothing better to say about it than to insinuate an unscrupulous immorality.'
'Politics are always immoral.'
'Why did you recommend them to him, then?' said the Princess, sharply.
'They are better than some other things—thanrouge et noir, for instance; but I did not perhaps do right in advising a mere man of pleasure to use the nation as his larger gaming-table.'
'You are beyond my comprehension! Your wire drawing is too fine for my dull eyesight. One thing is certainly quite clear to me, dull as I am; you live alone until you grow dissatisfied with everything. There is no possibility of pleasing a woman who disapproves of the whole living world!'
'The world sees few unmixed motives,' said Wanda, to which the Princess replied by an impatient movement.
'The post has brought fifty letters for you. I have been looking over the journals,' she answered. 'There is something you may also perhaps deign to read.'
She held out a French newspaper and pointed to a column in it.
Wanda took it and read it, standing. It was a report of a debate in the French Chamber.
She read in silence and attentively, leaning against the great carved chimney-piece. 'I was not aware he was so good an orator,' she said simply, when she had finished reading.
'You grant that it is a very fine speech, a very noble speech?' said Madame Otillie, eagerly and with impatience. 'You perceive the sensation it caused; it is evidently the first time he has spoken. You will see in another portion of the print how they praise him.'
'He has acquired his convictions with rapidity. He was a Socialist when here.'
'The idea! A man of his descent has always the instincts of his order: he may pretend to resist them, but they are always stronger than he. You might at least commend him, Wanda, since your words turned him towards public life.'
'He is no doubt eloquent,' she answered, with 'some reluctance. 'That we could see here. If he be equally sincere he will be a great gain to the nobility of France.'
'Why should you doubt his sincerity?'
'Is mere ambition ever sincere?'
'I really cannot understand you. You censured his waste of ability and accession; you seem equally disposed to cavil at his exertions and use of his talent. Your prejudices are most cruelly tenacious.'
'How can I applaud your friend's action until I am sure of his motive?'
'His motive is to please you,' thought the Princess, but she was too wary to say so.
She merely replied:
'No motive is ever altogether unmixed, as you cruelly observed; but I should say that his must be on the whole sufficiently pure. He wishes to relieve the inaction and triviality of a useless life.'
'To embrace a hopeless cause is always in a manner noble,' assented her niece. 'And I grant you that he has spoken very well.'
Then she went to her own room to dress for dinner.
In the evening she read the reported speech again, with closer attention. It was eloquent, ironical, stately, closely reasoned, and rose in its peroration to a caustic and withering eloquence of retort and invective. It was the speech of a born orator, but it was also the speech of a strongly conservative partisan.
'How much of what he says does he believe?' she thought, with a doubt that saddened her and made her wonder why it came to her. And whether he believed or not, whether he were true or false in his political warfare, whether he were selfish or unselfish in his ambitions, what did it matter to her?
He had stayed there a few weeks, and he had played so well that the echoes of his music still seemed to linger after him, and that was all. It was not likely they would ever meet again.
With the New Year Madame Ottilie received another letter from him. It was brief, grateful, and touching. It concluded with a message of ceremonious homage to the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. Of his entrance into political life it said nothing. With the letter came a screen of gilded leather which he had painted himself, with passages from the history of S. Julian Hospitador.
'It will seem worthless,' he said, 'where every chamber is a museum of art; but accept it as a sign of my grateful and imperishable remembrance.'
The Princess was deeply touched and sensibly flattered.
'You will admit, at least,' she said, with innocent triumph, 'that he knows how to make gratitude graceful.'
'It is an ex-voto, and you are his patron saint, dear mother,' said the Countess Wanda, with a smile but the smile was one of approval. She thought his silence on his own successes and on her name was in good taste. And the screen was so admirably painted that the Venetian masters might have signed it without discredit.
'May I give him no message from you,' said the Princess, as she was about to write her reply.
Her niece hesitated.
'Say we have read his first speech, and are glad of his success,' she said, after a few moments' reflection.
'Nothing more?'
'What else should I say?' replied Wanda, with some irritation.
The Princess was too honourable a woman to depart from the text of the congratulation, but she contrived to throw a little more warmth into the spirit of it; and she did not show her letter to the mistress of Hohenszalras. She set the screen near her favourite chair in the blue-room.
'If only there were any one to appreciate it!' she said, with a sigh. 'Like everything else in this house, it might as well be packed up in a chest for aught people see of it. This place is not a museum; the world goes to a museum: it is a crypt!'
'Would it be improved by a crowd of sightseers at ten kreutzers a head?'
'No: but it would be very much brightened by a house-party at Easter, and now and then at midsummer and autumn. In your mother's time the October parties for the bear-hunts, the wolf-hunts, the boar-hunts, were magnificent. No, I do not think the chase contrary to God's will; man has power over the beasts of the field and the forest. The archdukes never missed an autumn here; they found the sport finer than in Styria.'
Her niece kissed her hand and went out to where her four black horses were fretting and champing before the great doors, and the winter sun was lighting up the gilded scrollwork, and the purple velvet, and the brown sables of her sleigh, that had been built in Russia and been a gift to her from Egon Vàsàrhely. She felt a little impatience of the Princess Ottilie, well as she loved her; the complacent narrowness of mind, the unconscious cruelty, the innocent egotism, the conventional religion which clipped and fitted the ways of Deity to suit its own habits and wishes: these fretted her, chafed her, oppressed her with a sense of their utter vanity. The Princess would not herself have harmed a sparrow or a mouse, yet it seemed to her that Providence had created all the animal world only to furnish pastime for princes and their jägers. She saw no contradiction in this view of the matter. The small conventional mind of her had been cast in that mould and would never expand: it was perfectly pure and truthful, but it was contracted and filled with formula.
Wanda von Szalras, who loved her tenderly, could not help a certain impatience of this, the sole, companionship she had. A deep affection may exist side by side with a mental disparity that creates an unwilling but irresistible sense of tedium and discordance. A clear and broad intelligence is infinitely patient of inferiority; but its very patience has its reaction in its own fatigue and silent irritation.
This lassitude came on her most in the long evenings whilst the Princess slumbered and she herself sat alone. She was not haunted by it when she was in the open air, or in the library, occupied with the reports or the requirements on her estates. But the evenings were lonely and tedious; they had not seemed so when the little boat had come away from the monastery, and the prayer and praise of Handel and Haydn, and the new-born glory of the Nibelungen tone-poems had filled the quiet twilight hours. It was in no way probable that the musician and she would ever meet again. She understood that his own delicacy and pride must perforce keep him out of Austria, and she, however much the Princess desired it, could never invite him there alone, and would not probably gather such a house-party at Hohenszalras as might again warrant her doing so.
Nothing was more unlikely, she supposed, than that she would ever hear again the touch that had awakened the dumb chords of the old painted spinet.
But circumstance, that master of the ceremonies, as Madame Brancka termed it, who directs themenuet de la courof life, and who often diverts himself by letting it degenerate into a dance of death, willed it otherwise. There was a dear friend of hers who was a dethroned and exiled queen. Their friendship was strong, tender, and born in childish days. On the part of Wanda, it had been deepened by the august adversity which impresses and attaches all noble natures. Herself born of a great race, and with the instincts of a ruling class hereditary in her, there was something sacred and awful in the fall of majesty. Her friend, stripped of all appanages of her rank, and deserted by nearly all who 'had so late sworn her allegiance, became more than ever dear; she became holy to her, and she would sooner have denied the request of a reigning sovereign than of one powerless to command or to rebuke. 'When this friend, who had been so hardly smitten by fate, sent her word that she was ill and would fain see her, she, therefore, never even hesitated as to obedience before the summons. It troubled and annoyed her; it came to her ill-timed and unexpected; and it was above all disagreeable to her, because it would take her to Paris. But it never occurred to her to send an excuse to this friend, who had no longer any power to say, 'I will,' but could only say, like common humanity, 'I hope.'
Within two hours of her reception of the summons she was on her way to Windisch-Matrey. The Princess did not accompany her; she intended to make as rapid a journey as possible without pausing on the way, and her great-aunt was too old and too delicate in health for such exertion.
'Though I would fain go and see that great Parisian aurist,' she said plaintively. 'My hearing is not what it used to be.'
'The great aurist shall come to you, dear mother,' said Wanda. 'I will bring him back with me.'
She travelled with a certain state, since she did not think that the moment of a visit to a dethroned sovereign was a fit time to lay ceremony aside. She took several of her servants and some of her horses with her, and journeyed by way of Munich and Strasburg.
Madame Ottilie was too glad she should go anywhere to offer opposition; and in her heart of hearts she thought of her favourite. He was in Paris; who knew what might happen?
It was midwinter, and the snow was deep on all the country, whether of mountain or of plain, which stretched between the Tauern and the French capital. But there was no great delay of the express, and in some forty hours the Countess von Szalras, with her attendants, and her horses with theirs, arrived at the Hôtel Bristol.
The noise, the movement, the brilliancy of the streets seemed a strange spectacle, after four years spent without leaving the woodland quiet and mountain solitudes of Hohenszalras.
She was angry with herself that, as she stood at the windows of her apartment, she almost unconsciously watched the faces of the crowd passing below, and felt a vague expectancy of seeing amongst them the face of Sabran.
She went that evening, to the modest hired house where the young and beautiful sovereign she came to visit had found a sorry refuge. It was a meeting full of pain to both. When they had last parted at the Hofburg of Vienna, the young queen had been in all the triumph and hope of brilliant nuptials; and at Hohenszalras, the people's Heilige Bela had been living, a happy boy, in all his fair promise.
Meanwhile, the news-sheets informed all their leaders that the Countess von Szalras was in Paris. Ambassadors and ambassadresses, princes and princesses, and a vast number of very great people, hastened to write their names at the Hôtel Bristol.
Amongst the cards left was that of Sabran. But he sent it; he did not go in person.
She refused all invitations, and declined almost all visits. She had come there only to see her friend, the Queen of Natalia. Paris, which loves anything new, talked a great deal about her; and its street crowds, which admires what is beautiful, began to gather before the doors at the hours when her black horses, driven Russian fashion, came fretting and flashing like meteors over the asphalte.
'Why did you bring your horses for so short a time?' said Madame Kaulnitz to her. 'You could, of course, have had any of ours.'
'I always like to have some of my horses with me,' she answered. 'I would have brought them all, only it would have looked so ostentatious; you know they are my children.'
'I do not see why you should not have other children,' said Madame Kaulnitz. 'It is quite inhuman that you will not marry.'
'I have never said that I will not. But I do not think it likely.'
Two days after her arrival, as she was driving down the Avenue de l'Impératrice, she saw Sabran on foot. She was driving slowly. She would have stopped her carriage if he had paused in his walk; but he did not, he only bowed low and passed on. It was almost rude, after the hospitality of Hohenszalras, but the rudeness pleased her. It spoke both of pride and of sensitiveness. It seemed scarcely natural, after their long hours of intercourse, that they should pass each other thus as strangers; yet it seemed impossible they should any more be friends. She did not ask herself why it seemed so, but she felt it rather by instinct than by reasoning.
She was annoyed to feel that the sight of him had caused a momentary emotion in her of mingled trouble and pleasure.
No one mentioned his name to her, and she asked no one concerning him. She spent almost all her time with the Queen of Natalia, and there were other eminent foreign personages in Paris at that period whose amiabilities she could not altogether reject, and she had only allowed herself fifteen days as the length of her sojourn, as Madame Ottilie was alone amidst the snow-covered mountains of the Tauern.
On the fifth day after her meeting with Sabran he sent another card of his to the hotel, and sent with it an immense basket of gilded osier filled with white lilac. She remembered having once said to him at Hohenszalras that lilac was her flower of preference. Her rooms were crowded with bouquets, sent her by all sorts of great people, and made of all kinds of rare blossoms, but the white lilac, coming in the January snows, touched her more than all those. She knew that his poverty was no fiction; and that great clusters of white lilac in midwinter in Paris meant much money.
She wrote a line or two in German, which thanked him for his recollection of her taste, and sent it to the Chamber. She did not know where he lived.
That evening she mentioned his name to her godfather, the Duc de Noira, and asked him if he knew it. The Duc, a Legitimist, a recluse, and a man of strong prejudices, answered at once.
'Of course I know it; he is one of us, and he has made a political position for himself within the last year.'
'Do you know him personally?'
'No, I do not. I see no one, as you are aware; I live in greater retirement than ever. But he bears an honourable name, and though I believe that, until lately, he was but aflâneur, he has taken a decided part this session, and he is a very great acquisition to the true cause.'
'It is surely very sudden, his change of front?'
'What change? He took no part in politics that ever I heard of; it is taken for granted that a Marquis de Sabran is loyal to his sole legitimate sovereign. I believe he never thought of public life; but they tell me that he returned from some long absence last autumn, an altered and much graver man. Then one of the deputies for his department died, and he was elected for the vacancy with no opposition.'
The Duc de Noira proceeded to speak of the political aspects of the time, and said no more.
Involuntarily, as she drove through the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, she thought of the intuitive comprehension, the half-uttered sympathy, the interchange of ideas,à demi-mots, which had made the companionship of Sabran so welcome to her in the previous summer. They had not always agreed, she often had not even approved him; but they had always understood one another, they had never needed to explain. She was startled to realise how much and how vividly she regretted him.
'If one could only be sure of his sincerity,' she thought, 'there would be few men living who would equal him.'
She did not know why she doubted his sincerity. Some natures have keen instincts like dogs. She regretted to doubt it; but the change in him seemed to her too rapid to be one of conviction. Yet the homage in it to herself was delicate and subtle. She would not have been a woman had it not touched her, and she was too honest with herself not to frankly admit in her own thoughts that she might very well have inspired a sentiment which would go far to change a nature which it entered and subdued. Many men had loved her; why not he?
She drew the whip over the flanks of her horses as she felt that mingled impatience and sadness with which sovereigns remember that they can never be certain they are loved for themselves, and not for all which environs them and lifts them up out of the multitude.
She was angry with herself when she felt that what interested her most during her Parisian sojourn was the report of the debates of the French Chamber in the French journals.
One night the Baron Kaulnitz spoke of Sabran in her hearing.
'He is the most eloquent of the Legitimist party,' he said to some one in her hearing. 'No one supposed that he had it in him; he was a mere idler, a mere man of pleasure, and it was at times said of something worse, but he has of late manifested great talent; it is displayed for a lost cause, but it is none the less admirable as talent goes.'
She heard what he said with pleasure.
Advantage was taken of her momentary return to the world to press on her the choice of a great alliance. Names as mighty as her own were suggested to her, and more than one great prince, of a rank even higher than hers, humbly solicited the honour of the hand which gave no caress except to a horse's neck, a dog's head, a child's curls. But she did not even pause to allow these proposals any consideration; she refused them all curtly, and with a sense of irritation.
'Have you sworn never to marry?' said the Duc de Noira, with much chagrin, receiving her answer for a candidate of his own to whom he was much attached.
'I never swear anything,' she answered. 'Oaths are necessary for people who do not know their own minds. I do know my own.'
'You know that you will never marry?'
'I hardly say that; but I shall never contract a mere alliance. It is horrible—that union eternal of two bodies and souls without sympathy, without fitness, without esteem, merely for sake of additional position or additional wealth.'
'It is not eternal! said the Duc, with a smile; 'and I can assure you that my friend adores you for yourself. You will never understand, Wanda, that you are a woman to inspire great love; that you would be sought for your face, for your form, for your mind, if you had nothing else.'
'I do not believe it.'
'Can you doubt at least that your cousin Egon——'
'Oh, pray spare me the name of Egon!' she said with unwonted irritation. 'I may surely be allowed to have left that behind me at home!'
It was a time of irritation and turbulence in Paris. The muttering of the brooding storm was visible to fine ears through the false stillness of an apparently serene atmosphere. She, who knew keen and brilliant politicians who were not French, saw the danger that was at hand for France which France did not see.
'They will throw down the glove to Prussia; and they will repent of it as long as the earth lasts,' she thought, and she was oppressed by her prescience, for war had cost her race dear; and she said to herself, 'When that liquid fire is set flowing who shall say where it will pause?'
She felt an extreme desire to converse with Sabran as she had done at home; to warn him, to persuade him, to hear his views and express to him her own; but she did not summon him, and he did not come. She did justice to the motive which kept him away, but she was not as yet prepared to go as far as to invite him to lay his scruples aside and visit her with the old frank intimacy which had brightened both their lives at the Hohenszalrasburg. It had been so different there; he had been a wanderer glad of rest, and she had had about her the defence of the Princess's presence, and the excuse of the obligations of hospitality. She reproached herself at times for hardness, for unkindness; she had not said a syllable to commend him for that abandonment of a frivolous life which was in itself so delicate and lofty a compliment to herself. He had obeyed her quite as loyally as knight ever did his lady, and she did not even say to him, 'It is well done.'
Wanda von Szalras—a daughter of brave men, and herself the bravest of women—was conscious that she was for once a coward. She was afraid of looking into her own heart.
She said to her cousin, when he paid his respects to her, 'I should like to hear a debate at the Chamber. Arrange it for me.'
He replied: 'At your service in that as in all things.'
The next day as she was about to drive out, about four o'clock, he met her at the entrance of her hotel.
'If you could come with me,' he said, 'you might hear something of interest to-day; there will be a strong discussion. Will you accept my carriage or shall I enter yours?'
What she heard when she reached the Chamber did not interest her greatly. There was a great deal of noise, of declamation, of personal vituperation, of verbose rancour; it did not seem to her to be eloquence. She had heard much more stately oratory in both the Upper and Lower Reichsrath, and much more fiery and noble eloquence at Buda Pesth. This seemed to her poor, shrill mouthing, which led to very little, and the disorder of the Assembly filled her with contempt.
'I thought it was the country of S. Louis!' she said, with a disdainful sigh, to Kaulnitz who answered:
'Cromwell is perhaps more wanted here than S. Louis.'
'Their Cromwell will always be a lawyer without clients, or a journalistsans le sou!' retorted the châtelaine of Hohenszalras.
When she had been there an hour or more she saw Sabran enter the hall and take his place. His height, his carriage, and his distinction of appearance made him conspicuous in a multitude, while the extreme fairness and beauty of his face were uncommon and striking.
'Here is S. Louis,' said the ambassador, with a little smile, 'or a son of S. Louis's crusaders at any rate. He is sure to speak. I think he speaks very well; one would suppose he had done nothing else all his life.'
After a time, when some speakers, virulent, over-eager, and hot in argument, had had their say, and a tumult had risen and been quelled, and the little bell had rung violently for many minutes, Sabran entered the tribune. He had seen the Austrian minister and his companion.
His voice, at all times melodious, had a compass which could fill with ease the large hall in which he was. He appeared to use no more effort than if he were conversing in ordinary tones, yet no one there present lost a syllable that he said. His gesture was slight, calm, and graceful; his language admirably chosen, and full of dignity.
His mission of the moment was to attack the ministry upon their foreign policy, and he did so with exceeding skill, wit, irony, and precision. His eloquence was true eloquence, and was not indebted in any way to trickery, artifice, or over-ornament. He spoke with fire, force, and courage, but his tranquillity never gave way for a moment. His speech was brilliant and serene, in utter contrast to the turbulent and florid declamation which had preceded him. There was great and prolonged applause when he had closed with a peroration stately and persuasive; and when Emile Ollivier rose to reply, that optimistic statesman was plainly disturbed and at a loss.
Sabran resumed his seat without raising his eyes to where the Countess von Szalras sat. She remained there during the speech of the minister, which was a lame and laboured one, for he had been pierced between the joints of his armour. Then she rose and went away with her escort.
'What do you think of S. Louis?' said he, jestingly.
'I think he is very eloquent and very convincing, but I do not think he is at all like a Frenchman.'
'Well, he is aBreton bretonnant' rejoined the ambassador. 'They are always more in earnest and more patrician.'
'If he be sincere, if he be only sincere,' she thought: that doubt pursued her. She had a vague sense that it was all only a magnificent comedy after all. Could apathy and irony change all so suddenly to conviction and devotion? Could the scoffer become so immediately the devotee? Could he care, really care, for those faiths of throne and altar which he defended with so much eloquence, so much earnestness? And yet, why not? These faiths were inherited things with him; their altars must have been always an instinct with him; for their sake his fathers had lived and died. What great wonder, then, that they should have been awakened in him after a torpor which had been but the outcome of those drugs with which the world is always so ready to lay asleep the soul?
They had now got out into the corridors, and as they turned the corner of one, they came straight upon Sabran.
'I congratulate you,' said Wanda, as she stretched her hand out to him with a smile.
As he took it and bowed over it he grew very pale.
'I have obeyed you,' he murmured, 'with less success than I could desire.'
'Do not be too modest, you are a great orator. You know how to remain calm whilst you exalt, excite, and influence others.'
He listened in silence, then inquired for the health of his kind friend the Princess Ottilie.
'She is well,' answered Wanda, 'and loses nothing of her interest in you. She reads all your speeches with approval and pleasure; not the less approval and pleasure because her political creed has become yours.'
He coloured slightly.
'What did you tell me?' he said. 'That if I had no convictions, I could do no better than abide by the traditions of the Sabrans? If their cause were the safe and reigning one I would not support it for mere expediency, but as it is——'
'Your motives cannot be selfish ones,' she answered a little coldly. 'Selfishness would have led you to profess Bakouinism; it is the popular profession, and a socialistic aristocrat is always attracted and flattering to theplebs.'
'You are severe,' he said, with a flush on his cheek. 'I have no intention of playing Philip Egalité now or in any after time.'
She did hot reply; she was conscious of unkindness and want of encouragement in her own words. She hesitated a little, and then said:
'Perhaps you will have time to come and see me? I shall remain here a few days more.'
The ambassador joined them at that moment, and was too well bred to display any sign of the supreme astonishment he felt at finding the Countess von Szalras and the new deputy already known to each other.
'He is a favourite of Aunt Ottilie's,' she explained to him as, leaving Sabran, they passed down the corridor. 'Did I not tell you? He had an accident on the Umbal glacier last summer, and in his convalescence we saw him often.'
'I recollect that your aunt asked me about him. Excuse me; I had quite forgotten,' said the ambassador, understanding now why she had wanted to go to the Chamber.
The next day Sabran called upon her. There were with her three or four great ladies. He did not stay long, and was never alone with her. She felt an impatience of her friends' presence, which irritated her as it awoke in her. He sent her a second basket of white lilac in the following forenoon. She saw no more of him.
She found herself wondering about the manner of his life. She did not even know in what street he lived; she passed almost all her time with the Queen of Natalia, who did not know him, and was still so unwell that she received no one.
She was irritated with herself because it compromised her consistency to desire to stay on in Paris, and she did so desire; and she was one of those to whom a consciousness of their own consistency is absolutely necessary as a qualification for self-respect. There are natures that fly contentedly from caprice to caprice, as humming-birds from blossom to bud; but if she had once become changeable she would have become contemptible to herself, she would hardly have been herself any longer. With some anger at her own inclinations she resisted them, and when her self-allotted fifteen days were over, she did not prolong them by so much as a dozen hours. There was an impatience in her which was wholly strange to her serene and even temper. She felt a vague dissatisfaction with herself; she had been scarcely generous, scarcely cordial to him; she failed to approve her own conduct, and yet she scarcely saw where she had been at fault.
The Kaulnitz and many other high persons were at the station in the chill, snowy, misty day to say their last farewells. She was wrapped in silver-fox fur from head to foot; she was somewhat pale; she felt an absurd reluctance to go away from a city which was nothing to her. But her exiled friend was recovering health, and Madame Ottilie was all alone; and though she was utterly her own mistress, far more so than most women, there were some things she could not do. To stay on in Paris seemed to her to be one of them.
The little knot of high personages said their last words; the train began slowly to move upon its way; a hand passed through the window of the carriage and laid a bouquet of lilies of the valley on her knee.
'Adieu!' said Sabran very gently, as his eyes met hers once more.
Then the express train rolled faster on its road, and passed out by the north-east, and in a few moments had left Paris far behind it.
CONTENTSPROEM.CHAPTER I.CHAPTER II.CHAPTER IIICHAPTER IV.CHAPTER V.CHAPTER VI.CHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIII.CHAPTER IX.CHAPTER X.