WANDA
BY
OUIDA
_'Doch!--alles was dazu mich trieb_;
_Gott!--war so gut, ach, war so lieb!'_
Goethe
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. III.
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICADILLY
1883
WANDA.
CHAPTER XXIX.
When they came home from their tour amidst the mines of Galicia and
the plains of Hungary, and from their reception amongst the adoring
townsfolk of restored Idrac, the autumn was far advanced, and the long
rains and the wild winds of October had risen, making of every brook a
torrent.
On their return she found intelligence from Paris that a friend of
her father's, and her own godfather, the Duc de Noira, had died,
bequeathing her his gallery of pictures, and his art collection of
the eighteenth century, which were both famous. The Duc had been a
Legitimist and a hermit. He had been unmarried, and had spent all the
latter years of his life in amassing treasures of art, for which he had
no heir of his own blood to care a jot. The bequest was a very precious
one, and her presence in Paris was requested. Regretful for herself
to leave Hohenszalras, she perceived that to Sabran the tidings were
welcome. Moved by an unselfish impulse she said at once:
'Go alone; go instead of me; your presence will be the same as mine.
Paris will amuse you more if you are by yourself, and you will be so
happy amongst all those Lancrets and Fragonards, those Reiseiners
and Gauthières. The collection is a marvel, but entirely of the Beau
Siècle. You never saw it? No! I think the Duc never opened his doors
to anyone save to half a dozen old tried friends, and he had a horror
of turning his _salons_ into showrooms. If you think well, we will
leave it all as it is, buying the house if we can. All that eighteenth
century _bibeloterie_ would not suit this place, and I should like to
keep it all as he kept it; that is the only true respect to show to a
legacy.'
Sabran hesitated; he was tempted, yet he was half reluctant to yield to
the temptation. He felt that he would willingly be by himself awhile,
yet he loved his wife too passionately to quit her without pain. His
own conscience made her presence at times oppress and trouble him, yet
he had never lost the half-religious adoration with which she had first
inspired him. He suggested a compromise--why should they not winter in
Paris?
She was about to dissent, for of all seasons in the Tauern she loved
the winter best; but when she looked at him she saw such eager
anticipation on his face that she suppressed her own wishes unuttered.
'We will go, if you like,' she said, without any hesitation or
reluctance visible. 'I dare say we can find some pretty house. Aunt
Ottilie will be pleased; there is nothing here which cannot do without
us for a time, we have such trusty stewards; only I think it would be
more change for you if you went alone.'
'No!' he said; 'separation is a sort of death; do not let us tempt fate
by it. Life is so short at its longest; it is ingratitude to lose an
hour that we can spend together.'
'There was never such a lover since Petrarca,' she said, with a smile.
'Nay, you eclipse him: he was never tried by marriage.'
But though he jested at it, his great love for her seemed like a
beautiful light about her life. What did his state-secret matter? What
did it matter what cause had led him to avoid political life?--he loved
her so well.
The following month they were in Paris, having found an hotel in the
Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great sunny garden; and when they
were fairly installed there, the Princess and the children and the
horses followed them, and their arrival made an event of great interest
and importance in the city which of all others in the world it is
hardest thus to impress.
The Countess von Szalras, a notability always, was celebrated just
then as the inheritress of the coveted Noira collection, which it had
been fondly hoped would have gone to the hammer: and Sabran, popular
always, and not forgotten here, where most things and people are
forgotten in a week, was courted, flattered, and welcomed by men and
by women; and as he rode down the Allée des Acacias, or entered the
Mirlitons, he felt himself at home. His beautiful wife, his beautiful
children, his incomparable horses, his marvellous good fortune were the
talk of all those who had already left their country-houses for the
winter _rentrée_, and attained a publicity, beginning with the great
Szalras pearls and ending with the babies' white donkeys, which was the
greatest of all possible offences to her; she abhorred and contemned
publicity with the sensitiveness of a delicate temper and the contempt
of a scornful patrician.
To Sabran it was not so offensive; there was the Slav in him, which
loved display, and was not ill-pleased by notoriety. All this
admiration around them made him feel that his life after all had been
a great success, that he had drawn prizes in the lottery of fate which
all men envied him; it helped him to forget Egon Vàsàrhely. He had
never so nearly felt affection for Bela as when lines of men and women
stood still to watch the handsome child gallop on his pony down the
avenues of the Bois.
'Life is after all like baccara or billiards,' he said to himself.
'It is of no use winning unless there be a _galerie_ to look on and
applaud.'
And then he felt ashamed of the poorness and triviality of the thought,
which was not one he would have expressed to his wife. That very
morning, when she had read a long flattery of herself in a journal of
fashion, she had cast the sheet from her with disgust on every line of
her face.
'We are safe from _that_, at least, in the Iselthal,' she had said.
'Cannot you make them understand that we are not public artists to
need _réclames_, nor yet sovereigns to be compelled to submit to the
microscope? Is this the meaning of civilisation--to make privacy
impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?'
He had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not done so.
He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.
'They will put this in the papers!' said Bela, when the snow came and
he had his sledge out for the first time with four little Hungarian
ponies.
'That is the poison of cities!' said Wanda, as she heard him. 'Who can
have been so foolish as to tell him of the papers?'
'Your heir, my dear, will never want for reporters of any flattery,'
said his father. 'It is as well he should run the gauntlet of them
early.'
Bela listened, and said to his brother a little later: 'I like Paris.
Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the print, and then
they want to see us.'
'What good is that?' said Gela. 'I like home. They all of them _know_
us; they don't want to _see_ us. That is much better.'
'No, it isn't,' said Bela. 'One drives all day long at home, and there
is nothing but the trees; here the trees are all people, and the people
talk of us, and the people want to _be_ us.'
'But they love us at home,' said Gela.
'That does not matter,' said Bela with hauteur.
Wanda called the children to her.
'Bela,' she said gently, 'do you know that once, not so very long ago,
there was a little boy here in Paris very much like you, with golden
hair and velvet coat like yours, and he was called the Dauphin, and
when he went out with his servants, as you do, the people envied him,
and talked of him, and put in print what he did each day? The people
wanted to _be_ him, as you say, but they did not love him--poor little
child!--because they envied him so. And in a very little while--a
very, very little while--because it was envy and not love, they put
the Dauphin in prison, and they cut off his golden hair, and gave
him nothing but bread and water and filthy straw, and locked him up
all alone till he died. That is the use of being envied in Paris--or
anywhere else. Gela is right. It is better when people love us.'
The next day, as Bela drove in his sledge down the white avenues
through the staring crowds, his little fair face was very grave under
its curls; he thought of the Dauphin.
When the weather opened, Wanda took him and his brother to Versailles
and Trianon, and told them more of that saddest of all earthly
histories of fallen greatness. Gela sobbed aloud; Bela was silent and
grew pale.
'I hate Paris,' he said very slowly, as they went back to it in the red
close of the wintry afternoon.
'Do not hate Paris. Do not hate anything or anyone,' said his mother
softly; 'but love your own home and your own people, and be grateful
for them.'
Bela lifted his little cap and made the sign of the Cross, as he did
when he saw anything holy. 'I am the Dauphin at home,' he thought; and
he felt the tears in his eyes, though he never would cry as Gela did.
So she gave them her simples as antidotes to the city's poison, and
occupied herself with her children, with the poor around her, with the
various details of her distant estates, and paid but little heed to
that artificial world which, when she heeded it, offended and irritated
her. To please Sabran she went to a few great houses and to the opera,
and gave many entertainments herself, happy that he was happy in it,
but not otherwise interested in the life around her, or moved by the
homage of it.
'It is much more my jewels than it is myself that they stare at,' she
assured him, when he told her of the admiration which she elicited
wherever she appeared. 'Believe me, if you put my pearls or my
diamonds on Madame Chose or Baroness Niemand, they would gather and
gaze quite as much.'
He laughed.
'Last night I think you wore no ornaments except a few tea-roses, and I
saw them follow you just the same. It is very odd that you never seem
to understand that you are a beautiful woman.'
'I am glad to be so in your eyes, if I never shall be in my own. As for
that popularity of society, it never commended itself to me. It has too
strong a savour of the mob.'
'When you are so proud to the world why are you so humble to me?'
She was silent a moment, then said:
'I think when one loves any other very much, one becomes for him
altogether unlike what one is to the world. As for being proud, I have
never fairly made out whether my pride is humility or my humility
pride, and none of my confessors have ever been able to tell me. I
assure you I have searched my heart in vain.'
A shadow passed over his face; he thought that there even would be
pride enough to send him out for ever from her side if she knew----
One day she suggested to him that he should visit Romaris.
'Now you are near for so long a time, surely you should go,' she urged.
'It is not well never to see your poor people. The priest is a good
man, indeed; but he cannot altogether make up for your absence.'
He answered with some irritation that they were not his people. All
the land had been parcelled out, and nothing remained to the name of
Sabran except a strip of the sea-shore and one old half ruined tower:
he could not see that he had any duties or obligations there. She did
not insist, because she never pursued a theme which appeared unwelcome;
but in herself she wondered at the dislike which was in him towards his
Breton hamlet, wondered that he did not wish one of his sons to bear
its title, wondered that he did not desire the children to see once,
at least, the sea-nest of his forefathers. It was more effort to her
than usual to restrain herself from pressing questions upon him. But
she did forbear; and as a consolation to her conscience sent to the
Curé of Romaris a sum of money for the poor, which was so large that it
astounded and bewildered the holy man by the weight of responsibility
it laid on him.
The indifference shocked her the more because of the profound
conviction, in which she had been reared, of the duties of the noble
to his poorer brethren, and the ties of mutual affection which bound
together her and her people's interests.
'The weapon of our order against the Socialist is duty,' she had once
said to him.
He, more sceptical, had told her that no weapon, not even that anointed
one, can turn aside the devilish hate of envy. But she held to her
creed, and strove to rear her children in its tenets. It always seemed
to her that the Cross before which the fiend shrinks cowering in
'Faust' is but a symbol of the power of a noble life to force even
hatred to its knees.
She did not care for this season in Paris, but she did not let him
perceive any dissatisfaction in her. She made her own interests out of
the arts and charity; she bought the Hôtel Noira, and left everything
as the Duc had left it; she found pleasure in intercourse with her
royal exiled friends, and left her husband his own entire liberty of
action.
'Are you never jealous?' said her royal friend to her once. 'He is so
much liked--so much made love to--I wonder you are not jealous!'
'I?' she echoed: and it seemed to her friend as if in that one pronoun
she had said volumes. 'Jealous!'
She repeated the word as she drove home alone that day, and almost
wondered what it meant. Who could be to him what she was? Who could
dethrone her from that 'great white throne' to which his adoration had
raised her? If his senses ever strayed, his soul would never swerve
from its loyalty.
When she reached home that afternoon she found a card, on which was
written with a pencil, in German:
'So sorry not to find you. I am in Paris to see my doctor. Zdenka has
taken my service at Court. I will come to you to-morrow.'
The card was Madame Brancka's.