WANDA
BY
OUIDA
_'Doch!--alles was dazu mich trieb_;
_Gott!--war so gut, ach, war so lieb!_'
Goethe
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1873
TO
'A PERFECT WOMAN, NOBLY PLANN'D'
WALPURGA, LADY PAGET
NÉE
COUNTESS VON HOHENTHAL
This book is inscribed
IN ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION
WANDA.
PROEM.
Doch--alles was dazu mich trieb,
Gott! war so gut! ach, war so lieb!--GOETHE.
Towards the close of a summer's day in Russia a travelling carriage was
compelled to pause before a little village whilst a smith rudely mended
its broken wheel. The hamlet was composed of a few very poor dwellings
grouped around a large low horse-shoe shaped building, which was the
manorial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and dropping
to decay; its many windows were barred and shuttered; the grass grew in
its courts, and flowering weeds had time to seed and root themselves
on its whitewashed walls.
Around it the level ground was at this season covered with green
wheat, spreading for leagues on leagues, and billowing and undulating
under the wind that blew from the steppes, like the green sea which it
resembled. Farther on were woods of larch and clumps of willow; and in
the distance, across the great plain to the westward, rolled a vast
shining river, here golden with choking sand, here dun-coloured with
turbid waves, here broken with islets and swamps of reeds, where the
singing swan and the pelican made their nests.
It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the Volga rolls
its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was bleak and mournful,
though for many leagues the green corn spread and caught the timid
sunshine and the shadow of the clouds. There were a few stunted
willows near the house, and a few gashed pines; a dried-up lake was
glittering with crystals of salt; the domes and minarets of a little
city rose above the sky line far away to the south-east; and farther
yet northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains; the wall of
stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All was desolate,
melancholy, isolated, even though the season was early summer; but the
vastness of the view, the majesty of the river, the suggestion of the
faint blue summits where the Urals rose against the sky, gave solemnity
and a melancholy charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous and
tedious.
Prince Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff was in Russia because he was on the
point of marriage with a great heiress of the southern provinces, and
was travelling across from Orenburg to the Krimea, where his betrothed
bride awaited him in the summer palace of her fathers. Russia, with the
exception of Petersburg, was an unknown and detested place to him; his
errand was distasteful, his journey tedious, his temper irritated; and
when a wheel of his _telegue_ came off in this miserable village of
the Northern Volga district, he was in no mood to brook with patience
such an accident. He paced to and fro restlessly as he looked round on
the few and miserable cabins of a district that had been continually
harried and fired through many centuries by Kossack and Tartar.
'Whose house is that?' he said to his servant, pointing to the great
white building.
The servant humbly answered, 'Little father, it is thine.'
'Mine!' echoed Paul Zabaroff. He was astonished; then he laughed, as he
remembered that he had large properties around the city of Kazán.
The whole soil was his own as far as his eyes could reach, till the
great river formed its boundary. He did not even know his steward here;
the villagers did not know him. He had been here once only, a single
night, in the late autumn time, long, long before, He was a man in
whose life incidents followed each other too rapidly for remembrance
to have any abiding-place or regret any home in his mind. He had
immense estates, north, south, east, west; his agents forwarded him
the revenues of each, or as much of the revenues as they chose him to
enjoy, when they themselves were satisfied with their gains.
When he was not in Paris he was in Petersburg, and he was an
impassioned and very daring gamester. These great silent houses, in
the heart of fir woods, in the centre of grass plains, or on the banks
of lonely rivers, were all absolutely unknown to and indifferent to
him. He was too admired and popular at his Court ever to have had the
sentence passed upon him to retire to his estates; but had he been
forced to do so he would have been as utterly an exile in any one of
the houses of his fathers as if he had been consigned to Tobolsk itself.
He looked around him now, an absolute stranger in the place where
he was as absolutely lord. All these square leagues he learned were
his, all these miserable huts, all these poor lives; for it was in
a day before the liberation of the serfs had been accomplished by
that deliverer whom Russia rewarded with death. A vague remembrance
came over him as he gazed around: he had been here once before. The
villagers, learning that it was their master who had arrived thus
unexpectedly in their midst, came timidly around and made their humble
prostrations: the steward who administered the lands was absent that
day in the distant town. He was entreated to go within his own deserted
dwelling, but he refused: the wheel was nearly mended, and he reflected
that a house abandoned for so long was probably damp and in disorder,
cold and comfortless. He was impatient to be gone, and urged the smith
to his best and quickest by the promise of many roubles. The _moujiks_,
excited and frightened, hastened to him with the customary offerings
of bread and salt; he touched the gifts carelessly; spoke to them with
good-humoured, indifferent carelessness; and asked if they had any
grievances to complain of, without listening to the answer. They had
many, but they did not dare to say so, knowing that their lord would be
gone in five minutes, but that the heavy hand of his steward would lie
for ever upon them.
Soon the vehicle was repaired, and Paul Zabaroff ceased his restless
walk to and fro the sandy road, and prepared to depart from this weary
place of detention. But, from an _isba_ that stood apart, beneath one
of the banks of sand that broke the green level of the corn, the dark
spare figure of an old woman came, waving bony hands upon the air, and
crying with loud voice to the _barine_ to wait.
'It is only mad Maritza,' said the people; yet they thought Maritza
had some errand with their lord, for they fell back and permitted her
to approach him as she cried aloud: 'Let me come! Let me come! I would
give him back the jewel he left here ten years ago!'
She held a young boy by the hand, and dragged him with her as she spoke
and moved. She was a dark woman, once very handsome, with white hair
and an olive skin, and a certain rugged grandeur in her carriage; she
was strong and of strong purpose; she made her way to Paul Zabaroff as
he stood by the carriage, and she fell at his feet and touched the dust
with her forehead, and forced the child beside her to make the same
obeisance.
'All hail to my lord, and heaven be with him! The poor Maritza comes
to give him back what he left.'
Prince Zabaroff smiled in a kindly manner, being a man often careless,
but not cruel.
'Nay, good mother, keep it, whatever it be: you have earned the right.
Is it a jewel, you say?'
'It is a jewel.'
'Then keep it. I had forgotten even that I was ever here.'
'Ay! the great lord had forgot.'
She rose up with the dust on her white hair, and thrust forward a young
boy, and put her hands on the boy's shoulders and made him kneel.
'There is the jewel, Paul Ivanovitch. It is time the Gospodar kept it
now.'
Paul Zabaroff did not understand. He looked down at the little serf
kneeling in the dust.
'A handsome child. May the land have many such to serve the Tsar. Is he
your grandson, good mother?'
The boy was beautiful, with long curling fair hair and a rosy mouth,
and eyes like the blue heavens in a night of frost. His limbs were
naked, and his chest. He had a shirt of sheepskin.
Old Maritza kept her hands on the shoulders of the kneeling child.
'He is thy son, O lord!'
'My son!'
'Ay. The lord has forgotten. The lord tarried but one night, but he
bade my Sacha serve drink to him in his chamber, and on the morrow,
when he left, Sacha wept. The lord has forgotten!'
Paul Zabaroff stood silent, slowly remembering. In the boy's face
looking up at him, half-sullenly, half-timidly, he saw the features of
his own race mingled with something much more beautiful, oriental, and
superb.
Yes: he had forgotten; quite forgotten; but he remembered now.
The people stood around, remembering better than he, but thinking it no
wrong in him to have forgotten, because he was their ruler and lord,
and did that which seemed right to him; and when he had gone away, in
Sacha's bosom there had been a thick roll of gold.
'Where is--the mother?' he said at length.
Old Maritza made answer:
'My Sacha died four summers ago. Always Sacha hoped that the lord might
some day return.'
Prince Zabaroff's cheek reddened a little with pain.
'Fool! why did you not marry her?' he said with impatience. 'There
were plenty of men. I would have given more dowry.'
'Sacha would not wed. What the lord had honoured she thought holy.'
'Poor soul!' muttered Paul Zabaroff; and he looked again at the boy,
who bore his own face, and was as like him as an eaglet to an eagle.
'Do you understand what we say?'
The boy answered sullenly, 'I understand.' 'What is your name?'
'I am Vassia.'
'And what do you do?'
'I do nothing.'
'Are you happy?'
'What is that? I do not know.'
Prince Zabaroff was silent.
'Rise up, since you are my son,' he said at length.
The boy rose.
He was sullen, shy, tameless, timid, like a young animal from the pine
woods. The old woman took her hands off his shoulders.
'I have delivered the jewel to the lord that owns it. I have done
Sacha's will.'
Then she turned herself round and covered her face, and went towards
her home.
The child stood, half-fierce, half-fearful, like a dog which an old
master drives away, and which fears the new one.
'These jewels are as many as the sands of the sea, and as worthless,'
said Paul Zabaroff with a slight smile.
Nevertheless, he resolved, since Maritza spoke truth, that the boy
should be cared for and well taught, and have all that gold could get
for him, and be sent away out from Russia; for in Russia he was a serf.
The boy's hair hung over his eyes, which were hungrily watching the
dark lean figure of the woman as it went away through the tall corn to
the white wood hut that stood alone in the fields. He dimly understood
that his life was being changed for him, but how he knew not. He wanted
to go home with Maritza to his nest of moss, where his bear-cubs slept
with him by night and played with him at dawn.
'Farewell,' said Paul Zabaroff, and he touched his son's cheek with his
hand.
'You are magnificently handsome, my poor child; indeed, who knows
what you will be?--a jewel or only a toad's eye?' he said dreamily;
then he sprang up behind his horses, and was borne away through the
fast-falling shades of the evening, leaving behind him the boy Vassia
and a little rough mound of nameless grass, which he had never seen,
and which was Sacha's grave.
The four fiery horses that bore the _telegue_ dashed away with it in
the sunlight, scattering the sand in yellow clouds, and the village
on the Volga plains beheld its lord never more in life. The boy stood
still, and looked after it with a sombre anger on his beautiful fair
Circassian face.
'You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia,' said the men to him
with envy. The child could not have expressed the vague mute wrath and
shame that stirred together in him, but he turned from them without a
word, and ran fleet as a roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He
loved his great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost
passion, though it was silent and almost unconscious of itself. She
never checked him, beat him, or cursed him as the other women often
did their children. She did her best by him, though they dwelt in a
miserable little _isba_, that often in winter time was covered up with
the snow like a bear's hole, and in summer, the fierce brief parching
summer of north-east Russia, was as hot as a scorched eye under a
sun-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to him. He was
loved and he was free: childhood wants nothing more; Maritza was a
Persian woman. Years and years before, when she had been in her youth,
she had come from the Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are
alike alive with the leaping naphtha of the Ghebir worship: she had
been born within the iron gates of Derbent, of Persian parentage, and
she had known war and capture and violence, and had had many troubles,
many privations, many miseries before she had found herself stranded in
her old age, with her grandchild, in this little desolate village on
the sand-bank by the Volga.
She was very poor; she had an evil reputation: nothing evil was ever
really traced to her, but she had Oriental faiths and traditions
and worshipped fire, or so said her enemies the black clergy of the
scattered villages and their ready believers. Never did Maritza light a
lamp at nightfall, but her neighbours saw in the act a devil worship.
She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor; she was hated
accordingly. When her granddaughter Sacha bore a child that was
the offspring of Prince Paul Zabaroff, though she cursed him, the
neighbours envied her and begrudged her such an honour.
Maritza had brought up the young Vassia with little tenderness, yet
with a great yearning over the boy, with his pure Persian face and
his beautiful fair body, like a pearl. The uttermost she wished for
him was that he should grow up a raftsman or a fisherman on the Volga
water; all that she dreaded was that the Kossacks would take him and
put a lance in his hand and have him slain in war, as in the old stern
days of her youth her lovers had been taken by the battle-god, that
devoured them one by one, and her sons after them.
She never gave a thought to the boy's parentage as of possible use to
him, but she always said to herself, 'If Paul Zabaroff ever come back,
then shall he know his son,' and meanwhile the boy was happy, though
he had not known the meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny
Volga in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts go down
it, and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which took the
condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a gang of such captives
would go by on foot and chained; miserable exceedingly, wounded,
exhausted, doomed to twelve months' foot-sore travel ere they reached
the endless darkness of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual
frost. He watched them; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity nor
pity as he lay on the tall rough grass, and they moved by him on the
dusty, flint-strewn, ill-made road towards that chain of blue hills
which marked their future home and their eternal grave. For sport the
boy had the bear, the wolf, the blue fox, the wild hare, in the long
wintertime; in the brief summer he helped chase the pelican and the
swan along the sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves.
He was keen of eye and swift of foot: the men of his native village
were always willing to have his company, child though he was. He was
fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder still of sport; once he
risked his own life to save a stork and her nest on a burning roof.
When asked why he did it, he who choked the cygnet and snared the cub,
he could not say: he was ashamed of his own tenderness.
He wanted no other life than this rude freedom, but one day, a month or
more after Paul Zabaroff had passed through the country, there came to
the door of Maritza's hut a stranger, who displayed to her eyes, which
could not read, a letter with the Prince's seal and signature. He said:
'I am sent to take away the boy who is called Vassia.'
The Persian woman bowed her head as before a headsman's glaive.
'It is the will of God,' she said.
But the time came when Vassia, grown to man's estate, thought that
devils rather than gods had meddled with him then.
'Send him to a great school; send him out of Russia; spare no cost;
make him a gentleman,' Paul Zabaroff had said to his agents when he
had seen the son of Sacha, and he had been obeyed. The little fierce
half-naked boy who in frost was wrapped in wolf-fur and looked like a
little wild beast, had been taken from the free, headstrong, barbaric
life of the Volga plains, where he was under no law and knew no rule,
and passionately loved the river and the chase, and the great silent
snow-wrapt world of his birth, and was sent to a famous and severe
college near Paris, to the drill, and the class, and the uniform, and
the classic learning, and the tape-bound, hard, artificial routine of
mechanical education. The pride, of the Oriental and the subtlety of
the Slav were all he brought with him as arms in the unequal combat
with an unsympathetic crowd.
For a year's time he was insulted, tormented, ridiculed; in another
twelve months he was let alone; in a third year he was admired and
feared. All the while his heart was bursting within him with the agony
of home-sickness and revolt; but he gave no sign of either. Only at
nights, when the others of his chamber were all sleeping, he would slip
out of bed and stare up at the stars, which did not look the same as
he had known, and think of Maritza and of the bear-cubs, and of the
Volga's waters bearing the wild white swans upon their breast; and then
he would sob his very soul out in silence.
He had been entered upon the books of the college under the name
of Vassia Kazán; Kazán having been the place at which he had been
baptised, the golden-domed, many-towered, half Asiatic city which
was seen afar off from the little square window in Maritza's hut.
High influence and much gold had persuaded the principal of a great
college--the Lycée Clovis, situated between Paris and Versailles--not
to inquire too closely into the parentage of this beautiful little
savage from the far north. Russia still remains dim, distant, and
mysterious to the western mind; among his tutors and comrades it was
taken for granted that he was some young barbarian noble, and the
child's own lips were shut as close as if the ice of his own land had
frozen them.
Eight years later, on another day when wheat was ripe and willows
waved in summer sunshine, a youth lay asleep with his head on an open
Lucretius in the deserted playground of a French college. The place
of recreation was a dusty gravelled square; there were high stone
walls all round it, and a few poplars stood in it white with dust.
It was August, and all the other scholars were away; he alone had
been forgotten; he was used to being forgotten. He was not dull or
sorrowful, as other lads are when left in vacation time alone. He had
many arts and pastimes, and he was a scholar by choice, if a capricious
one, and he had a quick and facile tact which taught him how to have
his own way always; and on many a summer night, when his teachers
believed him safe sleeping, he was out of college, and away dancing and
singing and laughing at students' halls, and in the haunts of artists,
and at the little theatre beyond the barrier, and he had never been
found out, and would have cared but little if he had been. And he slept
now with his fair forehead leaning on Lucretius, and a drowsy, heavy
heat around him, filled with the hum of flies and gnats. He did not
dream of the heat and the insects; he did not even dream of the saucy
beauty at the barrier ball the night before, who had kicked cherries
out of his mouth with her blue-shod feet, and kissed him on his curls.
He dreamt of a little, low, dark hut; of an old woman that knelt before
a brazen image; of slumbering bear-cubs in a nest of hay; of a winter
landscape, white and shining, that stretched away in an unbroken level
of snow to the sea that half the year was ice. He dreamed of these,
and, dreaming, sighed and woke. He thought he stood on the frozen sea,
and the ice broke, and the waters swallowed him.
It was nothing; only the voice of his tutor calling him. He was
summoned to the Principal of the Lycée: a rare honour. He rose, a
slender, tall, beautiful youth, in the dark close-fitting costume
of the institute. He shook the dust off his uniform and his curls,
shut his book, and went within the large white prison-like building
which had been his home since he had left the lowly _isba_ among the
sandhills and the blowing corn by Volga.
The Principal was sitting in one of his private chambers, a grim,
dark, book-lined chamber; he held an open letter in his hand, which
he had read and re-read. He was a clever man, and unscrupulous and
purchasable; but he was not without feeling, and he was disquieted, for
he had a painful office to fulfil.
When the youth obeyed his summons he looked up and shaded his eyes
with his hand. He hesitated, looking curiously at the young man's
attitude, which had an easy grace in it, and some hauteur visible under
a semblance of respect.
The Principal took up the open letter: 'I regret, I grieve, to tell
you,' he said slowly, 'your patron and friend, the Prince Zabaroff, has
died suddenly!'
The face of Vassia Kazán grew very pale, but very cold. He said nothing.
'He died quite suddenly,' continued the director of the college; 'a
blood-vessel broke in the brain, after great fatigue in hunting; he was
upon one of his estates in White Russia.'
The son of Paul Zabaroff was still silent. His master wished that he
would show some emotion.
'It was he who placed you here--was at all costs for your education. I
suppose you are aware of that?' he continued, with some embarrassment.
Vassia Kazán bowed and still said nothing. He might have been made of
ice or of marble for any sign that he gave. He might only have heard
that an unknown man had died in the street.
'You were placed here by him--at least, by his agents; you were the son
of a dead friend, they said. I did not inquire closer--payments were
always made in advance.'
He passed his hand a little confusedly over his eyes, for he felt a
little shame; his college was of high repute, and the agents of Prince
Zabaroff had placed sums in his hands, to induce him to deviate from
his rules, larger than he would have cared to confess.
The boy was silent.
'If he would only speak!' thought his master. 'He must know--he must
know.'
But the son of the dead Zabaroff did not speak.
'I am sorry to say,' resumed his master, still with hesitation, 'I am
very sorry to say that the death of the Prince being thus sudden and
thus unforeseen, his agents write me that there are no instructions, no
arrangement, no testament, in short--you will understand what I mean;
you will understand that, in point of fact, there is nothing for you,
there is no one to pay anything any longer.'
He paused abruptly; the fair face of the boy grew a shade paler, that
was all. He bore the shock without giving any sign.
'Is he made of ice and steel?' thought the old man, who had been proud
of him as his most brilliant pupil.
'It pains me to give you such terrible intelligence,' he muttered; 'but
it is my duty not to conceal it an hour. You are quite--penniless. It
is very sad.'
The boy smiled slightly; it was not a smile for so young a face.
'He has given me learning; he need not have done that,' he said
carelessly. The words sounded grateful, but it was not gratitude that
glanced from his eyes.
'I believe I am a serf in Russia?' he added, after a short silence.
'I do not know at all,' muttered the Principal, who felt ill at ease
and ashamed of himself for having taken for eight years the gold of
Prince Paul.
'I cannot tell--lawyers would tell you--I am not sure at all; indeed, I
know nothing of your history; but you are young and friendless. You are
a brilliant scholar, but you are not fit for work. What will you do, my
poor lad?'
The boy did not respond to the kindness that was in the tone, and he
resented the pity there was in it.
'That will be my affair alone,' he said, still carelessly and very
haughtily.
'All is paid up to the New Year,' said his master, feeling restless and
dissatisfied. 'There is no haste--I would not turn you from my roof.
You are a brilliant classic--you might be a teacher here, perhaps?'
The youth smiled; then he said coldly:
'You are very good. I had better go away at once. I should wish to be
away before the others return.'
'But where will you go?' said the old man, staring at him with a dull
and troubled surprise.
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
'The world is large--at least it looks so when one has not been over
it. Can you tell me who inherits from Prince Paul Zabaroff?'
'His eldest son by his marriage with a Princess Kourouassine. If he had
only left some will, some sort of command or direction--perhaps if I
wrote to the Princess, and told her the facts, she--'
'Pray do not do that,' said the boy coldly. 'I thank you for all I have
learned here, and I will leave your house to-night. Farewell to you,
sir.'
The boy's eyes were dry and calm; the old man's were wet and dim. He
rose hurriedly, and laid aside his stern habit of authority for a
moment, as he put his hand on the lad's shoulder.
'Vassia, do not leave us like that. I do not like to see you so cold,
so quiet, so unnaturally indifferent. You are left friendless and
nameless--and after all he was your father.'
The boy drew himself away gently, and shrugged his shoulders once more
with his slight gesture of contempt.
'He never called me his son. I wish he had left me by the Volga with
the bear-cubs: that is all. Adieu, sir.'
'But what do you mean to do?'
'I will do what offers.'
'But few things offer when one is friendless and you have many faults,
Vassia, though you have many talents. I fear for your future.'
'Adieu, sir.'
The boy bowed low, with composure and grace, and left the room. The
old man sat in the shadow by his desk, and blamed himself, and blamed
the dead. The young collegian went out from his presence with a firm
step and a careless carriage, and ascended the staircase of the
college to his dormitory. The large long room, with its whitewashed
walls, its barred casements, its rows of camp bedsteads, looked like a
barrack-room deserted by the soldiers. The aspen and poplar leaves were
quivering outside the grated windows; the rays of the bright August sun
streamed through and shone on the floor. The boy sat down on his bed.
It was at the top of the row of beds, next one of the casements. The
sun-rays touched his head; he was all alone. The clamour, the disputes,
the mirth, the wrong-doing with which he and his comrades had consoled
themselves for the stern discipline of the day, were all things of
the past, and he would know them no more. In a way he had been happy
here, being lord and king of the rebellious band that had filled this
chamber, and knowing so little of his own fate or of his own future
that any greatness or glory might be possible to him.
Three years before he had been summoned to a château on the north coast
of France in the full summer season. It had entered into the capricious
fancy of Prince Zabaroff that he should like to see what the wild
young wolf-cub of the Volga plains had become. He had found in him a
youth so handsome, so graceful, so accomplished, that a certain fibre
of paternal pride had been touched in him; whilst the coldness, the
silence, and the disdainfulness of the boy's temper had commanded his
respect. No word of their relationship had passed between them, but by
the guests assembled there it had been assumed that the young Vassia
Kazán was near of kin to their host, whose lawfully-begotten sons and
daughters were far away in one of his summer palaces of the Krimea.
The boy was beautiful, keen-witted, precocious in knowledge and tact;
the society assembled there, which was dissolute enough, dazzled and
indulged him. The days had gone by like a tale of magic. There had
been always in him the bitter, mortified, rebellious hatred of his
own position; but this he had not shown, and no one had suspected it.
These three summer months of unbridled luxury and indulgence had made
an indelible impression on him. He had felt that life was not worth the
living unless it could be passed in the same manner. He had known that
away there in Russia there were young Zabaroff princes, his brethren,
who would not have owned him; but the remembrance of them had not dwelt
on him. He had not known definitely what to expect of the future.
Though he was still there only Vassia Kazán, yet he had been treated
as though he were a son of the house. When the party had broken up he
had been sent back to his college with many gifts and a thousand francs
in gold. When he reached Paris he had given the presents to a dancing
girl and the money to an old professor of classics who had lost his
sight. Not a word had been said as to his future. Measuring both by the
indulgences and liberalities that were conceded to him, he had always
dreamed of it vaguely but gorgeously, as sure to bring recognition and
reverence, pomp and power, to him from the world. He had vaguely built
up ambitious hopes. He had been sensible of no ordinary intelligence,
of no common powers; and it had seemed legitimate to suppose that so
liberal and princely an education meant that some golden gates would
open to him at manhood: why should they rear him so if they intended
to leave him in obscurity?
This day, as he had sat in the large white courtyard, shadowed by the
Parisian poplar trees, he had remembered that he was within a few weeks
of the completion of his eighteenth year, and he had wondered what
they meant to do with him. He had heard nothing from Prince Zabaroff
since those brilliant, vivid, tumultuous months which had left on him a
confused sense of dazzling though vague expectation. He had hoped every
summer to hear something, but each summer had passed in silence; and
now he was told that Paul Zabaroff was dead.
He had been happy, being dowered with facile talents, quick wit, and
the great art of being able to charm others without effort to himself.
He had been seldom obedient, often guilty, yet always successful. The
place had been no prison to him; he had passed careless days and he had
dreamed grand dreams there; and now--
He sat on the little iron bed, and knew that in a few nights to come he
might have to make his bed with beggars under bridge arches and in the
dens of thieves.
Tears gathered in his eyes, and fell slowly one by one. A sort of
convulsion passed over his face. He gripped his throat with his hand,
to stifle a sob that rose there.
The intense stillness of the chamber was not broken even by the buzzing
of a gnat.
He sat quite motionless, and his thoughts went back to the summer day
in the cornfields by the Volga; he saw the scene in all its little
details: the impatient good-humour of the great lord, the awe of the
listening peasants, the blowing wheat, the wooden cross, the stamping
horses, the cringing servants; he heard the voice of his father saying,
'Will you be a jewel or a toad's eye?'
'Why could he not leave me there?' he thought; 'I should have known
nothing; I should have been a hunter; I should have done no harm on the
ice and the snow there, with old Maritza.'
He thought of his grandmother, of the little hut, of the nest of skins,
of the young bears at play, of the glittering plains in winter, of the
low red sun, of the black lonely woods, of the grey icy river, of the
bright virgin snow--thought, with a great longing like that of thirst.
Why had they not let him be? Why had they not left him ignorant and
harmless in the clear, keen, solitary winter world?
Instead of that they had flung him into hell, and now left him in it,
alone.
There was a far-off murmur on the sultry summer air, and a far-off
gleam of metal beyond the leaves of the poplar trees; it was the murmur
of the streets, and the glisten of the roofs of Paris.
About his neck there hung a little silver image of St. Paul. His mother
had hung it there at birth, and Maritza had prayed him never to disturb
it. Now he took it off, he spat on it, he trod on it, he threw it out
to fall into the dust.
He did this insult to the sacred thing coldly, without passion. His
tears were no more on his cheeks, nor the sobs in his throat.
He changed his clothes quickly, put together a few necessaries, leaving
behind nearly all that he possessed, because he hated everything that
the dead man's money had bought; and then, without noise and without
haste, looking back once down the long empty chamber, he went through
the house by back ways that he knew and had used in hours of forbidden
liberty, and opening the gate of the courtyard, went out into the long
dreary highway, white with dust, that stretched before him and led to
Paris.
He had made friends, for he was a beautiful bold boy, gay of wit,
agile, and strong, and of many talents; but these friends were
artists little known in the world, soldiers who liked pleasure, young
dramatists without theatres, pretty frail women who had taught him to
eat the sweet and bitter apple that is always held out in the hand of
Eve. These and their like were all butterfly friends of a summer noon
or night; he knew that very well, for he had a premature and unerring
knowledge of the value of human words. They would be of no use in such
a strait as his; and the colour flushed back for one instant into his
pale cheeks, as he thought that he would die in a hospital before he
was twenty rather than ask their aid.
As the grey dust, the hot wind, the nauseous smell of streets in summer
smote upon him, leaving the poplar-shadowed court of his old school,
he felt once more the same strange yearning of home-sickness for the
winter world of his birth, for the steel-grey waters, the darkened
skies, the forests of fir, the howl of the wolves on the wind, the joys
of the fresh fierce cold, the feel of the ice in the air, the smell of
the pines and the river. The bonds of birth are strong.
'If Maritza were not dead I would go back,' he thought. But Maritza had
been long dead, laid away under the snow by her daughter's side.
The boy went to Paris.
Would it be any fault of his what he became?
He told himself, No.
It would lie with the dead; and with Paris.
CHAPTER I.
In the heart of the Hohe Tauern, province of lakes and streams, there
lies one lake called the Szalrassee: known to the pilgrim, to the
fisher, to the hunter, but to the traveller little, for it is shut
away from the hum and stir of man by the amphitheatre of its own hills
and forests. To the south-east of it lies the Iselthal, and to the
north-west the Wilde Gerlos; due east is the great Glöckner group, and
due west the Venediger. Farther away are the Alps of Zillerthal, and on
the opposite horizon the mountains of Karinthia.
Here, where the foaming rivers thunder through their rocky channels,
and the ice bastions of a thousand glaciers glow in the sunrise and bar
the sight of sunset; here, where a thousand torrents bathe in silver
the hillsides, and the deep moan of subterranean waters sounds for
ever through the silence of the gorges, dark with the serried pines;
here, in the green and cloudy Austrian land, the merry trout have many
a joyous home, but none is fairer or more beloved by them than this
lovely lake of Hohenszalras; so green that it might have been made of
emeralds dissolved in sunbeams, so deep that at its centre no soundings
can be taken, so lonely that of the few wanderers who pass from S.
Johann im Wald or from Lienz to Matrey, even of those few scarce one in
a summer will know that a lake lies there, though they see from afar
off its great castle standing, many-turreted and pinnacled, with its
frowning keep, backed by the vast black forests, clothing slopes whose
summits hide themselves in cloud, whilst through the cold clear air the
golden vulture and the throated eagle wing their way.
The lake lies like a crystal bedded in rock, lovely and lonely as the
little Gosausee when the skies are fair; perilous and terrible as the
great Königs-See in storm, when the north wind is racing in from the
Bœhmervald and the Polish steppes, and the rain-mists are dark and
dense, and the storks leave their home on the chapel roof because the
winter draws nigh. It is fed by snow and ice descending from a hundred
hills, and by underground streams and headlong-descending avalanches,
and in its turn feeds many a mountain waterfall, many a mountain tarn,
many a woodland brook, and many a village fountain. The great white
summits tower above it, and the dense still woods enshroud it; there
are a pier and harbour at either end, but these are only used by the
village people, and once a year by pilgrims who come to the Sacred
Island in its midst; pilgrims who flock thither from north, south,
east, and west, for the chapel of the Szalrassee is as renowned and
blessed as the silver shrine of holy Mariazell itself.
On the right bank of its green glancing water, looking towards the
ice-peaks of the Glöckner on the east, and on the south towards the
Kitchbull mountains and the limestone Alps, a promontory juts out
into the lake and soars many hundred feet above it. It is of hard
granite rock. Down one of its sides courses a torrent, the other side
is clothed with wood; on the summit is the immense building that is
called the Hohenszalrasburg, a mass of towers and spires and high metal
roofs and frowning battlements, with a huge square fortress at one end
of them: it is the old castle of the Counts of Szalras, and the huge
donjon keep of it has been there twelve centuries, and in all these
centuries no man has ever seen its flag furled or its portcullis drawn
up for a conqueror's entry.
The greater part of the Schloss now existing is the work of Meister
Wenzel of Klosterneuburg, begun in 1350, but the date of the keep
and of the foundations generally are much earlier, and the prisons
and clock tower are Romanesque. Majestic, magnificent, and sombre,
though not gloomy, by reason of its rude decoration and the brilliant
colours of its variegated roofs, it is scarcely changed since its lords
dwelt there in the fourteenth century, when their great banner, black
vultures on a ground of gold and red, floated then high up amongst the
clouds, even as it now shakes its heavy folds out on the strong wind
that blew so keenly from the Prussian and the Polish plains due north.
It is a fortress that has wedded a palace; it is majestic, powerful,
imposing, splendid, like the great race, of which it so long has been
the stronghold and the birthplace. But it is as lonely in the quiet
heart of the everlasting hills as any falcon's or heron's nest hung in
the oak branches.
And this loneliness seemed its sweetest charm in the eyes of its
châtelaine and mistress, the Countess Wanda von Szalras, as she leaned
one evening over the balustrade of her terrace, watching for the
after-glow to warm the snows of the Glöckner. She held in her hand an
open letter from her Kaiserin, and the letter in its conclusion said:
'You have sorrowed and tarried in seclusion long enough--too long;
longer than he would have wished you to do. Come back to us and to the
world.'
And Wanda von Szalras thought to herself: 'What can the world give me?
What I love is Hohenszalras on earth, and Bela in heaven.'
What could the world give her indeed? The world cannot give back the
dead. She wanted nothing of the world. She was rich in all that it can
ever give.
In the time of Ferdinand the Second those who were then Counts of
Szalras had stitched the cloth cross on their sleeves and gone with the
Emperor to the Third Crusade. In gratitude for their escape, father
and son, from the perils of Palestine and the dangers of the high seas
and of the treacherous Danube water, from Moslem steel, and fever of
Jaffa, and chains of swarming Barbary corsairs, they, returning at last
in safety to their eyrie above the Szalrassee, had raised a chapel
on the island in the lake, and made it dedicate to the Holy Cross,
a Szalras of the following generation, belonging to the Dominican
community, and being a man of such saintly fervour and purity that he
was canonised by Innocent, had dwelt on the Holy Isle, and given to
it the benediction and the tradition of his sanctity and good works.
As centuries went on the holy fame of the shrine where the Crusader
had placed a branch from a thorn-tree of Nazareth grew, and gained in
legend and in miracle, and became as adored an object, of pilgrimage as
the Holy Phial of Heiligenblut. All the Hohe Tauern, and throngs even
from Karinthia on the one side and Tirol on the other, came thither on
the day of Ascension.
The old faith still lives, very simple, warm, and earnest, in the
heart of Austria, and with that day-dawn in midsummer thousands of
peasant-folks flock from mountain villages and forest chalets and
little remote secluded towns, to speed over the green lake with flaming
crucifix and floating banner, and haunted anthem echoed from hill
to hill. One of those days of pilgrimage had made her mistress of
Hohenszalras.
It was a martial and mighty race this which in the heart of the green
Tauern had made of fealty to God and the Emperor a religion for itself
and all its dependants. The Counts of Szalras had always been proud,
stern, and noble men: though their records were often stained with
fierce crimes, there was never in them any single soil of baseness,
treachery, or fear. They had been fierce and reckless in the wild days
when they were for ever at war with the Counts of Tirol and the warlike
Archbishops of Salzburg. Then with the Renaissance they had become no
less powerful, but more lettered, more courtly, and more splendid, and
had given alike friendship and service to the Habsburg. Now, of all
these princely and most powerful people there was but one descendant,
but one representative; and that one was a woman.
Solferino had seen Count Gela fall charging at the head of his own
regiment of horse; Magenta had seen Count Victor cut in two by a
cannon-shot as he rode with the dragoons of Swartzenberg; and but a
few years later the youngest, Count Bela, had been drowned by his own
bright lake.
Their father had died of grief for his eldest son; their mother had
been lost to them in infancy; Bela and Wanda had grown up together,
loving each other as only two lonely children can. She had been his
elder by a few years, and he younger than his age by reason of his
innocent simplicity of nature and his delicacy of body. They had always
thought to make a priest of him, and when that peaceful future was
denied him on his becoming the sole heir, it was the cause of bitter
though mute sorrow to the boy who was indeed so like a young saint in
church legends that the people called him tenderly _der Heilige Graf._
He had never quitted Hohenszalras, and he knew every peasant around,
every blossom that blew, every mountain path, every forest beast
and bird, and every tale of human sorrow in his principality. When
he became lord of all after his brother's death he was saddened and
oppressed by the sense of his own overwhelming obligations. 'I am but
the steward of God,' he would say, with a tender smile, to the poor who
blessed him.
One Ascension Day the lake was, as usual, crowded with the boats of
pilgrims; the morning was fair and cloudless, but, after noontide, wind
arose, the skies became overcast, and one of the sudden storms of the
country burst over the green waters. The little lord of Hohenszalras
was the first to see the danger to the clumsy heavy boats crowded with
country people, and with his household rowed out to their aid. The
storm had come so suddenly and with such violence that it smote, in
the very middle of the lake, some score of these boats laden with the
pilgrims of the Pinzgau and the Innthal, women chiefly; their screams
pierced through the noise of the roaring winds, and their terror added
fresh peril to the dangers of the lake, which changed in a few moments
to a seething whirlpool, and flung them to and fro like coots' nests
in a flood. The young Bela with his servants saved many, crossing and
recrossing the furious space of wind-lashed, leaping, foaming water;
but on the fourth voyage back the young Count's boat, over-burdened
with trembling peasants, whose fright made them blind and restive,
dipped heavily on one side, filled, and sank. Bela could swim well,
and did swim, even to the very foot of his own castle rock, where a
hundred hands were outstretched to save him; but, hearing a drowning
woman's moan, he turned and tried to reach her. A fresh surge of the
hissing water, a fresh gust of the bitter north wind, tossed him back
into a yawning gulf of blackness, and drove him headlong, and with no
more resistance in him than if he had been a broken bough, upon the
granite wall of his own rocks. He was caught and rescued almost on the
instant by his own men, but his head had struck upon the stone, and he
was senseless. He breathed a few hours, but he never spoke or opened
his eyes or gave any sign of conscious life, and before the night had
far advanced his innocent body was tenantless and cold, and his sweet
spirit lived only in men's memories. His sister, who was absent at that
time at the court of her Empress, became by his death the mistress of
Hohenszalras and the last of her line.
When the tidings of his heroic end reached her at the imperial
hunting-place of Gödöllö all the world died for her; that splendid
pageant of a world, whose fairest and richest favours had been always
showered on the daughter of the mighty House of Szalras. She withdrew
herself from her friends, from her lovers, from her mistress, and
mourned for him with a grief that time could do little to assuage,
nothing to efface. She was then twenty years of age.
She was thinking of that death now, four years later, as she stood on
the terrace which overhung the cruel rocks that had killed him.
His loss was to her a sorrow that could never wholly pass away.
Her other brothers had been dear to her, but only as brilliant young
soldiers are to a little child who sees them seldom. But Bela had been
her companion, her playmate, her friend, her darling. From Bela she had
been scarce ever parted. Every day and every night, herself, and all
her thoughts and all her time, were given to such administration of her
kingdom as should best be meet in the sight of God and his angels. 'I
am but Bela's almoner, as he was God's steward,' she said.
She leaned against the parapet, and looked across the green and shining
water, the open letter hanging in her hand.
The Countess Wanda von Szalras was a beautiful woman; but she had that
supreme distinction which eclipses beauty, that subtle, indescribable
grace and dignity which are never seen apart from some great lineage
with long traditions of culture, courtesy, and courage. She was very
tall, and her movements had a great repose and harmony in them; her
figure, richness and symmetry. Her eyes were of a deep brown hue, like
the velvety brown of a stag's throat; they were large, calm, proud,
and meditative. Her mouth was very beautiful; her hair was light and
golden; her skin exceedingly fair. She was one of the most beautiful
women of her country, and one of the most courted and the most
flattered; and her imperial mistress said now to her, 'Come back to us
and to the world.'
Standing upon her terrace, in a gown of pale grey velvet that had no
ornament save an old gold girdle with an enamelled missal hung to
it, with two dogs at her side, one the black hunting-hound of St.
Hubert, the other the white sleuth-hound of Russia, she looked like a
châtelaine of the days of Mary of Burgundy or Elizabeth of Thuringia.
It seemed as if the dark cedar boughs behind her should lift and admit
to her presence some lover with her glove against the plume of his hat,
and her ring set in his sword-hilt, who would bow down before her feet
and not dare to touch her hand unbidden.
But no lover was there. The Countess Wanda dismissed all lovers; she
was wedded to the memory of her brother, and to her own liberty and
power.
She leaned on the stone parapet of her castle and gazed on the scene
that her eyes had rested on since they had first seen the light, yet of
which she never wearied. The intense depth of colour, that is the glory
of Austria, was deepening with each moment that the sun went nearer
to its setting in the dark blue of thunderclouds that brooded in the
west, over the Venediger and the Zillerthal Alps. Soon the sun would
pass that barrier of stone and ice, and evening would fall here in the
mountains of the Iselthal, whilst it would be still day for the plains
of the Ober Pinzgau and Salzkammergut. But as yet the radiance was
here; and the dark oak woods and birch woods, the purple pine forests,
the blue lake waters, and the glaciers of the Glöckner range, had
all that grandeur which makes a sunset in these highlands at once so
splendid and so peaceful. There is an infinite sense of peace in those
cool, vast, unworn mountain solitudes, with the rain-mists sweeping
like spectral armies over the level lands below, and the sun-rays
slanting heavenward, like the spears of an angelic host. There is such
abundance of rushing water, of deep grass, of endless shade, of forest
trees, of heather and pine, of torrent and tarn; and beyond these are
the great peaks that loom through breaking clouds, and the clear cold
air, in which the vulture wheels and the heron sails; and the shadows
are so deep, and the stillness is so sweet, and the earth seems so
green, and fresh, and silent, and strong. Nowhere else can one rest
so well; nowhere else is there so fit a refuge for all the faiths and
fancies that can find a home no longer in the harsh and hurrying world:
there is room for them all in the Austrian forests, from the Erl-King
to Ariel and Oberon.
The Countess Wanda leaned against the balustrade of the terrace and
watched that banquet of colour on land and cloud and water; watched
till the sun sank out of sight behind the Venediger snows, and the
domes of the Glöckner, and all the lesser peaks opposite were changing
from the warmth, as of a summer rose, to a pure transparent grey, that
seemed here and there to be pierced as with fire.
'How often do we thank God for the mountains?' she thought; 'yet we
ought every night that we pray.'
Then she sighed as her eyes sank from the hill-tops to the lake water,
dark as iron, glittering as steel, now that the radiance of the sun had
passed off it. She remembered Bela.
How could she ever forget him, with that murderous water shining for
ever at her feet?
The world called her undiminished tenderness for her dead brother a
morbid grief, but then to the world at large any fidelity seems so
strange and stupid a waste of years: it does not understand that _tout
casse, tout lasse, tout passe_, was not written for strong natures.
'How could I ever forget him, so long as that water glides there?' she
thought, as her eyes rested on the emerald and sparkling lake.
'Yet her Majesty is so right! So right and so wise!' said a familiar
voice at her side.
And there came up to her the loveliest little lady in all the empire;
an old lady, but so delicate, so charming, so pretty, so fragile, that
she seemed lovelier than all the young ones; a very fairy godmother,
covered up in lace and fur, and leaning on a gold-headed cane, and
wearing red shoes with high gilt heels, and smiling with serene blue
eyes, as though she had just stepped down out of a pictured copy of
Cinderella, and could change common pumpkins into gilded chariots, and
mice into horses, at a wish.
She was the Princess Ottilie of Lilienhöhe, and had once been head of a
religious house.
'Her Majesty is so right!' she said once more, with emphasis.
The Countess Wanda turned and smiled, rather with her eyes than with
her lips.
'It would not become my loyal affection to say she could be wrong. But
still, I know myself, and I know the world very well, and I far prefer
Hohenszalras to it.'
'Hohenszalras is all very well in the summer and autumn,' said Princess
Ottilie, with a glance of anything but love at the great fantastic
solemn pile; 'but for a woman of your age and your possessions to
pass your days talking to farmers and fishermen, poring over books,
perplexing yourself as to whether it is right for you to accept wealth
that comes from such a source of danger to human life as your salt
mines--it is absurd, it is ludicrous. You are made for something more
than a political economist; you should be in the great world.'
'I prefer my solitude and my liberty.'
'Liberty! Who or what could dictate to you in the world? You reigned
there once; you would always reign there.'
'Social life is a bondage, as an empress's is. It denies one the
greatest luxury of life--solitude.'
'Certainly, if you love solitude so much, you have your heart's desire
here. It is an Alvernia! It is a Mount Athos! It is a snow-entombed
paraclete, a hermitage, only tempered by horses!' said the Princess,
with a little angry laugh.
Her grand-niece smiled.
'By many horses, certainly. Dearest aunt, what would you have?
Austrians are all centaurs and amazons. I am only like my Kaiserin in
that passion.'
The Princess sighed.
She had never been able to comprehend the forest life, the daring, the
intrepidity, the open-air pastimes, and the delight in danger which
characterised all the race of Szalras. Daughter of a North German
princeling, and with some French blood in her veins also, reared under
the formal etiquette of her hereditary court, and at an early age
canoness of one of those great semi-religious orders which are only
open to the offspring of royal or of most noble lines, her whole life
had been one moulded to form and conventional habit, and only her own
sweetness and sprightliness of temper had saved her from the narrowness
of judgment and the chilliness of formality which such a life begets.
The order of which until late years she had been superior was one for
magnificence and wealth unsurpassed in Europe; but, semi-secular in its
privileges, it had left her much liberty, and never wholly divorced
her from the world, which in an innocent way she had always loved
and enjoyed. After Count Victor's death she had resigned her office
on plea of age and delicacy of health, and had come to take up her
residence at Hohenszalras with her dead niece's children. She had done
so because she had believed it to be her duty, and her attachment to
Wanda and Bela had always been very great; but she had never learned to
love the solitude of the Hohe Tauern, or ceased to regard Hohenszalras
as a place of martyrdom. After the minute divisions of every hour
and observances of every smallest ceremonial that she had been used
to at her father's own little court of Lilienslüst, and in her own
religious house, where every member of the order was a daughter of
some one of the highest families of Germany or of Austria, the life at
Hohenszalras, with its outdoor pastimes, its feudal habits, its vast
liberties for man and beast, and its long frozen winters, when not a
soul could come near it from over the passes, seemed very terrible to
her. She could never understand her niece's passionate attachment to
it, and she in real truth only breathed entirely at ease in those few
weeks of the year which to please her niece she consented to pass away
from the Hohe Tauern.
'Surely you will go to Ischl or go to Gödöllö this autumn, since Her
Majesty wishes it?' she said now, with an approving glance at the
imperial letter.
'Her Majesty is so kind as always to wish it,' answered the Countess
Wanda. 'Let us leave time to show what it holds for us. This is
scarcely summer. Yesterday was the fifteenth of May.'
'It is horribly cold,' said the Princess, drawing her silver-grey fur
about her. 'It is always horribly cold here, even in midsummer. And
when it does not snow it rains; you cannot deny _that._'
'Come, come! we have seen the sun all day to-day. I hope we shall see
it many days, for they have begun planting-out, you see--the garden
will soon be gorgeous.'
'When the mist allows it to be seen, it will be, I dare say,' said
Princess Ottilie, somewhat pettishly. 'It is tolerable here in the
summer, though never agreeable; but the Empress is so right, it is
absurd to shut yourself longer up in this gloomy place; you are bound
to return to the world. You owe it to your position to be seen in it
once more.'
'The world does not want me, my dear aunt; nor do I want the world.'
'That is sheer perversity----'
'How am I perverse? I know the world very well, and I know that no one
is necessary to it, unless it be Herr von Bismarck.'
'I do not see what Herr von Bismarck has to do with your going back to
your natural manner of life,' said the Princess, severely, who abhorred
any sort of levity in regard to the mighty minister who had destroyed
the Lilienhöhe princes one fine morning, as indifferently as a boy
plucks down a cranberry bough. 'In summer, or even autumn, Hohenszalras
is endurable, but in winter it is--hyperborean--even you must grant
that. One might as well be jammed in a ship, amidst icebergs, in the
midst of a frozen sea.'
'And you were born on the Elbe, oh fie! But indeed, my dearest aunt, I
like the frozen sea. The white months have no terrors for me. What you
call, and what calls itself, the great world is far more narrow than
the Iselthal. Here one's fancies, at least, can fly high as the eagles
do; in the world who can rise out of the hot-house air of the salons,
and see beyond the doings of one's friends and foes?'
'Surely one's own friends and foes--people like oneself, in a
word--must be as interesting as Hans, and Peter, and Katte, and
Grethel, with their crampons or their milkpails,' said the Princess,
with impatience. 'Besides, surely in the world there are political
movement, influence, interests.'
'Oh, intrigue?--as useful as Mme. de Laballe's or Mme. de
Longueville's? No! I do not believe there is even that in our time,
when even diplomacy itself is fast becoming a mere automatic factor
in a world that is governed by newspapers, and which has changed the
tyranny of wits for the tyranny of crowds. The time is gone by when a
"Coterie of Countesses" could change ministries, if they ever did do so
outside the novels of Disraeli. Drawing-room cabals may still do some
mischief perhaps, but they can do no good. Sometimes, indeed, I think
that what is called Government everywhere is nothing but a gigantic
mischief-making and place-seeking. The State is everywhere too like a
mother who sweeps her doorstep diligently, and scolds the neighbours,
while her child scalds itself to death unseen within.'
'In the world,' interrupted the Princess oppositely, 'you might
persuade them that the sweeping of doorsteps is not sufficient----'
'I prefer to keep my own house in order. It is quite enough
occupation,' said the Countess Wanda, with a smile. 'Dear aunt, here
amongst my own folks I can do some real good, I have some tangible
influence, I can feel that my life is not altogether spent in vain.
Why should I exchange these simple and solid satisfactions, for the
frivolities and the inanities of a life of pleasure which would not
even please me?'
'You are very hard to please, I know,' retorted the Princess. 'But say
what you will, it becomes ridiculous for a person of your age, your
great position, and your personal beauty, to immure yourself eternally
in what is virtually no better than confinement to a fortress!'
'A court is more of a prison to me,' said Wanda von Szalras. 'I know
both lives, and I prefer this life. As for my being very hard to
please, I think I was very gay and mirthful before Bela's death. Since
then all the earth has grown grey for me.'
'Forgive me, my beloved!' said Princess Ottilie, with quick contrition,
whilst moisture sprang into her limpid and still luminous blue eyes.
Wanda von Szalras took the old abbess's hand in her own, and kissed it.
'I understand all you wish for me, dear aunt. Believe me, I envy people
when I hear them laughing light-heartedly amongst each other. I think
I shall never laugh _so_ again.'
'If you would only marry----' said the Princess, with some hesitation.
'You think marriage amusing?' she said, with a certain contempt. 'If
you do, it is only because you escaped it.'
'Amusing!' said the Princess, a little scandalised. 'I could speak of
no Sacrament of our Holy Church as "amusing." You rarely display such
levity of language. I confess I do not comprehend you. Marriage would
give you interests in life which you seem to lack sadly now. It would
restore you to the world. It would be a natural step to take with such
vast possessions as yours.'
'It is not likely I shall ever take it,' said Wanda von Szalras,
drawing the soft fine ear of Donau through her fingers.
'I know it is not likely. I am very sorry that it is not likely. Yet
what nobler creature does God's earth contain than your cousin Egon?
'Egon? No: he is a good and brave and loyal gentleman, none better; but
I shall no more marry him than Donau here will wed a forest doe.'
'Yet he has loved you for ten years. But if not he there are so
many others, men of high enough place to be above all suspicion of
mercenary motive. No woman has been more adored than you, Wanda. Look
at Hugo Landrassy.'
'Oh, pray spare me their enumeration. It is like the Catalogue of
Ships!' said the Countess Wanda, with some coldness and some impatience
on her face.
At that moment an old man, who was major-domo of Hohenszalras,
approached and begged with deference to know whether his ladies would
be pleased to dine.
The Princess signified her readiness with alacrity; Wanda von Szalras
signed assent with less willingness.
'What a disagreeable obligation dining is,' she said, as she turned
reluctantly from the evening scene, with the lake sleeping in dusk and
shadow, while the snow summits still shone like silver and glowed with
rose.
'It is very wicked to think so,' said her great-aunt. 'When a merciful
Creator has appointed our appetites for our consolation and support it
is only an ingrate who is not thankful lawfully to indulge them.'
'That view of them never occurred to me,' said the châtelaine of
Hohenszalras. 'I think you must have stolen it, aunt, from some abbé
galant or some chanoinesse as lovely as yourself in the last century.
Alas! if not to care to eat be ungrateful I am a sad ingrate. Donau
and Neva are more ready subscribers to your creed.'
Donau and Neva were already racing towards the castle, and Wanda von
Szalras, with one backward lingering glance to the sunset, which
already was fading, followed them with slow steps to the grand house of
which she was mistress.
In the north alone the sky was overcast and of a tawny colour, where
the Pinzgau lay, with the green Salzach water rushing through its
wooded gorges, and its tracks of sand and stone desolate as any desert.
That slender space of angry yellow to the north boded ill for the
night. Bitter storms rolled in west from the Bœhmerwald, or north
from the Salzkammergut, many a time in the summer weather, changing it
to winter as they passed, tugging at the roof-ropes of the châlets,
driving the sheep into their sennerin's huts, covering with mist and
rain the mountain sides, and echoing in thunder from the peaks of the
Untersburg to the snows of the Ortler Spitze. It was such a sudden
storm which had taken Bela's life.
'I think we shall have wild weather,' said the Princess, drawing her
furs around her, as she walked down the broad length of the stone
terrace.
'I think so too,' said Wanda. 'It is coming very soon; and I fear I did
a cruel thing this morning.'
'What was that?'
'I sent a stranger to find his way over our hills to Matrey, as best
he might. He will hardly have reached it by now, and if a storm should
come----'
'A stranger?' said Princess Ottilie, whose curiosity was always alive,
and had also lately no food for its hunger.
'Only a poacher; but he was a gentleman, which made his crime the
worse.'
'A gentleman, and you sent him over the hills without a guide? It seems
unlike the hospitality of Hohenszalras.'
'Why he would have shot a _kuttengeier!_'
'A _kuttengeier_ is a horrible beast,' said the Princess, with a
shudder; 'and a stranger, just for an hour or so, would be welcome.'
'Even if his name were not in the Hof-Kalender?' asked her niece,
smiling.
'If he had been a pedlar, or a clockmaker, you would have sent him in
to rest. For a gentlewoman, Wanda, and so proud a one as you are, you
become curiously cruel to your own class.'
'I am always cruel to poachers. And to shoot a vulture in the month of
May!'