With the morning, though the storm had ceased and passed away, the
clouds were dark, the mountains were obscured, and the rain was pouring
down upon lake and land.
It was still early in the day when the stranger was aroused to the full
sense of awaking in a room unknown to him; he had slept all through the
night; he was refreshed and without fever. His left arm was strained,
and he had many bruises; otherwise he was conscious of no hurt.
'Twice in that woman's power,' he thought, with anger, as he looked
round the great tapestried chamber that sheltered him, and tried to
disentangle his actual memories of the past night from the dreams that
had haunted him of the Nibelungen Queen, who all night long he had
seen in her golden armour, with her eyes which, like those of the Greek
nymph, dazzled those on whom they gazed to madness. Dream and fact had
so interwoven themselves that it was with an effort he could sever the
two, awaking as he did now in an unfamiliar chamber, and surrounded
with those tapestries whose colossal figures seemed the phantoms of a
spirit world.
He was a man in whom some vein of superstition had outlived the
cold reason and the cynical mockeries of the worldly experiences
and opinions in which he was steeped. A shudder of cold ran through
his blood as he opened his eyes upon that dim, tranquil, and vast
apartment, with the stories of the Tannhäuser legend embroidered on the
walls.
'I am he! I am he!' he thought incoherently, watching the form of the
doomed knight speeding through the gloom and snow.
'How does the most high and honourable gentleman feel himself this
morning?' asked of him, in German, a tall white-haired woman, who might
have stepped down from an old panel of Metzu.
The simple commonplace question roused him from the mists of his
fancies and fears, and realised to him the bare fact that he was a
guest, unbidden, in the walls of Szaravola.
The physician also drew near his bed to question him; and a boy brought
on a tray Rhine wine and Tokayer Ausbruck, coffee and chocolate, bread
and eggs.
He broke his fast with a will, for he had eaten nothing since the day
before at noon; and the Professor Greswold congratulated him on his
good night's rest, and on his happy escape from the Szalrassee.
Then he himself said, with a little confusion:
'I saw a lady last night?'
'Certainly, you saw our lady,' said Greswold, with a smile.
'What do you call her?' he asked, eagerly.
The physician answered:
'She is the Countess Wanda von Szalras. She is sole mistress here.
But for her, my dear sir, I fear me you would be now lying in those
unfathomed depths that the bravest of us fear.'
The stranger shuddered a little.
'I was a madman to try the lake with such an overcast sky; but I had
missed my road, and I was told that it lay on the other side of the
water. Some peasants tried to dissuade me from crossing, but I am a
good rower and swimmer too; so I set forth to pull myself over your
lake.'
'With a sky black as ink! I suppose you are used to more serene
summers. Midsummer is not so different to midwinter here that you can
trust to its tender mercies.'
The stranger was silent.
'She took my gun from me in the morning,' he said abruptly. The memory
of the indignity rankled in him, and made bitter the bread and wine.
The physician laughed.
'Were you poaching? Oh, that is almost a hanging matter in the
Hohenszalras woods. Had you met Otto without our lady he would most
likely have shot you without warning.'
'Are you savages in the Tauern?'
'Oh no; but we are very feudal still, and our forest laws have escaped
alteration in this especial part of the province.'
'She has been very hospitable to me, since my crime was so great.'
'She is the soul of hospitality, and the Schloss is a hospice,' said
the physician. 'When there is no town nearer than ten Austrian miles,
and the nearest posting-house is at Windisch-Matrey, it is very
necessary to exercise the primitive virtues; it is our compensation
for our feudalism. But take some tokayer, my dear sir; you are weaker
than you know. You have had a bath of ice; you had best lie still, and
I will send you some journals and books.'
'I would rather get up and go away,' said the stranger. 'These bruises
are nothing. I will thank your lady, as you call her, and then go on my
way as quickly as I may.'
'I see you do not understand feudal ways, though you have suffered from
them,' said the doctor. 'You shall get up if you wish; but I am certain
my lady will not let you leave here to-day. The rains are falling
in torrents; the roads are dangerous; a bridge has broken down over
the Bürgenbach, which you must cross to get away. In a word, if you
insist on departure, they will harness their best horses for you, for
all the antique virtues have refuge here, and amongst them is a grand
hospitality; but you will possibly kill the horses, and perhaps the
postillions, and you will not even then get very far upon your way. Be
persuaded by me. Wait at least until the morning dawns.'
'I had better burden your lady with an unbidden guest than kill her
horses, certainly,' said the stranger. 'How is she sole mistress here?
Is there a Count von Szalras? Is she a widow?'
'She has never married,' answered Greswold; and gave his patient a
brief sketch of the tragic fates of the lords of Hohenszalras, amongst
whom death had been so busy.'
'A very happy woman to be so rich, and so free!' said the traveller,
with a little impatient envy; and he added, 'She is very handsome also;
indeed, beautiful. I now remember to have heard of her in Paris. Her
hand has been esteemed one of the great prizes of Europe.'
'I think she will never marry,' said the old man.
'Oh, my dear doctor, who can make such at least she looks young. What
age may she be?'
'She was twenty-four years of age on Easter Day. As for happiness,
when you know the Countess Wanda, you will know that she would go out
as poor as S. Elizabeth, and self-dethroned like her, most willingly,
could she by such a sacrifice see her brothers living around her.'
The stranger gave a little cynical laugh of utter incredulity, which
dismayed and annoyed the old professor.
'You do not know her,' he said angrily.
'I know humanity,' said the other. 'Will you kindly take all my
apologies and regrets to the Countess, and give her my name; the
Marquis de Sabran. She can satisfy herself as to my identity at any
embassy she may care to consult.'
When he said his name, the professor gave a great cry and started from
his seat.
'Sabran!' he echoed. 'You edited the "Mexico"!' he exclaimed, and gazed
over his spectacles in awe and sympathy commingled at the stranger, who
smiled and answered----
'Long ago, yes. Have you heard of it?'
'Heard of it!' echoed Greswold. 'Do you take us for barbarians, sir?'
It is here, both in my small library, which is the collection of a
specialist, and in the great library of the castle, which contains a
million of volumes.'
'I am twice honoured,' said the stranger, with a smile of some irony.
The good professor was a little disconcerted, and his enthusiasm was
damped and cooled. He felt as much embarrassment as though he had been
the owner of a discredited work.
'May I not be permitted to congratulate you, sir?' he said timidly. 'To
have produced that great work is to possess a title to the gratitude
and esteem of all educated men.'
'You are very good,' said Sabran, somewhat indifferently; 'but all
that is great in that book is the Marquis Xavier's. I am but the mere
compiler.'
'The compilation, the editing of it, required no less learning than the
original writer displayed, and that was immense,' said the physician,
and with all the enthusiasm of a specialist he plunged into discussion
of the many notable points of a mighty intellectual labour, which had
received the praise of all the cultured world.
Sabran listened courteously, but with visible weariness. 'You are very
good,' he said at last. 'But you will forgive me if I say that I have
heard so much of the "Mexico" that I am tempted to wish I had never
produced it. I did so as a duty; it was all I could do in honour of one
to whom I owed far more than mere life itself.'
Greswold bowed and said no more.
'Give me my belt,' said the stranger to the man who waited on him;
it was a leathern belt, which had been about his loins; it was made
to hold gold and notes, a small six-chambered revolver, and a watch;
these were all in it, and with his money was the imperial permission to
shoot, which had been given, him by Franz Josef the previous autumn on
the Thorstein.
'Your Countess' will doubtless recognise her Emperor's signature,' he
said, as he gave the paper to the physician. 'It will serve at least as
a passport, if not as a letter of presentation.'
Réné, Marquis de Sabran-Romaris, was one of those persons who
illustrate the old fairy tale, of all the good gifts at birth being
marred by the malison of one godmother. He had great physical beauty,
personal charm, and facile talent; but his very facility was his bane.
He did all things so easily and well, that he had never acquired the
sterner quality of application. He was a brilliant and even profound
scholar, an accomplished musician, a consummate critic of art; and
was endowed, moreover, with great natural tact, taste, and correct
intuition.
Being, as he was, a poor man, these gifts should have made him an
eminent one or a wealthy one, but the perverse fairy who had cursed
when the other had blessed him, had contrived to make all these graces
and talents barren. Whether it be true or not that the world knows
nothing of its greatest men, it is quite true that its cleverest men
very often do nothing of importance all their lives long. He did
nothing except acquire a distinct repute as a _dilettante_ in Paris,
and a renown in the clubs of being always serene and fortunate at play.
He had sworn to himself when he had been a youth to make his career
worthy of his name; but the years had slipped away, and he had done
nothing. He was a very clever man, and he had once set a high if a cold
and selfish aim before him as his goal. But he had done worse even than
fail; he had never even tried to reach it.
He was only a _boulevardier_; popular and admired amongst men for his
ready wit and his cool courage, and by women often adored and often
hated, and sometimes, by himself, thoroughly despised: never so much
despised as when by simple luck at play or on the Bourse he made the
money which slid through his fingers with rapidity.
All he had in the world were the wind-torn oaks and the sea-washed
rocks of a bleak and lonely Breton village, and a few hundred thousand
francs' worth of pictures, porcelains, arms, and _bibelots_, which
had accumulated in his rooms on the Boulevard Haussmann, bought at
the Drouot in the forenoons after successful play at night. Only two
things in him were unlike the men whose associate he was: he was as
temperate as an Arab, seldom even touching wine; and he was a keen
mountaineer and athlete, once off the asphalte of the Boulevards. For
the rest, popular though he was in the society he frequented, no
living man could boast of any real intimacy with him. He had a thousand
acquaintances, but he accepted no friend. Under the grace and suavity
of a very courtly manner he wore the armour of a great reserve.
'At heart you have the taciturnity and the _sauvagerie_ of the
Armorican beneath all your polished suavity,' said a woman of his world
to him once; and he did not contradict her.
Men did not quarrel with him for it: he was a fine swordsman and a dead
shot: and women were allured all the more surely to him because they
felt that they never really entered his life or took any strong hold on
it.
Such as he was he lay now half-awake on the great bed under its amber
canopy, and gazed dreamily at the colossal figures of the storied
tapestry, where the Tuscan idlers of the Decamerone wore the sombre
hues and the stiff and stately garb of Flemish fashion of the sixteenth
century.
'I wonder why I tried so hard to live last night! I am not in love
with life,' he thought to himself, as he slowly remembered all that
had happened, and recalled the face of the lady who had leaned down
to him from over the stone parapet in the play of the torchlight and
lightnings. And yet life seemed good and worth having as he recalled
that boiling dusky swirl of water which had so nearly swallowed him up
in its anger.
He was young enough to enjoy; he was blessed with a fine constitution
and admirable health, which even his own excesses had not impaired; he
had no close ties to the world, but he had a frequent enjoyment of it,
which made it welcome to him. The recovery of existence always enhances
its savour; and as he lay dreamily recalling the sharp peril he had
run, he was simply and honestly glad to be amongst living men.
He remained still when the physician had left and looked around him;
in the wide hearth a fire of oak logs was burning; rain was beating
against the painted panes of the oriel casements; there was old
oak, old silver, old ivory in the furniture of the chamber, and the
tapestries were sombre and gorgeous. It was a room of the sixteenth
century; but the wine was in jugs of Bacarat glass, and a box of
Turkish cigarettes stood beside them, with the Paris and Vienna
newspapers. Everything had been thought of that could contribute to
his comfort: he wondered if the doctor had thought of all this, or
if it was due to the lady. 'It is a magnificent hospice,' he said to
himself with a smile, and then he angrily remembered his rifle, his
good English rifle, that was now sunk for ever with his little boat in
the waters of the Szalrassee. 'Why did she offer me that outrage?' he
said to himself: it went hard with him to lie under her roof, to touch
her wine and bread. Yet he was aching in every limb, the bed was easy
and spacious, the warmth and the silence and the aromatic scent of the
burning pine-cones were alluring him to rest; he dropped off to sleep
again, the same calm sleep of fatigue that had changed into repose, and
nothing woke him till the forenoon was passed.
'Good heavens! how I am trespassing on this woman's hospitality!' he
thought as he did awake, angry with himself for having been lulled into
this oblivion; and he began to rise at once, though he felt his limbs
stiff and his head for the moment light.
'Cannot I get a carriage for S. Johann? My servant is waiting for me
there,' he said to the youth attending on him, when his bath was over.
The lad smiled with amusement.
'There are no carriages here but our lady's, and she will not let you
stir this afternoon, my lord,' he answered in German, as he aided the
stranger to put on his own linen and shooting breeches, now dry and
smoothed out by careful hands.
'But I have no coat! said the traveller in discomfiture, remembering
that his coat was gone with his rifle and his powder-flask.
'The Herr Professor thought you could perhaps manage with one of these.
They were all of Count Gela's, who was a tall man and about your make,'
said an older man-servant who had entered, and now showed him several
unworn or scarcely worn suits.
'If you could wear one of these, my lord, for this evening, we will
send as soon as it is possible for your servant and your clothes to S.
Johann; but it is impossible to-day, because a bridge is down over the
Bürgenbach.'
'You are all of you too good,' said Sabran, as he essayed a coat of
black velvet.
Pull of his new acquaintance and all his talents, the good man Greswold
had hurried away to obey the summons of his ladies, who had desired
to see him. He found them in the white room, a grand salon hung with
white satin silver-fringed, and stately with white marble friezes
and columns, whence it took its name. It was a favourite room with
the mistress of the Schloss; at either end of it immense windows,
emblazoned and deeply embayed, looked out over the sublime landscape
without, of which at this moment every outline was shrouded in the grey
veil of an incessantly falling rain.
With humble obeisances Greswold presented the message and the
credentials of her guest to Wanda von Szalras; it was the first
occasion that he had had of doing so. She read the document signed by
the Kaiser with a smile.
'This is the paper which this unhappy gentleman spoke of when I
arrested him as a poacher,' she said to her aunt. 'The Marquis de
Sabran. The name is familiar to me: I have heard it before.'
'Surely you do not forget the Pontêves-Bargême, the Ducs de Sabran?'
said the Princess, with some severity. S. Eleazar was a Comte de
Sabran!'
'I know! But it is of something nearer to us than S. Eleazar that I am
thinking; there was surely some work or another which bore that name,
and was much read and quoted.'
'He edited and annotated the great "Mexico",' said Herr Greswold, as
though all were told in that.
'A _savant?_' murmured the Princess, in some contemptuous chagrin.
'Pray what is the "Mexico"?'
'The grandest archæological and botanical work, the work of the finest
research and most varied learning that has been produced out of
Germany,' commenced the Professor, with eagerness, but the Princess
arrested him midway in his eloquence.
'The French are all infidels, we know that; but one might have hoped
that in one of the old nobility, as his name would imply, some
lingering reverence for tradition remained.'
'It is not a subversive, not a philosophic work,' said the Professor,
eagerly; but she silenced him.
'It is a book! Why should a Marquis de Sabran write a book?' said the
Princess, with ineffable disdain.
There were all the Fathers for anyone who wanted to read: what need for
any other use of printer's type? So she was accustomed to think and to
say when, scandalised, she saw the German, French, and English volumes,
of which whole cases were wont to arrive at Hohenszalras for the use
of Wanda von Szalras alone: works of philosophy and of science amongst
them which had been denounced in the 'Index.'
'Dear mother,' said the Countess Wanda, 'I have read the "Mexico":
it is a grand monument raised to a dead man's memory out of his own
labours by one of his own descendants--his only descendant, if I
remember aright.'
'Indeed,' said the Princess, unconvinced. 'I know those scientific
works by repute; they always consider the voyage of a germ of moss,
carried on an aerolite through an indefinite space for a billion of
ages, a matter much easier of credence than the "Life of St. Jerome."
I believe they call it sporadic transmission; they call typhus fever
the same.'
'There is nothing of that in the "Mexico": it is a very fine work on
the archæology and history of the country, and on its flora.'
'I should have supposed a Marquis de Sabran a gentleman,' said the
Princess, whom no precedent from the many monarchs who have been
guilty of inferior literature could convince that literature was other
than a trade much like shoemaking: at its best a sort of clerk's
quill-driving, to be equally pitied and censured.
Here Greswold, who valued his post and knew his place too well to
defend either literature or sporadic germs, timidly ventured to suggest
that the Marquis might be well known amongst the nobility of western
France, although not of that immense distinction which finds its
chronicle in the Hof-Kalender. The Princess smiled.
'_Petite noblesse._ You mean petite noblesse, my good Greswold? But
even the petite noblesse need not write books?'
When, however, the further question arose of inviting the stranger to
come to their dinner-table, it was the haughtier Princess who advocated
the invitation; the mistress of the house demurred. She thought that
all requirements of courtesy and hospitality would be fulfilled by
allowing him to dine in his own apartments.
'We do not know him,' she urged. 'No doubt he may very well be what he
says, but it is not easy to refer to an embassy while the rains are
making an island of the Tauern! Nay, dear mother, I am not suspicious;
but I think, as we are two women alone, we can fulfil all obligations
of hospitality towards this gentleman without making him personally
acquainted with ourselves.'
'That is really very absurd. It is acting as if Hohenszalras were a
_gasthof_,' said the Princess, with petulance. 'It is not so often that
we have any relief to the tedium with which you are pleased to surround
yourself that we should be required to shut ourselves from any chance
break in it. Of course, if you send this person his dinner to his own
rooms, he will feel hurt, mortified; he will go away, probably on foot,
rather than remain where he is insulted. Breton nobility is not very
eminent, but it is very proud; it is provincial, territorial; but every
one knows it is ancient, and usually of the most loyal traditions alike
to Church and State. I should be the last person to advocate making a
friendship, or even an acquaintance, without the fullest inquiry; but
when it is a mere question of a politeness for twenty-four hours,
which can entail no consequences, then I must confess that I think
prejudices should yield before the obligations of courtesy. But of
course, my love, decide as you will: you are mistress.'
The Countess Wanda smiled, and did not press her own opposition. She
perceived that the mind of her aunt was full of vivid and harmless
curiosity.
In the end she suggested that the Princess should represent her, and
receive the foreign visitor with all due form and ceremony; but she
herself was still indisposed to admit a person of whose antecedents she
had no positive guarantee so suddenly and entirely into her intimacy.
'You are extraordinarily suspicious,' said the elder lady, pettishly.
'If he were a pedlar or a colporteur, you would be willing to talk with
him.'
'Pedlars and colporteurs cannot take any social advantage of one's
conversation afterwards,' replied her niece. 'We are not usually
invaded by men of rank here; so the precedent may not be perilous. Have
your own way, mother mine.'
The Princess demurred, but finally accepted the compromise; reflecting
that if this stranger were to dine alone with her, she would be able to
ascertain much more about him than if Wanda, who had been created void
of all natural curiosity, and who would have been capable of living
with people twelve months without asking them a single question, would
render it possible to do were she present.
Meanwhile, the physician hurried back to his new friend, who had a
great and peculiar interest for him as the editor of the "Mexico", and
offered him, with the permission of the Countess von Szalras, to wile
away the chill and gloomy day by an inspection of the Schloss.
Joachim Greswold was a very learned and shrewd man, whom poverty and
love of tranquil opportunities of study had induced to bury himself
in the heart of the Glöckner mountains. He had already led a long,
severe, and blameless life of deep devotion and hard privation,
when the post of private physician at Hohenszalras in general, and
to the Princess Ottilie in especial, had been procured for him by
the interest of Prince Lilienhöhe. He had had many sorrows, trials,
and disappointments, which made the simple routine and the entire
solitude of his existence here welcome to him. But he was none the less
delighted to meet any companion of culture and intelligence to converse
with, and in his monotonous and lonely life it was a rare treat to be
able to exchange ideas with one fresh from the intellectual movements
of the outer world.
The Professor found, not to his surprise since he had read the
"Mexico", that his elegant _grand seigneur_ knew very nearly as much
as he did of botany and of comparative anatomy; that he had travelled
nearly all over the world, and travelled to much purpose, and knew many
curious things of the flora of the Rio Grande, whilst it appeared that
he possessed in his cabinets in Paris a certain variety of orchid that
the doctor had always longed to obtain. He was entirely won over when
Sabran, to whom the dried flower was very indifferent, promised to
send it to him. The French Marquis had not Greswold's absolute love of
science; he had studied every thing that had come to his hand, because
he had a high intelligence, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge;
and he had no other kind of devotion to it; when he had penetrated its
mysteries, it lost all interest for him.
At any rate he knew enough to make him an enchanting companion to a
learned man who was all alone in his learning, and received little
sympathy in it from anyone near him.
'What a grand house to be shut up in the heart of the mountains!' said
Sabran, with a sigh. 'I do believe what romance there still is in the
world does lie in these forests of Austria, which have all the twilight
and the solitude that would suit Merlin or the Sleeping Beauty better
than anything we have in France, except, indeed, here and there an old
château like Chenonceaux, or Maintenon.'
'The world has not spoilt us as yet,' said the doctor. 'We see few
strangers. Our people are full of old faiths, old loyalties, old
traditions. They are a sturdy and yet tender people. They are as
fearless as their own steinbock, and they are as reverent as saints
were in monastic days. Our mountains are as grand as the Swiss ones,
but, thank Heaven, they are unspoilt and little known. I tremble when
I think they have begun to climb the Gross Glöckner; all the mystery
and glory of our glaciers will vanish when they become mere points of
ascension. The alpenstock of the tourist is to the everlasting hills
what railway metals are to the plains. Thank God! the few railroads we
have are hundreds of miles asunder.'
'You are a reactionist, Doctor?'
'I am an old man, and I have learned the value of repose,' said
Greswold. 'You know we are called a slow race. It is only the unwise
amongst us who have quicksilver in their brains and toes.'
'You have gold in the former, at least,' said Sabran, kindly, 'and I
dare say quicksilver is in your feet, too, when there is a charity to
be done?'
Herr Joachim, who was simple in the knowledge of mankind, though shrewd
in mother-wit, coloured a little with pleasure. How well this stranger
understood him!
The day went away imperceptibly and agreeably to the physician and to
the stranger in this pleasant rambling talk; whilst the rain poured
down in fury on the stone terraces and green lawns without, and the
Szalrassee was hidden under a veil of fog.
'Am I not to see her at all?' thought Sabran. He did not like to
express his disquietude on that subject to the physician, and he was
not sure himself whether he most desired to ride away without meeting
the serene eyes of his châtelaine, or to be face to face with her once
more.
He stood long before her portrait, done by Carolus Duran; she wore
in it a close-fitting gown of white velvet, and held in her hand a
great Spanish hat with white plumes; the two hounds were beside her;
the attitude had a certain grandeur and gravity in it which were very
impressive.
'This was painted last year,' said Greswold, 'at the Princess's
request. It is admirably like----'
'It is a noble picture,' said Sabran. 'But what a very proud woman she
looks!'
'Blood tells,' said Greswold, 'far more than most people know or admit.
It is natural that my Lady, with the blood in her of so many mighty
nobles, who had the power of judgment and chastisement over whole
provinces, should be sometimes disposed to exercise too despotic a
will, to be sometimes contemptuous of the dictates of modern society,
which sends the princess and the peasant alike to a law court for sole
redress of their wrongs. She is at times irreconcilable with the world
as it stands; she is the representative and descendant in a direct
line of arrogant and omnipotent princes. That she combines with that
natural arrogance and instinct of dominion a very beautiful pitifulness
and even humility is a proof of the chastening influence of religious
faith on the nature of women; we are too apt to forget that, in our
haste to destroy the Church. Men might get on perhaps very well without
a religion of any kind; but I tremble to think what their mothers and
their mistresses would become.'
They passed the morning in animated discussion, and as it drew to
a close, the good doctor did not perceive how adroitly his new
acquaintance drew out from him all details of the past and present of
Hohenszalras, and of the tastes and habits of its châtelaine, until he
knew all that there was to be known of that pure and austere life.
'You may think her grief for her brother Bela's death--for all her
brothers' deaths--a morbid sentiment,' said the doctor as he spoke of
her. 'But it is not so--no. It is, perhaps, overwrought; but no life
can be morbid that is so active in duty, so untiring in charity, so
unsparing of itself. Her lands and riches, and all the people dependent
on her, are to the Countess Wanda only as so much trust, for which
hereafter she will be responsible to Bela and to God. You and I may
smile, you and I, who are philosophers, and have settled past dispute
that the human life has no more future than the snail-gnawed cabbage,
but yet--yet, my dear sir, one cannot deny that there is something
exalted in such a conception of duty; and--of this I am convinced--that
on the character of a woman it has a very ennobling influence.'
'No doubt. But has she renounced all her youth? Does she mean never to
go into the world or to marry?'
'I am quite sure she has made no resolve of the sort,' But I do not
think she will ever alter. She has refused many great alliances.
Her temperament is serene, almost cold; and her ideal it would be
difficult, I imagine, for any mortal man to realise.'
'But when a woman loves----'
'Oh, of course,' said Herr Joachim, rather drily. 'If the aloe
flower!----Love does not I think possess any part of the Countess
Wanda's thoughts or desires. She fancies it a mere weakness.'
'A woman can scarcely be amiable without that weakness.'
'No. Perhaps she is not precisely what we term amiable. She is rather
too far also from human emotions and human needs. The women of the
house of Szalras have been mostly very proud, silent, brave, and
resolute; great ladies rather than lovable wives. Luitgarde von Szalras
held this place with only a few archers and spearmen against Heinrich
Jasomergott in the twelfth century, and he raised the siege after five
months. "She is not a woman, nor human, she is a _kuttengeier_," he
said, as he retreated into his Wiener Wald. All the great monk-vultures
and the gyps and the pygargues have been sacred all through the Hohe
Tauern since that year.'
'And I was about to shoot a _kuttengeier_--now I see that my offence
was beyond poaching, it was high treason almost!'
'I heard the story from Otto. He would have hanged you cheerfully.
But I hope,' said the doctor, with a pang of misgiving, 'that I have
not given you any false impression of my Lady, as cold and hard and
unwomanly. She is full of tenderness of a high order; she is the
noblest, most truthful, and most generous nature that I have ever known
clothed in human form, and if she be too proud--well, it is a stately
sin, pardonable in one who has behind her eleven hundred years of
fearless and unblemished honour.'
'I am a socialist,' said Sabran, a little curtly; then added, with a
little laugh, 'Though I believe not in rank, I do believe in race.'
'_Bon sang ne peut mentir_,' murmured the old physician; the fair face
of Sabran changed slightly.
'Will you come and look over the house?' said the Professor, who
noticed nothing, and only thought of propitiating the owner of the
rare orchid. 'There is almost as much to see as in the Burg at Vienna.
Everything has accumulated here undisturbed for a thousand years.
Hohenszalras has been besieged, but never deserted or dismantled.
'It is a grand place!' said Sabran, with a look of impatience. 'It
seems intolerable that a woman should possess it all, while I only own
a few wind-blown oaks in the wilds of Finisterre.'
'Ah, ah, that is pure socialism!' said the doctor, with a little
chuckle. '_Ote-toi, que je m'y mette._ That is genuine Liberalism all
the world over.'
'You are no communist yourself, doctor?'
'No,' said Herr Joachim, simply. 'All my studies lead me to the
conviction that equality is impossible, and were it possible, it would
be hideous. Variety, infinite variety, is the beneficent law of the
world's life. Why, in that most perfect of all societies, the beehive,
flawless mathematics are found co-existent with impassable social
barriers and unalterable social grades.'
Sabran laughed good-humouredly.
'I thought at least the bees enjoyed an undeniable Republic.'
'A Republic with helots, sir, like Sparta. A Republic will always have
its helots. But come and wander over the castle. Come first and see the
parchments.'
'Where are the ladies?' asked Sabran, wistfully.
'The Princess is at her devotions and taking tisane. I visited her this
morning; she thinks she has a sore throat. As for our Lady, no one
ever disturbs her or knows what she is doing. When she wants any of us
ordinary folks, we are summoned. Sometimes we tremble. You know this
alone is an immense estate, and then there is a palace at the capital,
and one at Salzburg, not to speak of the large estates in Hungary
and the mines in Galicia. All these our Lady sees after and manages
herself. You can imagine that her secretary has no easy task, and that
secretary is herself; for she does not believe in doing anything well
by others.'
'A second Maria Theresa!' said Sabran.
'Not dissimilar, perhaps,' said the doctor, nettled at the irony of the
tone. 'Only where our great Queen sent thousands out to their deaths
the Countess von Szalras saves many lives. There are no mines in the
world--I will make bold to say--where there is so much comfort and so
little peril as those mines of hers in Stanislaw. She visited them
three years hence. But I forget, you are a stranger, and as you do not
share our cultus for the Grafin, cannot care to hear its Canticles.
Come to the muniment-room; you shall see some strange parchments.'
'Heavens, how it rains!' said Sabran, as they left his chambers. 'Is
that common here?'
'Very common, indeed!' said the doctor, with a laugh. 'We pass
two-thirds of the year between snow and water. But then we have
compensation. Where will you see such grass, such forests, such
gardens, when the summer sun does shine?'
The Marquis de Sabran charmed him, and as they wandered over the huge
castle the physician delightedly displayed his own erudition, and
recognised that of his companion. The Hohenszalrasburg was itself
like some black-letter record of old South-German history; it was a
chronicle written in stone and wood and iron. The brave old house,
like a noble person, contained in itself a liberal education, and the
stranger whom through an accident it sheltered was educated enough to
comprehend and estimate it at its due value. In his passage through
it he won the suffrages of the household by his varied knowledge
and correct appreciation. In the stables his praises of the various
breeds of horses there commended itself by its accuracy to Ulrich, the
_stallmeister_, not less than a few difficult shots in the shooting
gallery proved his skill to his enemy of the previous day, Otto, the
_jägermeister._ Not less did he please Hubert, who was learned in such
things, with his cultured admiration of the wonderful old gold and
silver plate, the Limoges dishes and bowls, the Vienna and Kronenthal
china; nor less the custodian of the pictures, a collection of Flemish
and German masters, with here and there a modern _capolavoro_, hung all
by themselves in a little vaulted gallery which led into a much larger
one consecrated to tapestries, Flemish, French, and Florentine.
When twilight came, and the greyness of the rain-charged atmosphere
deepened into the dark of night, Sabran had made all living things at
the castle his firm friends, down to the dogs of the house, save and
except the ladies who dwelt in it. Of them he had had no glimpse. They
kept their own apartments. He began to feel some fresh embarrassment
at remaining another night beneath a roof the mistress of which did
not deign personally to recognise his presence. A salon hung with
tapestries opened out of the bedchamber allotted to him; he wondered if
he were to dine there like a prisoner of state.
He felt an extreme reluctance united to a strong curiosity to meet
again the woman who had treated him with such cool authority and
indifference as a common poacher in her woods. His cheek tingled still,
whenever he thought of the manner in which, at her signal, his hands
had been tied, and his rifle taken from him. She was the representative
of all that feudal, aristocratic, despotic, dominant spirit of a dead
time which he, with his modern, cynical, reckless Parisian Liberalism,
most hated, or believed that he hated. She was Austria Felix
personified, and he was a man who had always persuaded himself and
others that he was a socialist, a Philippe Egalité. And this haughty
patrician had mortified him and then had benefited and sheltered him!
He would willingly have gone from under her roof without seeing
her, and yet a warm and inquisitive desire impelled him to feel an
unreasonable annoyance that the day was going by without his receiving
any intimation that he would be allowed to enter her presence, or be
expected to make his obeisances to her. When, however, the servants
entered to light the many candles in his room, Hubert entered behind
them, and expressed the desire of his lady that the Marquis would
favour them with his presence: they were about to dine.
Sabran, standing before the mirror, saw himself colour like a boy: he
knew not whether he were most annoyed or pleased. He would willingly
have ridden away leaving his napoleons for the household, and seeing
no more the woman who had made him ridiculous in his own eyes; yet
the remembrance of her haunted him as something strange, imperious,
magnetic, grave, serene, stately; vague memories of a thousand things
he had heard said of her in embassies and at courts came to his mind;
she had been a mere unknown name to him then; he had not listened,
he had not cared, but now he remembered all he had heard; curiosity
and an embarrassment wholly foreign to him struggled together in him.
What could he say to a woman who had first insulted and then protected
him? It would tax all the ingenuity and the tact for which he was
famed. However, he only said to the major-domo, 'I am much flattered.
Express my profound gratitude to your ladies for the honour they are so
good as to do me.' Then he made his attire look as well as it could,
and considering that punctuality is due from guests as well as from
monarchs, he said that he was ready to follow the servant waiting for
him, and did so through the many tapestried and panelled corridors by
which the enormous house was traversed.
Though light was not spared at the burg it was only such light as oil
and wax could give the galleries and passages; dim mysterious figures
loomed from the rooms and shadows seemed to stretch away on every side
to vast unknown chambers that might hold the secrets of a thousand
centuries. When he was ushered into the radiance of the great white
room he felt dazzled and blinded.
He felt his bruise still, and he walked with a slight lameness from a
strain of his left foot, but this did not detract from the grace and
distinction of his bearing, and the pallor of his handsome features
became them; and when he advanced through the opened doors and bent
before the chair and kissed the hands of the Princess Ottilie she
thought to herself, 'What a perfectly beautiful person. Even Wanda
will have to admit that!' Whilst Hubert, going backward, said to his
regiment of under-servants: 'Look you! since Count Gela rode out to his
death at the head of the White Hussars, so grand a man as this stranger
has not set foot in this house.'
He expected to see the Countess Wanda von Szalras. Instead, he saw
the loveliest little old lady he had ever seen in his life, clad in a
semi-conventual costume, leaning on a gold-headed cane, with clouds
of fragrant old lace about her, and a cross of emeralds hung at her
girdle of onyx beads, who saluted him with the ceremonious grace of
that etiquette which is still the common rule of life amongst the great
nobilities of the north. He hastened to respond in the same spirit with
an exquisite deference of manner.
She greeted him with affable and smiling words, and he devoted himself
to her with deference and gallantry, expressing all his sense of
gratitude for the succour and shelter he received, with a few eloquent
and elegant phrases which said enough and not too much, with a grace
that it is difficult to lend to gratitude which is generally somewhat
halting and uncouth.
'His name must be in the Hof-Kalendar!' she thought, as she replied to
his protestations with her prettiest smile which, despite her sacred
calling and her seventy years, was the smile of a coquette.
'M. le Marquis,' she said, in her tender and flute-like voice, 'I
deserve none of your eloquent thanks. Age is sadly selfish. I did
nothing to rescue you, unless, indeed, Heaven heard my unworthy
prayer!--and this house is not mine, nor anything in it; the owner of
it, and, therefore, your châtelaine of the moment, is my grand-niece,
the Countess Wanda von Szalras.'
'That I had your intercession with Heaven, however indirectly, was far
more than I deserved,' said Sabran, still standing before her. 'For the
Countess Wanda, I have been twice in her power, and she has been very
generous.'
'She has done her duty, nothing more,' said the Princess a little
primly and petulantly, if princesses and petulance can mingle. 'We
should have scarce been Christians if we had not striven for your
life. As to leaving us this day it was out of the question. The storm
continues, the passes are torrents; I fear much that it will even be
impossible for your servant to come from S. Johann; we could not send
to Matrey even this morning for the post-bag, and they tell me the
bridge is down over the Bürgenbach.'
'I have wanted for nothing, and my Parisian rogue is quite as well
yawning and smoking his days away at S. Johann,' said Sabran. 'Oh,
Madame! how can I ever express to you all my sense of the profound
obligations you have laid me under, stranger that I am!'
'At least we were bound to atone for the incivility of the Szalrassee,'
said the Princess, with her pretty smile. 'It is a very horrible
country to live in. My niece, indeed, thinks it Arcadia, but an Arcadia
subject to the most violent floods, and imprisoned in snow and frost
for so many months, does not commend itself to me; no doubt it is very
grand and romantic.'
The ideal of the Princess was neither grand nor romantic: it was life
in the little prim, yet gay north German town in the palace of which
she and all her people had been born; a little town, with red roofs,
green alleys, straight toylike streets, clipped trees, stiff soldiers,
set in the midst of a verdant plain; flat and green, and smooth as a
card table.
The new comer interested her; she was quickly won by personal beauty,
and he possessed this in a great degree. It was a face unlike any she
had ever seen; it seemed to her to bear mystery with it and melancholy,
and she loved both those things; perhaps because she had never met with
either out of the pages of German poets and novelists of France. Those
who are united to them in real life find them uneasy bedfellows.
'Perhaps he is some Kronprinz in disguise,' she thought with pleasure;
but then she sadly recollected that she knew every crown prince that
there was in Europe. She would have liked to have asked him many
questions, but her high-breeding was still stronger than her curiosity;
and a guest could never be interrogated.
Dinner was announced as served.
'My niece, the Countess Wanda,' said the Princess, with a little
reluctance visible in her hesitation, 'will dine in her own rooms. She
begs you to excuse her; she is tired from the storm last night.'
'She will not dine with me,' thought Sabran, with the quick intuition
natural to him.
'You leave me nothing to regret, Princess,' he said readily, with a
sweet smile, as he offered his arm to this lovely little lady, wrapped
in laces fine as cobweb, with her great cross of emeralds pendent from
her rosary.
A woman is never too old to be averse to the thought that she can
charm; very innocent charming was that of the Princess Ottilie, and she
thought with a sigh if she had married--if she had had such a son; yet
she was not insensible to the delicate compliment which he paid her
in appearing indifferent to the absence of his châtelaine and quite
content with her own presence.
Throughout dinner in that great hall, he, sitting on her right hand,
amused her, flattered her with that subtlest of all flattery, interest
and attention; diverted her with gay stories of worlds unknown to her,
and charmed her with his willingness to listen to her lament over the
degeneracy of mankind and of manners. After a few words of courtesy as
to his hostess's absence he seemed not even to remember that Wanda von
Salzras was absent from the head of her table.
'And I have said that she was tired! She who is never more tired
than the eagles are! May heaven forgive me the untruth!' thought
the Princess more than once during the meal, which was long and
magnificent, and at which her guest ate sparingly and drank but little.
'You have no appetite?' she said regretfully.
'Pardon me, I have a good one,' he answered her; 'but I have always
been content to eat little and drink less. It is the secret of health;
and my health is all my riches.'
She looked at him with interest.
'I should think your riches in that respect are inexhaustible?'
He smiled.
'Oh yes! I have never had a day's illness, except once, long ago in the
Mexican swamps, a marsh fever and a snake-bite.'
'You have travelled much?'
'I have seen most of the known world, and a little of the unknown,'
he answered. 'I am like Ulysses; only there will be not even a dog to
welcome me when my wanderings are done.'
'Have you no relatives?'
'None!' he added, with an effort. Everyone is dead; dead long ago. I
have been long alone, and I am very well used to it.'
'But you must have troops of friends?'
'Oh!--friends who will win my last napoleon at play, or remember me as
long as they meet me every day on the boulevards? Yes, I have many of
that sort, but they are not worth Ulysses' dog.'
He spoke carelessly, without any regard to the truth as far as it went,
but no study would have made him more apt to coin words to attract the
sympathy of his listeners.
'He is unfortunate,' she thought. 'How often beauty brings misfortune.
My niece must certainly see him. I wish he belonged to the
Pontêves-Bargêmes!'
Not to have a name that she knew, one of those names that fill all
Europe as with the trump of an archangel, was to be as one maimed or
deformed in the eyes of the Princess, an object for charity, not for
intercourse.
'Your title is of Brittany, I think?' she said a little wistfully,
and as he answered something abruptly in the affirmative, she solaced
herself once more with the remembrance that there was a good deal of
_petite noblesse_, honourable enough, though not in the 'Almanac de
Gotha,' which was a great concession from her prejudices, invented on
the spur of the interest that he excited in her imagination.
'I never saw any person so handsome,' she thought, as she glanced
at his face; while he in return thought that this silver-haired,
soft-cheeked, lace-enwrapped Holy Mother was _jolie à croquer_ in
the language of those boulevards, which had been his nursery and his
palestrum. She was so kind to him, she was so gracious and graceful,
she chatted with him so frankly and pleasantly, and she took so active
an interest in his welfare that he was touched and grateful. He had
known many women, many young ones and gay ones; he had never known what
the charm of a kindly and serene old age can be like in a woman who has
lived with pure thoughts, and will die in hope and in faith; and this
lovely old abbess, with her pretty touch of worldliness, was a study to
him, new with the novelty of innocence, and of a kind of veneration.
And he was careful not to let her perceive his mortification that the
Countess von Szalras would not deign to dine in his presence. In truth,
he thought of little else, but no trace of irritation or of absence of
mind was to be seen in him as he amused the Princess, and discovered
with her that they had in common some friends amongst the nobilities of
Saxony, of Wurtemberg, and of Bohemia.
'Come and take your coffee in my own room, the blue-room,' she said to
him, and she rose and took his arm. 'We will go through the library;
you saw it this morning, I imagine? It is supposed to contain the
finest collection of Black Letter in the empire, or so we think.'
And she led him through the great halls and up a few low stairs into a
large oval room lined with oaken bookcases, which held the manuscripts,
missals, and volumes of all dates which had been originally gathered
together by one of the race who had been also a bishop and a cardinal.
The library was oak-panelled, and had an embossed and emblazoned
ceiling; silver lamps of old Italian _trasvorato_ work, hung by
silver chains, and shed a subdued clear light; beneath the porphyry
sculptures of the hearth a fire of logs was burning, for the early
summer evening here is chill and damp; there were many open fireplaces
in Hohenszalras, introduced there by a chilly Provençal princess, who
had wedded a Szalras in the seventeenth century, and who had abolished
the huge porcelain stoves in many apartments in favour of grand carved
mantel-pieces, and gilded andirons, and sweet smelling simple fires of
aromatic woods, such as made glad the sombre hotels and lonely châteaux
of the Prance of the Bourbons.
Before this hearth, with the dogs stretched on the black bearskin
rugs, his hostess was seated; she had dined in a small dining-hall
opening out of the library, and was sitting reading with a shaded
light behind her. She rose with astonishment, and, as he fancied,
anger upon her face as she saw him enter, and stood in her full height
beneath the light of one of the silver hanging lamps. She wore a gown
of olive-coloured velvet, with some pale roses fastened amongst the
old lace at her breast; she had about her throat several rows of large
pearls, which she always wore night and day that they should not change
their pure whiteness by disuse; she looked very stately, cold, annoyed,
disdainful, as she stood there without speaking.
'It is my niece, the Countess von Szalras,' said the Princess to her
companion in some trepidation. 'Wanda, my love, I was not aware you
were here; I thought you were in your own octagon room; allow me to
make you acquainted with your guest, whom you have already received
twice with little ceremony I believe.'
The trifling falsehoods were trippingly but timidly said; the
Princess's blue eyes sought consciously her niece's forgiveness with
a pathetic appeal, to which Wanda, who loved her tenderly, could not
be long obdurate. Had it been any other than Mme. Ottilie who had
thus brought by force into her presence a stranger whom she had
marked her desire to avoid, the serene temper of the mistress of
the Hohenszalrasburg would not have preserved its equanimity, and
she would have quitted her library on the instant, sweeping a grand
courtesy which should have been greeting and farewell at once to one
too audacious. But the shy entreating appeal of the Princess's regard
touched her heart, and the veneration she had borne from childhood
to one so holy, and so sacred by years of grace, checked in her any
utterance or sign of annoyance.
Sabran, meanwhile, standing by in some hesitation and embarrassment,
bowed low with consummate grace, and a timidity not less graceful.
She advanced a step and held her hand out to him.
'I fear I have been inhospitable, sir,' she said to him in his
own tongue. 'Are you wholly unhurt? You had a rough greeting from
Hohenszalras.'
He took the tip of her fingers on his own and bent over them as humbly
as over an empress's.
Well used to the world as he was, to its ceremonies, courts, and
etiquettes, he was awed by her as if he were a youth; he lost his ready
aptness of language, and his easy manner of adaptability.
'I am but a vagrant, Madame!' he murmured, as he bowed over her hand.
'I have no right even to your charity!'
For the moment it seemed to her as if he spoke in bitter and melancholy
earnest, and she looked at him in a passing surprise that changed into
a smile.
'You were a poacher certainly, but that is forgiven. My aunt has taken
you under her protection; and you had the Kaiser's already: with such a
dual shelter you are safe. Are you quite recovered?' she said, bending
her grave glance upon him. 'I have to ask your pardon for my great
negligence in not sending one of my men to guide you over the pass to
Matrey.'
'Nay, if you had done so I should not have enjoyed the happiness of
being your debtor,' he replied, meeting her close gaze with a certain
sense of confusion most rare with him; and added a few words of
eloquent gratitude, which she interrupted almost abruptly:
'Pray carry no such burden of imaginary debt, and have no scruples in
staying as long as you like; we are a mountain refuge, use it as you
would a monastery. In the winter we have many travellers. We are so
entirely in the heart of the hills that we are bound by all Christian
laws to give a refuge to all who need it. But how came you on the lake
last evening? Could you not read the skies?'
He explained his own folly and hardihood, and added, with a glance at
her, 'The offending rifle is in the Szalrassee. It was my haste to quit
your dominions that made me venture on to the lake. I had searched in
vain for the high road that you had told me of, and I thought if I
crossed the lake I should be off your soil.'
'No; for many leagues you would not have been off it,' she answered
him. 'Our lands are very large, and, like the Archbishopric of
Berchtesgarten, are as high as they are broad. Our hills are very
dangerous for strangers, especially until the snows of the passes have
all melted. I repented me too late that I did not send a jäger with you
as a guide.'
'All is well that ends well,' said the Princess. 'Monsieur is not the
worse for his bath in the lake, and we have the novelty of an incident
and of a guest, who we will hope in the future will become a friend.'
'Madame, if I dared hope that I should have much to live for!' said the
stranger, and the Princess smiled sweetly upon him.
'You must have very much to live for, as it is. Were I a man, and as
young as you, and as favoured by nature, I am afraid I should be
tempted to live for--myself.'
'And I am most glad when I can escape from so poor a companion,' said
he, with a melancholy in the accent and a passing pain that was not
assumed.
Before this gentle and gracious old woman in this warm and elegant
chamber he felt suddenly that he was a wanderer--perhaps an outcast.
'You need not use the French language with him, Wanda,' interrupted the
Princess. 'The Marquis speaks admirable German: it is impossible to
speak better.'
'We will speak our own tongue then,' said Wanda, who always regarded
her aunt as though she were a petted and rather wayward child. 'Are you
quite rested, M. de Sabran? and quite unhurt?' I did not dine with you.
It must have seemed churlish. But I am very solitary in my habits, and
my aunt entertains strangers so much better than I do that I grow more
hermit-like every year.'
He smiled; he thought there was but little of the hermit in this
woman's supreme elegance and dignity as she stood beside her hearth
with its ruddy, fitful light playing on the great pearls at her throat
and burnishing into gold the bronze shadows of her velvet gown.
'The Princess has told me that you are cruel to the world,' he answered
her. 'But it is natural with such a kingdom that you seldom care to
leave it.'
'It is a kingdom of snow for seven months out of the year,' said the
Princess peevishly, 'and a water kingdom the other five. You see what
it is to-day, and this is the middle of May!'
'I think one might well forget the rain and every other ill between
these four walls,' said the French Marquis, as he glanced around him,
and then slowly let his eyes rest on his châtelaine.
'It is a grand library,' she answered him; 'but I must warn you that
there is nothing more recent in it than Diderot and Descartes. The
cardinal--Hugo von Szalras--who collected it lived in the latter half
of last century, and since his day no Szalras has been bookish save
myself. The cardinal, however, had all the MSS. and the black letters,
or nearly all, ready to his hand; what he added is a vast library
of science and history, and he also got together some of the most
beautiful missals in the world. Are you curious in such things?'
She rose as she spoke, and unlocked one of the doors of the oak
bookcase and brought out an ivory missal carved by the marvellous
Prönner of Klagenfurt, with the arms of the Szalras on one side of it
and those of a princely German house on the other.
'That was the nuptial missal of Georg von Szalras and Ida Windisgratz
in 1501,' she said; 'and these are all the other marriage-hours of our
people, if you care to study them'; and in that case next to this there
is a wonderful Evangelistarium, with miniatures of Angelico's. But I
see they tell all their stories to you; I see by the way you touch them
that you are a connoisseur.'
'I fear I have studied them chiefly at the sales of the Rue Drouot,'
said Sabran, with a smile; but he had a great deal of sound knowledge
on all arts and sciences, and a true taste which never led him wrong.
With an illuminated chronicle in his hand, or a book of hours on his
knee, he conversed easily, discursively, charmingly, of the early
scribes and the early masters; of monkish painters and of church
libraries; of all the world has lost, and of all aid that art had
brought to faith.
He talked well, with graceful and well-chosen language, with
picturesque illustration, with a memory that never was at fault for
name or date, or apt quotation; he spoke fluent and eloquent German, in
which there was scarcely any trace of foreign accent; and he disclosed
without effort the resources of a cultured and even learned mind.
The antagonism she had felt against the poacher of her woods melted
away as she listened and replied to him; there was a melody in his
voice and a charm in his manner that it was not easy to resist; and
with the pale lights from the Italian lamp which swung near upon the
fairness of his face she reluctantly owned that her aunt had been
right: he was singularly handsome, with that uncommon and grand cast
of beauty which in these days is rarer than it was in the times of
Vandyck and of Velasquez--for manners and moods leave their trace on
the features, and this age is not great.
The Princess in, her easy-chair, for once not sleeping after dinner,
listened to her and thought to herself, 'She is angry with me; but how
much better it is to talk with a living being than to pass the evening
over a philosophical treatise, or the accounts of her schools, or her
stables!'
Sabran having conquered the momentary reluctance and embarrassment
which had overcome him in the presence of the woman to whom he owed
both an outrage and a rescue, endeavoured, with all the skill he
possessed, to interest and beguile her attention. He knew that she was
a great lady, a proud woman, a recluse, and a student, and a person
averse to homage and flattery of every kind; he met her on the common
ground of art and learning, and could prove himself her equal at all
times, even occasionally her master. When he fancied she had enough of
such serious themes he spoke of music. There was a new opera then out
at Paris, of which the theme was as yet scarcely known. He looked round
the library and said to her:
'Were there an organ here or a piano I could give you some idea of the
motive; I can recall most of it.'
'There are both in my own room. It is near here,' she said to him.
'Will you come?'
Then she led the way across the gallery, which alone separated the
library from that octagon room which was so essentially her own where
all were hers. The Princess accompanied her: content as a child is who
has put a light to a slow match that leads it knows not whither. 'She
must approve of him, or she would not take him there,' thought the wise
Princess.
'Go and play to us,' said Wanda von Szalras, as her guest entered the
sacred room. 'I am sure you are a great musician; you speak of music
as we only speak of what we love.'
'What do you love?' he wondered mutely, as he sat down before the
grand piano and struck a few chords. He sat down and played without
prelude one of the most tender and most grave of Schubert's sonatas.
It was subtle, delicate, difficult to interpret, but he gave it with
consummate truth of touch and feeling. He had always loved German music
best. He played on and on, dreamily, with a perfection of skill that
was matched by his tenderness of interpretation.
'You are a great artist,' said his hostess, as he paused.
He rose and approached her.
'Alas! no, I am only an amateur,' he answered her. 'To be an artist one
must needs have immense faith in one's art and in oneself: I have no
faith in anything. An artist steers straight to one goal; I drift.'
'You have drifted to wise purpose----'You must have studied much?'
'In my youth. Not since. An artist! Ah! how I envy artists! They
believe; they aspire; even if they never attain, they are happy, happy
in their very torment, and through it, like lovers.'
'But your talent----'
'Ah, Madame, it is only talent; it is nothing else. The _feu sacré_ is
wanting.'
She looked at him with some curiosity.
'Perhaps the habit of the world has put out that fire: it often does.
But if even it be only talent, what a beautiful talent it is! To
carry all that store of melody safe in your memory--it is like having
sunlight and moonlight ever at command.'
Lizst had more than once summoned the spirits of Heaven to his call
there in that same room in Hohenszalras; and since his touch no one
had ever made the dumb notes speak as this stranger could do, and the
subdued power of his voice added to the melody he evoked. The light
of the lamps filled with silvery shadows the twilight of the chamber;
the hues of the tapestries, of the ivories, of the gold and silver
work, of the paintings, of the embroideries, made a rich chiaro-oscuro
of colour; the pine cones and the dried thyme burning on the hearth
shed an aromatic smell on the air; there were large baskets and vases
full of hothouse roses and white lilies from the gardens; she sat by
the hearth, left in shadow except where the twilight caught the gleam
of her pearls and the shine of her eyes; she listened, the jewels on
her hand glancing like little stars as she slowly waved to and fro a
feather screen in rhythm with what he sang or played: so might Mary
Stuart have looked, listening to Rizzio or Ronsard. 'She is a queen!'
he thought, and he sang--
'Si j'étais Roi!'
'Go on!' she said, as he paused; he had thrown eloquence and passion
into the song.
'Shall I not tire you?'
'That is only a phrase! Save when Liszt passes by here I never hear
such music as yours.'
'He obeyed her, and played and sang many and very different things.
At last he rose a little abruptly.
Two hours had gone by since they had entered the octagon chamber.
'It would be commonplace to thank you,' she murmured with a little
hesitation. 'You have a great gift; one of all gifts the most generous
to others.'
He made a gesture of repudiation, and walked across to a spinet of the
fifteenth century, inlaid with curious devices by Martin Pacher of
Brauneck, and having a painting of his in its lid.
'What a beautiful old box,' he said, as he touched it. 'Has it any
sound, I wonder? If one be disposed to be sad, surely of all sad things
an old spinet is the saddest! To think of the hands that have touched,
of the children that have danced to it, of the tender old ballads that
have been sung to the notes that to us seem so hoarse and so faulty!
All the musicians dead, dead so long ago, and the old spinet still
answering when anyone calls! Shall I sing you a madrigal to it?'
Very tenderly, very lightly, he touched the ivory keys of the painted
toy of the ladies so long dead and gone, and he sang in a minor key the
sweet, sad, quaint poem:--
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
That ballad of fair women echoed softly through the stillness of the
chamber, touched with the sobbing notes of the spinet, even as it might
have been in the days of its writer:
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The chords of the old music-box seemed to sigh and tremble with
remembrance. Where were they, all the beautiful dead women, all the
fair imperious queens, all the loved, and all the lovers? Where were
they? The snow had fallen through so many white winters since that song
was sung--so many! so many!
The last words thrilled sadly and sweetly through the silence.
He rose and bowed very low.
'I have trespassed too long on your patience, madame; I have the honour
to wish you goodnight.'
Wanda von Szalras was not a woman quickly touched to any emotion, but
her eyelids were heavy with a mist of unshed tears, as she raised them
and looked up from the fire, letting drop on her lap the screen of
plumes.
'If there be a Lorelei in our lake, no wonder from envy she tried to
drown you,' she said, with a smile that cost her a little effort.
Good-night, sir; should you wish to leave us in the morning, Hubert
will see you reach S. Johann safely and as quickly as can be.'
'Your goodness overwhelms me,' he murmured. 'I can never hope to show
my gratitude----'
'There is nothing to be grateful for,' she said quickly. 'And if there
were, you would have repaid it: you have made a spinet, silent for
centuries, speak, and speak to our hearts. Good-night, sir; may you
have good rest and a fair journey!'
When he had bowed himself out, and the tapestry of the door had closed
behind him, she rose and looked at a clock.
'It is actually twelve!'
'Acknowledge at least that he has made the evening pass well!' said
the Princess, with a little petulance and much triumph.
'He has made it pass admirably,' said her niece. 'At the same time,
dear aunt, I think it would have been perhaps better if you had not
made a friend of a stranger.'
'Why?' said the Princess with some asperity.
'Because I think we can fulfil all the duties of hospitality without
doing so, and we know nothing of this gentleman.'
'He is certainly a gentleman,' said the Princess, with not less
asperity. 'It seems to me, my dear Wanda, that you are for once in your
life--if you will pardon me the expression--ill-natured.'
The Countess Wanda smiled a little.
'I cannot imagine myself ill-natured; but I may be so. One never knows
oneself.'
'And ungrateful,' added the Princess. 'When, I should like to know,
have you for years reached twelve o'clock at night without being
conscious of it?'
'Oh, he sang beautifully, and he played superbly,' said her niece,
still with the same smile, balancing her ostrich-feathers. 'But let him
go on his way to-morrow; you and I cannot entertain strange men, even
though they give us music like Rubenstein's.'
'If Egon were here----'
'Oh, poor Egon! I think he would not like your friend at all. They both
want to shoot eagles----'
'Perhaps he would not like him for another reason,' said the Princess,
with a look of mystery. 'Egon could never make the spinet speak.'
'No; but who knows? Perhaps he can take better care of his own soul
because he cannot lend one to a spinet!'
'You are perverse, Wanda!'
'Perverse, inhospitable, and ill-natured? I fear I shall carry a heavy
burden of sins to Father Ferdinand in the morning!'
'I wish you would not send horses to S. Johann in the morning. We never
have anything to amuse us in this solemn solitary place.'
'Dear aunt, one would think you were very indiscreet.'
'I wish you were more so!' said the pretty old lady with impatience,
and then her hand made a sign over the cross of emeralds, for she
knew that she had uttered an unholy wish. She kissed her niece with
repentant tenderness, and went to her own apartments.
Wanda von Szalras, left alone in her chamber, stood awhile thoughtfully
beside the fire; then she moved away and touched the yellow ivory of
the spinet keys.
'Why could he make them speak,' she said to herself, 'when everyone
else always failed?'