Sabran, as he undressed himself and laid himself down under the great
gold-fringed canopy of the stately bed, thought: 'Was I only a clever
comedian to-night, or did my eyes really grow wet as I sang that old
song and see her face through a mist as if she and I had met in the old
centuries long ago?'
He stood and looked a moment at his own reflection in the great mirror
with the wax candles burning in its sconces. He was very pale.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The burden of it ran through his mind.
Almost it seemed to him long ago--long ago--she had been his lady and
he her knight, and she had stooped to him, and he had died for her.
Then he laughed a little harshly.
'I grow that best of all actors,' he thought, 'an actor who believes in
himself!'
Then he turned from the mirror and stretched himself on the great
bed, with its carved warriors at its foot and its golden crown at its
head, and its heavy amber tissues shining in the shadows. He was a
sound sleeper at all times. He had slept peacefully on a wreck, in
a hurricane, in a lonely hut on the Andes, as after a night of play
in Paris, in Vienna, in Monaco. He had a nerve of steel, and that
perfect natural constitution which even excess and dissipation cannot
easily impair. But this night, under the roof of Hohenszalras, in the
guest-chamber of Hohenszalras, he could not summon sleep at his will,
and he lay long wide awake and restless, watching the firelight play on
the figures upon the tapestried walls, where the lords and ladies of
Tuscan Boccaccio and their sinful loves were portrayed in stately and
sombre guise, and German costumes of the days of Maximilian.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The line of the old romaunt ran through his brain, and when towards
dawn he did at length fall asleep it was not of Hohenszalras that he
dreamed, but of wide white steppes, of a great ice-fed rolling river,
of monotonous pine woods, with the gilded domes of a half eastern city
rising beyond them in the pale blue air of a northern twilight.
With the early morning he awoke, resolute to get away be the weather
what it would. As it chanced, the skies were heavy still, but no rain
fell; the sun was faintly struggling through the great black masses of
cloud; the roads might be dangerous, but they were not impassable; the
bridge over the Bürgenbach might be broken, but at least Matrey could
be reached, if it were not possible to go on farther to Taxenbach or S.
Johann im Wald. High north, where far away stretched the wild marshes
and stony swamps of the Pinzgau (the Pinzgau so beautiful, where in its
hilly district the grand Salzach rolls on its impetuous way beneath
deep shade of fir-clad hills, tracks desolate as a desert of sand or
stone), the sky was overcast, and of an angry tawny colour that brooded
ill for the fall of night. But the skies were momentarily clear, and he
desired to rid of his presence the hospitable roof beneath which he was
but an alien and unbidden.
He proposed to leave on foot, but of this neither Greswold nor the
major-domo would hear: they declared that such an indignity would
dishonour the Hohenszalrasburg for evermore. Guests there were masters.
'Bidden guests, perhaps,' said Sabran, reluctantly yielding to be
sped on his way by a pair of the strong Hungarian horses that he had
seen and admired in their stalls. He did not venture to disturb the
ladies of the castle by a request for a farewell audience at the early
hour at which it was necessary he should depart if he wished to try
to reach a railway the same evening, but he left two notes for them,
couched in that graceful compliment of which his Parisian culture made
him an admirable master, and took a warm adieu of the good physician,
with a promise not to forget the orchid of the Spiritù Santo. Then he
breakfasted hastily, and left the tapestried chamber in which he had
dreamed of the Nibelungen Queen.
At the door he drew a ring of great value from his finger and passed it
to Hubert, but the old man, thanking him, protested he dared not take
it.
'Old as I am in her service,' he said, 'the Countess would dismiss me
in an hour if I accepted any gifts from a guest.'
'Your lady is very severe,' said Sabran. 'It is happy for her she has
servitors who subscribe to feudalism. If she were in Paris----'
'We are bound to obey,' said the old man, simply. 'The Countess deals
with us most generously and justly. We are bound, in return, to render
her obedience.'
'All the antique virtues have indeed found refuge here!' said Sabran;
but he left the ring behind him lying on a table in the Rittersäal.
Four instead of two vigorous and half-broke horses from the Magyar
plains bore him away in a light travelling carriage towards the
Virgenthal; the household, with Herr Joachim at their head, watching
with regret the travelling carriage wind up amongst the woods and
disappear on the farther side of the lake. He himself looked back with
a pang of envy and regret at the stately pile towering towards the
clouds, with its deep red banner streaming out on the wind that blew
from the northern plains.
'Happy woman!' he thought; 'happy--thrice happy--to possess such
dominion, such riches, and such ancestry! If I had had them I would
have had the world under my foot as well!'
It was with a sense of pain that he saw the great house disappear
behind its screen of mantling woods, as his horses climbed the hilly
path beyond, higher and higher at every step, until all that he saw
of Hohenszalras was a strip of the green lake--green as an arum
leaf--lying far down below, bearing on its waters the grey willows of
the Holy Isle.
'When I am very old and weary I will come and die there,' he thought,
with a touch of that melancholy which all his irony and cynicism could
not dispel from his natural temper. There were moments when he felt
that he was but a lonely and homeless wanderer on the face of the
earth, and this was one of those moments, as, alone, he went upon his
way along the perilous path, cut along the face of precipitous rocks,
passing over rough bridges that spanned deep defiles and darkening
ravines, clinging to the side of a mountain as a swallow's nest clings
to the wall of a house, and running high on swaying galleries above
dizzy depths, where nameless torrents plunged with noise and foam into
impenetrable chasms. The road had been made in the fifteenth century by
the Szalras lords themselves, and the engineering of it was bold and
vigorous though rude, and kept in sound repair, though not much changed.
He had left a small roll of paper lying beside the ring in the knight's
hall. Hubert took them both to his mistress when, a few hours later,
he was admitted to her presence. Opening the paper she saw a roll of a
hundred napoleons, and on the paper was written, 'There can be no poor
where the Countess von Szalras rules. Let these be spent in masses for
the dead.'
'What a delicate and graceful sentiment,' said the Princess Ottilie,
with vivacity and emotion.
'It is prettily expressed and gracefully thought of,' her niece
admitted.
'Charmingly--admirably!' said the Princess, with a much warmer accent.
'There is delicate gratitude there, as well as a proper feeling towards
a merciful God.'
'Perhaps,' said her niece, with a little smile, 'the money was won at
play, in giving someone else what they call a _culotte_; what would you
say then, dear aunt? Would it be purified by entering the service of
the Church?'
'I do not know why you are satirical,' said the Princess; 'and I cannot
tell either how you can bring yourself to use Parisian bad words.'
'I will send these to the Bishop,' said Wanda, rolling up the gold.
'Alas! alas! there are always poor. As for the ring, Hubert, give it to
Herr Greswold, and he will transmit it to this gentleman's address in
Paris, as though it had been left behind by accident. You were so right
not to take it; but my dear people are always faithful.'
These few words were dearer and more precious to the honest old man
than all the jewels in the world could ever have become. But the offer
of it and the gift of the gold for the Church's use had confirmed the
high opinion in which he and the whole household of Hohenszalras held
the departed guest.
'Allow at least that this evening will be much duller than last!' said
the Princess, with much irritation.
'Your friend played admirably,' said Wanda von Szalras, as she sat at
her embroidery frame.
'You speak as if he were an itinerant pianist! What is your dislike to
your fellow creatures, when they are of your own rank, based upon? If
he had been a carpet-dealer from the Defreggerthal, as I said before,
you would have bidden him stay a month.'
'Dearest aunt, be reasonable. How was it possible to keep here on a
visit a French Marquis of whom we know absolutely nothing, except from
himself?'
'I never knew you were prudish!'
'I never knew either that I was,' said the Countess Wanda, with her
serene temper unruffled. 'I quite admit your new friend has many
attractive qualities--on the surface at any rate; but if it were
possible for me to be angry with you, I should be so for bringing him
as you did into the library last night.'
'You would never have known your spinet could speak if I had not. You
are very ungrateful, and I should not be in the least surprised to find
that he was a Crown Prince or a Grand Duke travelling incognito.'
'We know them all, I fear.'
'It is strange he should not have his name in the Hof-Kalender, beside
the Sabran-Pontêves!' insisted the Princess. 'He looks _prince du
sang_, if ever anyone did; so----'
'There is good blood outside your Hof Kalender, dear mother mine.'
'Certainly,' said the Princess, 'he must surely be a branch of that
family, though it would be more satisfactory if one found his record
there. One can never know too much or too certainly of a person whom
one admits to friendship.'
'Friendship is a very strong word,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a
smile. 'This gentleman has only made a hostelry of Hohenszalras for a
day or two, and even that was made against his will. But as you are so
interested in him, _meine Liebe_, read this little record I have found.'
She gave the Princess an old leather-bound volume of memoirs, written
and published at Lausanne, by an obscure noble in his exile, in the
year 1798. She had opened the book at one of the pages that narrated
the fates of many nobles of Brittany, relatives or comrades of the
writer.
'And foremost amongst these,' said this little book, 'do I ever and
unceasingly regret the loss of my beloved cousin and friend, Yvon
Marquis de Sabran-Romaris. So beloved was he in his own province that
even the Convention was afraid to touch him, and being poor, despite
his high descent, as his father had ruined his fortunes in play and
splendour at the court of Louis XV., he thought to escape the general
proscription, and dwell peaceably on his rock-bound shores with his
young children. But the blood madness of the time so grew upon the
nation that even the love of his peasantry and his own poverty could
not defend him, and one black, bitter day an armed mob from Vannes
came over the heath, burning all they saw of ricks, or homesteads, or
châteaux, or cots, that they might warm themselves by those leaping
fires; and so they came on at last, yelling, and drunk, and furious,
with torches flaming and pikes blood-stained, up through the gates of
Romaris. Sabran went out to meet them, leading his eldest son by the
hand, a child of eight years old. "What seek ye?" he said to them: "I
am as poor as the poorest of you, and consciously have done no living
creature wrong. What do you come for here?" The calm courage of him,
and the glance of his eyes, which were very beautiful and proud,
quelled the disordered, mouthing, blood-drunk multitude in a manner,
and moved them to a sort of reverence, so that the leader of them,
stepping forth, said roughly, 'Citizen, we come to slit your throat
and burn your house; but if you will curse God and the King, and cry
'Long live the sovereign people!' we will leave you alone, for you
have been the friend of the poor. Come, say it!--come, shout it with
both lungs!--it is not much to ask? Sabran put his little boy behind
him with a tender gesture, then kissed the hilt of his sword, which he
held unsheathed in his hand: "I sorrow for the people," he said, "since
they are misguided and mad. But I believe in my God and I love my King,
and even so shall my children do after me;" and the words were scarce
out of his mouth before a score of pikes ran him through the body, and
the torches were tossed into his house, and he and his perished like
so many gallant gentlemen of the time, a prey to the blind fury of an
ingrate mob.'
The Princess Ottilie's tender eyes moistened as she read, and she
closed the volume reverently, as though it were a sacred thing.
'I thank you for sending me such a history,' she said. 'It does one's
soul good in these sad, bitter days of spiritless selfishness and
utter lack of all impersonal devotion. This gentleman must, then, be a
descendant of the child named in this narrative?'
'The story says that he and his perished,' replied her niece. 'But I
suppose that child, or some other younger one, escaped the fire and the
massacre. If ever we see him again, we will ask him. Such a tradition
is as good as a page in the Almanac de Gotha.'
'It is,' accented the Princess. 'Where did you find it?'
'I read those memoirs when I was a child, with so many others of that
time,' answered the Countess Wanda. 'When I heard the name of your new
friend it seemed familiar to me, and thinking over it, I remembered
these Breton narratives.'
'At least you need not have been afraid to dine with him!' said
the Princess Ottilie, who could never resist having the last word,
though she felt that the retort was a little ungenerous, and perhaps
undeserved.
Meantime Sabran went on his way through the green valley under the
shadow of the Klein and the Kristallwand, with the ice of the great
Schaltten Gletscher descending like a huge frozen torrent. When he
reached the last stage before Matrey he dismissed his postillions with
a gratuity as large as the money remaining in his belt would permit,
and insisted on taking his way on foot over the remaining miles.
Baggage he had none, and he had not even the weight of his knapsack and
rifle. The men remonstrated with him, for they were afraid of their
lady's anger if they returned when they were still half a German mile
off their destination. But he was determined, and sent them backwards,
whilst they could yet reach home by daylight. The path to Matrey passed
across pastures and tracts of stony ground; he took a little goatherd
with him as a guide, being unwilling to run the risk of a second
misadventure, and pressed on his way without delay.
The sun had come forth from out a watery world of cloud and mist,
which shrouded from sight all the domes and peaks and walls of ice
of the mountain region in which he was once more a wanderer. But
when the mists had lifted, and the sun was shining, it was beautiful
exceedingly: all the grasses were full of the countless wild flowers of
the late Austrian spring; the swollen brooks were blue with mouse-ear,
and the pastures with gentian; clumps of daffodils blossomed in all
the mossy nooks, and hyacinths purpled the pine-woods. On the upper
slopes the rain-fog still hung heavily, but the sun-rays pierced it
here and there, and the white vaporous atmosphere was full of fantastic
suggestions and weird half-seen shapes, as pine-trees loomed out of
the mist or a vast black mass of rock towered above the clouds. A
love of nature, of out-of-door movement, of healthful exercise and
sports, resisted in him the enervating influences of the Paris life
which he had led. He had always left the gay world at intervals for
the simple and rude pleasures of the mountaineer and the hunter. There
was an impulse towards that forest freedom which at times mastered
him, and made the routine of worldly dissipation and diversion wholly
intolerable to him. It was what his fair critic of Paris had called his
barbarism, which broke up out of the artificial restraints and habits
imposed by the world.
His wakeful night had made him fanciful, and his departure from
Hohenszalras had made him regretful; for he, on his way back to Paris
and all his habits and associates and pleasures, looking around him
on the calm white mountain-sides, and penetrated by the pure, austere
mountain silence, suddenly felt an intense desire to stay amidst that
stillness and that solitude, and rest here in the green heart of the
Tauern.
'Who knows but one might see her again?' he thought, as the sound of
the fall of the Gschlossbach came on his ear from the distance. That
stately figure seated by the great wood fire, with the light on her
velvet skirts, and the pearls at her throat, and the hounds lying
couched beside her, was always before his memory and his vision.
And he paid and dismissed his goatherd at the humble door of the Zum
Rautter in Windisch-Matrey, and that evening began discussing with
Christ Rangediner and Egger, the guides there, the ascent of the
Kahralpe and the Lasörling, and the pass to Krimml, over the ice crests
of the Venediger group.
A mountaineer who had dwelt beneath the shadow of Orizaba was not
common in the heart of the Tauern, and the men made much of their new
comrade, not the less because the gold pieces rattled in his pouch, and
the hunting-watch he earned had jewels at its back.
'If anyone had told me that in the Mois de Marie I should bury myself
under an Austrian glacier!' he thought, with some wonder at his
own decision, for he was one of those foster-sons of Paris to whom
_parisine_ is an habitual and necessary intoxication.
But there comes a time when even parisine, like chloral, ceases to
have power to charm; in a vague way he had often felt the folly and
the hollowness of the life that turned night into day, made the green
cloth of the gaming-table the sole field of battle, and offered as
all form of love the purchased smile of the _belle petite._ A sense of
repose and of freshness, like the breath of a cool morning blowing on
tired eyes, came to him as he sat in the grey twilight amidst the green
landscape, with the night coming down upon the eternal snows above,
whilst the honest, simple souls around him talked of hill perils and
mountaineers' adventures, and all the exploits of a hardy life; and in
the stillness, when their voices ceased, there was no sound but the
sound of water up above amidst the woods, tumbling and rippling in a
hundred unseen brooks and falls.
'If they had let me alone,' he thought, 'I should have been a hunter
all my days; a guide, perhaps, like this Christ and this Egger here. An
honest man, at least----'
His heart was heavy and his conscience ill at ease. The grand, serene
glance of Wanda von Szalras seemed to have reached his soul and called
up in him unavailing regrets, pangs of doubt long dormant, vague
remorse long put to sleep with the opiate of the world-taught cynicism,
which had become his second nature. The most impenetrable cynicism will
yield and melt, and seem but a poor armour, when it is brought amidst
the solemnity and solitude of the high hills.