The summer glided away and became autumn, and the Countess Wanda
refused obstinately to fill Hohenszalras with house-parties. In vain
her aunt spoke of the Lynau, the Windischgrätz, the Hohenlöhe, and the
other great families who were their relatives or their friends. In vain
she referred continually to the fact that every Schloss in Austria and
all adjacent countries was filling with guests at this season, and the
woods around it resounding with the hunter's horn and the hound's bay.
In vain did she recapitulate the glories of Hohenszalras in an earlier
time, and hint that the mistress of so vast a domain owed some duties
to society.
Wanda von Szalras opposed to all these suggestions and declarations
that indifference which would have seemed obstinacy had it been less
mild. As for the hunting parties, she avowed with truth that although a
daughter of mighty hunters, she herself regarded all pastimes founded
on cruelty with aversion and contempt; the bears and the boars, the
wild deer and the mountain chamois, might dwell undisturbed for the
whole of their lives so far as she was concerned. When a bear came
down and ate off the heads of an acre or two of wheat, she recompensed
the peasant who had suffered the loss, but she would not have her
_jägermeister_ track the poor beast. The _jägermeister_ sighed as
Madame Ottilie did for the bygone times when a score of princes and
nobles had ridden out on a wolf-chase, or hundreds of peasants had
threshed the woods to drive the big game towards the Kaiser's rifle;
but for poachers his place would have been a sinecure and his days a
weariness. His mistress was not to be persuaded. She preferred her
forests left to their unbroken peace, their stillness filled with the
sounds of rushing waters and the calls of birds.
The weeks glided on one after one with the even measured pace of
monotonous and unruffled time; her hours were never unoccupied, for her
duties were constant and numerous.
She would go and visit the sennerinn in their loftiest cattle-huts,
and would descend an ice-slope with the swiftness and security of a
practised mountaineer. In her childhood she and Bela had gone almost
everywhere the chamois went, and she came of a race which, joined to
high courage, had the hereditary habits of a great endurance. In the
throne room of Vienna, with her great pearls about her, that had once
been sent by a Sultan to a Szalras who fought with Wenceslaus, she
was the stateliest and proudest lady of the greatest aristocracy of
the world; but on her own mountain sides she was as dauntless as an
ibis, as sure-footed as a goat, and would sit in the alpine cabins and
drink a draught of milk and break a crust of rye-bread as willingly as
though she were a sennerinn herself; so she would take the oars and row
herself unaided down the lake, so she would saddle her horse and ride
it over the wildest country, so she would drive her sledge over many
a German mile of snow, and even in the teeth of a north wind blowing
straight from the Russian plains and the Arctic seas.
'Fear nothing!' had been said again and again to her in her childhood,
and she had learned that her race transmitted to and imposed its
courage no less on its daughters than on its sons. Cato would have
admired this mountain brood, even though its mountain lair was more
luxurious than he would have deemed was wise.
She knew thoroughly what all her rights, titles, and possessions were.
She was never vague or uncertain as to any of her affairs, and it would
have been impossible to deceive or to cheat her. No one tried to do so,
for her lawyers were men of old-fashioned ways and high repute, and
for centuries the vast properties of the Counts von Szalras had been
administered wisely and honestly in the same advocates' offices, which
were close underneath the Calvarienburg in the good city of Salzburg.
Her trustees were her uncle Cardinal Vàsàrhely and her great-uncle
Prince George of Lilienhöhe; they were old men, both devoted to her,
and both fully conscious that her intelligence was much abler and
keener than their own. All these vast possessions gave her an infinite
variety of occupation and of interests, and she neglected none of them.
Still, all the properties and duties in the world will not suffice to
fill up the heart and mind of a woman of four-and-twenty years of age,
who enjoys the perfection of bodily health and of physical beauty. The
most spiritual and the most dutiful of characters cannot altogether
resist the impulses of nature. There were times when she now began to
think that her life was somewhat empty and passionless.
But a certain sense of their monotony had begun for the first time to
come upon her; a certain vague dissatisfaction stirred in her now and
then. The discontent of Sabran seemed to have left a shadow of itself
upon her. For the first time she seemed to be listening, as it were, to
her life and to find a great silence in it; there was no echo in it of
voices she loved.
Why had she never perceived it before? Why did she become conscious
of it now? She asked herself this impatiently as the slight but
bitter flavour of dissatisfaction touched her, and the days for once
seemed--now and then--over long.
She loved her people and her forests and her mountains, and she had
always thought that they would be sufficient for her, and she had
honestly told the Princess that of solitude she was not afraid; and yet
a certain sense that her life was cold and in a measure empty had of
late crept upon her. She wondered angrily why a vague and intangible
melancholy stole on her at times, which was different from the sorrow
which still weighed on her for her brother's death. Now and then she
looked at the old painted box of the spinet, and thought of the player
who had awakened its dumb strings; but she did not suspect for a
moment that it was in any sense his companionship which, now that it
was lost, made the even familiar tenor of her time appear monotonous
and without much interest. In the long evenings, whilst the Princess
slumbered and she herself sat alone watching the twilight give way to
the night over the broad and solemn landscape, she felt a lassitude
which did not trouble her in the open air, in the daylight, or when she
was busied indoors over the reports and requirements of her estates.
Unacknowledged, indeed, unknown to her, she missed the coming of the
little boat from the Holy Isle, and missed the prayer and praise of the
great tone-poets rolling to her ear from the organ within. If anyone
had told her that her late guest had possessed any such power to make
her days look grey and pass tediously she would have denied it, and
been quite sincere in her denial. But as he had called out the long
mute music from the spinet, so he had touched, if only faintly, certain
chords in her nature that until then had been dumb.
'I am not like you, my dear Olga,' she wrote to her relative, the
Countess Brancka. 'I am not easily amused. That _course effrénée_ of
the great world carries you honestly away with it; all those incessant
balls, those endless visits, those interminable conferences on your
toilettes, that continual circling of human butterflies round you,
those perpetual courtships of half a score of young men; it all
diverts you. You are never tired of it; you cannot understand any
life outside its pale. All your days, whether they pass in Paris or
Petersburg, at Trouville, at Biarritz, or at Vienna or Scheveningen,
are modelled on the same lines; you must have excitement as you have
your cup of chocolate when you wake. What I envy you is that the
excitement excites you. When I was amidst it I was not excited; I was
seldom even diverted. See the misfortune that it is to be born with a
grave nature! I am as serious as Marcus Antoninus. You will say that it
comes of having learned Latin and Greek. I do not think so; I fear I
was born unamusable. I only truly care about horses and trees, and they
are both grave things, though a horse can be playful enough sometimes
when he is allowed to forget his servitude. Your friends, the famous
tailors, send me admirably-chosen costumes which please that sense in
me which Titians and Vandycks do (I do not mean to be profane); but
I only put them on as the monks do their frocks. Perhaps I am very
unworthy of them; at least, I cannot talk toilette as you can with
ardour a whole morning and every whole morning of your life. You will
think I am laughing at you; indeed I am not. I envy your faculty of
sitting, as I am sure you are sitting now, in a straw chair on the
shore, with a group of _boulevardiers_ around you, and a crowd making
a double hedge to look at you when it is your pleasure to pace the
planks. My language is involved. I do not envy you the faculty of doing
it, of course; I could do it myself to-morrow. I envy you the faculty
of finding amusement in doing it, and finding flattery in the double
hedge.'
A few days afterwards the Countess Brancka wrote back in reply:
'The world is like wine; _ça se mousse et ça monte._ There are heads it
does not affect; there are palates that do not like it, yours amongst
them. But there is so much too in habit. Living alone amidst your
mountains you have lost all taste for the _brouhaha_ of society, which
grows noisier, it must be said, every year. Yes, we are noisy: we have
lost our dignity. You alone keep yours, you are the châtelaine of the
middle ages. Perceforest or Parsifal should come riding to your gates
of granite. By the way, I hear you have been entertaining one of our
_boulevardiers._ Réné de Sabran is charming, and the handsomest man in
Paris; but he is not Parsifal or Perceforest. Between ourselves, he has
an indifferent reputation, but perhaps he has repented on your Holy
Isle, They say he is changed; that he has quarrelled with Cochonette,
and that he is about to be made deputy for his department, whose
representative has just died. Pardon me for naming Cochonette; it is
part of our decadence that we laugh about all these naughty things and
naughty people who are, after all, not so very much worse than we are
ourselves. But you do not laugh, whether at these or at anything else.
You are too good, my beautiful Wanda; it is your sole defect. You have
even inoculated this poor Marquis, who, after a few weeks upon the
Szalrassee, surrenders Cochonette for the Chamber! My term of service
comes round next month: if you will have me I will take the Tauern on
my road to Gödöllö. I long to embrace you.'
'Olga will take pity on our solitude,' said Wanda von Szalras to her
aunt. 'I have not seen her for four years, but I imagine she is little
changed.'
The Princess read the letter, frowning and pursing her lips together in
pretty rebuke as she came to the name of Cochonette.
'They have indeed lost all dignity,' she said with a sigh; 'and
something more than dignity also. Olga was always frivolous.'
'All her _monde_ is; not she more than another.'
'You were very unjust, you see, to M. de Sabran; he pays you the
compliment of following your counsels.'
Wanda von Szalras rose a little impatiently. 'He had better have
followed them before he broke the bank at Monaco. It is an odd sort of
notoriety with which to attract the pious and taciturn Bretons; and
when he was here he had no convictions. I suppose he picked them up
with the gold pieces at the tables!'
Olga, Countess Brancka, _née_ Countess Seriatine, of a noble Russian
family, had been married at sixteen to the young Gela von Szalras, who,
a few months after his bridal, had been shot dead on the battlefield of
Solferino.
After scarce a year of mourning she had fascinated the brother of
Egon Vàsàrhely, a mere youth who bore the title of Count Brancka.
There had been long and bitter opposition made to the new alliance on
the part of both families, on account of the consanguinity between
Stefan Brancka and her dead lord. But opposition had only increased
the ardour of the young man and the young widow; they had borne down
all resistance, procured all dispensations, had been wedded, and in a
year's time had both wished the deed undone. Both were extravagant,
capricious, self-indulgent, and unreasonable; their two egotisms were
in a perpetual collision. They met but seldom, and never met without
quarrelling violently. The only issue of their union was two little,
fantastic, artificial fairies who were called respectively Mila and
Marie.
At the time of the marriage of the Branckas, Wanda had been too young
to share in opposition to it; but the infidelity to her brother's
memory had offended and wounded her deeply, and in her inmost heart
she had never pardoned it, though the wife of Stefan Brancka had been
a passing guest at Hohenszalras, where, had Count Gela lived, she
would have reigned as sovereign mistress. That his sister reigned
there in her stead the Countess Olga resented keenly and persistently.
Her own portion of the wealth of the Szalras had been forfeited under
her first marriage contract by her subsequent alliance. But she never
failed to persuade herself that her exclusion from every share in that
magnificent fortune was a deep wrong done to herself, and she looked
upon Wanda von Szalras as the doer of that wrong.
In appearance, however, she was always cordial, caressing,
affectionate, and if Wanda chose to mistrust her affection, it was, she
reflected, only because a life of unwise solitude had made a character
naturally grave become severe and suspicious.
She did not fail to arrive there a week later. She was a small,
slender, lovely woman, with fair skin, auburn hair, wondrous black
eyes, and a fragile frame that never knew fatigue. She held a high
office at the Imperial Court, but when she was not on service, she
spent, under the plea of health, all her time at Paris or _les eaux._
She came with her numerous attendants, her two tiny children, and a
great number of huge _fourgons_ full of all the newest marvels of
combination in costume. She was seductive and caressing, but she was
capricious, malicious, and could be even violent; in general she was
gaily given up to amusement and intrigue, but she had moments of rage
that were uncontrollable. She had had many indiscretions and some
passions, but the world liked her none the less for that; she was a
great lady, and in a sense a happy woman, for she had nerves of steel
despite all her maladies, and brought to the pleasures of life an
unflagging and even ravenous zest.
When with her perfume of Paris, her restless animation, her children,
like little figures from a fashion-plate, her rapid voice that was
shrill yet sweet, like a silver whistle, and her eyes that sparkled
alike with mirth and with malice, she came on to the stately terraces
of Hohenszalras, she seemed curiously discordant with it and its old
world peace and gravity. She was like a pen-and-ink sketch of Cham
thrust between the illuminated miniatures of a missal.
She felt it herself.
'It is the Roman de la Rose in stone,' she said, as her eyes roved
over the building, which she had not visited for four years. 'And you,
Wanda, you look like Yseulte of the White Hand or the Marguerite des
Marguerites; you must be sorry you did not live in those times.'
'Yes: if only for one reason. One could make the impress of one's own
personality so much more strongly on the time.'
'And now the times mould us. We are all horribly alike. There is only
yourself who retain any individuality amidst all the women that I know.
'_La meule du pressoir de l'abrutissement_ might have been written of
our world. After all, you are wise to keep out of it. My straw chair at
Trouville looks trumpery beside that ivory chair in your Rittersäal.
I read the other day of some actresses dining off a truffled pheasant
and a sack of bon-bons. That is the sort of dinner we make all the year
round, morally--metaphorically--how do you say it? It makes us thirsty,
and perhaps, I am not sure, perhaps it leaves us half starved, though
we nibble the sweetmeats, and don't know it.
'Your dinner must lack two things--bread and water.'
'Yes: we never see either. It is all truffles and caramels and _vins
frappés._'
'There is your bread.'
She glanced at the little children, two pretty, graceful little maids
of six and seven years old.
'_Ouf!_' said the Countess Zelenka. 'They are only little bits of puff
paste, a couple of _petits fours_ baked on the boulevards. If they be
_chic_, and marry well, I for one shall ask no more of them. If ever
you have children, I suppose you will rear them on science and the
Antonines?'
'Perhaps on the open air and Homer,' said Wanda, with a smile.
The Countess Brancka was silent a moment, then said abruptly:
'You dismissed Egon again?'
'Has he made you his ambassadress?'
'No, oh no; he is too proud: only we all are aware of his wishes.
Wanda, do you know that you have some cruelty in you, some sternness?'
'I think not. The cruelty would be to grant the wishes. With a loveless
wife Egon, would be much more unhappy than he is now.'
'Oh, after a few months he would not care, you know; they never do. To
unite your fortunes is the great thing; you could lead your lives as
you liked.'
'Our fortunes do very well apart,' said the Countess von Szalras, with
a patience which cost her some effort.
'Yours is immense,' said Madame Brancka, with a sigh, for her own and
her husband's wealth had been seriously involved by extravagance and
that high play in which they both indulged. 'And it must accumulate in
your hands. You cannot spend much. I do not see how you could spend
much. You never receive; you never go to your palaces; you never leave
Hohenszalras; and you are so wise a woman that you never commit any
follies.'
Wanda was silent. It did not appear to her that she was called on to
discuss her expenditure.
Dinner was announced; their attendants took away the children; the
Princess woke up from a little dose, and said suddenly, 'Olga, is M. de
Sabran elected?'
'Aunt Ottilie,' said her niece, hastily, 'has lost her affections to
that gentleman, because he painted her saint on a screen and had all
old Haydn at his fingers' ends.'
'The election does not take place until next month,' said the Countess.
'He will certainly be returned, because of the blind fidelity of the
department to his name. The odd thing is that he should wish to be so.'
'Wanda told him it was his duty,' said Princess Ottilie, with innocent
malice.
The less innocent malice of the Countess Brancka's eyes fell for a
passing moment with inquiry and curiosity on the face of her hostess,
which, however, told her nothing.
'Then he _was_ Parsifal or Perceforest!' she cried, 'and he has ridden
away to find the emerald cup of tradition. What a pity that he paused
on his way to break the bank at Monte Carlo. The two do not accord. I
fear he is but Lancelot.'
'There is no reason why he should not pursue an honourable ambition,'
said the Princess, with some offence.
'No reason at all, even if it be not an honourable one,' said Madame
Brancka, with a curious intonation. 'He always wins at baccara; he has
done some inimitable caricatures which hang at the Mirliton; he is an
amateur Rubenstein, and he has been the lover of Cochonette. These are
his qualifications for the Chamber, and if they be not as valiant ones
as those of _les Preux_ they are at least more amusing.'
'My dear Olga,' said the Princess, with a certain dignity of reproof,
'you are not on your straw chair at Trouville. There are subjects,
expressions, suggestions, which are not agreeable to my ears or on your
lips.'
'Cochonette!' murmured the offender, with a graceful little curtsey
of obedience and contrition. 'Oh, Madame, if you knew! A year ago we
talked of nothing else!'
The Countess Brancka wished to talk still of nothing else, and though
she encountered a chillness and silence that would have daunted a less
bold spirit, she contrived to excite in the Princess a worldly and
almost unholy curiosity concerning that heroine of profane history
who had begun life in a little bakehouse of the Batignolles, and had
achieved the success of putting her name (or her nickname) upon the
lips of all Paris.
Throughout dinner she spoke of little save of Cochonette, that
goddess of _bouffe_, and of Parsifal, as she persisted in baptising
the one lover to whom alone the goddess had ever been faithful. With
ill-concealed impatience her hostess bore awhile with the subject; then
dismissed it somewhat peremptorily.
'We are provincials, my dear Olga,' she said, with a very cold
inflection of contempt in her voice. 'We are very antiquated in our
ways and our views. Bear with our prejudices and do not scare our
decorum. We keep it by us as we keep kingfishers' skins amongst our
furs in summer against moth; a mere superstition, I daresay, but we are
only rustic people.'
'How you say that, Wanda,' said her guest, with a droll little laugh,
'and you look like Marie Antoinette all the while! Why will you bury
yourself? You would only need to be seen in Paris a week, and all the
world would turn after you and go back to tradition and ermine, instead
of _chien_ and plush. If you live another ten years as you live now you
will turn Hohenszalras into a religious house; and even Mme. Ottilie
would regret that. You will institute a Carmelite Order, because
white becomes you so. Poor Egon, he would sooner have you laugh about
Cochonette.'
The evening was chill, but beautifully calm and free of mist. Wanda
von Szalras walked out on to the terrace, whilst her cousin and guest,
missing the stimulus of her usual band of lovers and friends, curled
herself up on a deep chair and fell sound asleep like a dormouse.
There was no sound on the night except the ripple of the lake water
below and the splash of torrents falling down the cliffs around; a
sense of irritation and of pleasure moved her both in the same moment.
What was a French courtesan, a singer of lewd songs, an interpreter
of base passions to her? Nothing except a creature to be loathed and
pitied, as men in health feel a disgusted compassion for disease.
Yet she felt a certain anger stir in her as she recalled all this
frivolous, trivial, ill-flavoured chatter of her cousin's. And what was
it to her if one of the many lovers of this woman had cast her spells
from about him and left her for a manlier and a worthier arena? Yet
she could not resist a sense of delicate distant homage to herself in
the act, in the mute obedience to her counsels such as a knight might
render, even Lancelot with stained honour and darkened soul.
The silence of it touched her.
He had said nothing: only by mere chance, in the idle circling of
giddy rumour, she learned he had remembered her words and followed her
suggestion. There was a subtle and flattering reverence in it which
pleased the taste of a woman who was always proud but never vain. And
to any noble temperament there is a singularly pure and honest joy in
the consciousness of having been in any measure the means of raising
higher instincts and loftier desires in any human soul that was not
dead but dormant.
The shrill voice of Olga Brancka startled her as it broke in on her
musings.
'I have been asleep!' she cried, as she rose out of her deep chair and
came forth into the moonlight. 'Pray forgive me, Wanda. You will have
all that drowsy water running and tumbling all over the place; it makes
one think of the voices in the Sistine in Passion Week; there are the
gloom, the hush, the sigh, the shriek, the eternal appeal, the eternal
accusation. That water would drive me into hysteria; could you not
drain it, divert it, send it underground--silence it somehow?'
'When you can keep the Neva flowing at New Year, perhaps I shall be
able. But I would not if I could. I have had all that water about me
from babyhood; when I am away from the sound of it I feel as if some
hand had woolled up my ears.'
'That is what I feel when I am away from the noise of the streets. Oh,
Wanda! to think that you can do utterly as you like and yet do not like
to have the sea of light of the Champs-Élysées or the Graben before
your eyes, rather than that gliding, dusky water!'
'The water is a mirror. I can see my own soul in it and Nature's;
perhaps one hopes even sometimes to see God's.'
'That is not living, my dear, it is dreaming.'
'Oh, no, my life is very real; it is as real as light to darkness, it
is absolute prose.'
'Make it poetry then; that is very easy.'
'Poetry is to the poetical; I am by no means poetical. My stud-book,
my stewards' ledgers, my bankers' accounts, form the chief of my
literature; you know I am a practical farmer.'
'I know you are one of the most beautiful and one of the richest women
in Europe, and you live as if you were fifty years old, ugly, and
_dévote_; all this will grow on you. In a few years' time you will
be a hermit, a prude, an ascetic. You will found a new order, and be
canonised after death.'
'My aunt is afraid that I shall die a freethinker. It is hard to
please every one,' replied the Countess Wanda, with unruffled good
humour. 'It is poetical people who found religious orders, enthusiasts,
visionaries; I wish I were one of them. But I am not. The utmost I
can do is to follow George Herbert's precept and sweep my own little
chambers, so that this sweeping may be in some sort a duty done.'
'You are a good woman, Wanda, and I dare say a grand one, but you are
too grave for me.'
'You mean that I am dull? People always grow dull who live much alone.'
'But you could have the whole world at your feet if you only raised a
finger.'
'That would not amuse me at all.'
Her guest gave an impatient movement of her shoulders; after a little
she said, 'Did Réné de Sabran amuse you?'
Wanda von Szalras hesitated a moment.
'In a measure he interested me,' she answered, being a perfectly
truthful woman. 'He is a man who has the capacity of great things,
but he seems to me to be his own worst enemy; if he had fewer gifts
he might probably have more achievement. A waste of power is always a
melancholy sight.'
'He is only a _boulevardier_, you know.'
'No doubt your Paris asphalte is the modern embodiment of Circe.'
'But he is leaving Circe.'
'So much the better for him if he be. But I do not know why you speak
of him so much. He is a stranger to me, and will never, most likely,
cross my path again.'
'Oh, Parsifal will come back,' said Madame Brancka, with a little
smile. 'Hohenszalras is his Holy Grail.'
'He can scarcely come uninvited, and who will invite him here?' said
the mistress of Hohenszalras, with cold literalness.
'Destiny will; the great master of the ceremonies who disposes of us
all,' said her cousin.
'Destiny!' said Wanda, with some contempt. 'Ah, you are superstitious;
irreligious people always are. You believe in mesmerism and disbelieve
in God.'
'Oh, most Holy Mother, cannot you make Wanda a little like other
people?' said the Countess Brancka when her hostess had left her alone
with Princess Ottilie. 'She is as much a fourteenth-century figure as
any one of those knights in the Rittersäal.'
'Wanda is a gentlewoman,' said the Princess drily. 'You great ladies
are not always that, my dear Olga. You are all very _piquantes_ and
_provocantes_, no doubt, but you have forgotten what dignity is like,
and perhaps you have forgotten, too, what self-respect is like. It is
but another old-fashioned word.'