With the New Year Madame Ottilie received another letter from him.
It was brief, grateful, and touching. It concluded with a message of
ceremonious homage to the châtelaine of Hohenszalras. Of his entrance
into political life it said nothing. With the letter came a screen of
gilded leather which he had painted himself, with passages from the
history of S. Julian Hospitador.
'It will seem worthless,' he said, 'where every chamber is a museum
of art; but accept it as a sign of my grateful and imperishable
remembrance.'
The Princess was deeply touched and sensibly flattered.
'You will admit, at least,' she said, with innocent triumph, 'that he
knows how to make gratitude graceful.'
'It is an ex-voto, and you are his patron saint, dear mother,' said
the Countess Wanda, with a smile but the smile was one of approval.
She thought his silence on his own successes and on her name was in
good taste. And the screen was so admirably painted that the Venetian
masters might have signed it without discredit.
'May I give him no message from you,' said the Princess, as she was
about to write her reply.
Her niece hesitated.
'Say we have read his first speech, and are glad of his success,' she
said, after a few moments' reflection.
'Nothing more?'
'What else should I say?' replied Wanda, with some irritation.
The Princess was too honourable a woman to depart from the text of
the congratulation, but she contrived to throw a little more warmth
into the spirit of it; and she did not show her letter to the mistress
of Hohenszalras. She set the screen near her favourite chair in the
blue-room.
'If only there were any one to appreciate it!' she said, with a sigh.
'Like everything else in this house, it might as well be packed up in
a chest for aught people see of it. This place is not a museum; the
world goes to a museum: it is a crypt!'
'Would it be improved by a crowd of sightseers at ten kreutzers a head?'
'No: but it would be very much brightened by a house-party at Easter,
and now and then at midsummer and autumn. In your mother's time the
October parties for the bear-hunts, the wolf-hunts, the boar-hunts,
were magnificent. No, I do not think the chase contrary to God's
will; man has power over the beasts of the field and the forest. The
archdukes never missed an autumn here; they found the sport finer than
in Styria.'
Her niece kissed her hand and went out to where her four black horses
were fretting and champing before the great doors, and the winter sun
was lighting up the gilded scrollwork, and the purple velvet, and the
brown sables of her sleigh, that had been built in Russia and been a
gift to her from Egon Vàsàrhely. She felt a little impatience of the
Princess Ottilie, well as she loved her; the complacent narrowness of
mind, the unconscious cruelty, the innocent egotism, the conventional
religion which clipped and fitted the ways of Deity to suit its own
habits and wishes: these fretted her, chafed her, oppressed her with a
sense of their utter vanity. The Princess would not herself have harmed
a sparrow or a mouse, yet it seemed to her that Providence had created
all the animal world only to furnish pastime for princes and their
jägers. She saw no contradiction in this view of the matter. The small
conventional mind of her had been cast in that mould and would never
expand: it was perfectly pure and truthful, but it was contracted and
filled with formula.
Wanda von Szalras, who loved her tenderly, could not help a certain
impatience of this, the sole, companionship she had. A deep affection
may exist side by side with a mental disparity that creates an
unwilling but irresistible sense of tedium and discordance. A clear and
broad intelligence is infinitely patient of inferiority; but its very
patience has its reaction in its own fatigue and silent irritation.
This lassitude came on her most in the long evenings whilst the
Princess slumbered and she herself sat alone. She was not haunted by
it when she was in the open air, or in the library, occupied with the
reports or the requirements on her estates. But the evenings were
lonely and tedious; they had not seemed so when the little boat had
come away from the monastery, and the prayer and praise of Handel and
Haydn, and the new-born glory of the Nibelungen tone-poems had filled
the quiet twilight hours. It was in no way probable that the musician
and she would ever meet again. She understood that his own delicacy
and pride must perforce keep him out of Austria, and she, however much
the Princess desired it, could never invite him there alone, and would
not probably gather such a house-party at Hohenszalras as might again
warrant her doing so.
Nothing was more unlikely, she supposed, than that she would ever hear
again the touch that had awakened the dumb chords of the old painted
spinet.
But circumstance, that master of the ceremonies, as Madame Brancka
termed it, who directs the _menuet de la cour_ of life, and who often
diverts himself by letting it degenerate into a dance of death, willed
it otherwise. There was a dear friend of hers who was a dethroned
and exiled queen. Their friendship was strong, tender, and born in
childish days. On the part of Wanda, it had been deepened by the august
adversity which impresses and attaches all noble natures. Herself born
of a great race, and with the instincts of a ruling class hereditary
in her, there was something sacred and awful in the fall of majesty.
Her friend, stripped of all appanages of her rank, and deserted by
nearly all who 'had so late sworn her allegiance, became more than ever
dear; she became holy to her, and she would sooner have denied the
request of a reigning sovereign than of one powerless to command or
to rebuke. 'When this friend, who had been so hardly smitten by fate,
sent her word that she was ill and would fain see her, she, therefore,
never even hesitated as to obedience before the summons. It troubled
and annoyed her; it came to her ill-timed and unexpected; and it was
above all disagreeable to her, because it would take her to Paris. But
it never occurred to her to send an excuse to this friend, who had no
longer any power to say, 'I will,' but could only say, like common
humanity, 'I hope.'
Within two hours of her reception of the summons she was on her way to
Windisch-Matrey. The Princess did not accompany her; she intended to
make as rapid a journey as possible without pausing on the way, and her
great-aunt was too old and too delicate in health for such exertion.
'Though I would fain go and see that great Parisian aurist,' she said
plaintively. 'My hearing is not what it used to be.'
'The great aurist shall come to you, dear mother,' said Wanda. 'I will
bring him back with me.'
She travelled with a certain state, since she did not think that the
moment of a visit to a dethroned sovereign was a fit time to lay
ceremony aside. She took several of her servants and some of her horses
with her, and journeyed by way of Munich and Strasburg.
Madame Ottilie was too glad she should go anywhere to offer opposition;
and in her heart of hearts she thought of her favourite. He was in
Paris; who knew what might happen?
It was midwinter, and the snow was deep on all the country, whether of
mountain or of plain, which stretched between the Tauern and the French
capital. But there was no great delay of the express, and in some forty
hours the Countess von Szalras, with her attendants, and her horses
with theirs, arrived at the Hôtel Bristol.
The noise, the movement, the brilliancy of the streets seemed a strange
spectacle, after four years spent without leaving the woodland quiet
and mountain solitudes of Hohenszalras.
She was angry with herself that, as she stood at the windows of her
apartment, she almost unconsciously watched the faces of the crowd
passing below, and felt a vague expectancy of seeing amongst them the
face of Sabran.
She went that evening, to the modest hired house where the young and
beautiful sovereign she came to visit had found a sorry refuge. It
was a meeting full of pain to both. When they had last parted at the
Hofburg of Vienna, the young queen had been in all the triumph and hope
of brilliant nuptials; and at Hohenszalras, the people's Heilige Bela
had been living, a happy boy, in all his fair promise.
Meanwhile, the news-sheets informed all their leaders that the Countess
von Szalras was in Paris. Ambassadors and ambassadresses, princes and
princesses, and a vast number of very great people, hastened to write
their names at the Hôtel Bristol.
Amongst the cards left was that of Sabran. But he sent it; he did not
go in person.
She refused all invitations, and declined almost all visits. She had
come there only to see her friend, the Queen of Natalia. Paris, which
loves anything new, talked a great deal about her; and its street
crowds, which admires what is beautiful, began to gather before the
doors at the hours when her black horses, driven Russian fashion, came
fretting and flashing like meteors over the asphalte.
'Why did you bring your horses for so short a time?' said Madame
Kaulnitz to her. 'You could, of course, have had any of ours.'
'I always like to have some of my horses with me,' she answered.
'I would have brought them all, only it would have looked so
ostentatious; you know they are my children.'
'I do not see why you should not have other children,' said Madame
Kaulnitz. 'It is quite inhuman that you will not marry.'
'I have never said that I will not. But I do not think it likely.'
Two days after her arrival, as she was driving down the Avenue de
l'Impératrice, she saw Sabran on foot. She was driving slowly. She
would have stopped her carriage if he had paused in his walk; but he
did not, he only bowed low and passed on. It was almost rude, after the
hospitality of Hohenszalras, but the rudeness pleased her. It spoke
both of pride and of sensitiveness. It seemed scarcely natural, after
their long hours of intercourse, that they should pass each other thus
as strangers; yet it seemed impossible they should any more be friends.
She did not ask herself why it seemed so, but she felt it rather by
instinct than by reasoning.
She was annoyed to feel that the sight of him had caused a momentary
emotion in her of mingled trouble and pleasure.
No one mentioned his name to her, and she asked no one concerning him.
She spent almost all her time with the Queen of Natalia, and there
were other eminent foreign personages in Paris at that period whose
amiabilities she could not altogether reject, and she had only allowed
herself fifteen days as the length of her sojourn, as Madame Ottilie
was alone amidst the snow-covered mountains of the Tauern.
On the fifth day after her meeting with Sabran he sent another card
of his to the hotel, and sent with it an immense basket of gilded
osier filled with white lilac. She remembered having once said to him
at Hohenszalras that lilac was her flower of preference. Her rooms
were crowded with bouquets, sent her by all sorts of great people,
and made of all kinds of rare blossoms, but the white lilac, coming
in the January snows, touched her more than all those. She knew that
his poverty was no fiction; and that great clusters of white lilac in
midwinter in Paris meant much money.
She wrote a line or two in German, which thanked him for his
recollection of her taste, and sent it to the Chamber. She did not know
where he lived.
That evening she mentioned his name to her godfather, the Duc de Noira,
and asked him if he knew it. The Duc, a Legitimist, a recluse, and a
man of strong prejudices, answered at once.
'Of course I know it; he is one of us, and he has made a political
position for himself within the last year.'
'Do you know him personally?'
'No, I do not. I see no one, as you are aware; I live in greater
retirement than ever. But he bears an honourable name, and though I
believe that, until lately, he was but a _flâneur_, he has taken a
decided part this session, and he is a very great acquisition to the
true cause.'
'It is surely very sudden, his change of front?'
'What change? He took no part in politics that ever I heard of; it
is taken for granted that a Marquis de Sabran is loyal to his sole
legitimate sovereign. I believe he never thought of public life; but
they tell me that he returned from some long absence last autumn,
an altered and much graver man. Then one of the deputies for his
department died, and he was elected for the vacancy with no opposition.'
The Duc de Noira proceeded to speak of the political aspects of the
time, and said no more.
Involuntarily, as she drove through the avenues of the Bois de
Boulogne, she thought of the intuitive comprehension, the half-uttered
sympathy, the interchange of ideas, _à demi-mots_, which had made the
companionship of Sabran so welcome to her in the previous summer. They
had not always agreed, she often had not even approved him; but they
had always understood one another, they had never needed to explain.
She was startled to realise how much and how vividly she regretted him.
'If one could only be sure of his sincerity,' she thought, 'there would
be few men living who would equal him.'
She did not know why she doubted his sincerity. Some natures have keen
instincts like dogs. She regretted to doubt it; but the change in him
seemed to her too rapid to be one of conviction. Yet the homage in it
to herself was delicate and subtle. She would not have been a woman had
it not touched her, and she was too honest with herself not to frankly
admit in her own thoughts that she might very well have inspired a
sentiment which would go far to change a nature which it entered and
subdued. Many men had loved her; why not he?
She drew the whip over the flanks of her horses as she felt that
mingled impatience and sadness with which sovereigns remember that they
can never be certain they are loved for themselves, and not for all
which environs them and lifts them up out of the multitude.
She was angry with herself when she felt that what interested her most
during her Parisian sojourn was the report of the debates of the
French Chamber in the French journals.
One night the Baron Kaulnitz spoke of Sabran in her hearing.
'He is the most eloquent of the Legitimist party,' he said to some one
in her hearing. 'No one supposed that he had it in him; he was a mere
idler, a mere man of pleasure, and it was at times said of something
worse, but he has of late manifested great talent; it is displayed for
a lost cause, but it is none the less admirable as talent goes.'
She heard what he said with pleasure.
Advantage was taken of her momentary return to the world to press on
her the choice of a great alliance. Names as mighty as her own were
suggested to her, and more than one great prince, of a rank even higher
than hers, humbly solicited the honour of the hand which gave no caress
except to a horse's neck, a dog's head, a child's curls. But she did
not even pause to allow these proposals any consideration; she refused
them all curtly, and with a sense of irritation.
'Have you sworn never to marry?' said the Duc de Noira, with much
chagrin, receiving her answer for a candidate of his own to whom he was
much attached.
'I never swear anything,' she answered. 'Oaths are necessary for
people who do not know their own minds. I do know my own.'
'You know that you will never marry?'
'I hardly say that; but I shall never contract a mere alliance. It is
horrible--that union eternal of two bodies and souls without sympathy,
without fitness, without esteem, merely for sake of additional position
or additional wealth.'
'It is not eternal! said the Duc, with a smile; 'and I can assure you
that my friend adores you for yourself. You will never understand,
Wanda, that you are a woman to inspire great love; that you would be
sought for your face, for your form, for your mind, if you had nothing
else.'
'I do not believe it.'
'Can you doubt at least that your cousin Egon----'
'Oh, pray spare me the name of Egon!' she said with unwonted
irritation. 'I may surely be allowed to have left that behind me at
home!'
It was a time of irritation and turbulence in Paris. The muttering of
the brooding storm was visible to fine ears through the false stillness
of an apparently serene atmosphere. She, who knew keen and brilliant
politicians who were not French, saw the danger that was at hand for
France which France did not see.
'They will throw down the glove to Prussia; and they will repent of it
as long as the earth lasts,' she thought, and she was oppressed by her
prescience, for war had cost her race dear; and she said to herself,
'When that liquid fire is set flowing who shall say where it will
pause?'
She felt an extreme desire to converse with Sabran as she had done
at home; to warn him, to persuade him, to hear his views and express
to him her own; but she did not summon him, and he did not come. She
did justice to the motive which kept him away, but she was not as
yet prepared to go as far as to invite him to lay his scruples aside
and visit her with the old frank intimacy which had brightened both
their lives at the Hohenszalrasburg. It had been so different there;
he had been a wanderer glad of rest, and she had had about her the
defence of the Princess's presence, and the excuse of the obligations
of hospitality. She reproached herself at times for hardness, for
unkindness; she had not said a syllable to commend him for that
abandonment of a frivolous life which was in itself so delicate and
lofty a compliment to herself. He had obeyed her quite as loyally as
knight ever did his lady, and she did not even say to him, 'It is well
done.'
Wanda von Szalras--a daughter of brave men, and herself the bravest of
women--was conscious that she was for once a coward. She was afraid of
looking into her own heart.
She said to her cousin, when he paid his respects to her, 'I should
like to hear a debate at the Chamber. Arrange it for me.'
He replied: 'At your service in that as in all things.'
The next day as she was about to drive out, about four o'clock, he met
her at the entrance of her hotel.
'If you could come with me,' he said, 'you might hear something of
interest to-day; there will be a strong discussion. Will you accept my
carriage or shall I enter yours?'
What she heard when she reached the Chamber did not interest her
greatly. There was a great deal of noise, of declamation, of personal
vituperation, of verbose rancour; it did not seem to her to be
eloquence. She had heard much more stately oratory in both the Upper
and Lower Reichsrath, and much more fiery and noble eloquence at Buda
Pesth. This seemed to her poor, shrill mouthing, which led to very
little, and the disorder of the Assembly filled her with contempt.
'I thought it was the country of S. Louis!' she said, with a disdainful
sigh, to Kaulnitz who answered:
'Cromwell is perhaps more wanted here than S. Louis.'
'Their Cromwell will always be a lawyer without clients, or a
journalist _sans le sou!_' retorted the châtelaine of Hohenszalras.
When she had been there an hour or more she saw Sabran enter the hall
and take his place. His height, his carriage, and his distinction of
appearance made him conspicuous in a multitude, while the extreme
fairness and beauty of his face were uncommon and striking.
'Here is S. Louis,' said the ambassador, with a little smile, 'or a son
of S. Louis's crusaders at any rate. He is sure to speak. I think he
speaks very well; one would suppose he had done nothing else all his
life.'
After a time, when some speakers, virulent, over-eager, and hot in
argument, had had their say, and a tumult had risen and been quelled,
and the little bell had rung violently for many minutes, Sabran entered
the tribune. He had seen the Austrian minister and his companion.
His voice, at all times melodious, had a compass which could fill with
ease the large hall in which he was. He appeared to use no more effort
than if he were conversing in ordinary tones, yet no one there present
lost a syllable that he said. His gesture was slight, calm, and
graceful; his language admirably chosen, and full of dignity.
His mission of the moment was to attack the ministry upon their foreign
policy, and he did so with exceeding skill, wit, irony, and precision.
His eloquence was true eloquence, and was not indebted in any way to
trickery, artifice, or over-ornament. He spoke with fire, force, and
courage, but his tranquillity never gave way for a moment. His speech
was brilliant and serene, in utter contrast to the turbulent and florid
declamation which had preceded him. There was great and prolonged
applause when he had closed with a peroration stately and persuasive;
and when Emile Ollivier rose to reply, that optimistic statesman was
plainly disturbed and at a loss.
Sabran resumed his seat without raising his eyes to where the Countess
von Szalras sat. She remained there during the speech of the minister,
which was a lame and laboured one, for he had been pierced between the
joints of his armour. Then she rose and went away with her escort.
'What do you think of S. Louis?' said he, jestingly.
'I think he is very eloquent and very convincing, but I do not think he
is at all like a Frenchman.'
'Well, he is a _Breton bretonnant_' rejoined the ambassador. 'They are
always more in earnest and more patrician.'
'If he be sincere, if he be only sincere,' she thought: that doubt
pursued her. She had a vague sense that it was all only a magnificent
comedy after all. Could apathy and irony change all so suddenly to
conviction and devotion? Could the scoffer become so immediately the
devotee? Could he care, really care, for those faiths of throne and
altar which he defended with so much eloquence, so much earnestness?
And yet, why not? These faiths were inherited things with him; their
altars must have been always an instinct with him; for their sake his
fathers had lived and died. What great wonder, then, that they should
have been awakened in him after a torpor which had been but the outcome
of those drugs with which the world is always so ready to lay asleep
the soul?
They had now got out into the corridors, and as they turned the corner
of one, they came straight upon Sabran.
'I congratulate you,' said Wanda, as she stretched her hand out to him
with a smile.
As he took it and bowed over it he grew very pale.
'I have obeyed you,' he murmured, 'with less success than I could
desire.'
'Do not be too modest, you are a great orator. You know how to remain
calm whilst you exalt, excite, and influence others.'
He listened in silence, then inquired for the health of his kind friend
the Princess Ottilie.
'She is well,' answered Wanda, 'and loses nothing of her interest in
you. She reads all your speeches with approval and pleasure; not the
less approval and pleasure because her political creed has become
yours.'
He coloured slightly.
'What did you tell me?' he said. 'That if I had no convictions, I could
do no better than abide by the traditions of the Sabrans? If their
cause were the safe and reigning one I would not support it for mere
expediency, but as it is----'
'Your motives cannot be selfish ones,' she answered a little coldly.
'Selfishness would have led you to profess Bakouinism; it is the
popular profession, and a socialistic aristocrat is always attracted
and flattering to the _plebs._'
'You are severe,' he said, with a flush on his cheek. 'I have no
intention of playing Philip Egalité now or in any after time.'
She did hot reply; she was conscious of unkindness and want of
encouragement in her own words. She hesitated a little, and then said:
'Perhaps you will have time to come and see me? I shall remain here a
few days more.'
The ambassador joined them at that moment, and was too well bred to
display any sign of the supreme astonishment he felt at finding the
Countess von Szalras and the new deputy already known to each other.
'He is a favourite of Aunt Ottilie's,' she explained to him as, leaving
Sabran, they passed down the corridor. 'Did I not tell you? He had an
accident on the Umbal glacier last summer, and in his convalescence we
saw him often.'
'I recollect that your aunt asked me about him. Excuse me; I had quite
forgotten,' said the ambassador, understanding now why she had wanted
to go to the Chamber.
The next day Sabran called upon her. There were with her three or four
great ladies. He did not stay long, and was never alone with her. She
felt an impatience of her friends' presence, which irritated her as
it awoke in her. He sent her a second basket of white lilac in the
following forenoon. She saw no more of him.
She found herself wondering about the manner of his life. She did not
even know in what street he lived; she passed almost all her time with
the Queen of Natalia, who did not know him, and was still so unwell
that she received no one.
She was irritated with herself because it compromised her consistency
to desire to stay on in Paris, and she did so desire; and she was one
of those to whom a consciousness of their own consistency is absolutely
necessary as a qualification for self-respect. There are natures that
fly contentedly from caprice to caprice, as humming-birds from blossom
to bud; but if she had once become changeable she would have become
contemptible to herself, she would hardly have been herself any longer.
With some anger at her own inclinations she resisted them, and when her
self-allotted fifteen days were over, she did not prolong them by so
much as a dozen hours. There was an impatience in her which was wholly
strange to her serene and even temper. She felt a vague dissatisfaction
with herself; she had been scarcely generous, scarcely cordial to him;
she failed to approve her own conduct, and yet she scarcely saw where
she had been at fault.
The Kaulnitz and many other high persons were at the station in the
chill, snowy, misty day to say their last farewells. She was wrapped
in silver-fox fur from head to foot; she was somewhat pale; she felt
an absurd reluctance to go away from a city which was nothing to her.
But her exiled friend was recovering health, and Madame Ottilie was
all alone; and though she was utterly her own mistress, far more so
than most women, there were some things she could not do. To stay on in
Paris seemed to her to be one of them.
The little knot of high personages said their last words; the train
began slowly to move upon its way; a hand passed through the window of
the carriage and laid a bouquet of lilies of the valley on her knee.
'Adieu!' said Sabran very gently, as his eyes met hers once more.
Then the express train rolled faster on its road, and passed out by the
north-east, and in a few moments had left Paris far behind it.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.