Produced by David Widger
PRINCE ZILAH
By Jules Claretie
With a Preface by Compte d’Haussonville of the French Academy
JULES CLARETIE
Arsene Arnaud Claretie (commonly called Jules), was born on December 3,
1840, at Limoges, the picturesque and smiling capital of Limousin. He
has been rightly called the “Roi de la Chronique” and the “Themistocle
de la Litterature Contemporaine.” In fact, he has written, since early
youth, romances, drama, history, novels, tales, chronicles, dramatic
criticism, literary criticism, military correspondence, virtually
everything! He was elected to the French Academy in 1888.
Claretie was educated at the Lycee Bonaparte, and was destined for a
commercial career. He entered a business-house as bookkeeper, but was at
the same time contributing already to newspapers and reviews. In 1862
we find him writing for the Diogene; under the pseudonym, “Olivier
de Jalin,” he sends articles to La France; his nom-deplume in
L’Illustration is “Perdican”; he also contributes to the Figaro,
‘L’Independence Belge, Opinion Nationale’ (1867-1872); he signs articles
in the ‘Rappel; as “Candide”; in short, his fecundity in this field
of literature is very great. He is today a most popular journalist and
writes for the ‘Presse, Petit Journal, Temps’, and others. He has not
succeeded as a politician. Under the second Empire he was often in
collision with the Government; in 1857 he was sentenced to pay a fine of
1,000 francs, which was a splendid investment; more than once lectures
to be given by him were prohibited (1865-1868); in 1871 he was an
unsuccessful candidate for L’Assemblee Nationale, both for La Haute
Vienne and La Seine. Since that time he has not taken any active part in
politics. Perhaps we should also mention that as a friend of Victor Noir
he was called as a witness in the process against Peter Bonaparte; and
that as administrator of the Comedie Francaise he directed, in 1899, an
open letter to the “President and Members of the Court Martial trying
Captain Dreyfus” at Rennes, advocating the latter’s acquittal. So much
about Claretie as a politician!
The number of volumes and essays written by Jules Claretie surpasses
imagination, and it is, therefore, almost impossible to give a complete
list. As a historian he has selected mostly revolutionary subjects. The
titles of some of his prominent works in this field are ‘Les Derniers
Montagnards (1867); Histoire de la Revolution de 1870-71 (second
edition, 1875, 5 vols.); La France Envahie (1871); Le Champ de Bataille
de Sedan (1871); Paris assiege and Les Prussiens chez eux (1872); Cinq
Ans apres, L’Alsace et la Lorraine depuis l’Annexion (1876); La Guerre
Nationale 1870-1871’, etc., most of them in the hostile, anti-German
vein, natural to a “Chauvinist”; ‘Ruines et Fantomes (1873). Les Femmes
de la Revolution (1898)’ contains a great number of portraits, studies,
and criticisms, partly belonging to political, partly to literary,
history. To the same category belong: Moliere, sa Vie et ses OEuvres
(1873); Peintres et Sculpteurs Contemporains, and T. B. Carpeaux (1875);
L’Art et les Artistes Contemporains (1876)’, and others. Quite different
from the above, and in another phase of thought, are: ‘Voyages d’un
Parisien (1865); Journees de Voyage en Espagne et France (1870);
Journees de Vacances (1887)’; and others.
It is, however, as a novelist that the fame of Claretie will endure. He
has followed the footsteps of George Sand and of Balzac. He belongs
to the school of “Impressionists,” and, although he has a liking for
exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without
serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous
disorder, no “brain fag,” he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and
has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to
exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His
novels and tales contain the essential qualities which attract and
retain the reader. Some of his works in chronological order, omitting
two or three novels, written when only twenty or twenty-one years old,
are: ‘Pierrille, Histoire de Village (1863); Mademoiselle Cachemire
(1867); Un Assassin, also known under the title Robert Burat (1867);
Madeleine Bertin, replete with moderated sentiment, tender passion, and
exquisite scenes of social life (1868); Les Muscadins (1874, 2 vols.);
Le Train No. 17 (1877); La Maison Vide (1878); Le Troisieme dessous
(1879); La Maitresse (1880); Monsieur le Ministre (1882); Moeurs du Jour
(1883); Le Prince Zilah (1884), crowned by the Academy four years before
he was elected; Candidat!(1887); Puyjoli (1890); L’Americaine (1892);
La Frontiere (1894); Mariage Manque (1894); Divette (1896); L’Accusateur
(1897), and others.
It is, perhaps, interesting to know that after the flight of the
Imperial family from the Tuileries, Jules Claretie was appointed to put
into order the various papers, documents, and letters left behind in
great chaos, and to publish them, if advisable.
Very numerous and brilliant have also been the incursions of Jules
Claretie into the theatrical domain, though he is a better novelist than
playwright. He was appointed director of the Comedie Francaise in
1885. His best known dramas and comedies are: ‘La Famille de Gueux, in
collaboration with Della Gattina (Ambigu, 1869); Raymond Lindey (Menus
Plaisirs, 1869, forbidden for some time by French censorship); Les
Muscadins (Theatre Historique, 1874); Un Pyre (with Adrien Decourcelle,
Gymnase, 1874); Le Regiment de Champagne (Theatre Historique, 1877);
Monsieur le Ministre, together with Dumas fils and Busnach (Gymnase,
1883); and Prince Zilah (Gymnase, 1885).
Some of them, as will be noticed, are adapted to the stage from his
novels. In Le Regiment de Champagne, at least, he has written a little
melodramatically. But thanks to the battles, fumes of powder, muskets,
and cannons upon the stage the descendants of Jean Chauvin accept it
with frenetic applause. In most of the plays, however, he exhibits a
rather nervous talent, rich imagination, and uses very scintillating and
picturesque language, if he is inclined to do so--and he is very often
inclined. He received the “Prix Vitet” in 1879 from the Academy for Le
Drapeau. Despite our unlimited admiration for Claretie the journalist,
Claretie the historian, Claretie the dramatist, and Claretie the
art-critic, we think his novels conserve a precious and inexhaustible
mine for the Faguets and Lansons of the twentieth century, who, while
frequently utilizing him for the exemplification of the art of fiction,
will salute him as “Le Roi de la Romance.”
COMPTE D’HAUSSONVILLE
de L’Academie Francaise.
PRINCE ZILAH
BOOK 1.
CHAPTER I. THE BETROTHAL FETE
“Excuse me, Monsieur, but pray tell me what vessel that is over there.”
The question was addressed to a small, dark man, who, leaning upon the
parapet of the Quai des Tuileries, was rapidly writing in a note-book
with a large combination pencil, containing a knife, a pen, spare leads,
and a paper-cutter--all the paraphernalia of a reporter accustomed to
the expeditions of itinerant journalism.
When he had filled, in his running hand, a leaf of the book, the little
man tore it hastily off, and extended it to a boy in dark blue livery
with silver buttons, bearing the initial of the newspaper, L’Actualite;
and then, still continuing to write, he replied:
“Prince Andras Zilah is giving a fete on board one of the boats
belonging to the Compagnie de la Seine.”
“A fete? Why?”
“To celebrate his approaching marriage, Monsieur.”
“Prince Andras! Ah!” said the first speaker, as if he knew the name
well; “Prince Andras is to be married, is he? And who does Prince Andras
Zil--”
“Zilah! He is a Hungarian, Monsieur.”
The reporter appeared to be in a hurry, and, handing another leaf to the
boy, he said:
“Wait here a moment. I am going on board, and I will send you the rest
of the list of guests by a sailor. They can prepare the article from
what you have, and set it up in advance, and I will come myself to the
office this evening and make the necessary additions.”
“Very well, Monsieur Jacquemin.”
“And don’t lose any of the leaves.”
“Oh, Monsieur Jacquemin! I never lose anything!”
“They will have some difficulty, perhaps, in reading the names--they are
all queer; but I shall correct the proof myself.”
“Then, Monsieur,” asked the lounger again, eager to obtain all the
information he could, “those people who are going on board are almost
all foreigners?”
“Yes, Monsieur; yes, Monsieur; yes, Monsieur!” responded jacquemin,
visibly annoyed. “There are many foreigners in the city, very many; and
I prefer them, myself, to the provincials of Paris.”
The other did not seem to understand; but he smiled, thanked the
reporter, and strolled away from the parapet, telling all the people he
met: “It is a fete! Prince Andras, a Hungarian, is about to be married.
Prince Andras Zilah! A fete on board a steamer! What a droll idea!”
Others, equally curious, leaned over the Quai des Tuileries and watched
the steamer, whose tricolor flag at the stern, and red streamers at the
mastheads, floated with gay flutterings in the fresh morning breeze. The
boat was ready to start, its decks were waxed, its benches covered with
brilliant stuffs, and great masses of azaleas and roses gave it the
appearance of a garden or conservatory. There was something highly
attractive to the loungers on the quay in the gayly decorated steamer,
sending forth long puffs of white smoke along the bank. A band of
dark-complexioned musicians, clad in red trousers, black waistcoats
heavily embroidered in sombre colors, and round fur caps, played odd
airs upon the deck; while bevies of laughing women, almost all pretty in
their light summer gowns, alighted from coupes and barouches, descended
the flight of steps leading to the river, and crossed the plank to the
boat, with little coquettish graces and studied raising of the skirts,
allowing ravishing glimpses of pretty feet and ankles. The defile of
merry, witty Parisiennes, with their attendant cavaliers, while
the orchestra played the passionate notes of the Hungarian czardas,
resembled some vision of a painter, some embarkation for the dreamed-of
Cythera, realized by the fancy of an artist, a poet, or a great lord,
here in nineteenth century Paris, close to the bridge, across which
streamed, like a living antithesis, the realism of crowded cabs, full
omnibuses, and hurrying foot-passengers.
Prince Andras Zilah had invited his friends, this July morning, to a
breakfast in the open air, before the moving panorama of the banks of
the Seine.
Very well known in Parisian society, which he had sought eagerly with
an evident desire to be diverted, like a man who wishes to forget, the
former defender of Hungarian independence, the son of old Prince Zilah
Sandor, who was the last, in 1849, to hold erect the tattered standard
of his country, had been prodigal of his invitations, summoning to
his side his few intimate friends, the sharers of his solitude and
his privacy, and also the greater part of those chance fugitive
acquaintances which the life of Paris inevitably gives, and which
are blown away as lightly as they appeared, in a breath of air or a
whirlwind.
Count Yanski Varhely, the oldest, strongest, and most devoted friend of
all those who surrounded the Prince, knew very well why this fanciful
idea had come to Andras. At forty-four, the Prince was bidding farewell
to his bachelor life: it was no folly, and Yanski saw with delight
that the ancient race of the Zilahs, from time immemorial servants of
patriotism and the right, was not to be extinct with Prince Andras.
Hungary, whose future seemed brightening; needed the Zilahs in the
future as she had needed them in the past.
“I have only one objection to make to this marriage,” said Varhely; “it
should have taken place sooner.” But a man can not command his heart
to love at a given hour. When very young, Andras Zilah had cared for
scarcely anything but his country; and, far from her, in the bitterness
of exile, he had returned to the passion of his youth, living in Paris
only upon memories of his Hungary. He had allowed year after year to
roll by, without thinking of establishing a home of his own by marriage.
A little late, but with heart still warm, his spirit young and ardent,
and his body strengthened rather than worn out by life, Prince Andras
gave to a woman’s keeping his whole being, his soul with his name,
the one as great as the other. He was about to marry a girl of his own
choice, whom he loved romantically; and he wished to give a surrounding
of poetic gayety to this farewell to the past, this greeting to the
future. The men of his race, in days gone by, had always displayed a
gorgeous, almost Oriental originality: the generous eccentricities
of one of Prince Andras’s ancestors, the old Magyar Zilah, were often
cited; he it was who made this answer to his stewards, when, figures in
hand, they proved to him, that, if he would farm out to some English or
German company the cultivation of his wheat, corn, and oats, he would
increase his revenue by about six hundred thousand francs a year:
“But shall I make these six hundred thousand francs from the nourishment
of our laborers, farmers, sowers, and gleaners? No, certainly not; I
would no more take that money from the poor fellows than I would take
the scattered grains from the birds of the air.”
It was also this grandfather of Andras, Prince Zilah Ferency, who, when
he had lost at cards the wages of two hundred masons for an entire year,
employed these men in constructing chateaux, which he burned down at
the end of the year to give himself the enjoyment of fireworks upon
picturesque ruins.
The fortune of the Zilahs was then on a par with the almost fabulous,
incalculable wealth of the Esterhazys and Batthyanyis. Prince Paul
Esterhazy alone possessed three hundred and fifty square leagues of
territory in Hungary. The Zichys, the Karolyis and the Szchenyis,
poorer, had but two hundred at this time, when only six hundred families
were proprietors of six thousand acres of Hungarian soil, the nobles
of Great Britain possessing not more than five thousand in England. The
Prince of Lichtenstein entertained for a week the Emperor of Austria,
his staff and his army. Old Ferency Zilah would have done as much if
he had not always cherished a profound, glowing, militant hatred of
Austria: never had the family of the magnate submitted to Germany,
become the master, any more than it had bent the knee in former times to
the conquering Turk.
From his ancestors Prince Andras inherited, therefore, superb
liberality, with a fortune greatly diminished by all sorts of losses
and misfortunes--half of it confiscated by Austria in 1849, and enormous
sums expended for the national cause, Hungarian emigrants and proscribed
compatriots. Zilah nevertheless remained very rich, and was an imposing
figure in Paris, where, some years before, after long journeyings, he
had taken up his abode.
The little fete given for his friends on board the Parisian steamer
was a trifling matter to the descendant of the magnificent Magyars; but
still there was a certain charm about the affair, and it was a pleasure
for the Prince to see upon the garden-like deck the amusing, frivolous,
elegant society, which was the one he mingled with, but which he towered
above from the height of his great intelligence, his conscience, and
his convictions. It was a mixed and bizarre society, of different
nationalities; an assemblage of exotic personages, such as are met
with only in Paris in certain peculiar places where aristocracy touches
Bohemianism, and nobles mingle with quasi-adventurers; a kaleidoscopic
society, grafting its vices upon Parisian follies, coming to inhale
the aroma and absorb the poison of Paris, adding thereto strange
intoxications, and forming, in the immense agglomeration of the old
French city, a sort of peculiar syndicate, an odd colony, which belongs
to Paris, but which, however, has nothing of Paris about it except its
eccentricities, which drive post-haste through life, fill the little
journals with its great follies, is found and found again wherever Paris
overflows--at Dieppe, Trouville, Vichy, Cauteret, upon the sands of
Etretat, under the orange-trees of Nice, or about the gaming tables of
Monaco, according to the hour, season, and fashion.
This was the sort of assemblage which, powdered, perfumed, exquisitely
dressed, invaded, with gay laughter and nervous desire to be amused, the
boat chartered by the Prince. Above, pencil in hand, the little dark man
with the keen eyes, black, pointed beard and waxed moustache, continued
to take down, as the cortege defiled before him, the list of the invited
guests: and upon the leaves fell, briskly traced, names printed a
hundred times a day in Parisian chronicles among the reports of the
races of first representations at the theatres; names with Slav, Latin,
or Saxon terminations; Italian names, Spanish, Hungarian, American
names; each of which represented fortune, glory, power, sometimes
scandal--one of those imported scandals which break out in Paris as the
trichinae of foreign goods are hatched there.
The reporter wrote on, wrote ever, tearing off and handing to the page
attached to ‘L’Actualite’ the last leaves of his list, whereon figured
Yankee generals of the War of the Rebellion, Italian princesses,
American girls flirting with everything that wore trousers; ladies who,
rivals of Prince Zilah in wealth, owned whole counties somewhere in
England; great Cuban lords, compromised in the latest insurrections
and condemned to death in Spain; Peruvian statesmen, publicists,
and military chiefs at once, masters of the tongue, the pen, and the
revolver; a crowd of originals, even a Japanese, an elegant young man,
dressed in the latest fashion, with a heavy sombrero which rested upon
his straight, inky-black hair, and which every minute or two he took off
and placed under his left arm, to salute the people of his acquaintance
with low bows in the most approved French manner.
All these odd people, astonishing a little and interesting greatly the
groups of Parisians gathered above on the sidewalks, crossed the gangway
leading to the boat, and, spreading about on the deck, gazed at the
banks and the houses, or listened to the czardas which the Hungarian
musicians were playing with a sort of savage frenzy beneath the French
tricolor united to the three colors of their own country.
The Tzigani thus saluted the embarkation of the guests; and the clear,
bright sunshine enveloped the whole boat with a golden aureole, joyously
illuminating the scene of feverish gayety and childish laughter.
CHAPTER II. THE BARONESS’S MATCHMAKING
The Prince Zilah met his guests with easy grace, on the deck in front
of the foot-bridge. He had a pleasant word for each one as they came
on board, happy and smiling at the idea of a breakfast on the deck of a
steamer, a novel amusement which made these insatiable pleasure-seekers
forget the fashionable restaurants and the conventional receptions of
every day.
“What a charming thought this was of yours, Prince, so unexpected, so
Parisian, ah, entirely Parisian!”
In almost the same words did each newcomer address the Prince, who
smiled, and repeated a phrase from Jacquemin’s chronicles: “Foreigners
are more Parisian than the Parisians themselves.”
A smile lent an unexpected charm to the almost severe features of the
host. His usual expression was rather sad, and a trifle haughty. His
forehead was broad and high, the forehead of a thinker and a student
rather than that of a soldier; his eyes were of a deep, clear blue,
looking directly at everything; his nose was straight and regular, and
his beard and moustache were blond, slightly gray at the corners of
the mouth and the chin. His whole appearance, suggesting, as it did,
reserved strength and controlled passion, pleased all the more because,
while commanding respect, it attracted sympathy beneath the powerful
exterior, you felt there was a tender kindliness of heart.
There was no need for the name of Prince Andras Zilah--or, as they say
in Hungary, Zilah Andras--to have been written in characters of blood in
the history of his country, for one to divine the hero in him: his erect
figure, the carriage of his head, braving life as it had defied the
bullets of the enemy, the strange brilliance of his gaze, the sweet
inflections of his voice accustomed to command, and the almost caressing
gestures of his hand used to the sword--all showed the good man under
the brave, and, beneath the indomitable soldier, the true gentleman.
When they had shaken the hand of their host, the guests advanced to the
bow of the boat to salute a young girl, an exquisite, pale brunette,
with great, sad eyes, and a smile of infinite charm, who was
half-extended in a low armchair beneath masses of brilliant
parti-colored flowers. A stout man, of the Russian type, with heavy
reddish moustaches streaked with gray, and an apoplectic neck, stood by
her side, buttoned up in his frock-coat as in a military uniform.
Every now and then, leaning over and brushing with his moustaches her
delicate white ear, he would ask:
“Are you happy, Marsa?”
And Marsa would answer with a smile ending in a sigh, as she vaguely
contemplated the scene before her:
“Yes, uncle, very happy.”
Not far from these two was a little woman, still very pretty, although
of a certain age--the age of embonpoint--a brunette, with very delicate
features, a little sensual mouth, and pretty rosy ears peeping forth
from skilfully arranged masses of black hair. With a plump, dimpled
hand, she held before her myopic eyes a pair of gold-mounted glasses;
and she was speaking to a man of rather stern aspect, with a Slav
physiognomy, a large head, crowned with a mass of crinkly hair as white
as lamb’s wool, a long, white moustache, and shoulders as broad as an
ox; a man already old, but with the robust strength of an oak. He
was dressed neither well nor ill, lacking distinction, but without
vulgarity.
“Indeed, my dear Varhely, I am enchanted with this idea of Prince
Andras. I am enjoying myself excessively already, and I intend to enjoy
myself still more. Do you know, this scheme of a breakfast on the water
is simply delightful! Don’t you find it so? Oh! do be a little jolly,
Varhely!”
“Do I seem sad, then, Baroness?”
Yanski Varhely, the friend of Prince Andras, was very happy, however,
despite his rather sombre air. He glanced alternately at the little
woman who addressed him, and at Marsa, two very different types of
beauty: Andras’s fiancee, slender and pale as a beautiful lily, and
the little Baroness Dinati, round and rosy as a ripe peach. And he
was decidedly pleased with this Marsa Laszlo, against whom he had
instinctively felt some prejudice when Zilah spoke to him for the
first time of marrying her. To make of a Tzigana--for Marsa was half
Tzigana--a Princess Zilah, seemed to Count Varhely a slightly bold
resolution. The brave old soldier had never understood much of the
fantastic caprices of passion, and Andras seemed to him in this, as in
all other things, just a little romantic. But, after all, the Prince
was his own master, and whatever a Zilah did was well done. So, after
reflection, Zilah’s marriage became a joy to Varhely, as he had just
been declaring to the fiancee’s uncle, General Vogotzine.
Baroness Dinati was therefore wrong to suspect old Yanski Varhely of any
‘arriere-pensee’. How was it possible for him not to be enchanted, when
he saw Andras absolutely beaming with happiness?
They were now about to depart, to raise the anchor and glide down the
river along the quays. Already Paul Jacquemin, casting his last leaves
to the page of L’Actualite, was quickly descending the gangplank. Zilah
scarcely noticed him, for he uttered a veritable cry of delight as he
perceived behind the reporter a young man whom he had not expected.
“Menko! My dear Michel!” he exclaimed, stretching out both hands to the
newcomer, who advanced, excessively pale. “By what happy chance do I see
you, my dear boy?”
“I heard in London that you were to give this fete. The English
newspapers had announced your marriage, and I did not wish to wait
longer--I----.”
He hesitated a little as he spoke, as if dissatisfied, troubled, and a
moment before (Zilah had not noticed it) he had made a movement as if to
go back to the quay and leave the boat.
Michel Menko, however, had not the air of a timid man. He was tall,
thin, of graceful figure, a man of the world, a military diplomat. For
some reason or other, at this moment, he exhibited a certain uneasiness
in his face, which ordinarily bore a rather brilliant color, but which
was now almost sallow. He was instinctively seeking some one among the
Prince’s guests, and his glance wandered about the deck with a sort of
dull anger.
Prince Andras saw only one thing in Menko’s sudden appearance; the young
man, to whom he was deeply attached, and who was the only relative
he had in the world (his maternal grandmother having been a Countess
Menko), his dear Michel, would be present at his marriage. He had
thought Menko ill in London; but the latter appeared before him, and the
day was decidedly a happy one.
“How happy you make me, my dear fellow!” he said to him in a tone of
affection which was almost paternal.
Each demonstration of friendship by the Prince seemed to increase the
young Count’s embarrassment. Beneath a polished manner, the evidence
of an imperious temperament appeared in the slightest glance, the least
gesture, of this handsome fellow of twenty-seven or twenty-eight years.
Seeing him pass by, one could easily imagine him with his fashionable
clothes cast aside, and, clad in the uniform of the Hungarian hussars,
with closely shaven chin, and moustaches brushed fiercely upward,
manoeuvring his horse on the Prater with supple grace and nerves like
steel.
Menko’s gray eyes, with blue reflections in them, which made one think
of the reflection of a storm in a placid lake, became sad when calm, but
were full of a threatening light when animated. The gaze of the young
man had precisely this aggressive look when he discovered, half hidden
among the flowers, Marsa seated in the bow of the boat; then, almost
instantaneously a singular expression of sorrow or anguish succeeded,
only in its turn to fade away with the rapidity of the light of a
falling star; and there was perfect calm in Menko’s attitude and
expression when Prince Zilah said to him:
“Come, Michel, let me present you to my fiancee. Varhely is there also.”
And, taking Menko’s arm, he led him toward Marsa. “See,” he said to the
young girl, “my happiness is complete.”
She, as Michel Menko bowed low before her, coldly and almost
imperceptibly inclined her dark head, while her large eyes, under the
shadow of their heavy lashes, seemed vainly trying to meet the gray eyes
of the young man.
Andras beckoned Varhely to come to Marsa, who was white as marble, and
said softly, with a hand on the shoulder of each of the two friends, who
represented to him his whole life--Varhely, the past; Michel Menko, his
recovered youth and the future.
“If it were not for that stupid superstition which forbids one to
proclaim his happiness, I should tell you how happy I am, very happy.
Yes, the happiest of men,” he added.
Meanwhile, the little Baroness Dinati, the pretty brunette, who had just
found Varhely a trifle melancholy, had turned to Paul Jacquemin, the
accredited reporter of her salon.
“That happiness, Jacquemin,” she said, with a proud wave of the hand,
“is my work. Without me, those two charming savages, so well suited to
each other, Marsa and Andras Zilah, would never have met. On what does
happiness depend!”
“On an invitation card engraved by Stern,” laughed Jacquemin. “But you
have said too much, Baroness. You must tell me the whole story. Think
what an article it would make: The Baroness’s Matchmaking! The romance!
Quick, the romance! The romance, or death!”
“You have no idea how near you are to the truth, my dear Jacquemin: it
is indeed a romance; and, what is more, a romantic romance. A romance
which has no resemblance to--you have invented the word--those
brutalistic stories which you are so fond of.”
“Which I am very fond of, Baroness, I confess, especially when they are
just a little--you know!”
“But this romance of Prince Andras is by no means just a little--you
know! It is--how shall I express it? It is epic, heroic, romantic--what
you will. I will relate it to you.”
“It will sell fifty thousand copies of our paper,” gayly exclaimed
Jacquemin, opening his ears, and taking notes mentally.
CHAPTER III. THE STORY OF THE ZILAHS
Andras Zilah, Transylvanian Count and Prince of the Holy Empire, was one
of those heroes who devote their whole lives to one aim, and, when they
love, love always.
Born for action, for chivalrous and incessant struggle, he had
sacrificed his first youth to battling for his country. “The Hungarian
was created on horseback,” says a proverb, and Andras did not belie the
saying. In ‘48, at the age of fifteen, he was in the saddle, charging
the Croatian hussars, the redcloaks, the terrible darkskinned Ottochan
horsemen, uttering frightful yells, and brandishing their big damascened
guns. It seemed then to young Andras that he was assisting at one of
the combats of the Middle Ages, during one of those revolts against the
Osmanlis, of which he had heard so much when a child.
In the old castle, with towers painted red in the ancient fashion, where
he was born and had grown up, Andras, like all the males of his family
and his country, had been imbued with memories of the old wars. A few
miles from his father’s domain rose the Castle of the Isle, which, in
the middle of the sixteenth century, Zringi had defended against the
Turks, displaying lofty courage and unconquerable audacity, and forcing
Soliman the Magnificent to leave thirty thousand soldiers beneath the
walls, the Sultan himself dying before he could subjugate the Hungarian.
Often had Andras’s father, casting his son upon a horse, set out,
followed by a train of cavaliers, for Mohacz, where the Mussulmans had
once overwhelmed the soldiers of young King Louis, who died with his
own family and every Hungarian who was able to carry arms. Prince Zilah
related to the little fellow, who listened to him with burning tears of
rage, the story of the days of mourning and the terrible massacres which
no Hungarian has ever forgotten. Then he told him of the great revolts,
the patriotic uprisings, the exploits of Botzkai, Bethlen Gabor, or
Rakoczy, whose proud battle hymn made the blood surge through the veins
of the little prince.
Once at Buda, the father had taken the son to the spot, where, in 1795,
fell the heads of noble Hungarians, accused of republicanism; and he
said to him, as the boy stood with uncovered head:
“This place is called the Field of Blood. Martinowitz was beheaded here
for his faith. Remember, that a man’s life belongs to his duty, and not
to his happiness.”
And when he returned to the great sombre halls of the castle, whence in
bygone days the Turks had driven out his ancestors, and whence, in their
turn, throwing off the yoke of the conquerors, his ancestors had driven
out the Turks, little Prince Andras found again examples before him in
the giants in semi-oriental costumes, glittering in steel or draped
in purple, who looked down upon him from their frames; smoke-blackened
paintings wherein the eagle eyes and long moustaches of black hussars,
contemporaries of Sobieski, or magnates in furred robes, with aigrettes
in their caps, and curved sabres garnished with precious stones and
enamel, attracted and held spellbound the silent child, while through
the window floated in, sung by some shepherd, or played by wandering
Tzigani, the refrain of the old patriotic ballad ‘Czaty Demeter’, the
origin of which is lost in the mist of ages--
Remember, oh, yes! remember our ancestors! Brave, proud Magyars,
when you left the land of the Scythians, brave ancestors, great
forefathers, you did not suspect that your sons would be slaves!
Remember, oh, yes! remember our ancestors!
Andras did remember them, and he knew by heart their history. He knew
the heroism of Prince Zilah Sandor falling in Mohacz in 1566 beside his
wife Hanska who had followed him, leaving in the cradle her son Janski,
whose grandson, Zilah Janos, in 1867, at the very place where his
ancestor had been struck, sabred the Turks, crying: “Sandor and Hanska,
look down upon me; your blood avenges you!”
There was not one of those men, whose portraits followed the child with
their black eyes, who was not recorded in the history of his country for
some startling deed or noble sacrifice. All had fought for Hungary: the
greater part had died for her. There was a saying that the deathbed of
the Zilahs was a bloody battleground. When he offered his name and his
life to Maria Theresa, one of the Zilah princes had said proudly to the
Empress: “You demand of the Hungarians gold, they bring you steel.
The gold was to nourish your courtiers, the steel will be to save your
crown. Forward!” These terrible ancestors were, besides, like all the
magnates of Hungary, excessively proud of their nobility and their
patriarchal system of feudalism. They knew how to protect their
peasants, who were trained soldiers, how to fight for them, and how to
die at their head; but force seemed to them supreme justice, and they
asked nothing but their sword with which to defend their right. Andras’s
father, Prince Sandor, educated by a French tutor who had been driven
from Paris by the Revolution, was the first of all his family to form
any perception of a civilization based upon justice and law, and not
upon the almighty power of the sabre. The liberal education which he
had received, Prince Sandor transmitted to his son. The peasants, who
detested the pride of the Magyars, and the middle classes of the cities,
mostly tradesmen who envied the castles of these magnates, soon became
attracted, fascinated, and enraptured with this transformation in the
ancient family of the Zilahs. No man, not even Georgei, the Spartanlike
soldier, nor the illustrious Kossuth, was more popular in 1849, at the
time of the struggle against Austria, than Prince Sandor Zilah and his
son, then a handsome boy of sixteen, but strong and well built as a
youth of twenty.
At this youthful age, Andras Zilah had been one of those magnates, who,
the ‘kalpach’ on the head, the national ‘attila’ over the shoulder and
the hand upon the hilt of the sword, had gone to Vienna to plead before
the Emperor the cause of Hungary. They were not listened to, and one
evening, the negotiations proving futile, Count Batthyanyi said to
Jellachich:
“We shall soon meet again upon the Drave!”
“No,” responded the Ban of Croatia, “I will go myself to seek you upon
the Danube!”
This was war; and Prince Sandor went, with his son, to fight bravely
for the old kingdom of St. Stephen against the cannon and soldiers of
Jellachich.
All these years of blood and battle were now half forgotten by Prince
Andras; but often Yanski Varhely, his companion of those days of
hardship, the bold soldier who in former times had so often braved the
broadsword of the Bohemian cuirassiers of Auersperg’s regiment, would
recall to him the past with a mournful shake of the head, and repeat,
ironically, the bitter refrain of the song of defeat:
Dance, dance, daughters of Hungary!
Tread now the measure so long delayed.
Murdered our sons by the shot or the hangman!
In this land of pleasure, oh! be not dismayed;--
Now is the time, brown daughters of Hungary,
To dance to the measure of true hearts betrayed!
And then, these melancholy words calling up the memory of disaster, all
would revive before Andras Zilah’s eyes--the days of mourning and the
days of glory; the exploits of Bem; the victories of Dembiski; the
Austrian flags taken at Goedolloe; the assaults of Buda; the defence
of Comorn; Austria, dejected and defeated, imploring the aid of Russia;
Hungary, beaten by the force of numbers, yet resisting Paskiewich as she
had resisted Haynau, and appealing to Europe and the world in the name
of the eternal law of nations, which the vanquished invoke, but which is
never listened to by the countries where the lion is tearing his prey.
And again, Zilah would remember the heroic fatherland struck down at
Temesvar; the remnants of an armed people in refuge at Arad; and Klapka
still holding out in the island of Comorn at the moment when Georgei
had surrendered. Then, again, the obscure deaths of his comrades;
the agonies in the ditches and in the depths of the woods; the last
despairing cries of a conquered people overwhelmed by numbers:
Dance, dance, daughters of Hungary!
All this bloody past, enveloped as in a crimson cloud, but glorious with
its gleams of hope and its flashes of victory, the Prince would revive
with old Varhely, in the corner of whose eye at intervals a tear would
glisten.
They both saw again the last days of Comorn, with the Danube at the
foot of the walls, and the leaves of the trees whirling in the September
wind, and dispersed like the Hungarians themselves; and the shells
falling upon the ramparts; and the last hours of the siege; and the
years of mournful sadness and exile; their companions decimated,
imprisoned, led to the gallows or the stake; the frightful silence and
ruin falling like a winding-sheet over Hungary; the houses deserted, the
fields laid waste, and the country, fertile yesterday, covered now with
those Muscovite thistles, which were unknown in Hungary before the year
of massacre, and the seeds of which the Cossack horses had imported in
their thick manes and tails.
Beloved Hungary, whose sons, disdaining the universe, used proudly to
boast: “Have we not all that man needs? Banat, which gives us wheat;
Tisza, wine; the mountain, gold and salt. Our country is sufficient for
her children!” And this country, this fruitful country, was now covered
with gibbets and corpses.
CHAPTER IV. “WHEN HUNGARY IS FREE!”
All these bitter memories Prince Andras, in spite of the years that had
passed, kept ever in his mind one sad and tragic event--the burial of
his father, Sandor Zilah, who was shot in the head by a bullet during an
encounter with the Croats early in the month of January, 1849.
Prince Sandor was able to grasp the hand of his son, and murmur in the
ear of this hero of sixteen:
“Remember! Love and defend the fatherland!”
Then, as the Austrians were close at hand, it was necessary to bury the
Prince in a trench dug in the snow, at the foot of a clump of fir-trees.
Some Hungarian ‘honveds, bourgeois’ militia, and Varhely’s hussars held
at the edge of the black opening resinous torches, which the wintry wind
shook like scarlet plumes, and which stained the snow with great red
spots of light. Erect, at the head of the ditch, his fingers grasping
the hand of Yanski Varhely, young Prince Andras gazed upon the earthy
bed, where, in his hussar’s uniform, lay Prince Sandor, his long blond
moustache falling over his closed mouth, his blood-stained hands crossed
upon his black embroidered vest, his right hand still clutching the
handle of his sabre, and on his forehead, like a star, the round mark of
the bit of lead that had killed him.
Above, the whitened branches of the firs looked like spectres, and upon
the upturned face of the dead soldier fell flakes of snow like congealed
tears. Under the flickering of the torch-flames, blown about by the
north wind, the hero seemed at times to move again, and a wild desire
came to Andras to leap down into the grave and snatch away the body. He
was an orphan now, his mother having died when he was an infant, and he
was alone in the world, with only the stanch friendship of Varhely and
his duty to his country to sustain him.
“I will avenge you, father,” he whispered to the patriot, who could no
longer hear his words.
The hussars and honveds had advanced, ready to fire a final salvo over
the grave of the Prince, when, suddenly, gliding between the ranks of
the soldiers, appeared a band of Tzigani, who began to play the March of
Rakoczy, the Hungarian Marseillaise, the stirring melody pealing forth
in the night-air, and lending a certain mysteriously touching element
to the sad scene. A quick shudder ran through the ranks of the soldiers,
ready to become avengers.
The national hymn rang out like a song of glory over the resting-place
of the vanquished. The soul of the dead seemed to speak in the voice of
the heroic music, recalling to the harassed contestants for liberty the
great days of the revolts of the fatherland, the old memories of the
struggles against the Turks, the furious charges of the cavaliers across
the free puszta, the vast Hungarian plain.
And while, with long sweeps of his arm, the chief of the Tzigani marked
the measure, and the ‘czimbalom’ poured forth its heartrending notes, it
seemed to the poor fellows gathered about that the music of the March of
Rakoczy summoned a whole fantastic squadron of avengers, horsemen with
floating pelisses and herons’ plumes in their hats, who, erect in their
saddles and with sabres drawn, struck, struck the frightened enemy,
and recovered, foot by foot, the conquered territory. There was in this
exalted march a sound of horses’ hoofs, the clash of arms, a shaking of
the earth under the gallop of horsemen, a flash of agraffes, a rustle
of pelisses in the wind, an heroic gayety and a chivalrous bravery,
like the cry of a whole people of cavaliers sounding the charge of
deliverance.
And the young Prince, gazing down upon his dead father, remembered how
many times those mute lips had related to him the legend of the czardas,
that legend, symbolic of the history of Hungary, summing up all
the bitter pain of the conquest, when the beautiful dark girls of
Transylvania danced, their tears burning their cheeks, under the lash
of the Osmanlis. At first, cold and motionless, like statues whose calm
looks silently insulted their possessors, they stood erect beneath the
eye of the Turk; then little by little, the sting of the master’s whip
falling upon their shoulders and tearing their sides and cheeks, their
bodies twisted in painful, revolted spasms; the flesh trembled under the
cord like the muscles of a horse beneath the spur; and, in the morbid
exaltation of suffering, a sort of wild delirium took possession
of them, their arms were waved in the air, their heads with hair
dishevelled were thrown backward, and the captives, uttering a sound
at once plaintive and menacing, danced, their dance, at first slow and
melancholy, becoming gradually active, nervous, and interrupted by cries
which resembled sobs. And the Hungarian czardas, symbolizing thus the
dance of these martyrs, kept still, will always keep, the characteristic
of contortions under the lash of bygone days; and, slow and languishing
at first, then soon quick and agitated, tragically hysterical, it
also is interrupted by melancholy chords, dreary, mournful notes and
plaintive accents like drops of blood from a wound-from the mortal wound
of Prince Sandor, lying there in his martial uniform.
The bronzed Tzigani, fantastically illumined by the red glare of the
torches, stood out against the white background like demons of revenge;
and the hymn, feverish, bold, ardent, echoed through the snow-covered
branches like a hurricane of victory. They were wandering musicians,
who, the evening before, had been discovered in a neighboring village by
some of Jellachich’s Croats, and whom Prince Sandor had unceremoniously
rescued at the head of his hussars; and they had come, with their
ancient national airs, the voice of their country, to pay their debt to
the fallen hero.
When they had finished, the wintry night-wind bearing away the last
notes of their war-song, the pistols of the hussars and the guns of
the honveds discharged a salute over the grave. The earth and snow were
shovelled in upon the body of Sandor Zilah, and Prince Andras drew away,
after marking with a cross the place where his father reposed.
A few paces away, he perceived, among the Tzigani musicians, a young
girl, the only woman of the tribe, who wept with mournful sobbings like
the echoes of the deserts of the Orient.
He wondered why the girl wept so bitterly, when he, the son, could not
shed a tear.
“Because Prince Zilah Sandor was valiant among the valiant,” she
replied, in answer to his question, “and he died because he would not
wear the talisman which I offered him.”
Andras looked at the girl.
“What talisman?”
“Some pebbles from the lakes of Tatra, sewn up in a little leather bag.”
Andras knew what a powerful superstition is attached by the people of
Hungary to these deep lakes of Tatra, the “eyes of the sea,” where, say
the old legends, the most beautiful carbuncle in the world lies hidden,
a carbuncle which would sparkle like the sun, if it could be discovered,
and which is guarded by frogs with diamond eyes and with lumps of pure
gold for feet. He felt more touched than astonished at the superstition
of the Tzigana, and at the offer which, the evening before, Prince
Sandor had refused with a smile.
“Give me what you wished to give my father,” he said. “I will keep it in
memory of him.”
A bright, joyous light flashed for a moment across the face of the
Tzigana. She extended to the young Prince the little bag of leather
containing several small, round pebbles like grains of maize.
“At all events,” exclaimed the young girl, “there will be one Zilah whom
the balls of the Croats will spare for the safety of Hungary.”
Andras slowly detached from his shoulder the silver agraffe, set with
opals, which clasped his fur pelisse, and handed it to the gypsy, who
regarded it with admiring eyes as it flashed in the red light.
“The day when my father is avenged,” he said, “and our Hungary is free,
bring me this jewel, and you and yours come to the castle of the Zilahs.
I will give you a life of peace in memory of this night of mourning.”
Already, at a distance, could be heard a rapid fusillade about the
outposts. The Austrians had perhaps perceived the light from the
torches, and were attempting a night attack.
“Extinguish the torches!” cried Yanski Varhely.
The resinous knots hissed as they were thrust into the snow, and the
black, sinister night of winter, with the cries of the wind in the
branches, fell upon the troop of men, ready to die as their chief had
died; and all disappeared vision, phantoms--the Tzigani silently taking
refuge in the sombre forest, while here and there could be heard the
rattle of the ramrods as the honveds loaded their guns.
This January night appeared now to Andras as an almost fantastic dream.
Since then he had erected a mausoleum of marble on the very spot where
Prince Sandor fell; and of all the moments of that romantic, picturesque
war, the agonizing moment, the wild scene of the burial of his father,
was most vivid in his memory--the picture of the warrior stretched in
the snow, his hand on the handle of his sword, remained before his eyes,
imperishable in its melancholy majesty.
CHAPTER V. “MY FATHER WAS A RUSSIAN!”
When the war was over, the Prince roamed sadly for years about
Europe--Europe, which, unmindful of the martyrs, had permitted the
massacre of the vanquished. It was many years before he could accustom
himself to the idea that he had no longer a country. He counted always
upon the future; it was impossible that fate would forever be implacable
to a nation. He often repeated this to Yanski Varhely, who had never
forsaken him--Yanski Varhely, the impoverished old hussar, the ruined
gentleman, now professor of Latin and mathematics at Paris, and living
near the Prince off the product of his lessons and a small remnant he
had managed to save from the wreck of his property.
“Hungary will spring up again, Yanski; Hungary is immortal!” Andras
would exclaim.
“Yes, on one condition,” was Varhely’s response. “She must arrive at a
comprehension that if she has succumbed, it is because she has committed
faults. All defeats have their geneses. Before the enemy we were not
a unit. There were too many discussions, and not enough action; such a
state of affairs is always fatal.”
The years brought happy changes to Hungary. She practically regained her
freedom; by her firmness she made the conquest of her own autonomy by
the side of Austria. Deak’s spirit, in the person of Andrassy, recovered
the possession of power. But neither Andras nor Varhely returned to
their country. The Prince had become, as he himself said with a smile,
“a Magyar of Paris.” He grew accustomed to the intellectual, refined
life of the French city; and this was a consolation, at times, for the
exile from his native land.
“It is not a difficult thing to become bewitched with Paris,” he would
say, as if to excuse himself.
He had no longer, it is true, the magnificent landscapes of his youth;
the fields of maize, the steppes, dotted here and there with clumps of
wild roses; the Carpathian pines, with their sombre murmur; and all
the evening sounds which had been his infancy’s lullaby; the cowbells,
melancholy and indistinct; the snapping of the great whips of the
czikos; the mounted shepherds, with their hussar jackets, crossing the
plains where grew the plants peculiar to the country; and the broad
horizons with the enormous arms of the windmills outlined against the
golden sunset. But Paris, with its ever-varying seductions, its activity
in art and science, its perpetual movement, had ended by becoming a real
need to him, like a new existence as precious and as loved as the first.
The soldier had become a man of letters, jotting down for himself, not
for the public, all that struck him in his observation and his reading;
mingling in all societies, knowing them all, but esteeming only one,
that of honest people; and thus letting the years pass by, without
suspecting that they were flying, regarding himself somewhat as a man
away on a visit, and suddenly awaking one fine morning almost old,
wondering how he had lived all this time of exile which, despite many
mental troubles, seemed to him to have lasted only a few months.
“We resemble,” he said to Varhely, “those emigrants who never unpack
their boxes, certain that they are soon to return home. They wait, and
some day, catching a glimpse of themselves in a glass, they are amazed
to find wrinkles and gray hairs.”
No longer having a home in his own country, Prince Andras had never
dreamed of making another abroad. He hired the sumptuous hotel he
inhabited at the top of the Champs Elysees, when houses were rather
scattered there. Fashion, and the ascensional movement of Paris toward
the Arc de Triomphe, had come to seek him. His house was rich in
beautiful pictures and rare books, and he sometimes received there his
few real friends, his companions in troublous times, like Varhely.
He was generally considered a little of a recluse, although he loved
society and showed himself, during the winter, at all entertainments
where, by virtue of his fame and rank, he would naturally be expected
to be present. But he carried with him a certain melancholy and
gravity, which contrasted strongly with the frivolous trivialities and
meaningless smiles of our modern society. In the summer, he usually
passed two months at the seashore, where Varhely frequently joined him;
and upon the leafy terrace of the Prince’s villa the two friends had
long and confidential chats, as they watched the sun sink into the sea.
Andras had never thought of marrying. At first, he had a sort of feeling
that he was doomed to an early death, ever expecting a renewal of the
struggle with Austria; and he thought at that time that the future would
bring to him his father’s fate--a ball in the forehead and a ditch.
Then, without knowing it, he had reached and passed his fortieth year.
“Now it is too late,” he said, gayly. “The psychological moment is long
gone by. We shall both end old bachelors, my good Varhely, and spend our
evenings playing checkers, that mimic warfare of old men.”
“Yes, that is all very well for me, who have no very famous name to
perpetuate; but the Zilahs should not end with you. I want some sturdy
little hussar whom I can teach to sit a horse, and who also will call me
his good old Yanski.”
The Prince smiled, and then replied, gravely, almost sadly: “I greatly
fear that one can not love two things at once; the heart is not elastic.
I chose Hungary for my bride, and my life must be that of a widower.”
In the midst of the austere and thoughtful life he led, Andras
preserved, nevertheless, a sort of youthful buoyancy. Many men of thirty
were less fresh in mind and body than he. He was one of those beings who
die, as they have lived, children: even the privations of the hardest
kind of an existence can not take away from them that purity and
childlike trust which seem to be an integral part of themselves, and
which, although they may be betrayed, deceived and treated harshly by
life, they never wholly lose; very manly and heroic in time of need and
danger, they are by nature peculiarly exposed to treasons and deceptions
which astonish but do not alter them. Since man, in the progress of
time, must either harden or break to pieces, the hero in them is of
iron; but, on the other hand, their hearts are easily wounded by the
cruel hand of some woman or the careless one of a child.
Andras Zilah had not yet loved deeply, as it was in his nature to
love. More or less passing caprices had not dried up the spring of real
passion which was at the bottom of his heart. But he had not sought this
love; for he adored his Hungary as he would have loved a woman, and the
bitter recollection of her defeat gave him the impression of a love that
had died or been cruelly betrayed.
Yanski, on the whole, had not greatly troubled himself to demonstrate
mathematically or philosophically that a “hussar pupil” was an absolute
necessity to him. People can not be forced, against their will, to
marry; and the Prince, after all, was free, if he chose, to let the name
of Zilah die with him.
“Taking life as it is,” old Varhely would growl, “perhaps it isn’t
necessary to bring into the world little beings who never asked to come
here.” And yet breaking off in his pessimism, and with a vision before
his eyes of another Andras, young, handsome, leading his hussars to the
charge “and yet, it is a pity, Andras, it is a pity.”
The decisions of men are more often dependent upon chance than upon
their own will. Prince Andras received an invitation to dinner one day
from the little Baroness Dinati, whom he liked very much, and whose
husband, Orso Dinati, one of the defenders of Venice in the time of
Manin, had been his intimate friend. The house of the Baroness was a
very curious place; the reporter Jacquemin, who was there at all
times, testing the wines and correcting the menus, would have called
it “bizarre.” The Baroness received people in all circles of society;
oddities liked her, and she did not dislike oddities. Very honest, very
spirituelle, an excellent woman at heart, she gave evening parties,
readings from unheard-of books, and performances of the works of
unappreciated musicians; and the reporters, who came to absorb her
salads and drink her punch, laughed at her in their journals before
their supper was digested.
The Prince, as we have said, was very fond of the Baroness, with an
affection which was almost fraternal. He pardoned her childishness and
her little absurdities for the sake of her great good qualities. “My
dear Prince,” she said to him one day, “do you know that I would throw
myself into the fire for you?”
“I am sure of it; but there would not be any great merit in your doing
so.”
“And why not, please?”
“Because you would not run any risk of being burned. This must be so,
because you receive in your house a crowd of highly suspicious people,
and no one has ever suspected you yourself. You are a little salamander,
the prettiest salamander I ever met. You live in fire, and you have
neither upon your face nor your reputation the slightest little scorch.”
“Then you think that my guests are”----
“Charming. Only, they are of two kinds: those whom I esteem, and who do
not amuse me--often; and those who amuse me, and whom I esteem--never.”
“I suppose you will not come any more to the Rue Murillo, then?”
“Certainly I shall--to see you.”
And it really was to see her that the Prince went to the Baroness
Dinati’s, where his melancholy characteristics clashed with so many
worldly follies and extravagances. The Baroness seemed to have a
peculiar faculty in choosing extraordinary guests: Peruvians, formerly
dictators, now become insurance agents, or generals transformed into
salesmen for some wine house; Cuban chiefs half shot to pieces by
the Spaniards; Cretes exiled by the Turks; great personages from
Constantinople, escaped from the Sultan’s silken bowstring, and
displaying proudly their red fez in Paris, where the opera permitted
them to continue their habits of polygamy; Americans, whose gold-mines
or petroleum-wells made them billionaires for a winter, only to go to
pieces and make them paupers the following summer; politicians out of a
place; unknown authors; misunderstood poets; painters of the future-in
short, the greater part of the people who were invited by Prince Andras
to his water-party, Baroness Dinati having pleaded for her friends and
obtained for them cards of invitation. It was a sort of ragout of real
and shady celebrities, an amusing, bustling crowd, half Bohemian, half
aristocratic, entirely cosmopolitan. Prince Andras remembered once
having dined with a staff officer of Garibaldi’s army on one side of
him, and the Pope’s nuncio on the other.
On a certain evening the Baroness was very anxious that the Prince
should not refuse her latest invitation.
“I am arranging a surprise for you,” she said. “I am going to have to
dinner”--
“Whom? The Mikado? The Shah of Persia?”
“Better than the Mikado. A charming young girl who admires you
profoundly, for she knows by heart the whole history of your battles of
1849. She has read Georgei, Klapka, and all the rest of them; and she is
so thoroughly Bohemian in heart, soul and race, that she is universally
called the Tzigana.”
“The Tzigana?”
This simple word, resembling the clank of cymbals, brought up to Prince
Andras a whole world of recollections. ‘Hussad czigany’! The rallying
cry of the wandering musicians of the puszta had some element in it like
the cherished tones of the distant bells of his fatherland.
“Ah! yes, indeed, my dear Baroness,” he said; “that is a charming
surprise. I need not ask if your Tzigana is pretty; all the Tzigani of
my country are adorable, and I am sure I shall fall in love with her.”
The Prince had no notion how prophetic his words were. The Tzigana,
whom the Baroness requested him to take in to dinner, was Marsa, Marsa
Laszlo, dressed in one of the black toilettes which she affected, and
whose clear, dark complexion, great Arabian eyes, and heavy, wavy hair
seemed to Andras’s eyes to be the incarnation, in a prouder and more
refined type, of the warm, supple, nervous beauty of the girls of his
country.
He was surprised and strangely fascinated, attracted by the incongruous
mixture of extreme refinement and a sort of haughty unconventionality he
found in Marsa. A moment before, he had noticed how silent, almost rigid
she was, as she leaned back in her armchair; but now this same face was
strangely animated, illumined by some happy emotion, and her eyes burned
like coals of fire as she fixed them upon Andras.
During the whole dinner, the rest of the dining-room disappeared to the
Prince; he saw only the girl at his side; and the candles and polished
mirrors were only there to form a sparkling background for her pale,
midnight beauty.
“Do you know, Prince,” said Marsa, in her rich, warm contralto voice,
whose very accents were like a caress, “do you know that, among all
those who fought for our country, you are the one admiration of my
life?”
He smiled, and mentioned more illustrious names.
“No, no,” she answered; “those are not the names I care for, but yours.
I will tell you why.”
And she recalled, in a voice vibrating with emotion, all that Prince
Zilah Sandor and his son had attempted, twenty years before, for the
liberty of Hungary. She told the whole story in the most vivid manner;
had her age permitted her to have been present at those battles, she
could not have related them with more spirited enthusiasm.
“I know, perfectly, how, at the head of your hussars, you wrested from
the soldiers of Jellachich the first standard captured by the Hungarians
from the ranks of Austria. Shall I tell you the exact date? and the day
of the week? It was Thursday.”
The whole history, ignored, forgotten, lost in the smoke of more recent
wars, the strange, dark-eyed girl, knew day by day, hour by hour; and
there, in that Parisian dining-room, surrounded by all that crowd,
where yesterday’s ‘bon mot’, the latest scandal, the new operetta, were
subjects of paramount importance, Andras, voluntarily isolated, saw
again, present and living, his whole heroic past rise up before him, as
beneath the wave of a fairy’s wand.
“But how do you know me so well?” he asked, fixing his clear eyes upon
Marsa Laszlo’s face. “Was your father one of my soldiers?”
“My father was a Russian,” responded Marsa, abruptly, her voice suddenly
becoming harsh and cutting.
“A Russian?”
“Yes, a Russian,” she repeated, emphasizing the word with a sort of dull
anger. “My mother alone was a Tzigana, and my mother’s beauty was part
of the spoils of those who butchered your soldiers?”
In the uproar of conversation, which became more animated with the
dessert, she could not tell him of the sorrows of her life; and yet,
he guessed there was some sad story in the life of the young girl, and
almost implored her to speak, stopping just at the limit where sympathy
might change into indiscretion.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as she was silent, with a dark shadow
overspreading her face. “I have no right to know your life simply
because you are so well acquainted with mine.”
“Oh! you!” she said, with a sad smile; “your life is history; mine is
drama, melodrama even. There is a great difference.”
“Pardon my presumption!”
“Oh! I will willingly tell you of my life, if the existence of a useless
being like myself can interest you; but not here in the noise of this
dinner. It would be absurd,” with a change of tone, “to mingle tears
with champagne. By-and-bye! By-and-bye!”
She made an evident effort to appear gay, like the pretty women who were
there, and who, despite their prettiness, seemed to Andras perfectly
insignificant; but she did not succeed in driving away the cloud of
sadness which overshadowed her exquisite, dark face. And in the ears
of the Prince rang again the bitter accents of that voice saying in a
harsh, almost revolted tone:
“Yes, a Russian! My father was a Russian!”
CHAPTER VI. A GYPSY PRINCESS
The mystery which seemed to envelop Marsa, the flash of anger with which
she had spoken of the Russian who was her father, all attracted
the Prince toward her; and he experienced a deliciously disquieting
sentiment, as if the secret of this girl’s existence were now grafted
upon his own life.
She seemed to have no wish to keep her secret from him. At their first
meeting, during the conversation which followed the dinner and the
musical exhibition given by extraordinary musicians with long, unkempt
locks, Marsa, trusting with a sort of joy to the one whom she regarded
as a hero, told Prince Andras the story of her life.
She related to him the assault made by soldiers of Paskiewich upon
the little Hungarian village, and how her grandfather, leaving his
czimbalom, had fired upon the Russians from the ranks of the honveds.
There was a combat, or rather a butchery, in the sole street of the
town, one of the last massacres of the campaign. The Russians destroyed
everything, shooting down the prisoners, and burning the poor little
houses. There were some women among the Hungarians and Tzigani; they
had loaded the guns of the wounded, comforted the dying and avenged the
dead. Many of them were killed. One of them, the youngest and prettiest,
a gypsy, was seized by the Russian officer, and, when peace was declared
soon after, carried off by him to Russia. This was Tisza Laszlo, Marsa’s
mother. The officer, a great Russian nobleman, a handsome fellow and
extremely rich, really loved her with a mad sort of love. He forced her
to become his mistress; but he tried in every way to make her pardon the
brutality of his passion; keeping her half a captive in his castle near
Moscow, and yet offering her, by way of expiation, not only his
fortune but his name, the princely title of which the Tchereteff s,
his ancestors, had been so proud, and which the daughter of wandering
Tzigani refused with mingled hatred and disgust. Princess? She, the
gypsy, a Russian princess? The title would have appeared to her like
a new and still more abhorrent stigma. He implored her, but she was
obdurate. It was a strange, tragic existence these two beings led, shut
up in the immense castle, from the windows of which Tisza could perceive
the gilded domes of Moscow, the superb city in which she would never set
her foot, preferring the palace, sad and gloomy as a cell. Alone in the
world, the sole survivor of her massacred tribe, the Russians to her
were the murderers of her people, the assassins of the free musicians
with eagle profiles she used to follow as they played the czardas from
village to village.
She never saw Prince Tchereteff, handsome, generous, charming, loving
her and trembling before her glance although he had ruthlessly kidnapped
her from her country, that she did not think of him, sword in hand,
entering the burning Hungarian village, his face reddened by the flames,
as the bayonets of his soldiers were reddened with blood. She hated this
tall young man, his drooping moustache, his military uniform, his broad
figure, his white-gloved hands: he represented to the imprisoned Tzigana
the conqueror and murderer of her people. And yet a daughter was born to
them. She had defended herself with the cries of a tigress; and then she
had longed to die, to die of hunger, since, a close prisoner, she could
not obtain possession of a weapon, nor cast herself into the water. She
had lived, nevertheless, and then her daughter reconciled her to life.
The child which was born to her was all in all to Tizsa. Marsa was an
exact reproduction, feature by feature, of her mother, and, strange
to say, daughters generally resembling the father, had nothing of
Tchereteff, nothing Russian about her: on the contrary, she was all
Tzigana--Tzigana in the clear darkness of her skin, in her velvety eyes,
and her long, waving black hair, with its bronze reflections, which the
mother loved to wind about her thin fingers.
Her beauty, faded by long, slow sorrow, Tisza found again in her child,
a true daughter of Hungary like herself; and, as Marsa grew up, she
told her the legends, the songs, the heroism, the martyrdom, of Hungary,
picturing to the little girl the great, grassy plain, the free puszta,
peopled with a race in whose proud language the word honor recurs again
and again.
Marsa grew up in the Muscovite castle, loving nothing in the world
except her mother, and regarding with frightened eyes the blond stranger
who sometimes took her upon his knees and gazed sadly into her face.
Before this man, who was her father, she felt as if she were in the
presence of an enemy. As Tisza never went out, Marsa rarely quitted
the castle; and, when she went to Moscow, she hastened to return to her
mother. The very gayeties of that noisy city weighed upon her heart; for
she never forgot the war-tales of the Tzigana, and, perhaps, among the
passers-by was the wretch who had shot down her grandfather, old Mihal.
The Tzigana cultivated, with a sort of passion, a love of far-off
Hungary and a hatred for the master in the impressionable mind of her
daughter. There is a Servian proverb which says, that when a Wallachian
has crossed the threshold the whole house becomes Wallachian. Tisza did
not wish the house to become Hungarian; but she did wish that the child
of her loins should be and should remain Hungarian.
The servants of Prince Tchereteff never spoke of their mistress except
as The Tzigana, and this was the name which Marsa wished to bear also.
It seemed to her like a title of nobility.
And the years passed without the Tzigana pardoning the Russian, and
without Marsa ever having called him father.
In the name of their child, the Prince one day solemnly asked Tisza
Laszlo to consent to become his wife, and the mother refused.
“But our daughter?” said the Prince.
“My daughter? She will bear the name of her mother, which at least is
not a Russian name.”
The Prince was silenced.
As Marsa grew up, Moscow became displeasing to the Prince. He had his
daughter educated as if she were destined to be the Czarina. He summoned
to the castle a small army of instructors, professors of music and
singing; French, English, and German masters, drawing masters, etc.,
etc. The young girl, with the prodigious power of assimilation peculiar
to her race, learned everything, loving knowledge for its own sake,
but, nevertheless, always deeply moved by the history of that unknown
country, which was that of her mother, and even her own, the land of
her heart and her soul-Hungary. She knew, from her mother, about all its
heroes: Klapka, Georgei, Dembiski; Bem, the conqueror of Buda; Kossuth,
the dreamer of a sort of feudal liberty; and those chivalrous Zilah
princes, father and son, the fallen martyr and the living hero.
Prince Tchereteff, French in education and sentiment, wished to take to
France the child, who did not bear his name, but whom he adored. France
also exercised a powerful fascination over Marsa’s imagination; and she
departed joyously for Paris, accompanied by the Tzigana, her mother, who
felt like a prisoner set at liberty. To quit Russian soil was in itself
some consolation, and who knew? perhaps she might again see her dear
fatherland.
Tisza, in fact, breathed more freely in Paris, repeating however, like a
mournful refrain, the proverb of her country: Away from Hungary, life
is not life. The Prince purchased, at Maisons-Lafitte, not far from the
forest of Saint-Germain, a house surrounded by an immense garden. Here,
as formerly at Moscow, Tisza and the Prince lived together, and yet
apart--the Tzigana, implacable in her resentment, bitterly refusing all
pardon to the Russian, and always keeping alive in Marsa a hatred of
all that was Muscovite; the Prince, disconsolate, gloomy, discouraged
between the woman whom he adored and whose heart he could not win, and
the girl, so wonderfully beautiful, the living portrait of her mother,
and who treated him with the cold respect one shows to a stranger.
Not long after their arrival in Paris, a serious heart trouble attacked
Marsa’s father. He summoned to his deathbed the Tzigana and her
daughter; and, in a sort of supreme confession, he openly asked his
child, before the mother, to forgive him for her birth.
“Marsa,” he said, slowly, “your birth, which should make the joy of my
existence, is the remorse of my whole life. But I am dying of the love
which I can not conquer. Will you kiss me as a token that you have
pardoned me?”
For the first time, perhaps, Marsa’s lips, trembling with emotion, then
touched the Prince’s forehead. But, before kissing him, her eyes had
sought those of her mother, who bowed her head in assent.
“And you,” murmured the dying Prince, “will you forgive me, Tisza?”
The Tzigana saw again her native village in flames, her brothers dead,
her father murdered, and this man, now lying thin and pale amid the
pillows, erect, with sabre drawn, crying: “Courage! Charge! Forward!”
Then she saw herself dragged almost beneath a horse’s hoofs, cast into
a wagon with wrists bound together, carried in the rear of an army with
the rest of the victor’s spoils, and immured within Russian walls. She
felt again on her lips the degradation of the first kiss of this man
whose suppliant, pitiful love was hideous to her.
She made a step toward the dying man as if to force herself to whisper,
“I forgive you;” but all the resentment and suffering of her life
mounted to her heart, almost stifling her, and she paused, going no
farther, and regarding with a haggard glance the man whose eyes implored
her pardon, and who, after raising his pale face from the pillow, let
his head fall back again with one long, weary sigh.
CHAPTER VII. THE STORY OF MARSA
Prince Tchereteff left his whole fortune to Marsa Laszlo, leaving her in
the hands of his uncle Vogotzine, an old, ruined General, whose property
had been confiscated by the Czar, and who lived in Paris half imbecile
with fear, having become timid as a child since his release from
Siberia, where he had been sent on some pretext or other, no one knew
exactly the reason why.
It had been necessary to obtain the sovereign intervention of the
Czar--that Czar whose will is the sole law, a law above laws--to permit
Prince Tchereteff to give his property to a foreigner, a girl without a
name. The state would gladly have seized upon the fortune, as the Prince
had no other relative save an outlaw; but the Czar graciously gave his
permission, and Marsa inherited.
Old General Vogotzine was, in fact, the only living relative of Prince
Tchereteff. In consideration of a yearly income, the Prince charged him
to watch over Marsa, and see to her establishment in life. Rich as she
was, Marsa would have no lack of suitors; but Tisza, the half-civilized
Tzigana, was not the one to guide and protect a young girl in Paris.
The Prince believed Vogotzine to be less old and more acquainted with
Parisian life than he really was, and it was a consolation to the father
to feel that his daughter would have a guardian.
Tisza did not long survive the Prince. She died in that Russian house,
every stone of which she hated, even to the Muscovite crucifix over the
door, which her faith, however, forbade her to have removed; she died
making her daughter swear that the last slumber which was coming to her,
gently lulling her to rest after so much suffering, should be slept
in Hungarian soil; and, after the Tzigana’s death, this young girl of
twenty, alone with Vogotzine, who accompanied her on the gloomy journey
with evident displeasure, crossed France, went to Vienna, sought in
the Hungarian plain the place where one or two miserable huts and some
crumbling walls alone marked the site of the village burned long ago by
Tchereteff’s soldiers; and there, in Hungarian soil, close to the spot
where the men of her tribe had been shot down, she buried the Tzigana,
whose daughter she so thoroughly felt herself to be, that, in breathing
the air of the puszta, she seemed to find again in that beloved land
something already seen, like a vivid memory of a previous existence.
And yet, upon the grave of the martyr, Marsa prayed also for the
executioner. She remembered that the one who reposed in the cemetery of
Pere-Lachaise, beneath a tomb in the shape of a Russian dome, was her
father, as the Tzigana, interred in Hungary, was her mother; and she
asked in her prayer, that these two beings, separated in life, should
pardon each other in the unknown, obscure place of departed souls.
So Marsa Laszlo was left alone in the world. She returned to France,
which she had become attached to, and shut herself up in the villa of
Maisons-Lafitte, letting old Vogotzine install himself there as a sort
of Mentor, more obedient than a servant, and as silent as a statue;
and this strange guardian, who had formerly fought side by side with
Schamyl, and cut down the Circassians with the sang-froid of a butcher’s
boy wringing the neck of a fowl, and who now scarcely dared to open his
lips, as if the entire police force of the Czar had its eye upon him;
this old soldier, who once cared nothing for privations, now, provided
he had his chocolate in the morning, his kummel with his coffee at
breakfast, and a bottle of brandy on the table all day--left Marsa free
to think, act, come and go as she pleased.
She had accepted the Prince’s legacy, but with this mental reservation
and condition, that the Hungarian colony of Paris should receive half of
it. It seemed to her that the money thus given to succor the compatriots
of her mother would be her father’s atonement. She waited, therefore,
until she had attained her majority; and then she sent this enormous sum
to the Hungarian aid society, saying that the donor requested that
part of the amount should be used in rebuilding the little village
in Transylvania which had been burned twenty years before by Russian
troops. When they asked what name should be attached to so princely a
gift, Marsa replied: “That which was my mother’s and which is mine, The
Tzigana.” More than ever now did she cling to that cognomen of which she
was so proud.
“And,” she said to Zilah, after she had finished the recital of her
story, “it is because I am thus named that I have the right to speak to
you of yourself.”
Prince Andras listened with passionate attention to the beautiful girl,
thus evoking for him the past, confident and even happy to speak and
make herself known to the man whose life of heroic devotion she knew so
well.
He was not astonished at her sudden frankness, at the confidence
displayed at a first meeting; and it seemed to him that he had long been
acquainted with this Tzigana, whose very name he had been ignorant of
a few hours before. It appeared to him quite simple that Marsa should
confide in him, as he on his side would have related to her his whole
life, if she had asked it with a glance from her dark eyes. He felt that
he had reached one of the decisive moments of his life. Marsa called up
visions of his youth-his first tender dreams of love, rudely broken by
the harsh voice of war; and he felt as he used to feel, in the days
long gone by, when he sat beneath the starry skies of a summer night
and listened to the old, heart-stirring songs of his country and the
laughter of the brown maidens of Budapest.
“Prince,” said Marsa Laszlo, suddenly, “do you know that I have been
seeking you for a long time, and that when the Baroness Dinati presented
you to me, she fulfilled one of my most ardent desires?”
“Me, Mademoiselle? You have been seeking me?”
“Yes, you. Tisza, of whom I spoke to you, my Tzigana mother, who bore
the name of the blessed river of our country, taught me to repeat your
name. She met you years ago, in the saddest moment of your life.”
“Your mother?” said Andras, waiting anxiously for the young girl to
continue.
“Yes, my mother.”
She pointed to the buckle which clasped the belt of her dress.
“See,” she said.
Andras felt a sudden pang, which yet was not altogether pain, dart
through his heart, and his eyes wandered questioningly from the buckle
to Marsa’s face. Smiling, but her beautiful lips mute, Marsa seemed
to say to him: “Yes, it is the agraffe which you detached from your
soldier’s pelisse and gave to an unknown Tzigana near your father’s
grave.”
The silver ornament, incrusted with opals, recalled sharply to Prince
Zilah that sad January night when the dead warrior had been laid in his
last resting-place. He saw again the sombre spot, the snowy fir-trees,
the black trench, and the broad, red reflections of the torches, which,
throwing a flickering light upon the dead, seemed to reanimate the pale,
cold face.
And that daughter of the wandering musicians who had, at the open grave,
played as a dirge, or, rather, as a ringing hymn of resurrection and
deliverance, the chant of the fatherland-that dark girl to whom he
had said: “Bring me this jewel, and come and live in peace with the
Zilahs”--was the mother of this beautiful, fascinating creature, whose
every word, since he had first met her a few hours before, had exercised
such a powerful effect upon him.
“So,” he said, slowly, with a sad smile, “your mother’s talisman was
worth more than mine. I have kept the lake pebbles she gave me, and
death has passed me by; but the opals of the agraffe did not bring
happiness to your mother. It is said that those stones are unlucky. Are
you superstitious?”
“I should not be Tisza’s daughter if I did not believe a little in all
that is romantic, fantastic, improbable, impossible even. Besides, the
opals are forgiven now: for they have permitted me to show you that
you were not unknown to me, Prince; and, as you see, I wear this dear
agraffe always. It has a double value to me, since it recalls the memory
of my poor mother and the name of a hero.”
She spoke these words in grave, sweet accents, which seemed more
melodious to Prince Andras than all the music of Baroness Dinati’s
concert. He divined that Marsa Laszlo found as much pleasure in speaking
to him as he felt in listening. As he gazed at her, a delicate flush
spread over Marsa’s pale, rather melancholy face, tingeing even her
little, shell-like ears, and making her cheeks glow with the soft, warm
color of a peach.
Just at this moment the little Baroness came hastily up to them, and,
with an assumed air of severity, began to reproach Marsa for neglecting
the unfortunate musicians, suddenly breaking off to exclaim:
“Really, you are a hundred times prettier than ever this evening, my
dear Marsa. What have you been doing to yourself?”
“Oh! it is because I am very happy, I suppose,” replied Marsa.
“Ah! my dear Prince,” and the Baroness broke into a merry peal of
laughter, “it is you, O ever-conquering hero, who have worked this
miracle.”
But, as if she had been too hasty in proclaiming aloud her happiness,
the Tzigana suddenly frowned, a harsh, troubled look crept into her dark
eyes, and her cheeks became pale as marble, while her gaze was fixed
upon a tall young man who was crossing the salon and coming toward her.
Instinctively Andras Zilah followed her look. Michel Menko was advancing
to salute Marsa Laszlo, and take with affectionate respect the hand
which Andras extended to him.
Marsa coldly returned the low bow of the young man, and took no part
in the conversation which followed. Menko remained but a few moments,
evidently embarrassed at his reception; and after his departure, Zilah,
who had noticed the Tzigana’s coldness, asked her if she knew his
friend.
“Very well,” she said, in a peculiar tone.
“It would be difficult to imagine so from the way in which you received
him,” said Andras, laughing. “Poor Michel! Have you any reason to be
angry with him?”
“None.”
“I like him very much. He is a charming boy, and his father was one of
my companions in arms. I have been almost a guardian to his son. We are
kinsmen, and when the young count entered diplomacy he asked my advice,
as he hesitated to serve Austria. I told him that, after having fought
Austria with the sword, it was our duty to absorb it by our talents and
devotion. Was I not right? Austria is to-day subservient to Hungary,
and, when Vienna acts, Vienna glances toward Pesth to see if the Magyars
are satisfied. Michel Menko has therefore served his country well; and I
don’t understand why he gave up diplomacy. He makes me uneasy: he seems
to me, like all young men of his generation, a little too undecided what
object to pursue, what duty to fulfil. He is nervous, irresolute.
We were more unfortunate but more determined; we marched straight on
without that burden of pessimism with which our successors are loaded
down. I am sorry that Michel has resigned his position: he had a fine
future before him, and he would have made a good diplomatist.”
“Too good, perhaps,” interrupted Marsa, dryly.
“Ah, decidedly,” retorted the Prince, with a smile, “you don’t like my
poor Menko.”
“He is indifferent to me;” and the way in which she pronounced the words
was a terrible condemnation of Michel Menko. “But,” added the Tzigana,
“he himself has told me all that you have said of him. He, on his side,
has a great affection and a deep veneration for you; and it is not
astonishing that it should be so, for men like you are examples for men
like him, and--”
She paused abruptly, as if unwilling to say more.
“And what?” asked the Prince.
“Nothing. ‘Examples’ is enough; I don’t know what I was going to say.”
She made a little gesture with her pretty hand as if to dismiss the
subject; and, after wondering a moment at the girl’s singular reticence
after her previous frankness, Andras thought only of enjoying her grace
and charm, until the Tzigana gave him her hand and bade him good-night,
begging him to remember that she would be very happy and proud to
receive him in her own house.
“But, indeed,” she added, with a laugh which displayed two rows of
pearly teeth, “it is not for me to invite you. That is a terrible breach
of the proprieties. General!”
At her call, from a group near by, advanced old General Vogotzine, whom
Zilah had not noticed since the beginning of the evening. Marsa laid her
hand on his arm, and said, distinctly, Vogotzine being a little deaf:
“Prince Andras Zilah, uncle, will do us the honor of coming to see us at
Maisons-Lafitte.”
“Ah! Ah! Very happy! Delighted! Very flattering of you, Prince,”
stammered the General, pulling his white moustache, and blinking his
little round eyes. “Andras Zilah! Ah! 1848! Hard days, those! All
over now, though! All over now! Ah! Ah! We no longer cut one another’s
throats! No! No! No longer cut one another’s throats!”
He held out to Andras his big, fat hand, and repeated, as he shook that
of the Prince:
“Delighted! Enchanted! Prince Zilah! Yes! Yes!”
In another moment they were gone, and the evening seemed to Andras like
a vision, a beautiful, feverish dream.
He sent away his coupe, and returned home on foot, feeling the need
of the night air; and, as he walked up the Champs-Elysees beneath the
starry sky, he was surprised to find a new, youthful feeling at his
heart, stirring his pulses like the first, soft touch of spring.
CHAPTER VIII. “HAVE I NO RIGHT TO BE HAPPY”
There was a certain womanly coquetry, mingled with a profound love of
the soil where her martyred mother reposed, in the desire which Marsa
Laszlo had to be called the Tzigana, instead of by her own name.
The Tzigana! This name, as clear cut, resonant and expressive as the
czimbaloms of the Hungarian musicians, lent her an additional, original
charm. She was always spoken of thus, when she was perceived riding her
pure-blooded black mare, or driving, attached to a victoria, a pair of
bay horses of the Kisber breed. Before the horses ran two superb Danish
hounds, of a lustrous dark gray, with white feet, eyes of a peculiar
blue, rimmed with yellow, and sensitive, pointed ears--Duna and Bundas,
the Hungarian names for the Danube and the Velu.
These hounds, and an enormous dog of the Himalayas, with a thick, yellow
coat and long, sharp teeth, a half-savage beast, bearing the name
of Ortog (Satan), were Marsa’s companions in her walks; and their
submission to their young mistress, whom they could have knocked
down with one pat of their paws, gave the Tzigana reputation for
eccentricity; which, however, neither pleased nor displeased her, as she
was perfectly indifferent to the opinion of the public at large.
She continued to inhabit, near the forest of Saint-Germain, beyond the
fashionable avenues, the villa, ornamented with the holy Muscovite icon,
which Prince Tchereteff had purchased; and she persisted in remaining
there alone with old Vogotzine, who regarded her respectfully with his
round eyes, always moist with ‘kwass’ or brandy.
Flying the crowded city, eager for space and air, a true daughter of
Hungary, Marsa loved to ride through the beautiful, silent park, down
the long, almost deserted avenues, toward the bit of pale blue horizon
discernible in the distance at the end of the sombre arch formed by the
trees. Birds, startled by the horses’ hoofs, rose here and there out of
the bushes, pouring forth their caroling to the clear ether; and Marsa,
spurring her thoroughbred, would dash in a mad gallop toward a little,
almost unknown grove of oaks, with thickets full of golden furze and
pink heather, where woodcutters worked, half buried in the long grass
peppered with blue cornflowers and scarlet poppies.
Or, at other times, with Duna and Bundas bounding before her,
disappearing, returning, disappearing again with yelps of joy, it was
Marsa’s delight to wander alone under the great limes of the Albine
avenue--shade over her head, silence about her--and then slowly, by way
of a little alley bordered with lofty poplars trembling at every breath
of wind, to reach the borders of the forest. In ten steps she would
suddenly find herself plunged in solitude as in a bath of verdure, shade
and oblivion. The sweet silence surrounding her calmed her, and she
would walk on and on though the thick grass under the great trees. The
trunks of the giant oaks were clothed in robes of emerald moss, and wild
flowers of all descriptions raised their heads amid the grass. There
was no footstep, no sound; a bee lazily humming, a brilliant butterfly
darting across the path, something quick and red flashing up a tree--a
squirrel frightened by the Danish hounds; that was all. And Marsa was
happy with the languorous happiness which nature gives, her forehead
cooled by the fresh breeze, her eyes rested by the deep green which hid
the shoes, her whole being refreshed by the atmosphere of peace which
fell from the trees.
Then, calling her dogs, she would proceed to a little farmhouse, and,
sitting down under the mulberry trees, wait until the farmer’s wife
brought her some newly baked bread and a cup of milk, warm from the
cows. Then she would remain idly there, surrounded by chickens, ducks,
and great, greedy geese, which she fed, breaking the bread between her
white fingers, while Duna and Bundas crouched at her feet, pricking up
their ears, and watching these winged denizens of the farmyard, which
Marsa forbade them to touch. Finally the Tzigana would slowly wend her
way home, enter the villa, sit down before the piano, and play, with
ineffable sweetness, like souvenirs of another life, the free and
wandering life of her mother, the Hungarian airs of Janos Nemeth, the
sad “Song of Plevna,” the sparkling air of “The Little Brown Maid of
Budapest,” and that bitter; melancholy romance, “The World holds but One
Fair Maiden,” a mournful and despairing melody, which she preferred
to all others, because it responded, with its tearful accents, to a
particular state of her own heart.
The girl was evidently concealing some secret suffering. The bitter
memory of her early years? Perhaps. Physical pain? Possibly. She had
been ill some years before, and had been obliged to pass a winter at
Pau. But it seemed rather some mental anxiety or torture which impelled
the Tzigana to seek solitude and silence in her voluntary retreat.
The days passed thus in that villa of Maisons-Lafitte, where Tisza died.
Very often, in the evening, Marsa would shut herself up in the solitude
of that death-chamber, which remained just as her mother had left it.
Below, General Vogotzine smoked his pipe, with a bottle of brandy for
company: above, Marsa prayed.
One night she went out, and through the sombre alleys, in the tender
light of the moon, made her way to the little convent in the Avenue
Egle, where the blue sisters were established; those sisters whom she
often met in the park, with their full robes of blue cloth, their white
veils, a silver medallion and crucifix upon their breasts, and a rosary
of wooden beads suspended at their girdles. The little house of the
community was shut, the grating closed. The only sign of life was in the
lighted windows of the chapel.
Marsa paused there, leaning her heated brow against the cold bars of
iron, with a longing for death, and a terrible temptation to end all by
suicide.
“Who knows?” she murmured. “Perhaps forgetfulness, deep, profound
forgetfulness, lies within these walls.” Forgetfulness! Marsa, then,
wished to forget? What secret torture gave to her beautiful face that
expression so bitter, so terrible in its agony?
She stood leaning there, gazing at the windows of the chapel. Broken
words of prayers, of muttered verses and responses, reached her like the
tinkling of far-off chimes, like the rustling of invisible wings. The
blue sisters, behind those walls, were celebrating their vesper service.
Does prayer drive away anguish and heartrending memories?
Marsa was a Catholic, her mother having belonged to the minority of
Tzigani professing the faith of Rome; and Tisza’s daughter could,
therefore, bury her youth and beauty in the convent of the blue sisters.
The hollow murmur of the verses and prayers, which paused, began again,
and then died away in the night like sighs, attracted her, and, like
the trees of the forest, gave her an impression of that peace, that deep
repose, which was the longed-for dream of her soul.
But, suddenly, the Tzigana started, removed her gaze from the light
streaming through the blue and crimson glass, and hurried away, crying
aloud in the darkness:
“No! repose is not there. And, after all, where is repose? Only in
ourselves! It can be found nowhere, if it is not in the heart!”
Then, after these hours of solitude, this longing for the cloister, this
thirsting for annihilation and oblivion, Marsa would experience a desire
for the dashing, false, and frivolous life of Paris. She would quit
Maisons, taking with her a maid, or sometimes old Vogotzine, go to some
immense hotel, like the Continental or the Grand, dine at the table
d’hote, or in the restaurant, seeking everywhere bustle and noise, the
antithesis of the life of shade and silence which she led amid the
leafy trees of her park. She would show herself everywhere, at
races, theatres, parties--as when she accepted the Baroness Dinati’s
invitation; and, when she became nauseated with all the artificiality
of worldly life, she would return eagerly to her woods, her dogs and her
solitude, and, if it were winter, would shut herself up for long months
in her lonely, snow-girt house.
And was not this existence sweet and pleasant, compared with the life
led by Tisza in the castle of the suburbs of Moscow?
In this solitude, in the villa of Maisons-Lafitte, Andras Zilah was
again to see Marsa Laszlo. He came not once, but again and again. He
was, perhaps, since the death of Prince Tchereteff, the only man General
Vogotzine had seen in his niece’s house, and Marsa was always strangely
happy when Andras came to see her.
“Mademoiselle is very particular when Prince Zilah is coming to
Maisons,” said her maid to her.
“Because Prince Zilah is not a man like other men. He is a hero. In my
mother’s country there is no name more popular than his.”
“So I have heard Count Menko say to Mademoiselle.”
If it were the maid’s wish to remove all happiness from her mistress’s
face, she had met with complete success.
At the name of Menko, Marsa’s expression became dark and threatening.
Prince Andras had noticed this same change in the Tzigana’s face, when
he was speaking to her at Baroness Dinati’s.
The Prince had forgotten no detail of that first fascinating interview,
at which his love for the Tzigana was born. This man, who had hardly
any other desire than to end in peace a life long saddened by defeat and
exile, suddenly awoke to a happy hope of a home and family joys. He was
rich, alone in the world, and independent; and he was, therefore,
free to choose the woman to be made his princess. No caste prejudice
prevented him from giving his title to the daughter of Tisza. The
Zilahs, in trying to free their country, had freed themselves from all
littleness; and proud, but not vain, they bore but slight resemblance to
those Magyars of whom Szechenyi, the great count, who died of despair
in 1849, said: “The overweening haughtiness of my people will be their
ruin.”
The last of the Zilahs did not consider his pride humiliated by loving
and wedding a Tzigana. Frankly, in accents of the deepest love and the
most sincere devotion, Andras asked Marsa Laszlo if she would consent to
become his wife. But he was terrified at the expression of anguish which
passed over the pale face of the young girl.
Marsa, Princess Zilah! Like her mother, she would have refused from a
Tchereteff this title of princess which Andras offered her, nay, laid at
her feet with passionate tenderness. But--Princess Zilah!
She regarded with wild eyes the Prince, who stood before her, timid and
with trembling lips, awaiting her reply. But, as she did not answer, he
stooped over and took her hands in his.
“What is it?” he cried; for Marsa’s fingers were icy.
It cost the young girl a terrible effort to prevent herself from losing
consciousness.
“But speak to me, Marsa,” exclaimed Andras, “do not keep me in
suspense.”
He had loved her now for six months, and an iron hand seemed to clutch
the heart of this man, who had never known what it was to fear, at the
thought that perhaps Marsa did not return his love.
He had, doubtless, believed that he had perceived in her a tender
feeling toward himself which had emboldened him to ask her to be his
wife. But had he been deceived? Was it only the soldier in him that had
pleased Marsa? Was he about to suffer a terrible disappointment? Ah,
what folly to love, and to love at forty years, a young and beautiful
girl like Marsa!
Still, she made him no answer, but sat there before him like a statue,
pale to the lips, her dark eyes fixed on him in a wild, horrified stare.
Then, as he pressed her, with tears in his voice, to speak, she forced
her almost paralyzed tongue to utter a response which fell, cruel as a
death-sentence, upon the heart of the hero:
“Never!”
Andras stood motionless before her in such terrible stillness that she
longed to throw herself at his feet and cry out: “I love you! I love
you! But your wife--no, never!”
She loved him? Yes, madly-better than that, with a deep, eternal
passion, a passion solidly anchored in admiration, respect and esteem;
with an unconquerable attraction toward what represented, to her
harassed soul, honor without a blemish, perfect goodness in perfect
courage, the immolation of a life to duty, all incarnate in one man,
radiant in one illustrious name--Zilah.
And Andras himself divined something of this feeling; he felt that
Marsa, despite her enigmatical refusal, cared for him in a way that was
something more than friendship; he was certain of it. Then, why did she
command him thus with a single word to despair? “Never!” She was not
free, then? And a question, for which he immediately asked her pardon by
a gesture, escaped, like the appeal of a drowning man, from his lips:
“Do you love some one else, Marsa?”
She uttered a cry.
“No! I swear to you--no!”
He urged her, then, to explain what was the meaning of her refusal, of
the fright she had just shown; and, in a sort of nervous hysteria which
she forced herself to control, in the midst of stifled sobs, she told
him that if she could ever consent to unite herself to anyone, it
would be to him, to him alone, to the hero of her country, to him whose
chivalrous devotion she had admired long before she knew him, and that
now--And here she stopped short, just on the brink of an avowal.
“Well, now? Now?” demanded Andras, awaiting the word which, in her
overstrung condition, Marsa had almost spoken. “Now?”
But she did not speak these words which Zilah begged for with newly
awakened hope. She longed to end this interview which was killing her,
and in broken accents asked him to excuse her, to forgive her--but she
was really ill.
“But if you are suffering, I can not, I will not leave you.”
“I implore you. I need to be alone.”
“At least you will permit me to come to-morrow, Marsa, and ask for your
answer?”
“My answer? I have given it to you.”
“No! No! I do not accept that refusal. No! you did not know what you
were saying. I swear to you, Marsa, that without you life is impossible
to me; all my existence is bound up in yours. You will reflect there was
an accent in your voice which bade me hope. I will come again to-morrow.
Tomorrow, Marsa. What you have said to-day does not count. Tomorrow,
to-morrow; and remember that I adore you.”
And she, shuddering at the tones of his voice, not daring to say no,
and to bid him an eternal farewell, let him depart, confident, hopeful,
despite the silence to which she obstinately, desperately clung. Then,
when Andras was gone, at the end of her strength, she threw herself,
like a mad woman, down upon the divan. Once alone, she gave way utterly,
sobbing passionately, and then, suddenly ceasing, with wild eyes fixed
upon vacancy, to mutter with dry, feverish lips:
“Yet--it is life he brings to me--happiness he offers me. Have I no
right to be happy--I? My God! To be the wife of such a man! To love
him--to devote myself to him-to make his existence one succession of
happy days! To be his slave, his thing! Shall I marry him? Or--shall I
kill myself? Kill myself!” with a horrible, agonizing laugh. “Yes, that
is the only thing for me to do. But--but--I am a coward, now that I
love him--a coward! a coward! a miserable wretch!” And she fell headlong
forward, crouching upon the floor in a fierce despair, as if either life
or reason was about to escape from her forever.
CHAPTER IX. “O LIBERTY! O LOVE! THESE TWO I NEED!”
When Zilah came the next day he found Marsa perfectly calm. At first he
only questioned her anxiously as to her health.
“Oh! I am well,” she replied, smiling a little sadly; and, turning to
the piano at which she was seated, she began to play the exquisitely sad
romance which was her favorite air.
“That is by Janos Nemeth, is it not?” asked the Prince.
“Yes, by Janos Nemeth. I am very fond of his music; it is so truly
Hungarian in its spirit.”
The music fell upon the air like sighs--like the distant tones of a bell
tolling a requiem--a lament, poetic, mournful, despairing, yet ineffably
sweet and tender, ending in one deep, sustained note like the last clod
of earth falling upon a new-made grave.
“What is that called, Marsa?” said Andras.
She made no reply.
Rising, he looked at the title, printed in Hungarian; then, leaning over
the Tzigana till his breath fanned her cheek, he murmured:
“Janos Nemeth was right. The world holds but one fair maiden.”
She turned very pale, rose from the piano, and giving him her hand,
said:
“It is almost a madrigal, my dear Prince, is it not? I am going to be
frank with you. You love me, I know; and I also love you. Will you give
me a month to reflect? A whole month?”
“My entire life belongs to you now,” said the Prince. “Do with it what
you will.”
“Well! Then in a month I will give you your answer,” she said firmly.
“But,” said Andras, smiling beneath his blond moustache, “remember that
I once, took for my motto the verses of Petoefi. You know well those
beautiful verses of our country:
O Liberty! O Love!
These two I need.
My chosen meed,
To give my love for Liberty,
My life for Love.
“Well,” he added, “do you know, at this moment the Andras Zilah of
‘forty-eight would almost give liberty, that passion of his whole life,
for your love, Marsa, my own Marsa, who are to me the living incarnation
of my country.”
Marsa was moved to the depths of her heart at hearing this man speak
such words to her. The ideal of the Tzigana, as it is of most women, was
loyalty united with strength. Had she ever, in her wildest flights of
fancy, dreamed that she should hear one of the heroes of the war of
independence, a Zilah Andras, supplicate her to bear his name?
Marsa knew Yanski Varhely. The Prince had brought him to see her at
Maisons-Lafitte. She was aware that Count Varhely knew the Prince’s most
secret thoughts, and she was certain that Andras had confided all his
hopes and his fears to his old friend.
“What do you think would become of the Prince if I should not marry
him?” she asked him one day without warning.
“That is a point-blank question which I hardly expected,” said Yanski,
gazing at her in astonishment. “Don’t you wish to become a Zilah?”
Any hesitation even seemed to him insulting, almost sacrilegious.
“I don’t say that,” replied the Tzigana, “but I ask you what would
become of the Prince if, for one reason or another--”
“I can very easily inform you,” interrupted Varhely. “The Prince, as you
must be aware, is one of those men who love but once during their lives.
Upon my word of honor, I believe that, if you should refuse him,
he would commit some folly, some madness, something--fatal. Do you
understand?”
“Ah!” ejaculated Marsa, with an icy chill in her veins.
“That is my opinion,” continued Yanski, harshly. “He is wounded. It
remains with you to decide whether the bullet be mortal or not.”
Varhely’s response must have had great weight in Marsa Laszlo’s
reflections, full of anguish, fever, revolt and despair as they were,
during the few weeks preceding the day upon which she had promised to
tell Prince Andras if she would consent to become his wife or not. It
was a yes, almost as curt as another refusal, which fell at last from
the lips of the Tzigana. But the Prince was not cool enough to analyze
an intonation.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, “I have suffered so much during these weeks of
doubt; but this happiness makes amends for all.”
“Do you know what Varhely said to me?” asked Marsa.
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, since the Zilahs treat their love-affairs as they do their duels,
and risk their whole existence, so be it! I accept. Your existence for
mine! Gift for gift! I do not wish you to die!”
He did not try to understand her; but he took her burning hands between
his own, and covered them with kisses. And she, with trembling lip,
regarded, through her long eyelashes, the brave man who now bent before
her, saying: “I love you.”
Then, in that moment of infinite happiness, on the threshold of the
new life which opened before her, she forgot all to think only of the
reality, of the hero whose wife she was to be. His wife! So, as in a
dream, without thinking, without resisting, abandoning herself to the
current which bore her along, not trying to take account of time or
of the future, loving, and beloved, living in a sort of charmed
somnambulism, the Tzigana watched the preparations for her marriage.
The Prince, with the impatience of a youth of twenty, had urged an early
day for their union. He announced his engagement to the society, at once
Parisian and foreign, of which he formed a part; and this marriage of
the Magyar with the Tzigana was an event in aristocratic circles. There
was an aroma of chivalrous romance about this action of Prince Andras,
who was rich enough and independent enough to have married, if he had
wished, a shepherdess, like the kings of fairy tales.
“Isn’t it perfectly charming?” exclaimed the little Baroness Dinati,
enthusiastically. “Jacquemin, my dear friend, I will give you all the
details of their first meeting. You can make a delicious article out of
it, delicious!”
The little Baroness was almost as delighted as the Prince. Ah! what a
man that Zilah was! He would give, as a wedding-gift to the Tzigana, the
most beautiful diamonds in the world, those famous Zilah diamonds, which
Prince Joseph had once placed disdainfully upon his hussar’s uniform
when he charged the Prussian cuirassiers of Ziethen, sure of escaping
the sabre cuts, and not losing a single one of the stones during the
combat. It was said that Marsa, until she was his wife, would not accept
any jewels from the Prince. The opals in the silver agraffe were all she
wanted.
“You know them, don’t you, Jacquemin? The famous opals of the Tzigana?
Put that all in, every word of it.”
“Yes, it is chic enough.” answered the reporter. “It is very romantic,
a little too much so; my readers will never believe it. Never mind,
though, I will write it all up in my best manner.”
The fete on board the steamer, given by the Prince in honor of his
betrothal, had been as much talked of as a sensational first night at
the Francais, and it added decidedly to the romantic prestige of Andras
Zilah. There was not a marriageable young girl who was not a little in
love with him, and their mothers envied the luck of the Tzigana.
“It is astonishing how jealous the mammas are,” said the Baroness,
gayly. “They will make me pay dearly for having been the matchmaker; but
I am proud of it, very proud. Zilah has good taste, that is all. And, as
for him, I should have been in love with him myself, if I had not had my
guests to attend to. Ah, society is as absorbing as a husband!”
Upon the boat, Paul Jacquemin did not leave the side of the matchmaker.
He followed her everywhere. He had still to obtain a description of the
bride’s toilettes, the genealogy of General Vogotzine, a sketch of the
bridegroom’s best friend, Varhely, and a thousand other details.
“Where will the wedding take place?” he asked the Baroness.
“At Maisons-Lafitte. Oh! everything is perfect, my dear Jacquemin,
perfect! An idyl! All the arrangements are exquisite, exquisite! I only
wish that you had charge of the supper.”
Jacquemin, general overseer of the Baroness’s parties in the Rue
Murillo, did not confess himself inferior to any one as an epicure. He
would taste the wines, with the air of a connoisseur, holding his glass
up to the light, while the liquor caressed his palate, and shutting his
eyes as if more thoroughly to decide upon its merits.
“Pomard!” would slowly fall from his lips, or “Acceptable Musigny!”
“This Chambertin is really very fair!” “The Chateau Yquem is not half
bad!” etc., etc. And the next morning would appear in the reports,
which he wrote himself under various pseudonyms: “Our compliments to
our friend Jacquemin, if he had anything to do with the selection of
the wines, in addition to directing the rehearsals of the Baroness’s
operetta, which latter work he most skilfully accomplished. Jacquemin
possesses talents of all kinds; he knows how to make the best of all
materials. As the proverb says, ‘A good mill makes everything flour.’”
Jacquemin had already cast an eye over the menu of the Prince’s fete,
and declared it excellent, very correct, very pure.
....................
The steamer was at last ready to depart, and Prince Zilah had done
the honors to all his guests. It started slowly off, the flags waving
coquettishly in the breeze, while the Tzigani musicians played with
spirit the vibrating notes of the March of Rakoczy, that triumphant
air celebrating the betrothal of Zilah, as it had long ago saluted the
burial of his father.
CHAPTER X. “IS FATE SO JUST?”
“We are moving! We are off!” cried the lively little Baroness. “I hope
we shan’t be shipwrecked,” retorted Jacquemin; and he then proceeded
to draw a comical picture of possible adventures wherein figured white
bears, icebergs, and death by starvation. “A subject for a novel,--‘The
Shipwreck of the Betrothed.’”
As they drew away from Paris, passing the quays of Passy and the taverns
of Point-du-jour, tables on wooden horses were rapidly erected, and
covered with snowy cloths; and soon the guests of the Prince were seated
about the board, Andras between Marsa and the Baroness, and Michel Menko
some distance down on the other side of the table. The pretty women and
fashionably dressed men made the air resound with gayety and laughter,
while the awnings flapped joyously in the wind, and the boat glided on,
cutting the smooth water, in which were reflected the long shadows of
the aspens and willows on the banks, and the white clouds floating in
the clear sky. Every now and then a cry of admiration would be uttered
at some object in the panorama moving before them, the slopes of
Suresnes, the black factories of Saint-Denis with their lofty chimneys,
the red-roofed villas of Asnieres, or the heights of Marly dotted with
little white houses.
“Ah! how pretty it is! How charming!”
“Isn’t it queer that we have never known anything about all this? It is
a veritable voyage of discovery.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” cried, above the other voices, Jacquemin, whom
Zilah did not know, and to whom the Baroness had made him give a card of
invitation, “we are now entering savage countries. It is Kamtschatka, or
some such place, and there must be cannibals here.”
The borders of the Seine, which were entirely fresh to them, and which
recalled the pictures of the salon, were a delightful novelty to these
people, accustomed to the dusty streets of the city.
Seated between the Prince and the Japanese, and opposite Varhely and
General Vogotzine, the Baroness thoroughly enjoyed her breakfast. Prince
Andras had not spared the Tokay--that sweet, fiery wine, of which the
Hungarians say proudly: “It has the color and the price of gold;” and
the liquor disappeared beneath the moustache of the Russian General as
in a funnel. The little Baroness, as she sipped it with pretty little
airs of an epicure, chatted with the Japanese, and, eager to increase
her culinary knowledge, asked him for the receipt for a certain dish
which the little yellow fellow had made her taste at a dinner given at
his embassy.
“Send it to me, will you, Yamada? I will have my cook make it; nothing
gives me so much pleasure as to be able to offer to my guests a new and
strange dish. I will give you the receipt also, Jacquemin. Oh! it
is such an odd-tasting dish! It gives you a sensation of having been
poisoned.”
“Like the guests in Lucrezia Borgia,” laughed the Parisian Japanese.
“Do you know Lucrezia Borgia?”
“Oh, yes; they have sung it at Yokohama. Oh! we are no longer savages,
Baroness, believe me. If you want ignorant barbarians, you must seek the
Chinese.”
The little Japanese was proud of appearing so profoundly learned in
European affairs, and his gimlet eyes sought an approving glance from
Paul Jacquemin or Michel Menko; but the Hungarian was neither listening
to nor thinking of Yamada. He was entirely absorbed in the contemplation
of Marsa; and, with lips a little compressed, he fixed a strange look
upon the beautiful young girl to whom Andras was speaking, and who,
very calm, almost grave, but evidently happy, answered the Prince with a
sweet smile.
There was a sort of Oriental grace about Marsa, with her willowy figure,
flexible as a Hindoo convolvulus, and her dark Arabian eyes fringed with
their heavy lashes. Michel Menko took in all the details of her beauty,
and evidently suffered, suffered cruelly, his eyes invincibly attracted
toward her. In the midst of these other women, attired in robes of the
last or the next fashion, of all the colors of the rainbow, Marsa, in
her gown of black lace, was by far the loveliest of them all. Michel
watched her every movement; but she, quiet, as if a trifle weary, spoke
but little, and only in answer to the Prince and Varhely, and, when
her beautiful eyes met those of Menko, she turned them away, evidently
avoiding his look with as much care as he sought hers.
The breakfast over, they rose from the table, the men lighting cigars,
and the ladies seeking the mirrors in the cabin to rearrange their
tresses disheveled by the wind.
The boat stopped at Marly until it was time for the lock to be opened,
before proceeding to Maisons-Lafitte, where Marsa was to land. Many of
the passengers, with almost childish gayety, landed, and strolled about
on the green bank.
Marsa was left alone, glad of the silence which reigned on the steamer
after the noisy chatter of a moment ago. She leaned over the side of the
boat, listening idly to the swish of the water along its sides.
Michel Menko was evidently intending to approach her, and he had made
a few steps toward her, when he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder. He
turned, thinking it was the Prince; but it was Yanski Varhely, who said
to the young man:
“Well, my dear Count, you did right to come from London to this fete.
Not only is Zilah delighted to see you, but the fantastic composition
of the guests is very curious. Baroness Dinati has furnished us with an
‘ollapodrida’ which would have pleased her husband. There is a little of
everything. Doesn’t it astonish you?”
“No,” said Michel. “This hybrid collection is representative of modern
society. I have met almost all these faces at Nice; they are to be seen
everywhere.”
“To me,” retorted Yanski, in his guttural voice, “these people are
phenomena.”
“Phenomena? Not at all. Life of to-day is so complicated that the most
unexpected people and events find their place in it. You have not
lived, Varhely, or you have lived only for your idol, your country, and
everything amazes you. If you had, like me, wandered all over the
world, you would not be astonished at anything; although, to tell the
truth”--and the young man’s voice became bitter, trenchant, and almost
threatening--“we have only to grow old to meet with terrible surprises,
very hard to bear.”
As he spoke, he glanced, involuntarily perhaps, at Marsa Laszlo, leaning
on the railing just below him.
“Oh! don’t speak of old age before you have passed through the trials
that Zilah and I have,” responded Varhely. “At eighteen, Andras Zilah
could have said: ‘I am old.’ He was in mourning at one and the same time
for all his people and for our country. But you! You have grown up,
my dear fellow, in happy times. Austria, loosening her clutch, has
permitted you to love and serve our cause at your ease. You were born
rich, you married the most charming of women”--
Michel frowned.
“That is, it is true, the sorrow of your life,” continued Varhely. “It
seems to me only yesterday that you lost the poor child.”
“It is over two years, however,” said Michel, gravely. “Two years! How
time flies!”
“She was so charming,” said old Yanski, not perceiving the expression of
annoyance mingled with sadness which passed over the young man’s face.
“I knew your dear wife when she was quite small, in her father’s
house. He gave me an asylum at Prague, after the capitulation signed by
Georgei. Although I was an Hungarian, and he a Bohemian, her father and
I were great friends.”
“Yes,” said Menko, rapidly, “she often spoke of you, my dear Varhely.
They taught her to love you, too. But,” evidently seeking to turn the
conversation to avoid a subject which was painful to him, “you spoke of
Georgei. Ah! our generation has never known your brave hopes; and
your grief, believe me, was better than our boredom. We are useless
encumberers of the earth. Upon my word, it seems to me that we are
unsettled, enfeebled, loving nothing and loving everything, ready to
commit all sorts of follies. I envy you those days of battle, those
magnificent deeds of ‘forty-eight and ‘forty-nine. To fight thus was to
live!”
But even while he spoke, his thin face became more melancholy, and his
eyes again sought the direction of Prince Andras’s fiancee.
After a little more desultory conversation, he strolled away from
Varhely, and gradually approached Marsa, who, her chin resting on her
hand, and her eyes lowered, seemed absorbed in contemplation of the
ceaseless flow of the water.
Greatly moved, pulling his moustache, and glancing with a sort of
uneasiness at Prince Andras, who was promenading on the bank with the
Baroness, Michel Menko paused before addressing Marsa, who had
not perceived his approach, and who was evidently far away in some
day-dream.
Gently, hesitatingly, and in a low voice, he at last spoke her name:
“Marsa!”
The Tzigana started as if moved by an electric shock, and, turning
quickly, met the supplicating eyes of the young man.
“Marsa!” repeated Michel, in a humble tone of entreaty.
“What do you wish of me?” she said. “Why do you speak to me? You must
have seen what care I have taken to avoid you.”
“It is that which has wounded me to the quick. You are driving me mad.
If you only knew what I am suffering!”
He spoke almost in a whisper, and very rapidly, as if he felt that
seconds were worth centuries.
She answered him in a cutting, pitiless tone, harsher even than the
implacable look in her dark eyes. “You suffer? Is fate so just as that?
You suffer?”
Her tone and expression made Michel Menko tremble as if each syllable of
these few words was a blow in the face.
“Marsa!” he exclaimed, imploringly. “Marsa!”
“My name is Marsa Laszlo; and, in a few days, I shall be Princess
Zilah,” responded the young girl, passing haughtily by him, “and I think
you will hardly force me to make you remember it.”
She uttered these words so resolutely, haughtily, almost disdainfully,
and accompanied them with such a flash from her beautiful eyes that
Menko instinctively bowed his head, murmuring:
“Forgive me!”
But he drove his nails into the palm of his clenched hand as he saw her
leave that part of the boat, and retire as far from him as she could,
as if his presence were an insult to her. Tears of rage started into
the young man’s eyes as he watched her graceful figure resume its former
posture of dreamy absorption.
CHAPTER XI. A RIVER FETE
Close alongside of the Prince’s boat, waiting also for the opening of
the lock, was one of those great barges which carry wood or charcoal up
and down the Seine.
A whole family often lives on board these big, heavy boats. The smoke of
the kitchen fire issues from a sort of wooden cabin where several human
beings breathe, eat, sleep, are born and die, sometimes without hardly
ever having set foot upon the land. Pots of geranium or begonia give
a bit of bright color to the dingy surroundings; and the boats travel
slowly along the river, impelled by enormous oars, which throw long
shadows upon the water.
It was this motionless barge that Marsa was now regarding.
The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle
like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the
patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children,
boys and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh,
which was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who
was nursing a little baby.
A little farther off, two men-one tough and strong, a man of thirty,
whom toil had made forty, the other old, wrinkled, white-haired and
with skin like leather, father and grandfather, doubtless, of the little
brats beyond--were eating bread and cheese, and drinking, turn by turn,
out of a bottle of wine, which they swallowed in gulps. The halt was a
rest to these poor people.
As Marsa watched them, she seemed to perceive in these wanderers of the
river, as in a vision, those other wanderers of the Hungarian desert,
her ancestors, the Tzigani, camped in the puszta, the boundless plain,
crouched down in the long grass beneath the shade of the bushes, and
playing their beautiful national airs. She saw the distant fires of the
bivouac of those unknown Tzigani whose daughter she was; she seemed to
breathe again the air of that country she had seen but once, when upon a
mournful pilgrimage; and, in the presence of that poor bargeman’s wife,
with her skin tanned by the sun, she thought of her dead, her cherished
dead, Tisza.
Tisza! To the gipsy had doubtless been given the name of the river on
the banks of which she had been born. They called the mother Tisza, in
Hungary, as in Paris they called the daughter the Tzigana. And Marsa was
proud of her nickname; she loved these Tzigani, whose blood flowed in
her veins; sons of India, perhaps, who had descended to the valley
of the Danube, and who for centuries had lived free in the open air,
electing their chiefs, and having a king appointed by the Palatine--a
king, who commanding beggars, bore, nevertheless, the name of
Magnificent; indestructible tribes, itinerant republics, musicians
playing the old airs of their nation, despite the Turkish sabre and the
Austrian police; agents of patriotism and liberty, guardians of the old
Hungarian honor.
These poor people, passing their lives upon the river as the Tzigani
lived in the fields and hedges, seemed to Marsa like the very spectres
of her race. More than the musicians with embroidered vests did the
poor prisoners of the solitary barge recall to her the great proscribed
family of her ancestors.
She called to the children playing upon the sunbeaten deck: “Come here,
and hold up your aprons!”
They obeyed, spreading out their little tattered garments. “Catch
these!” she cried.
They could not believe their eyes. From the steamer she threw down to
them mandarins, grapes, ripe figs, yellow apricots, and great velvety
peaches; a rain of dainties which would have surprised a gourmand: the
poor little things, delighted and afraid at the same time, wondered if
the lady, who gave them such beautiful fruit, was a fairy.
The mother then rose; and, coming toward Marsa to thank her, her
sunburnt skin glowing a deeper red, the poor woman, with tears in her
tired eyes, and a wan smile upon her pale lips, touched, surprised,
happy in the pleasure of her children, murmured, faltering and confused:
“Ah! Madame! Madame! how good you are! You are too good, Madame!”
“We must share what we have!” said Marsa, with a smile. “See how happy
the children are!”
“Very happy, Madame. They are not accustomed to such things. Say ‘Thank
you,’ to the beautiful lady. Say ‘Thank you,’ Jean; you are the oldest.
Say like this: ‘Thank-you-Ma-dame.’”
“Thank-you-Ma-dame” faltered the boy, raising to Marsa big, timid eyes,
which did not understand why anybody should either wish him ill or do
him a kindness. And other low, sweet little voices repeated, like a
refrain: “Thank-you-Ma-dame.”
The two men, in astonishment, came and stood behind the children, and
gazed silently at Marsa.
“And your baby, Madame?” said the Tzigana, looking at the sleeping
infant, that still pressed its rosy lips to the mother’s breast. “How
pretty it is! Will you permit me to offer it its baptismal dress?”
“Its baptismal dress?” repeated the mother.
“Oh, Madame!” ejaculated the father, twisting his cap between his
fingers.
“Or a cloak, just as you please,” added Marsa.
The poor people on the barge made no reply, but looked at one another in
bewilderment.
“Is it a little girl?” asked the Tzigana.
“No, Madame, no,” responded the mother. “A boy.”
“Come here, jean,” said Marsa to the oldest child. “Yes, come here, my
little man.”
Jean came forward, glancing askance at his mother, as if to know whether
he should obey.
“Here, jean,” said the young girl, “this is for your baby brother.”
And into the little joined hands of the boy, Marsa let fall a purse,
through whose meshes shone yellow pieces of gold.
The people of the barge thought they were dreaming, and stood
open-mouthed in amazement, while Jean cried out:
“Mamma, see, mamma! Mamma! Mamma!”
Then the younger bargeman said to Marsa:
“Madame, no, no! we can not accept. It is too much. You are too good.
Give it back, Jean.”
“It is true, Madame,” faltered his wife. “It is impossible. It is too
much.”
“You will cause me great pain if you refuse to accept it,” said Marsa.
“Chance has brought us together for a moment, and I am superstitious. I
would like to have the little children pray that those I love--that the
one I love may be happy.” And she turned her eyes upon Prince Andras,
who had returned to the deck, and was coming toward her.
The lock was now opened.
“All aboard!” shouted the captain of the steamer.
The poor woman upon the barge tried to reach the hand of Marsa to kiss
it.
“May you be happy, Madame, and thank you with all our hearts for your
goodness to both big and little.”
The two bargemen bowed low in great emotion, and the whole bevy of
little ones blew kisses to the beautiful lady in the black dress, whom
the steamer was already bearing away.
“At least tell us your name, Madame,” cried the father. “Your name, that
we may never forget you.”
A lovely smile appeared on Marsa’s lips, and, in almost melancholy
accents, she said:
“My name!” Then, after a pause, proudly: “The Tzigana!”
The musicians, as she spoke, suddenly struck up one of the Hungarian
airs. Then, as in a flying vision, the poor bargemen saw the steamer
move farther and farther away, a long plume of smoke waving behind it.
Jacquemin, hearing one of those odd airs, which in Hungary start all
feet moving and keeping time to the music, exclaimed:
“A quadrille! Let us dance a quadrille! An Hungarian quadrille!”
The poor people on the barge listened to the music, gradually growing
fainter and fainter; and they would have believed that they had been
dreaming, if the purse had not been there, a fortune for them, and the
fruit which the children were eating. The mother, without understanding,
repeated that mysterious name: “The Tzigana.”
And Marsa also gazed after them, her ears caressed by the czardas of the
musicians. The big barge disappeared in the distance in a luminous haze;
but the Tzigana could still vaguely perceive the little beings perched
upon the shoulders of the men, and waving, in sign of farewell, pieces
of white cloth which their mother had given them.
A happy torpor stole over Marsa; and, while the guests of the Baroness
Dinati, the Japanese Yamada, the English heiresses, the embassy
attaches, all these Parisian foreigners, led by Jacquemin, the director
of the gayety, were organizing a ballroom on the deck, and asking the
Tzigani for polkas of Fahrbach and waltzes of Strauss, the young girl
heard the voice of Andras murmur low in her ear:
“Ah! how I love you! And do you love me, Marsa?”
“I am happy,” she answered, without moving, and half closing her eyes,
“and, if it were necessary for me to give my life for you, I would give
it gladly.”
In the stern of the boat, Michel Menko watched, without seeing them,
perhaps, the fields, the houses of Pecq, the villas of Saint-Germain,
the long terrace below heavy masses of trees, the great plain beside
Paris with Mont Valerien rising in its midst, the two towers of the
Trocadero, whose gilded dome sparkled in the sun, and the bluish-black
cloud which hung over the city like a thick fog.
The boat advanced very slowly, as if Prince Andras had given the order
to delay as much as possible the arrival at Maisons-Lafitte, where the
whole fete would end for him, as Marsa was to land there. Already, upon
the horizon could be perceived the old mill, with its broad, slated
roof. The steeple of Sartrouville loomed up above the red roofs of the
houses and the poplars which fringe the bank of the river. A pale blue
light, like a thin mist, enveloped the distant landscape.
“The dream is over,” murmured Marsa.
“A far more beautiful one will soon begin,” said Andras, “and that one
will be the realization of what I have waited for all my life and never
found--love.”
Marsa turned to the Prince with a look full of passionate admiration and
devotion, which told him how thoroughly his love was returned.
The quadrille had ended, and a waltz was beginning. The little Japanese,
with his eternal smile, like the bronze figures of his country, was
dancing with a pre-raphaelite English girl.
“How well you dance,” she said.
“If we only had some favors,” replied the Japanese, showing his teeth in
a grin, “I would lead the cotillon.”
The boat stopped at last at Maisons-Lafitte. The great trees of the
park formed a heavy mass, amid which the roof of the villa was just
discernible.
“What a pity it is all over,” cried the Baroness, who was ruddy as
a cherry with the exercise of dancing. “Let us have another; but
Maisons-Lafitte is too near. We will go to Rouen the next time; or
rather, I invite you all to a day fete in Paris, a game of polo, a
lunch, a garden party, whatever you like. I will arrange the programme
with Yamada and Jacquemin.”
“Willingly,” responded the Japanese, with a low bow. “To collaborate
with Monsieur Jacquemin will be very amusing.”
As Marsa Laszlo was leaving the boat, Michel Menko stood close to the
gangway, doubtless on purpose to speak to her; and, in the confusion of
landing, without any one hearing him, he breathed in her ear these brief
words:
“At your house this evening. I must see you.”
She gave him an icy glance. Michel Menko’s eyes were at once full of
tears and flames.
“I demand it!” he said, firmly.
The Tzigana made no reply; but, going to Andras Zilah, she took his arm;
while Michel, as if nothing had happened, raised his hat.
General Vogotzine, with flaming face, followed his niece, muttering, as
he wiped the perspiration unsteadily from his face:
“Fine day! Fine day! By Jove! But the sun was hot, though! Ah, and the
wines were good!”
BOOK 2.