Fessenden stood for a few moments at the window before entering,
although he had danced the Chardash many times and was arrayed as one
of the elect. The deserted street of the village, and the muffled
strains of a gypsy band, had informed him as he approached that it was
a day of dancing and feasting, and he had despatched a casual boy to
summon the tallest young man of the village. From the genial peasant
he had borrowed a native costume, and without the aid of gold--for he
carried a love potion in his indifferent command of the Magyar tongue.
Another New-Yorker might have been daunted by the white divided skirt,
which looked like anything but trousers, and the white blouse hanging
free above it, but not Fessenden. He would indeed have preferred the
Sunday best which the man had offered him to his own undoing, but had
generously refused it. The men all looked very fine in their gay cloth
or leathern jackets, embroidered, inlaid, their bright sashes, loose
shirts and flapping trousers, embroidered with worsted or silk; but
the women, after decorating their lords and brothers, would appear to
have had no time left to enhance their own charms, for they wore common
cotton frocks and had made no attempt at adornment beyond a ribbon or a
string of glass beads.
The room in which they danced evidently belonged to the rich man of the
village. It was of fair size for a peasant’s house, and its prints of
saints and Mary were draped with embroidered towels. The older folk sat
against the wall, and some sixty young people danced in what at first
sight looked to be a solid mass. The Chardash was near its finish,
and the couples were executing the vigorous and intricate figures,
even separating for a second and flying together again, without the
collision of an elbow or the twitch of a facial muscle.
Suddenly Fessenden swore in three languages and clutched the arm of his
host.
“Who is that girl?” he demanded.
“I do not know her name. The Count came two hours ago with
two--Austrian peasants,” he said, “but we doubt--who wished to learn
the Chardash. We know nothing further, except that they speak Hungarian
well and are virgins, for they wear their braids hanging; but we are
curious, for that one you admire is very pretty and lively, and the
other is as beautiful and queenlike as a Roumanian peasant--observe
her, my friend.”
The music had ceased and the crowd was melting towards the open. The
girl worthy to be compared to a Roumanian stood almost in the middle
of the room talking with pleasing humility to a young man who, even in
his peasant’s costume, was plainly the lord of the village. She wore
a common blue cotton gown a size too small for her, and a kerchief
pinned so tightly about her head that only half an inch of hair brushed
flatly backward was visible. But the figure was magnificent; the hands
were small, pointed, white; the skin of face and throat had never
been exposed to a peasant sun, and the visible hair was red. The girl
suddenly raised her eyes, and Fessenden screwed up his own and left the
window.
So he had seen the Archduchess!--was about to meet her at last! The
fountain burst its bonds and flew to his head. His deep, almost
passionate love of adventure shook him slightly from head to foot. The
color came into his face, and his nostrils quivered. If he could only
corner his sister and warn her before she betrayed him by a feminine
scream. She was standing just within the door arranging the ribbon at
the end of her long plait of hair, which, like many another, had been
disordered by the energy of the dance; and the hanging tresses brought
forward for reconstruction by herself and several other maidens may
possibly have fetched a sigh from lips too soon surrendered. Fessenden
entered and placed his back between her face and Ranata.
“Now don’t even raise your eyes,” he said rapidly. “I want to be
unknown here. I want you to introduce me to her and not tell her who I
am.”
Fessenden had underestimated his sister’s accomplishments. “I won’t
do anything of the sort,” she replied, smoothing her kerchief with
steady fingers. “It is just one thing I should never dare to do. The
responsibility shall be entirely your own.”
“Very well. I can manage it if you do not betray me. What on earth does
this mean, anyhow? Are you and she here alone? I don’t see the ghost of
a chaperon.”
“Our first idea was merely to look on, but we had no sooner arrived at
Count Zrinyi’s castle this morning than Sarolta was attacked by the
gout--or pretended she was; she is an angel--and ordered us to our
rooms. We made Zrinyi borrow clothes from two of his servants--and here
we are. I’ve never had so much fun in my life--neither has Ranata.” She
looked him over. “You are not a bad imitation,” she admitted. “So many
of them are fair, and luckily they all wear their hats. Pull your brim
a little lower; your eyes are hopelessly American. Of course you’ll
fall in love with her--I’ve seen it coming for years; but don’t propose
on the spot and spoil all our fun.”
“What do you take me for?” and Fessenden left her to an admiring
peasant and sought his host.
“That girl is very pretty,” he said discontentedly, “but I can’t dance
with a girl so much shorter than myself; I am always swinging her off
her feet. Will you introduce me to the other Austrian--or Roumanian,
did you say?”
“What is your name, my friend?”
“Árpád Hunyadi will do as well as any other.”
The peasant embraced him on both cheeks. “A great name,” he said
solemnly. “All I have is yours.”
A moment later Fessenden was standing before the Archduchess, while
Zrinyi’s willing eyes were diverted by Alexandra.
“You will dance this with me?” he asked in Magyar, his eyes bashfully
lowered.
“You are not a Hungarian!” she exclaimed.
“Alas, that your first word should be so cruel! It is true that I speak
the German tongue better--I have been much away--but my children shall
speak only Hungarian.”
“It is to be hoped so.”
“You will dance with me?”
“I do not know. I am tired.”
“One is never too tired for the Chardash. It would raise a Hungarian
from the grave.” This was uttered with simple fervor. He felt her
powerful gaze and dared not raise his eyes. But the majestic beauty of
her figure was in the direct line of his vision, and involuntarily he
lifted his hands to tuck in his shirt, but bethought himself in time.
“I don’t know,” repeated the Archduchess coldly, “I am tired, and I do
not happen to be a Hungarian.”
“A Roumanian? We have all said it; you are so beautiful.”
“No.”
The leader of the gypsy band struck his cymbal. His brothers drew the
first long wail from their fiddles. The crowd thronged in.
Fessenden raised his hands and placed them firmly about the slender
waist of the Archduchess. “Put your hands on my shoulders,” he said. “I
shall not let you go.”
She drew herself up rigidly for a moment, then obeyed him.
“I know who you are,” she said.
“So much the better,” replied Fessenden.
* * * * *
“This is a great moment in the history of Hungary!” said Zrinyi
solemnly.
“It is!” said Alexandra.
“A daughter of the Emperor of Austria and a Hungarian peasant! What a
symbol! It is full of portent!”
“If you only knew how much!”
“Ah, you dream of a universal democracy, I suppose. I fear I dream
only of the independence of Hungary--with William as enlightened
overlord--and the humiliation of Austria.”
“I can’t talk politics and dance the Chardash.”
Fessenden summoned to his eyes a far and impassive stare. Ranata
pointed her lashes to her cheeks. They were the tallest couple in the
room, and those who sat had much to say in comment. There was little
to criticise, for their natural grace and beauty of form diverted
the eye from their few mistakes; and in truth those whose blood is
quick must learn the Chardash easily. For a time the music is a wail
of almost hopeless longing, and the feet and body move hesitatingly,
monotonously, the man and woman at arm’s-length; gradually it grows
sweeter, more inspiring, and the feet move faster--life seems to
awaken. The music swells and the man takes the girl’s left hand and
raises it high; then, as it becomes triumphant and peremptory, he
swings her faster and faster, executes wild and rapid figures, stamps
his feet, snaps his fingers in the air, increases his speed to that of
the whirlwind, flings his partner from him and catches her again, to
whirl and whirl and whirl in a circle scarcely larger than his feet;
and all without a moment of forgetfulness, a rude embrace, a change
of expression. “It is the story of elementary passion before man was
created to express it,” Ranata had said to Alexandra before they had
ventured to take part; and certainly the Hungarian peasant, intelligent
and gay, but polite and dignified to his marrow, is worthy of a place
beside the impersonal artists of any civilization.
Nevertheless, the Chardash is so intoxicating that no one can dance
it perfunctorily, no matter how self-conscious at starting; and there
was nothing here to distract the attention of the most fastidious: the
air was pure, for the windows were open, and the Hungarian peasant
is clean. No matter what the pressure of the speed, not a foot was
trodden, not a temper shaken. Fessenden had danced half the native
dances of the world, sometimes in hours of greater abandon than this,
and Ranata had a natural love of the dance and indulged it whenever
possible. As she had recognized and intuitively obeyed her friend’s
brother, she realized in a flash that for sixteen years he had occupied
a silent but permanent place in a shadowy realm that was hers alone.
He had been Alexandra’s favorite theme from childhood, and Ranata’s
interest had never flagged. His sister was as truthful as most women,
but in her extreme youth she had possessed a violent imagination, and
her unknown brother, dwelling in the wilderness, had inspired it to
deeds which had caused the little Archduchess to sit open-mouthed for
hours as she drank in his blood-curdling and heroic adventures with
Indian tribes, robber bands, pirates, and wild beasts of every variety
whose pictures were to be found in Alexandra’s natural history. He had
seemed to her the most splendid and picturesque of living creatures,
and although the reduction of Alexandra’s allowance for a year to
the wages of a footman by her perturbed father had cured her of the
habit of exaggeration, she still could tell a pretty tale, and there
had been much to recount during Fessenden’s sojourn in South America
and after his return. To a princess living the most conventional and
restricted of earthly lives he represented all that the world, beyond
palace walls, held of romance, of freedom, of the grand free play
of personality. As she grew older she forbade her fancy to lead him
into the backwaters of sentiment, that being a part of the necessary
discipline of self; but there had been times when the effort had
exhausted her. Two thoughts had flashed through her mind as she
realized that she stood face to face with him at last: the one came
from depths she did not pause to analyze--“If I had suddenly heard
that he was dead, instead of meeting him like this, I should have
been appalled by a sense of personal loss.” The other thought flew
straight from superstition and made her for the moment the sister of
the peasant-women about her--“This colored frock! I might have known it
would bring me bad luck!”
In a moment she had angrily dismissed both suggestions, but she
endeavored to nurse a general resentment. She had been taken abominable
advantage of. He had known who she was and dared to treat her like
any ordinary girl masquerading. That royalty, or aristocracy for
that matter, moves on unselfconscious heights is one of the fictions
of fiction. The aristocracies of Europe may not, in the manner of
the American, carry their ancestors like a bunch of chips on their
shoulder, but like royalty, they are “simple and unaffected” only so
long as they are not expected to be humble and are not approached by
the wrong sort of people. The intense dramatic moments of William of
Germany might alone convince the unthinking of royalty’s sense of its
own value.
Ranata was not dramatic, or at all events had wanted opportunity;
but had she inherited the simplicity of her mother, which assuredly
she had not, she would have found it a difficult task to forget that
she was the daughter of an emperor. But she had experienced no such
inclination. She might sigh for liberty, and in erratic moments wish
she had been born an American, but to her composition had gone the
haughtiest particles of Europe. She was not only the last born of
an ancient line of kings who had exercised despotic rule over vast
possessions, but who had built about themselves a triple golden wall
of ceremony. No court had ever been so uncomplaisant, no royal favor
so difficult to gain; to-day no house in Europe was so tenacious of
its ancient formalities. Every act of Ranata’s life to which the least
importance could be attached had been the combined result of her active
consciousness that she was the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, and
of instinctive ancestral tribute.
Therefore did the Archduchess Ranata Theresia feel that her sacred self
had been trifled with, and was filled with wrath against her friend
and her friend’s brother. But it is both difficult and anomalous to
nurse the severer passions while moving one’s body and feet to the cry
of the Chardash for the fulfilment of human happiness. A mist rose to
and diffused itself through the historic tiers of Ranata’s brain, and
created an illusion. The music of the Chardash, older than the House
of Hapsburg, as old, perhaps, as that mysterious gypsy people who
brought it to Hungary, was the song of the wind among peaks about a
wild and lovely valley high in the Eastern Alps. She was primeval woman
dancing with primeval man. A silver hammer rang on the distant rocks,
the wind drew its bow on the young branches of the trees; all the new
world moved in measure about her, groping towards its birthright.
The vague melancholy promise of Nature grew ever more distinct in
its utterance, swelled in fuller volume from the heights and passes.
The man felt it and swung her with swifter assurance, clasped her
surrendered waist more firmly; then in the wild and breathless whirl,
where the male, inspired by the reckless adhortation of the music,
expresses the insolent triumph of his manhood, and the woman alone
hears the persistent note of sadness, the warning of the unfulfilment
of mortal desire, the heroine of this tale was the creature of another
will. In that dizzying circle she followed his every motion, the
peremptory guiding of his hand, with neither thought nor desire of
resistance; and when he flung her scornfully from him she leaped back
to his embrace as automatically as the meanest peasant in the room. At
the end she was conscious of nothing but that the mountain-tops were
flying about her in a furious attempt to meet and crash together; the
shouting of the men, the abrupt loud stamping of their feet, as the
musicians played like madmen, came to her confused senses as the forces
of the earth bursting their bonds; and when the illusion abruptly
finished and she found herself on the veranda she leaned heavily
against the wall and sought for nothing but her breath.
Fessenden mopped his streaming face. “By Jove!” he remarked, “that
was warm work! But it’s a great dance--and you--you--were simply
magnificent! When I get my breath I’ll tell you how grateful I am.”
Ranata lifted her head and assumed an expression of frigid severity,
which shone oddly from a face that was wet and red from hair to throat.
“Would you like to walk up and down the road for a change?” asked
Fessenden.
“No!” exclaimed Ranata, still short of breath. “I should not.”
“You are not ready for another?”
“No, I am not ready for another!” She spoke with an asperity quite
unnatural in a princess who never forgot to be gracious, lest she wound
the _amour propre_ of those at her mercy. The tumult within her had
soured and fermented into a sudden hatred of the colossal wealth, the
constant exercise of a power greater than her father’s, and the habit
of republican independence, which enabled this man to stand before her
as unconcernedly as if she were a girl of his own class. Her wrath
might be unreasonable, but she was in no mood to admit it, and she was
divided between a desire to relieve her tension with tears and for
power to humiliate the man.
Fessenden, who was too hot and thirsty to be sentimental, much less
conscious of outraged royalty that he had been swinging in the
Chardash, glanced about longingly. “I think there must be wine in
that shed,” he said. “Where there is a crowd after the Chardash there
usually is wine; and doubtless the Count has set up a barrel of his
own. If you will wait here I’ll fetch you some.”
As he walked away, his white blouse and skirts flapping in the breeze,
Ranata sank upon a bench. For the first time in her life she was
nonplussed, at a loss what to do. Her long experience with Alexandra
did not help her in the least. Not only had she always regarded the
American girl as _sui generis_, but it had been her royal pleasure
that she should be so. She suddenly became aware that her friend was
standing before her.
“Of course you are angry,” said Miss Abbott contritely. “And I must
confess at once that I knew he was here, and might have warned you. But
Fessenden is Fessenden, and I knew that he would do what he wanted in
spite of me or any one else. Would you rather go at once?”
The Archduchess rose with alacrity. “Yes,” she said, “let us go as
quickly as possible.”