"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!"