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.