The Princess Ottilie was scarcely less happy than they in the
realisation of her dreams and prophecies. Those who had been most
bitterly opposed to her alliance with him could find no fault in his
actions and his affections.
'I always said that Wanda ought to marry, since she had plainly no
vocation for the cloister,' she said a hundred times a year. 'And I was
certain that M. de Sabran was the person above all others to attract
and to content her. She has much more imagination than she would be
willing to allow and he is capable at once of fascinating her fancy
and of satisfying her intellect. No one can be dull where he is; he is
one of those who make _la pluie et le beau temps_ by his absence or
presence; and, besides that, no commonplace affection would have ever
been enough for her. And he loves her like a poet, which he is at once
whenever he leaves the world for Beethoven and Bach. I cannot imagine
why you should have opposed the marriage, merely because he had not two
millions in the Bank of France.'
'Not for that,' answered the Grand Duke; 'rather because he broke the
bank of Monte Carlo, and other similar reasons. A great player of
baccara is scarcely the person to endow with the wealth of the Szalras.'
'The wealth is tied up tightly enough at the least, and you will admit
that he was yet more eager than you that it should be so.'
'Oh, yes! he behaved very well. I never denied it. But she has placed
it in his power to make away with the whole of Idrac, if he should ever
choose. That was very unwise, but we had no power to oppose.'
'You may be quite sure that Idrac will go intact to the second son, as
it has always done; and I believe but for his own exertions Idrac would
now be beneath the Danube waters. Perhaps you never heard all that
story of the flood?'
'I only hope that if I have detractors you will defend me from them,'
said Prince Lilienhöhe, giving up argument.
Fair weather is always especially fair in the eyes of those who have
foretold at sunset that the morrow would be fine; and so the married
life of Wanda von Szalras was especially delightful as an object of
contemplation, as a theme of exultation, to the Princess, who alone had
been clear-sighted enough to foresee the future. She really also loved
Sabran like a son, and took pride and pleasure in the filial tenderness
he showed her, and in his children, with the beautiful blue eyes that
had gleams of light in them like sapphires. The children themselves
adored her; and even the bold and wilful Bela was as quiet as a
startled fawn beside this lovely little lady, with her snow-white hair
and her delicate smile, whose cascades of lace always concealed such
wonderful bon-bon boxes, and gilded cosaques, and illuminated stories
of the saints.
Almost all their time was spent at Hohenszalras. A few winter months
in Vienna was all they had ever passed away from it, except one visit
to Idrac and the Hungarian estates. The children never left it for
a day. He shared her affection for the place, and for the hardy and
frank mountain people around them. He seemed to her to entirely forget
Romaris, and beyond the transmission of moneys to its priest, he
took no heed of it. She hesitated to recall it to him, since to do
so might have seemed to remind him that it was she, not he, who was
suzerain in the Hohe Tauern. Romaris was but a bleak rock, a strip of
sea-swept sand; it was natural that it should have no great hold on his
affections, only recalling as it did all that its lords had lost.
'I hate its name,' he said impetuously once; and seeing the surprise
upon her face, he added: 'I was very lonely and wretched there; I
tried to take interest in it because you bade me, but I failed; all
I saw, all I thought of, was yourself, and I believed you as far and
for ever removed from me as though you had dwelt in some other planet.
No! perhaps I am superstitious: I do not wish you to go to Romaris. I
believe it would bring us misfortune. The sea is full of treachery, the
sands are full of graves.'
She smiled.
'Superstition is a sort of parody of faith; I am sure you are not
superstitious. I do not care to go to Romaris; I like to cheat myself
into the belief that you were born and bred in the Iselthal. Otto said
to me the other day, "My lord must be a son of the soil, or how could
he know our mountains so well as he does, and how could he anywhere
have learned to shoot like that?"'
'I am very glad that Otto does me so much honour. When he first met
me, he would have shot me like a fox, if you had given the word. Ah, my
love! how often I think of you that day, in your white serge, with your
girdle of gold, and your long gold-headed staff, and your little ivory
horn. You were truly a châtelaine of the old mystical German days.
You had some _Schlüsselblumen_ in your hand. They were indeed the key
flower to my soul, though, alas! treasures, I fear, you found none on
your entrance there.'
'I shall not answer you, since to answer would be to flatter you, and
Aunt Ottilie already, does that more than is good for you,' she said
smiling, as she passed her fingers over the waves of his hair. 'By the
way, whom shall we invite to meet the Lilienhöhe? Will you make out a
list?'
'The Grand Duke does not share Frau Ottilie's goodness for me.'
'What would you? He has been made of buckram and parchment; besides
which; nothing that is not German has, to his mind, any right to exist.
By the way, Egon wrote to me this morning; he will be here at last.'
He looked up quickly in unspoken alarm: 'Your cousin Egon? Here?'
'Why are you so surprised? I was sure that sooner or later he would
conquer that feeling of being unable to meet you. I begged him to come
now; it is eight whole years since I have seen him. When once you have
met you will be friends--for my sake.'
He was silent; a look of trouble and alarm was still upon his face.
'Why should you suppose it any easier to him now than then?' he said at
length. 'Men who love _you_ do not change. There are women who compel
constancy, _sans le vouloir_. The meeting can but be painful to Prince
Vàsàrhely.'
'Dear Réné,' she answered in some surprise, 'my nearest male relative
and I cannot go on for ever without seeing each other. Even these years
have done Egon a great deal of harm. He has been absent from the Court
for fear of meeting us. He has lived with his hussars, or voluntarily
confined to his estates, until he grows morose and solitary. I am
deeply attached to him. I do not wish to have the remorse upon me of
having caused the ruin of his gallant and brilliant life. When he
has been once here he will like you: men who are brave have always
a certain sympathy. When he has seen you here he will realise that
destiny is unchangeable, and grow reconciled to the knowledge that I am
your wife.'
Sabran gave an impatient gesture of denial, and began to write the list
of invitations for the autumn circle of guests who were to meet the
Prince and Princess of Lilienhöhe.
Once every summer and every autumn Hohenszalras was filled with a
brilliant house-party, for she sacrificed her own personal preferences
to what she believed to be for the good of her husband. She knew that
men cannot always live alone; that contact with the world is needful to
their minds and bracing for it. She had a great dread lest the ghost
_ennui_ should show his pale face over her husband's shoulder, for
she realised that from the life of the asphalte of the Champs-Élysées
to the life amidst the pine forests of the Iselthal was an abrupt
transition that might easily bring tedium in its train. And tedium is
the most terrible and the most powerful foe love ever encounters.
Sabran completed the list, and when he had corrected it into due
accordance with all Lilienhöhe's personal and political sympathies and
antipathies, despatched the invitations, 'for eight days,' written on
cards that bore the joint arms of the Counts of Idrac and the Counts of
Szalras. He had adopted the armorial bearings of the countship of Idrac
as his own, and seemed disposed to abandon altogether those of the
Sabrans of Romaris.
When they were written he went out by himself and rode long and fast
through the mists of a chilly afternoon, through dripping forest ways
and over roads where little water-courses spread in shining shallows.
The coming of Egon Vàsàrhely troubled him and alarmed him. He had
always dreaded his first meeting with the Magyar noble; and as the
years had dropped by one after another, and her cousin had failed
to find courage to see her again, he had begun to believe that they
and Vàsàrhely would remain always strangers. His wish had begotten
his thought. He knew that she wrote at intervals to her cousin, and
he to her; he knew that at the birth of each of their children some
magnificent gift, with a formal letter of felicitation, had come from
the Colonel of the White Hussars; but as time had gone on and Prince
Egon had avoided all possibility of meeting them, he had grown to
suppose that the wound given her rejected lover was too profound ever
to close; nor did he wonder that it was so: it seemed to him that any
man who loved her must do so for all eternity, if eternity there should
be. To learn suddenly that within another month Vàsàrhely would be his
guest, distressed and alarmed him in a manner she never dreamed. They
had been so happy. On their cloud less heaven there seemed to him to
rise a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but bearing with it disaster
and a moonless night.
'Perhaps he will have forgotten,' he thought, as he strove to shake off
his forebodings. 'We were so young then. He was not even as old as I!'
And he rode fast and furiously homewards as the day drew in, and the
lighted windows of the great castle seemed to smile at him as lie saw
it high up above the darkness of the woods and of the evening mists,
his home, beloved, sacred, infinitely dear to him; dear as the soil of
the mother country which the wrecked mariner reaches after facing death
on the deep sea.
'God save her from suffering by me!' he said, in an unconscious prayer,
as he drew rein before the terrace of Hohenszalras. Almost he believed
in God through her.
When, after dressing, he went into, the Saxe room, the peace and
beauty of the scene had never struck him so strongly as it did now,
coming out of the shadows of the wet woods and the gloom of his own
anxieties; anxieties the heavier and the more wearing because they
could be shared by no one. The soft, full light of the wax candles fell
on the Louis Seize embroideries and the white woodwork of the panelling
and the china borders of the mirrors. The Princess Ottilie sat making
silk-netting for the children's balls; his wife was reading, and Bela
and Gela, who were there for their privileged half-hour before dinner,
were fitting together on a white bearskin, playing with the coloured
balls of the game of solitaire. The soft light from the chandeliers
and sconces of the Saxe Royale china fell on the golden heads and the
velvet frocks of the children, on the old laces and the tawny-coloured
plush of their mothers skirts, on the great masses of flowers in the
Saxe bowls, and on the sleeping forms of the big dogs Donau and Neva.
It was an interior that would have charmed Chardin, that would have
been worthy of Vandyck.
As he looked at it he thought with a sort of ecstasy, 'All that is
mine;' and then his heartstrings tightened as he thought again, 'If she
knew----?'
She looked up at his entrance with a welcome on her face that needed no
words.
'Where have you been in the rain all this long afternoon?' You see we
have a fire, even though it is midsummer. Bela, rise, and make your
obeisance, and push that chair nearer the hearth.'
The two little boys stood up and kissed his hand, one after another,
with the pretty formality; of greeting on which she always insisted;
then they went back to their coloured glass balls, and he sank into a
low chair beside his wife with a sigh half of fatigue, half of content.
'Yes, I have been riding all the time,' he said to her. 'I am not sure
that Siegfried approved it. But it does one good sometimes, and after
the blackness and the wetness of that forest how charming it is to come
home!'
She looked at him with wistfulness.
'I wish you were not vexed that Egon is coming! I am sure you have been
thinking of it as you rode.'
'Yes, I have; but I am ashamed of doing so. He is your cousin, that
shall be enough for me. I will do my best to make him welcome. Only
there is this difficulty; a welcome from me to him will seem in itself
an insult.'
'An insult! when you are my husband? One would think you were my
_jägermeister._ Dear mother mine, help me to scold him.'
'I am a stranger,' he said, under his breath.
She smiled a little, but she said with a certain hauteur:
'You are master of Hohenszalras, as your son will be when our places
shall know us no more. Do not let the phantom of Egon come between us,
I beseech you. His real presence never will do so, that is certain.'
'Nothing shall come between us,' said Sabran, as his hand took and
closed upon hers. 'Forgive me if I have brought some gloomy _nix_ out
of the dark woods with me; he will flee away in, the light of this
beloved white-room. No evil spirits could dare stay by your hearth.'
'There are _nixes_ in the forests,' said Bela in a whisper to his
brother.
'Ja!' said Gela, not comprehending.
'We will kill them all when we are big,' said Bela.
'Ja! ja!' said Gela.
Bela knew very well what a _nix_ was. Otto had told him all about
kobolds and sprites, as his pony trotted down the drives.
'Or we will take them prisoners,' he added, remembering that his mother
never allowed anything to be killed, not even butterflies.
'Ja!' said Gela again, rolling the pretty blue and pink and amber balls
about in the white fur of the bearskin.
Gela's views of life were simplified by the disciple's law of
imitation; they were restricted to doing whatever Bela did, when that
was possible, when it was not possible he remained still adoring Bela,
with his little serious face as calm as a god's.
She used to think that when they should grow up Bela would be a great
soldier like Wallenstein or Condé, and Gela would stay at home and
take care of his people here in the green, lone, happy Iselthal.
Time ran on and the later summer made the blooming hay grow brown on
all the alpine meadows, and made the garden of Hohenszalras blossom
with a million autumnal glories; it brought also the season of the
first house-party. Egon Vàsàrhely was to arrive one day before the
Lilienhöhe and the other guests.
'I want Egon so much to see Bela!' she said, with the thoughtless
cruelty of a happy mother forgetful of the pain of a rejected lover.
'I fear Bela will find little favor in your cousin's eyes, since he is
mine too,' said Sabran.
'Oh, Egon is content to be only our cousin by this----'
'You think so? You do not know yourself if you imagine that.'
'Egon is very loyal. He would not come here if he could not greet you
honestly.'
Sabran's face flushed a little, and he turned away. He vaguely dreaded
the advent of Egon Vàsàrhely, and there were so many innocent words
uttered in the carelessness of intimate intercourse which stabbed him
to the quick; she had so wounded him all unconscious of her act.
'Shall we have a game of billiards?' he asked her as they stood in the
Rittersaal, whilst the rain fell fast without. She played billiards
well, and could hold her own against him, though his game was one that
had often been watched by a crowded _galerie_ in Paris with eager
speculation and heavy wager. An hour afterwards they were still playing
when the clang of a great bell announced the approach of the carriage
which had been sent to Windisch-Matrey.
'Come!' she said joyously, as she put back her cue in its rest; but
Sabran drew back.
'Receive your cousin first alone,' he said. 'He must resent my presence
here. I will not force it on him on the threshold of your house.'
'Of our house! Why will you use wrong pronouns? Believe me, dear, Egon
is too generous to bear you the animosity you think.'
'Then he never loved you,' said Sabran, somewhat impatiently, as he
sent one ball against another with a sharp collision. 'I will come if
you wish it,' he added; 'but I think it is not in the best taste to so
assert myself.'
'Egon is only my cousin and your guest. You are the master of
Hohenszalras. Come! you were not so difficult when you received the
Emperor.'
'I had done the Emperor no wrong,' said Sabran, controlling the
impatience and the reluctance he still felt.
'You have done Egon none. I should not have been his wife had I never
been yours.'
'Who knows?' murmured Sabran, as he followed her into the entrance
hall. The stately figure of Egon Vàsàrhely enveloped in furs was just
passing through the arched doorway.
She went towards him with a glad welcome and both hands outstretched.
Prince Egon bowed to the ground: then took both her hands in his and
kissed her on the cheek.
Sabran, who grew very pale, advanced and greeted him with ceremonious
grace.
'My wife has bade me welcome you, Prince, but it would be presumptuous
in me, a stranger, to do that. All her kindred must be dear and sacred
here.'
Egon Vàsàrhely, with an effort to which he had for years been vainly
schooling himself, stretched out his hand to take her husband's; but
as he did so, and his glance for the first time dwelt on Sabran, a
look surprised and indefinitely perplexed came on his own features.
Unconsciously he hesitated a moment; then, controlling himself, he
replied with a few fitting words of courtesy and friendship. That
there should be some embarrassment, some constraint, was almost
inevitable, and did not surprise her: she saw both, but she also saw
that both were hidden under the serenity of high breeding and worldly
habit. The most difficult moment had passed: they went together into
the Rittersaal, talked together a little on a few indifferent topics,
and in a little space Prince Egon withdrew to his own apartments to
change his travelling clothes. Sabran left him on the threshold of his
chamber.
Vàsàrhely locked the doors, locking out even his servant, threw off
his furs and sat down, leaning his head on his hands. The meeting had
cost him even more than he had feared that it would do. For five years
he had dreaded this moment, and its pain was as sharp and as fresh to
him as though it had been unforeseen. To sleep under the same roof
with the husband of Wanda von Szalras! He had overrated his power of
self-control, underrated his power of suffering, when to please her he
had consented after five years to visit Hohenszalras. What were five
years?--half a century would not have changed him.
Under the plea of fatigue, he, who had sat in his saddle eighteen hours
at a stretch, and was braced to every form of endurance in the forest
chase and in the tented field, sent excuses to his host for remaining
in his own rooms until the Ave Maria rung. When he at length went
down to the blue-room where she was, he had recovered, outwardly at
least, his tranquillity and his self-possession, though here, in this
familiar, once beloved chamber, where every object had been dear to him
from his boyhood, a keener trial than any he had passed through awaited
him, as she led forward to meet him a little boy clad in white velvet,
with a cloud of light golden hair above deep blue luminous eyes, and
said to him:
'Egon, this is my Bela. You will love him a little, for my sake?'
Vàsàrhely felt a chill run through him like the cold of death as he
stooped towards the child; but he smiled and touched the boy's forehead
with his lips.
'May the spirit of our lost Bela be with him and dwell in his heart,'
he murmured; 'better I cannot wish him.'
With an effort he turned to Sabran.
'Your little son is a noble child; you may with reason be proud of him.
He is very like you in feature. I see no trace of the Szalras.'
'The other boy is more like Wanda,' replied Sabran, sensible of a
certain tenacity of observation with which Vàsàrhely was gazing at
him. 'As for my daughter, she is too young for anyone to say whom she
will resemble. All I desire is that she should be like her mother,
physically and spiritually.'
'Of course,' said the Prince, absently, still looking from Sabran to
the child, as if in the endeavour to follow some remembrance that
eluded-him. The little face of Bela was a miniature of his father's,
they were as alike as it is possible for a child and a man to be so,
and Egon Vàsàrhely perplexedly mused and wondered at vague memories
which rose up to him as he gazed on each.
'And what do you like best to do, my little one?' he asked of Bela, who
was regarding him with curious and hostile eyes.
'To ride,' answered Bela at once, in his pretty uncertain German.
'There you are a true Szalras at least. And your brother Gela, can he
ride yet? Where is Gela, by the way?'
'He is asleep,' said Bela, with some contempt. 'He is a little thing.
Yes; he rides, but it is in a chair-saddle. It is not real riding.'
'I see. Well, when you come and see me you shall have some real riding,
on wild horses if you like;' and he told the child stories of the great
Magyar steppes, and the herds of young horses, and the infinite delight
of the unending gallop over the wide hushed plain; and all the while
his heart ached bitterly, and the sight of the child--who was her
child, yet had that stranger's face--was to him like a jagged steel
being turned and twisted inside a bleeding wound. Bela, however, was
captivated by the new visions that rose before him.
'Bela will come to Hungary,' he said with condescension, and then with
an added thought, continued: 'I think Bela has great lands there. Otto
said so.'
'Bela has nothing at all,' said Sabran, sternly. 'Bela talks great
nonsense sometimes, and it would be better he should go to sleep with
his brother.'
Bela looked up shyly under his golden cloud of hair. 'Folko is Bela's,'
he said under his breath. Folko was his pony.
'No,' said Sabran; 'Folko belongs to your mother. She only allows you
to have him so long as you are good to him.'
'Bela is always good to him,' he said decidedly.
'Bela is faultless in his own estimation,' said his mother, with a
smile. 'He is too little to be wise enough to see himself as he is.'
This view made Bela's blue eyes open very wide and fill very
sorrowfully. It was humiliating. He longed to get back to Gela, who
always listened to him dutifully, and never said anything in answer
except an entirely acquiescent 'Ja! ja!' which was indeed about the
limitation of Gela's lingual powers. In a few moments, indeed, his
governess came for him and took him away, a little dainty figure in his
ivory velvet and his blue silk stockings, with his long golden curls
hanging to his waist.
'It is so difficult to keep him from being spoilt,' she said, as the
door closed on him. 'The people make a little prince, a little god, of
him. He believes himself to be something wonderful. Gela, who is so
gentle and quiet, is left quite in the shade.'
'I suppose Gela takes your title?' said Vàsàrhely to his host. 'It
is usual with the Austrian families for the second son to have some
distant appellation?'
'They are babies,' said Sabran, impatiently.
'It will be time enough to settle those matters when they are old
enough to be court-pages or cadets. They are Bela and Gela at present.
The only real republic is childhood.'
'I am afraid Bela is the _tyrannus_ to which all republics succumb,'
said Wanda, with a smile. He is extremely autocratic in his notions,
and in his family. In all his "make believe" games he is crowned.'
'He is a beautiful child,' said her cousin, and she answered, still
smiling:
'Oh, yes: he is so like Réné!'
Egon Vàsàrhely turned his face from her. The dinner was somewhat dull,
and the evening seemed tedious, despite the efforts of Sabran to
promote conversation, and the _écarté_ which he and his guest played
together. They, were all sensible that some chord was out of tune, and
glad that on the morrow a large house-party would be there to spare
them a continuation of this difficult intercourse.
'Your cousin will never forgive me,' said Sabran to her when they were
alone. 'I think, beside his feeling that I stand for ever between you
and him there is an impatience of me as a stranger and one unworthy
you.'
'You do yourself and him injustice,' she answered. 'I shall be unhappy
if you and he be not friends.'
'Then unhappy you will be, my beloved. We both adore you.'
'Do not say that. He would not be here if it were so.'
'Ah! look at him when he looks at Bela!'
She sighed; she had felt a strong emotion on the sight of her cousin,
for Egon Vàsàrhely was much changed by these years of pain. His grand
carriage and his martial beauty were unaltered, but all the fire and
the light of earlier years were gone out of his face, and a certain
gloom and austerity had come there. To all other women he would have
been the more attractive for the melancholy which was in such apt
contrast with the heroic adventures of his life, but to her the change
in him was a mute reproach which filled her with remorse though she had
done no wrong.
Meantime Prince Egon, throwing open his window, leaned out into the
cold rainy night, as though a hand were at his throat and suffocating
him. And amidst all the tumult of his pain and revolt, one dim thought
was incessantly intruding itself; he was always thinking, as he
recalled the face of Sabran and of Sabran's little son, 'Where have I
seen those blue eyes, those level brows, those delicate curved lips?'
They were so familiar, yet so strange to him. When he would have given
a name to them they receded into the shadows of some far away past of
his own, so far away he could not follow them. He sat up half the night
letting the wind beat and the rain fall on him. He could not sleep.