Delphi collected works o.., p.551
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 551
He coloured and was silent.
‘Indeed,’ she said gravely, ‘we can honour brave men in the Tauern and in Idrac too. You are very brave. I do not know how to thank you for my people or for myself.’
‘Pray do not speak so,’ he said, in a very low voice. ‘To see you again would be recompense for much worthier things than any I have done.’
‘But you might have seen me long ago,’ she said, with a certain nervousness new to her, ‘had you only chosen to come to the Isle. I asked you twice.’
He looked at her with eyes of longing and pathetic appeal.
‘Do not tempt me,’ he murmured. ‘If I yielded, and if you despised me — —’
‘How could I despise one who has so nobly saved the lives of my people?’
‘You would do so.’
He spoke very low: he was silent a little while, then he said very softly:
‘One evening, when we spoke together on the terrace at Hohenszalras, you leant your hand upon the ivy there. I plucked the leaf you touched; you did not see. I had the leaf with me all through the war. It was a talisman. It was like a holy thing. When your cousin’s soldiers stripped me in their ambulance, they took it from me.’
His voice faltered. She listened and was moved to a profound emotion.
‘I will give you something better,’ she said very gravely. He did not ask her what she would give.
She looked away from him awhile, and her face flushed a little. She was thinking of what she would give him; a gift so great that the world would deem her mad to bestow it, and perhaps would deem him dishonoured to take it.
‘How did you hear of these floods along the Danube?’ she asked him, recovering her wonted composure.
‘I read about them in telegrams in Paris,’ he made answer. ‘I had mustered courage to revisit my poor Paris; all I possess is there. Nothing has been injured; a shell burst quite close by but did not harm my apartments. I went to make arrangements for the sale of my collections, and on the second day that I arrived there I saw the news of the inundations of Idrac and the lower Danubian plains. I remembered the name of the town; I remembered it was yours. I remembered your saying once that where you had feudal rights you had feudal duties, so I came on the chance of being of service.’
‘You have been most devoted to the people.’
‘The people! What should I care though the whole town perished? Do not attribute to me a humanity that is not in my nature.’
‘Be as cynical as you like in words so long as you are heroic in action. I am going out to the yacht; will you come with me?’
He hesitated. ‘I merely came to hear from the warder of your health. I am going to catch the express steamer at Neusatz; all danger is over.’
‘The yacht can take you to Neusatz. Come with me.’
He did not offer more opposition; he accompanied her to the boat and entered it.
The tears were in her eyes. She said nothing more, but she could not forget that scores of her own people here had owed their lives to his intrepidity and patience, and that he had never hesitated to throw his life into the balance when needed. And it had been done for her sake alone. The love of humanity might have been a nobler and purer motive, but it would not have touched her so nearly as the self-abandonment of a man by nature selfish and cold.
In a few moments they were taken to the yawl. He ascended the deck with her.
The tidings the skipper brought, the examination of the stores, the discussion of ways and means, the arrangements for the general relief, were air dull, practical matters that claimed careful attention and thought. She sat in the little cabin that was brave with marqueterie work and blue satin and Dresden mirrors, and made memoranda and calculations, and consulted him, and asked his advice on this, on that. The government official, sent to make official estimates of the losses in the township, had come on board to salute and take counsel with her. The whole forenoon passed in these details. He wrote, and calculated, and drew up reports for her. No more tender or personal word was spoken between them; but there was a certain charm for them both in this intimate intercourse, even though it took no other shape than the study of how many boatloads of wheat were needed for so many hundred people, of how many florins a day might be passed to the head of each family, of how many of the flooded houses would still be serviceable with restoration, of how many had been entirely destroyed, of how the town would best be rebuilt, and of how the inland rivers could best be restrained in the future.
To rebuild it she estimated that she would have to surrender for five years the revenues from her Galician and Hungarian mines, and she resolved to do it altogether at her own cost. She had no wish to see the town figure in public prints as the object of public subscription.
‘I am sure all my woman friends,’ she said, ‘would kindly make it occasion for a fancy fair or a lottery (with new costumes) in Vienna, but I do not care for that sort of thing, and I can very well do what is needed alone.’
He was silent. He had always known that her riches were great, but he had never realised them as fully as he now did when she spoke of rebuilding an entire town as she might have spoken of building a carriage.
‘You would make a good prime minister,’ she said, smiling; ‘you have the knowledge of a specialist on so many subjects.’
At noon they served her a little plain breakfast of Danubian salbling, with Carlowitzer wine and fruit sent by the steward of Mohacs. She bade him join her in it.
‘Had Egon himself been here he could not have done more for Idrac than you have done,’ she said.
‘Is this Prince Egon’s wine?’ he said abruptly, and on hearing that it was so, he set the glass down untasted.
She looked surprised, but she did not ask him his reason, for she divined it. There was an exaggeration in the unspoken hostility more like the days of Arthur and Lancelot than their own, but it did not displease her.
They were both little disposed to converse during their meal; after the dreary and terrible scenes they had been witness of, the atmosphere of life seems grave and dark even to those whom the calamity had not touched. The most careless spirit is oppressed by a sense of the precariousness and the cruelty of existence.
When they ascended to the deck the skies were lighter than they had been for many weeks; the fog had cleared, so that, in the distance, the towers of Neusatz and the fortress of Peterwardein were visible; vapour still hung over the vast Hungarian plain, but the Danube was clear and the affluents of it had sunk to their usual level.
‘You really go to-night?’ she said, as they looked down the river.
‘There is no need for me to stay; the town is safe, and you are well, you say. If there be anything I can still do, command me.’
She smiled a little and let her eye meet his for a moment.
‘Well, if I command you to remain then, will you do so as my viceroy? I want to return home; Aunt Ottilie grows daily more anxious, more alarmed, but I cannot leave these poor souls all alone with their priests, and their rabbi, who are all as timid as sheep and as stupid. Will you stay in the castle and govern them, and help them till they recover from their fright? It is much to ask, I know, but you have already done so much for Idrac that I am bold to ask you to do more?’
He coloured with a mingled emotion.
‘You could ask me nothing that I would not do,’ he said in a low tone. ‘I could wish you asked me something harder.’
‘Oh, it will be very hard,’ she said, with an indifference she did not feel. ‘It will be very dull, and you will have no one to speak to that knows anything save how to grow flax and cherries. You will have to talk the Magyar tongue all day, and you will have nothing to eat save kartoffeln and salbling; and I do not know that I am even right,’ she added, more gravely, ‘to ask you to incur the risks that come from all that soaked, ground, which will be damp so long.’
‘The risks that you have borne yourself! Pray do not wound me by any such scruple as that. I shall be glad, I shall be proud, to be for ever so short or so long a time as you command, your representative, your servant.’
‘You are very good.’
‘No.’
His eyes looked at hers with a quick flash, in which all the passion he dared not express was spoken. She averted her glance and continued calmly: ‘You are very good indeed to Idrac. It will be a great assistance and comfort to me to know that you are here. The poor people already love you, and you will write to me and tell me all that may need to be done. I will leave you the yacht and Anton. I shall return by land with my woman; and when I reach home I will send you Herr Greswold. He is a good companion, and has a great admiration for you, though he wishes that you had not forsaken the science of botany.’
‘It is like all other dissection or vivisection; it spoils the artistic appreciation of the whole. I am yet unsophisticated enough to feel the charm of a bank of violets, of a cliff covered with alpen-roses. I may write to you?’
‘You must write to me! It is you who will know all the needs of Idrac. But are you sure that to remain here will not interfere with your own projects, your own wishes, your own duties?’
‘I have none. If I had any I would throw them away, with pleasure, to be of use to one of your dogs, to one of your birds.’
She moved from his side a little.
‘Look how the sun has come out. I can see the sparkle of the brass on the cannon down yonder at Neusatz. We had better go now. I must see my sick people and then leave as soon as I can. The yacht must take me to Mohacs; from there I will send her back to you.’
‘Do as you will. I can have no greater happiness than to obey you.’
‘I am sure that I thank you in the way that you like best, when I say that I believe you.’
She said the words in a very low tone, but so calmly that the calmness of them checked any other words he might have uttered. It was a royal acceptance of a loyal service; nothing more. The boat took them back to the fortress. Whilst she was occupied in her farewell to the sick people, and her instructions to those who attended on them, he, left to himself in the apartment she had made her own, instinctively went to an old harpsichord that stood there and touched the keys. It had a beautiful case, rich with the varnish of the Martins. He played with it awhile for its external beauty, and then let his fingers stray over its limited keyboard. It had still sweetness in it, like the spinet of Hohenszalras. It suited certain pathetic quaint old German airs he knew, and which he half unconsciously reproduced upon it, singing them as he did so in a low tone. The melody, very soft and subdued, suited to the place where death had been so busy and nature so unsparing, and where a resigned exhaustion had now succeeded to the madness of terror, reached the ears of the sick women in the Rittersaal and of Wanda von Szalras seated beside their beds.
‘It is like the saints in Heaven sighing in pity for us here,’ said one of the women who was very feeble and old, and she smiled as she heard. The notes, tremulous from age but penetrating in their sweetness, came in slow calm movements of harmony through the stillness of the chamber; his voice, very low also, but clear, ascended with them. Wanda sat quite still, and listened with a strange pleasure. ‘He alone,’ she thought, ‘can make the dumb strings speak.
It was almost dusk when she descended to the room which she had made her own. In the passages of the castle oil wicks were lighted in the iron lamps and wall sconces, but here it was without any light, and in the gloom she saw the dim outline of his form as he sat by the harpsichord. He had ceased playing; his head was bent down and rested on the instrument; he was lost in thought, and his whole attitude was dejected. He did not hear her approach, and she looked at him some moments, herself unseen. A great tenderness came over her: he was unhappy, and he had been very brave, very generous, very loyal: she felt almost ashamed. She went nearer, and he raised himself abruptly.
‘I am going,’ she said to him. ‘Will you come with me to the yacht?’
He rose, and though it was dusk, and in this chamber so dark that his face was indistinct to her, she was sure that tears had been in his eyes.
‘Your old harpsichord has the vernis Martin,’ he said, with effort. ‘You should not leave it buried here. It has a melody in it too, faint and simple and full of the past, like the smell of dead rose-leaves. Yes, I will have the honour to come with you. I wish there were a full moon. It will be a dark night on the Danube.’
‘My men know the soundings of the river well. As for the harpsichord, you alone have found its voice. It shall go to your rooms in Paris.’
‘You are too good, but I would not take it. Let it go to Hohenszalras.’
‘Why would you not take it?
‘I would take nothing from you.’
He spoke abruptly, and with some sternness.
‘I think there is such a thing as being too proud? she said, with hesitation.
‘Your ancestors would not say so,’ he answered, with an effort; she understood the meaning that underlay the words. He turned away and closed the lid of the harpsichord, where little painted cupids wantoned in a border of metal scroll-work.
All the men and women well enough to stand crowded on the water-stairs to see her departure; little children were held up in their mother’s arms and bidden remember her for evermore; all feeble creatures lifted up their voices to praise her; Jew and Christian blessed her; the water-gate was cumbered with sobbing people, trying to see her face, to kiss her skirt for the last time. She could not be wholly unmoved before that unaffected, irrepressible emotion. Their poor lives were not worth much, but such as they were she, under Heaven, had saved them.
‘I will return and see you again,’ she said to them, as she made a slow way through the eager crowd. ‘Thank Heaven, my people, not me. And I leave my friend with you, who did much more for you than I. Respect him and obey him.’
They raised with their thin trembling voices a loud Eljén! of homage and promise, and she passed away from their sight into the evening shadows on the wide river.
Sabran accompanied her to the vessel, which was to take her to the town of Mohacs, thence to make her journey home by railway.
‘I shall not leave until you bid me, even though you should forget to call me all in my life!’ he said, as the boat slipped through the dark water.
‘Such oblivion would be a poor reward.’
‘I have had reward enough. You have called me your friend.’
She was silent. The boat ran through the dusk and the rippling rays of light streaming from the sides of the yacht, and they went on board. He stood a moment with uncovered head before her on the deck, and she gave him her hand.
‘You will come to the Holy Isle?’ she said, as she did so.
‘If you bid me,’ he said, as he bowed and kissed her hand. His lips trembled as he did so, and by the lamplight she saw that he was very pale.
‘I shall bid you,’ she said, very softly, by-and-by. Farewell!’
He bowed very low once more, then he dropped over the yacht’s side into the boat waiting below; the splash of the oars told her he was gone back to Idrac. The yawl weighed anchor and began to go up the river, a troublesome and tedious passage at all seasons. She sat on deck watching the strong current of the Danube as it rolled on under the bow of the schooner. For more than a league she could see the beacon that burned by the water-gate of the fortress. When the curve of the stream hid it from her eyes she felt a pang of painful separation, of wistful attachment to the old dreary walls where she had seen so much suffering and so much courage, and where she had learned to read her own heart without any possibility of ignoring its secrets. A smile came on her mouth and a moisture in her eyes as she sat alone in the dark autumn night, while the schooner made her slow ascent through the swell that accompanies the influx of the Drave.
CHAPTER XIV.
IN TWO DAYS’ time Hohenszalras received its mistress home.
She was not in any way harmed by the perils she had encountered, and the chills and fever to which she had been exposed. On the contrary, her eyes had a light and her face had a bloom which for many months had not been there.
The Princess heard a brief sketch of what had passed in almost total silence. She had disapproved strongly, and she said that her disapproval could not change, though a merciful heavenly host had spared her the realisation of her worst fears.
The name of Sabran was not spoken. Wanda was of a most truthful temper, but she could not bring herself to speak of his presence at Idrac; the facts would reveal themselves inevitably soon enough.
She sent Greswold to the Danube laden with stores and medicines. She received a letter every morning from her delegate; but he wrote briefly, and with scrupulous care, the statements of facts connected with the town and reports of what had been done. Her engineer had arrived from the mines by Kremnitz, and the builders estimated that the waters would have subsided and settled enough, if no fresh rising took place, for them to begin the reconstruction of the town with the beginning of the new month. Ague and fever were still very common, and fresh cases were brought in every hour to the hospital in the fortress. He wrote on the arrival of Herr Greswold, that, with her permission, he himself would still stay on, for the people had grown used to him, and having some knowledge of hydraulics he would be interested to see the plans proposed by her engineers for preserving the town from similar calamities.
Three weeks passed; all that time she spoke but little either of him or of any other subject. She took endless rides, and she sat many hours doing nothing in the white room, absorbed in thought. The Princess, who had learned what had passed, with admirable exercise of tact and self-restraint made neither suggestion nor innuendo, and accepted the presence of a French Marquis at a little obscure town in Sclavonia as if it were the most natural circumstance in the world.
‘All the Szalras have been imperious, arrogant, and of complicated character,’ she thought; ‘she has the same temper, though it is mitigated in her by great natural nobility of disposition and strong purity of motives. She will do as she chooses, let all the world do what it may to change her. If I say a word either way it may take effect in some wholly unforeseen manner that I should regret. It is better to abstain. In doubt do nothing, is the soundest of axioms.’
