Delphi collected works o.., p.552
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 552
And Princess Ottilie, who on occasion had the wisdom of the serpent with the sweetness of the dove, preserved a discreet silence, and devoured her really absorbing curiosity in her own heart.
At the end of the fourth week she heard that all was well at Idrac, so far as it could be so in a place almost wholly destroyed. There was no sign of renewed rising of the inland streams. The illness was diminished, almost conquered; the people had begun to take heart and hope, and, being aided, wished to aid themselves. The works for new embankments, water-gates, and streets were already planned, though they could not be begun until the spring. Meanwhile, strong wooden houses were being erected on dry places, which which could shelter ad interim many hundreds of families; the farmers were gradually venturing to return to their flooded lands. The town had suffered grievously and in much irreparably, but it began to resume its trade and its normal life.
She hesitated a whole day when she heard this. Though Sabran did not hint at any desire of his own to leave the place, she knew it, was impossible to bid him remain longer, and that a moment of irrevocable decision was come. She hesitated all the day, slept little all the night, then sent him a brief telegram: ‘Come to the Island.’
Obey the summons as rapidly as he might, he could not travel by Vienna and Salzburg more quickly than in some thirty hours or more. The time passed to her in a curious confusion and anxiety. Outwardly she was calm enough; she visited the schools, wrote some letters, and took her usual long ride in the now leafless woods, but at heart she was unquiet and ill at ease, troubled more than by anything else at the force of the desire she felt to meet him once more. It was but a month since they had parted on the deck, and it seemed ten years. She had known what he had meant when he had said that he would come if she bade him; she had known that she would only do the sheerest cruelty and treachery if she called him thither only to dismiss him. It had not been a visit of the moment, but all his life that she had consented to take when she had written ‘Come to the Island.’
She would never have written it unless she had been prepared to fulfil all to which it tacitly pledged her. She was incapable of wantonly playing with any passion that moved another, least of all with his. The very difference of their position would have made indecision or coyness in her seem cruelty, humiliation. The decision hurt her curiously with a sense of abdication, mortification, and almost shame. To a very proud woman in whom the senses have never asserted their empire, there is inevitably an emotion of almost shame, of self-surrender, of loss of self-respect, in the first impulses of love. It made her abashed and humiliated to feel the excitation that the mere touch of his hand, the mere gaze of his eyes, had power to cause her. ‘If this be love,’ she thought, ‘no wonder the world is lost for it.’
Do what she would, the time seemed very long; the two evenings that passed were very tedious and oppressive. The Princess seemed to observe nothing of what she was perfectly conscious of, and her flute-like voice murmured on in an unending stream of commonplaces to which her niece replied much at random.
In the afternoon of the third day she stood on the terrace looking down the lake and towards the Holy Isle, with an impatience of which she was in turn impatient. She was dressed in white woollen stuff with silver threads in it; she had about her throat an old necklace of the Golden Fleece, of golden shells enamelled, which had been a gift from Charles the Fifth to one of her house; over her shoulders, for the approach of evening was cold, she had thrown a cloak of black Russian sables. She made a figure beautiful, stately, patrician, in keeping with the background of the great donjon tower, and the pinnacled roofs, and the bronze warriors in their Gothic niches.
When she had stood there a few minutes looking down the lake towards the willows of the monastery island, a boat came out from the willow thickets, and came over the mile-and-half of green shadowy water. There was only one person in it. She recognised him whilst he was still far off, and a smile came on her mouth that it was a pity he could not see.
He was a bold man, but his heart stood still with awe of her, and his soul trembled within him at this supreme moment of his fate. For he believed that she would not have bidden him there unless her hand were ready to hold out destiny to him — the destiny of his maddest, of his sweetest, dreams.
She came forward a few paces to meet him; her face was grave and pale, but her eyes had a soft suppressed light.
‘I have much for which to thank you,’ she said, as she held out her hand to him. Her voice was tremulous though calm.
He kissed her hand, then stood silent. It seemed to him that there was nothing to say. She knew what he would have said if he had been king, or hero, or meet mate for her. His pulses were beating feverishly, his self-possession was gone, his eyes did not dare to meet hers. He felt as if the green woods, the shining waters, the rain-burdened skies were wheeling round him. That dumbness, that weakness, in a man so facile of eloquence, so hardy and even cynical in courage, touched her to a wondering pitifulness.
‘After all,’ she thought once more, ‘if we love one another what is it to anyone else? We are both free.’
If the gift she would give would be so great that the world would blame him for accepting it, what would that matter so long as she knew him blameless?
They were both mute: he did not even look at her, and she might have heard the beating of his heart. She looked at him and the colour came back into her face, the smile back upon her mouth.
‘My friend,’ she said very gently,’did never you think that I also — —’
She paused: it was very hard to her to say what she must say, and he could not help her, dared not help her, to utter it.
They stood thus another moment mute, with the sunset glow upon the shining water, and upon the feudal majesty of the great castle.
Then she looked at him with a straight, clear, noble glance, and with the rich blood mounting in her face, stretched out her hand to him with a royal gesture.
‘They robbed you of your ivy leaf, my cruel Prussian cousins. Will you — take — this — instead?’
Then Heaven itself opened to his eyes. He did not take her hand. He fell at her feet and kissed them.
CHAPTER XV.
IS IT WISEST after all to be very unwise, dear mother mine?’ she said a little later, with a smile that was tender and happy.
The Princess looked up quickly, and so looking understood.
‘Oh, my beloved, is it indeed so? Yes, you are wise to listen to your heart; God speaks in it!’
With tears in her eyes she stretched out her pretty hands in solemn benediction.
‘Be His Spirit for ever with you,’ she said with great emotion. ‘I shall be so content to know that I leave you not alone when our Father calls me, for I think your very greatness and dominion, my dear, but make you the more lonely, as sovereigns are, and it is not well to be alone, Wanda; it is well to have human love close about us.’
‘It is to lean on a reed, perhaps,’murmured Wanda, in that persistent misgiving which possessed her. ‘And when the reed breaks, then though it has been so weak before, it becomes of iron, barbed and poisoned.’
‘What gloomy thoughts! And you have made me so happy, and surely you are happy yourself?’
‘Yes. My reed is in full flower, but — but — yes, I am happy; I hope that Bela knows.’
The Princess kissed her once again.
‘Ah! he loves you so well.’
‘That I am sure of; yet I might never have known it but for you.’
‘I did for the best.’
‘I will send him to you. I want to be alone a little. Dear mother, he cares for you as tenderly as though he were your son.’
‘I have been his friend always,’ said the Princess, with a smile, whilst the tears still stood in her eyes. ‘You cannot say so much, Wanda; you were very harsh.’
‘I know it. I will atone to him.’
The eyes of the Princess followed her tenderly.’
‘And she will make her atonement generously, grandly,’ she thought. ‘She is a woman of few protestations, but of fine impulses and of unerring magnanimity. She will be incapable of reminding him that their kingdom is hers. I have done this thing; may Heaven be with it! If she had loved no one, life would have grown so pale, so chill, so monotonous to her; she would have tired of herself, having nothing but herself for contemplation. Solitude has been only grand to her hitherto because she has been young, but as the years rolled on she would have died without ever having lived; now she will live. She may have to bear pains, griefs, infidelities, calamities that she would have escaped; but even so, how much better the summer day, even with the summer storm, than the dull, grey, quiet, windless weather! Of course, if she could have found sanctuary in the Church —— But her faith is not absolute and unwavering enough for that; she has read too many philosophies; she requires, too, open-air and vigorous life; the cloister would have been to her a prison. She is one of those whose religion lies in activity; she will worship God through her children.’
Sabran entered as she mused, and knelt down before her.
‘You have been my good angel, always,’ he murmured. ‘How can I thank you? I think she would never have let her eyes rest on me but for you.’
The Princess smiled.
‘My friend, you are one of those on whom the eyes of women willingly rest, perhaps too willingly. But you — you will have no eyes for any other now? You must deserve my faith in you. Is it not so?’
‘Ah, madame,’ he answered with deep emotion, ‘all words seem so trite and empty; any fool can make phrases, but when I say that my life shall be consecrated to her, I mean it, in the uttermost royalty, the uttermost gratitude.’
‘I believe you,’ said the Princess, as she laid her hand lightly on his bent head. ‘Perhaps no man can understand entirely all that she surrenders in admitting that she loves you; for a proud woman to confess so much of weakness is very hard: but I think you will comprehend her better than any other would. I think you will not force her to pass the door of disillusion; and remember that though she will leave you free as air — for she is not made of that poor stuff which would enslave what it loves — she would not soon forgive too great abuse of freedom. I mean if you were ever — ever unfaithful ——
‘For what do you take me?’ he cried, with indignant passion. ‘Is there another woman in the world who could sit beside her, and not be dwarfed, paled, killed, as a candle by the sun?’
‘You are only her betrothed,’ said the Princess, with a little sigh. ‘Men see their wives with different eyes; so I have been told, at least. Familiarity is no courtier, and time is always cruel.’
‘Nay, time shall be our dearest friend,’ said Sabran, with a tenderness in his voice that spoke more constancy than a thousand oaths. ‘She will be beautiful when she is old, as you are; age will neither alarm nor steal from her; her bodily beauty is like her spiritual, it is cast in lines too pure and clear not to defy the years. Oh, mother mine! (let me call you that) fear nothing; I will love her so well that, all unworthy now, I will grow worthy her, and cause her no moment’s pain that human love can spare her.’
‘Her people shall be your people, and her God your God,’ murmured the Princess, with her hand still lying lightly on his head, obediently bent.
When late that night he went across the lake the monks were at their midnight orisons; their voices murmured as one man’s the Latin words of praise and prayer, and made a sound like that of a great sea rolling slowly on a lonely shore.
He believed naught that they believed. Deity was but a phrase to him; faith and a future life were empty syllables to him. Yet, in the fulness of his joy and the humiliation of his spirit, he felt his heart swell, his pride sink subdued. He knelt down in the hush and twilight of that humble place of prayer, and for the first moment in many years he also praised God.
No one heeded him; he knelt behind them in the gloom unnoticed; he rose refreshed as men in barren lands in drought are soothed by hearing the glad fall of welcome rain. He had no place there, and in another hour would have smiled at his own weakness; but now he remembered nothing except that he, utterly beyond his deserts, was blessed. As the monks rose to their feet and their loud chanting began to vibrate in the air, he went out unheard, as he had entered, and stood on the narrow strip of land that parted the chapel from the lake. The green waters were rolling freshly in under a strong wind, the shadows of coming night were stealing on; in the south-west a pale yellow moonlight stretched broadly in a light serene as dawn, and against it there rose squarely and darkly with its many turrets the great keep of Hohenszalras.
He looked, but it was not of that great pile and all which it represented and symbolised that he thought now.
It was of the woman he loved as a woman, not as a great possessor of wealth and lands.
‘Almost I wish that she were poor as the saints she resembles!’ he thought, with a tender passion that for the hour was true. It seemed to him that had he seen her standing in her shift in the snow, like our Lady of Hungary, discrowned and homeless, he would have been glad. He was honest with the honesty of passion. It was not the mistress of Hohenszalras that he loved, but his own wife.
Such a marriage could not do otherwise than arouse by its announcement the most angry amazement, the most indignant protests from all the mighty houses with which for so many centuries the house of Szalras had allied itself. In a few tranquil sentences she made known her intentions to those of her relations whom she felt bound thus to honour; but she gave them clearly to understand that it was a formula of respect not an act of consultation. When they received her letters they knew that her marriage was already quite as irrevocable as though it had already taken place in the Hof-Kapelle of Vienna.
All her relatives and all her order were opposed to her betrothal; a cold sufferance was the uttermost which any of them extended to Sabran. A foreigner and poor, and, with a troubled and uncertain past behind him, he was bitterly unwelcome to the haughty Prussian, Austrian, and Hungarian nobilities to which she belonged; neither his ancient name nor his recent political brilliancy and military service could place him on an equality with them in their eyes. Her trustees, the Grand Duke of Lilienhöhe and the Cardinal Vàsàrhely, with her cousin Kaulnitz, hurried in person as swiftly as special trains could bring them to the Iselthal, but they were too late to avert the blow.
‘It is not a marriage for her,’ said Kaulnitz, angrily.
‘Why not? It is a very old family,’ said the Princess, with no less irritation.
‘But quite decayed, long ruined,’ he returned. ‘This man was himself born in exile.’
‘As they exile everybody twice in every ten years in France!
‘And there have been stories — —’
‘Of whom are there not stories? Calumny is the parasite of character; the stronger the character the closer to it clings the strangler.’
‘I never heard him accused of any strength, except of the wrist in l’escrime!’
‘Do you know anything dishonourable of him? If you do you are bound to say it.’
‘Dishonourable is a grave word. No, I cannot say that I do; the society he frequents is a guarantee against that; but his life has been indifferent, complicated, uncertain, not a life to be allied with that of such a woman as Wanda. My dear Princess, it has been a life dans le milieu parisien; what more would you have me say?’
‘Prince Archambaud’s has been that. Yet three years since you earnestly pressed his suit on Wanda.’
‘Archambaud! He is one of the first alliances in Europe; he is of blood royal, and he has not been more vicious than other men.’
‘It would be better he should have been less so, since he lives so near ‘the fierce light that beats upon the throne;’ an electric light which blackens while it illumines! My good Kaulnitz, you wander very far afield. If you know anything serious against M. de Sabran it is your duty to say it.’
‘He is a gambler.’
‘He has renounced gambling.’
‘He is a duellist.’
‘Society was of much better constitution when the duel was its habitual phlebotomy.’
‘He has been the lover of many women.’
‘I am afraid that is nothing singular.’
‘He is hardly more than an adventurer.’
‘He counts his ancestry in unbroken succession from the clays of Dagobert.
‘He has nothing but a pignon sur rue in Paris, and a league or two of rocks and sand in Brittany; yet, though so poor, he made money enough by cards and speculation to be for three years the amant en titre of Cochonette.’
Madame Ottilie rose with a little frown.
‘I think we will say no more, my dear Baron; the matter is, after all, not yours or mine to decide. Wanda will assuredly do as she likes.’
‘But you have so much influence with her.’
‘I have none; no one has any: and I think you do not understand her in the least. It may cost her very much to avow to him that she loves him, but once having done that, it will cost her nothing at all to avow it to the world. She is much too proud a woman to care for the world.’
‘He is gentilhomme de race, I grant,’ admitted with reluctance the Grand Duke of Lilienhöhe.
‘When has a noble of Brittany been otherwise?’ asked the Princess Ottilie.
‘I know,’ said the Prince; ‘but you will admit that he occupies a difficult position — an invidious one.’
‘And he carries himself well through it. It is a difficult position which is the test of breeding,’ said the Princess, triumphantly, ‘and I deny entirely that it is what you call an invidious one. It is you who have the idea of the crowd when you lay so much stress on the mere absence of money.’
