Wanda, Vol. 2 (of 3)

'And your late guest? Have you nothing to tell me? Surely you have seen him?'

'He called once,' she answered, 'and I heard him speak at the Chamber.'

'And was that all?' cried the Princess, disappointed.

'He speaks very well in public,' added Wanda, 'and he said many tender and grateful things of you, and sent you many messages--such grateful ones that my memory is too clumsy a tray to hold such eggshell china.'

She was angered with herself as she spoke, but the fragrance of the white lilac and the remembrance of its donor pursued her--angered with herself, too, because Hohenszalras seemed for the moment sombre, solitary, still, almost melancholy, wrapped in that winter whiteness and stillness which she had always loved so well.

The next morning she saw all her people, visited her schools and her stables, and tried to persuade herself that she was as contented as ever.

The aurist came from Paris shortly after her, and consoled the Princess by assuring her that the slight deafness she suffered from occasionally was due to cold.

'Of course!' she said, with some triumph. 'These mountains, all this water, rain whenever there is not snow, snow whenever there is not rain; it is a miracle, and the mercy of Heaven, if one saves any of one's five senses uninjured in a residence here.'

She had her satin hood trebly wadded, and pronounced the aurist a charming person. Herr Greswold in an incautious moment had said to her that deafness was one of the penalties of age and did not depend upon climate. A Paris doctor would not have earned his fee of two hundred napoleons if he had only produced so ungallant a truism. She heard a little worse after his visit, perhaps, but if so, she said that was caused by the additional wadding in her hood. He had told her to use a rose-water syringe, and Herr Greswold was forbidden her presence for a week because he averred that you might as well try to melt the glacier with a lighted pastille.

The aurist gone, life at Hohenszalras resumed its even tenor; and except for, the post, the tea-cups, and the kind of dishes served at dinner, hardly differed from what life had been there in the sixteenth century, save that there were no saucy pages playing in the court, and no destriers stamping in the stalls, and no culverins loaded on the bastions.

'It is like living between the illuminated leaves of one of the Hours,' thought the Princess, and though her conscience told her that to dwell so in a holy book like a pressed flower was the most desirable life that could be granted by Heaven to erring mortality, still she felt it was dull. A little gossip, a little movement, a little rolling of other carriage-wheels than her own, had always seemed desirable to her.

Life here was laid down on broad lines. It was stately, austere, tranquil; one day was a mirror of all the rest. The Princess fretted for some little frou-frou of the world to break its solemn silence.

When Wanda returned from her ride one forenoon she said a little abruptly to her aunt:

'I suppose you will be glad to hear you have convinced me. I have telegraphed to Ludwig to open and air the house in Vienna; we will go there for three months. It is, perhaps, time I should be seen at Court.'

'It is a very sudden decision!' said Madame Ottilie, doubting that she could hear aright.

'It is the fruit of your persuasions, dear mother mine! The only advantage in having houses in half a dozen different places is to be able to go to them without consideration. You think me obstinate, whimsical, barbaric; the Kaiserin thinks so too. I will endeavour to conquer my stubbornness. We will go to Vienna next week. You will see all your old friends, and I all my old jewels.'

The determination once made, she adhered to it. She had felt a vague annoyance at the constancy and the persistency with which regret for the lost society of Sabran recurred to her. She had attributed it to the solitude in which she lived: that solitude which is the begetter and the nurse of thought may also be the hotbed of unwise fancies. It was indeed a solitude filled with grave duties, careful labours, high desires and endeavours; but perhaps, she thought, the world for a while, even in its folly, might be healthier, might preserve her from the undue share which the memory of a stranger had in her musings.

Her people, her lands, her animals, would none of them suffer by a brief absence; and perhaps there were duties due as well to her position as to her order. She was the only representative of the great Counts of Szalras. With the whimsical ingratitude to fate common to human nature, she thought she would sooner have been obscure, unnoticed, free. Her rank began to drag on her with something like the sense of a chain. She felt that she was growing irritable, fanciful, thankless; so she ordered the huge old palace in the Herrengasse to be got ready, and sought the world as others sought the cloister.

In a week's time she was installed in Vienna, with a score of horses, two score of servants, and all the stir and pomp that attend a great establishment in the most aristocratic city of Europe, and she made her first appearance at a ball at the Residenz covered with jewels from head to foot; the wonderful old jewels that for many seasons had lain unseen in their iron coffers--opals given by Rurik, sapphires taken from Kara Mustafa, pearls worn by her people at the wedding of Mary of Burgundy, diamonds that had been old when Maria Theresa had been young.

She had three months of continual homage, of continual flattery, of what others called pleasure, and what none could have denied was splendour. Great nobles laid their heart and homage before her feet, and all the city looked after her for her beauty as she drove her horses round the Ringstrasse. It left her all very cold and unamused and indifferent.

She was impatient to be back at Hohenszalras, amidst the stillness of the woods, the sound of the waters.

'You cannot say now that I do not care for the world, because I have forgotten what it was like,' she observed to her aunt.

'I wish you cared more,' said the Princess. 'Position has its duties.'

'I never dispute that; only I do not see that being wearied by society constitutes one of them. I cannot understand why people are so afraid of solitude; the routine of the world is quite as monotonous.'

'If you only appreciated the homage that you receive----'

'Surely one's mind is something like one's conscience: if one can be not too utterly discontented with what it says one does not need the verdict of others.'

'That is only a more sublime form of vanity. Really, my love, with your extraordinary and unnecessary humility in some things, and your overweening arrogance in others, you would perplex wiser heads than the one I possess.'

'No; I am sure it is not vanity or arrogance at all; it may be pride--the sort of pride of the "Rohan je suis." But it is surely better than making one's barometer of the smiles of simpletons.'

'They are not all simpletons.'

'Oh, I know they are not; but the world in its aggregate is very stupid. All crowds are mindless, the crowd of the Haupt-Allee as well as of the Wurstel-Prater.'

The Haupt-Allee indeed interested her still less than the Wurstel-Prater, and she rejoiced when she set her face homeward and saw the chill white peaks of the Glöckner arise out of the mists. Yet she was angry with herself for the sense of something missing, something wanting, which still remained with her. The world could not fill it up, nor could all her philosophy or her pride do so either.

The spring was opening in the Tauern, slow coming, veiled in rain, and parting reluctantly with winter, but yet the spring, flinging primroses broadcast through all the woods, and filling the shores of the lakes with hepatica and gentian; the loosened snows were plunging with a hollow thunder into the ravines and the rivers, and the grass was growing green and long on the alps between the glaciers. A pale sweet sunshine was gleaming on the grand old walls of Hohenszalras, and turning to silver and gold all its innumerable casements as she returned, and Donau and Neva leaped in rapture on her.

'It is well to be at home,' she said, with a smile, to Herr Greswold, as she passed through the smiling and delighted household down the Rittersaal, which was filled with plants from the hothouses, gardenias and gloxianas, palms and ericas, azaleas and camellias glowing between the stern armoured figures of the knights and the time-darkened oak of their stalls.

'This came from Paris this morning for Her Excellency,' said Hubert, as he showed his mistress a gilded boat-shaped basket, filled with tea-roses and orchids; a small card was tied to its handle with '_Willkommen_' written on it.

She coloured a little as she recognised the handwriting of the single word.

How could he have known, she wondered, that she would return home that day? And for the flowers to be so fresh, a messenger must have been sent all the way with them by express speed, and Sabran was poor.

'That is the Stanhopea tigrina,' said Herr Greswold, touching one with reverent fingers; 'they are all very rare. It is a welcome worthy of you, my lady.'

'A very extravagant one,' said Wanda von Szalras, with a certain displeasure that mingled with a softened emotion. 'Who brought it?'

'The Marquis de Sabran, by extra-poste, himself this morning,' answered Hubert--an answer she did not expect. 'But he would not wait; he would not even take a glass of tokayer, or let his horses stay for a feed of corn.'

'What knight-errantry!' said the Princess well pleased.