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Read Ebook: Wanda Vol. 3 (of 3) by Ouida
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Ebook has 1370 lines and 77213 words, and 28 pages
WANDA
OUIDA
IN THREE VOLUMES
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICADILLY
WANDA.
When they came home from their tour amidst the mines of Galicia and the plains of Hungary, and from their reception amongst the adoring townsfolk of restored Idrac, the autumn was far advanced, and the long rains and the wild winds of October had risen, making of every brook a torrent.
On their return she found intelligence from Paris that a friend of her father's, and her own godfather, the Duc de Noira, had died, bequeathing her his gallery of pictures, and his art collection of the eighteenth century, which were both famous. The Duc had been a Legitimist and a hermit. He had been unmarried, and had spent all the latter years of his life in amassing treasures of art, for which he had no heir of his own blood to care a jot. The bequest was a very precious one, and her presence in Paris was requested. Regretful for herself to leave Hohenszalras, she perceived that to Sabran the tidings were welcome. Moved by an unselfish impulse she said at once:
Sabran hesitated; he was tempted, yet he was half reluctant to yield to the temptation. He felt that he would willingly be by himself awhile, yet he loved his wife too passionately to quit her without pain. His own conscience made her presence at times oppress and trouble him, yet he had never lost the half-religious adoration with which she had first inspired him. He suggested a compromise--why should they not winter in Paris?
She was about to dissent, for of all seasons in the Tauern she loved the winter best; but when she looked at him she saw such eager anticipation on his face that she suppressed her own wishes unuttered.
'We will go, if you like,' she said, without any hesitation or reluctance visible. 'I dare say we can find some pretty house. Aunt Ottilie will be pleased; there is nothing here which cannot do without us for a time, we have such trusty stewards; only I think it would be more change for you if you went alone.'
'No!' he said; 'separation is a sort of death; do not let us tempt fate by it. Life is so short at its longest; it is ingratitude to lose an hour that we can spend together.'
'There was never such a lover since Petrarca,' she said, with a smile. 'Nay, you eclipse him: he was never tried by marriage.'
But though he jested at it, his great love for her seemed like a beautiful light about her life. What did his state-secret matter? What did it matter what cause had led him to avoid political life?--he loved her so well.
The following month they were in Paris, having found an hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great sunny garden; and when they were fairly installed there, the Princess and the children and the horses followed them, and their arrival made an event of great interest and importance in the city which of all others in the world it is hardest thus to impress.
To Sabran it was not so offensive; there was the Slav in him, which loved display, and was not ill-pleased by notoriety. All this admiration around them made him feel that his life after all had been a great success, that he had drawn prizes in the lottery of fate which all men envied him; it helped him to forget Egon V?s?rhely. He had never so nearly felt affection for Bela as when lines of men and women stood still to watch the handsome child gallop on his pony down the avenues of the Bois.
And then he felt ashamed of the poorness and triviality of the thought, which was not one he would have expressed to his wife. That very morning, when she had read a long flattery of herself in a journal of fashion, she had cast the sheet from her with disgust on every line of her face.
He had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not done so. He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.
'They will put this in the papers!' said Bela, when the snow came and he had his sledge out for the first time with four little Hungarian ponies.
'That is the poison of cities!' said Wanda, as she heard him. 'Who can have been so foolish as to tell him of the papers?'
'Your heir, my dear, will never want for reporters of any flattery,' said his father. 'It is as well he should run the gauntlet of them early.'
Bela listened, and said to his brother a little later: 'I like Paris. Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the print, and then they want to see us.'
'But they love us at home,' said Gela.
'That does not matter,' said Bela with hauteur.
Wanda called the children to her.
The next day, as Bela drove in his sledge down the white avenues through the staring crowds, his little fair face was very grave under its curls; he thought of the Dauphin.
When the weather opened, Wanda took him and his brother to Versailles and Trianon, and told them more of that saddest of all earthly histories of fallen greatness. Gela sobbed aloud; Bela was silent and grew pale.
'I hate Paris,' he said very slowly, as they went back to it in the red close of the wintry afternoon.
'Do not hate Paris. Do not hate anything or anyone,' said his mother softly; 'but love your own home and your own people, and be grateful for them.'
Bela lifted his little cap and made the sign of the Cross, as he did when he saw anything holy. 'I am the Dauphin at home,' he thought; and he felt the tears in his eyes, though he never would cry as Gela did.
So she gave them her simples as antidotes to the city's poison, and occupied herself with her children, with the poor around her, with the various details of her distant estates, and paid but little heed to that artificial world which, when she heeded it, offended and irritated her. To please Sabran she went to a few great houses and to the opera, and gave many entertainments herself, happy that he was happy in it, but not otherwise interested in the life around her, or moved by the homage of it.
'It is much more my jewels than it is myself that they stare at,' she assured him, when he told her of the admiration which she elicited wherever she appeared. 'Believe me, if you put my pearls or my diamonds on Madame Chose or Baroness Niemand, they would gather and gaze quite as much.'
He laughed.
'Last night I think you wore no ornaments except a few tea-roses, and I saw them follow you just the same. It is very odd that you never seem to understand that you are a beautiful woman.'
'I am glad to be so in your eyes, if I never shall be in my own. As for that popularity of society, it never commended itself to me. It has too strong a savour of the mob.'
'When you are so proud to the world why are you so humble to me?'
She was silent a moment, then said:
'I think when one loves any other very much, one becomes for him altogether unlike what one is to the world. As for being proud, I have never fairly made out whether my pride is humility or my humility pride, and none of my confessors have ever been able to tell me. I assure you I have searched my heart in vain.'
One day she suggested to him that he should visit Romaris.
'Now you are near for so long a time, surely you should go,' she urged. 'It is not well never to see your poor people. The priest is a good man, indeed; but he cannot altogether make up for your absence.'
He answered with some irritation that they were not his people. All the land had been parcelled out, and nothing remained to the name of Sabran except a strip of the sea-shore and one old half ruined tower: he could not see that he had any duties or obligations there. She did not insist, because she never pursued a theme which appeared unwelcome; but in herself she wondered at the dislike which was in him towards his Breton hamlet, wondered that he did not wish one of his sons to bear its title, wondered that he did not desire the children to see once, at least, the sea-nest of his forefathers. It was more effort to her than usual to restrain herself from pressing questions upon him. But she did forbear; and as a consolation to her conscience sent to the Cur? of Romaris a sum of money for the poor, which was so large that it astounded and bewildered the holy man by the weight of responsibility it laid on him.
The indifference shocked her the more because of the profound conviction, in which she had been reared, of the duties of the noble to his poorer brethren, and the ties of mutual affection which bound together her and her people's interests.
'The weapon of our order against the Socialist is duty,' she had once said to him.
He, more sceptical, had told her that no weapon, not even that anointed one, can turn aside the devilish hate of envy. But she held to her creed, and strove to rear her children in its tenets. It always seemed to her that the Cross before which the fiend shrinks cowering in 'Faust' is but a symbol of the power of a noble life to force even hatred to its knees.
She did not care for this season in Paris, but she did not let him perceive any dissatisfaction in her. She made her own interests out of the arts and charity; she bought the H?tel Noira, and left everything as the Duc had left it; she found pleasure in intercourse with her royal exiled friends, and left her husband his own entire liberty of action.
'Are you never jealous?' said her royal friend to her once. 'He is so much liked--so much made love to--I wonder you are not jealous!'
'I?' she echoed: and it seemed to her friend as if in that one pronoun she had said volumes. 'Jealous!'
She repeated the word as she drove home alone that day, and almost wondered what it meant. Who could be to him what she was? Who could dethrone her from that 'great white throne' to which his adoration had raised her? If his senses ever strayed, his soul would never swerve from its loyalty.
When she reached home that afternoon she found a card, on which was written with a pencil, in German:
'So sorry not to find you. I am in Paris to see my doctor. Zdenka has taken my service at Court. I will come to you to-morrow.'
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