Читать книгу General Crack - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 3

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The guide knew little—or would not speak. He seemed to be a man who had been so long silent that words were difficult. When I asked him about the portraits, he sullenly pointed to the names written in the corner of the ornate frame, where huge acanthus leaves scrolled amidst split fruits and massive grapes.

"But I am a foreigner," I protested, "and these names mean nothing to me."

A chilly sun made a faint refulgence in the immense room, falling clearly through the high, deep windows, which looked upon a tranquil and dusky garden, where heroic statues guarded, with a pensive air, parterres which for many a summer had borne no flowers.

The guide pointed to a candelabra in gilded bronze, and reluctantly extolled its merits as the finest piece of work in the vast room. It seemed as if he wished to distract me from these portraits of which he knew nothing. The candelabra was formed of grinning masks, gleaming snakes, and stiff, unearthly blooms, well suited to the rigid metal. I wondered how long since orange scarlet flowers of fire had also bloomed there, from the white stems of scented candles. A long while, no doubt...

"No one comes here but yourself, I suppose, and any traveller to whom you may chance to show the Château?"

"No one," he replied. "It is impossible to live in a place like this nowadays, and every one has forgotten it, and all that it is about, and every one who lived here. Even the pictures," he grumbled, "are not very good, and badly require cleaning."

"One of them," I said, "appears to be an emperor; but it has no name."

"The name is there if you look," replied the old man, sullenly, "and it is an emperor; but there were a great many of them in those days, and none of them lasted very long."

The portrait to which I referred was, indeed, blackened, and nothing showed clearly except the long, pale face of the young man, and his blond or powdered hair, tied with a cerulean ribbon. He had those marked features which we associate with the most important Imperial Dynasty, and his eyes were large, blue and appealing. He appeared to be wearing royal robes, and under his slender right hand was a purple cushion, on which rested an opulent diadem, richly embellished with enamel and jewels, but all, now, coated with dirt and dust; in many places cracked beneath the decayed varnish.

The companion picture was that of a girlish woman, very elaborately dressed; but this, also, had been much defaced by time.

"She was too plump," grumbled the guide, looking up at the pictured face, "and very stupid."

But I could discern little of the portrait—only that it was that of a soft, blonde creature, tightly laced into elaborate brocades, and feeding, from a golden chalice, an eagle delicately crowned. The lady, however, regarded neither the gilded eagle nor the gilded chalice, but gazed straight before her with light, mournful eyes. Her tresses were dressed high, and there was a braid of jasmine round her candid brow.

The frame of this picture was enriched by coats of arms, one above the other, mounting to the top, where the Imperial Eagle and the Imperial Diadem rose in a swirl of sumptuous pretension to an apex of gaudy splendour.

"She was related," remarked the surly guide, not without a certain pride, "to nearly all the noble houses of the empire." But he could tell me no more about her than that, and her name was Eleanora, which already, for myself, I had seen written on the frame in scrolling letters.

I lingered before these two pictures, which were set on either side of a ponderous ebony cabinet, emblazoned with Italian marble of rose, amber and orange hues. The guide told me, with sullen impatience, that there was nothing more to see in the Château, and he rattled the heavy keys, which he was longing to turn behind my back.

"Very few people come to see the Château," he added, reluctantly, "and, after all, why should they?"

The palace, I knew, had long ago been abandoned, and there was little left in it worthy of curiosity.

I was beset by many moods, and would have stayed in the mingling shadow and sunlight of that vast, arrogant and abandoned chamber; but the guide hastened me away.

"All these people are dead and forgotten," he grumbled. "What does it matter about them now?" He pointed out a basalt, lustrous black crucifix, and asked me if I had seen the golden bed of the Emperor in the Prince Palatine's residence at Oud-Buda?

"There, too," he continued, "is the regalia of St. Stephen, and his gilt crozier, and in the garden are silver tortoises and a marble cannon ball; but here we have no such treasures," he added, with sullen mournfulness. "There used to be a collection of medals, antiquities and Grecian coins; but they were sold some time ago. And now," he repeated, glancing at me with hostility, "there is nothing more to see."

But precisely at this moment I had observed yet another picture, which hung close to the opulent entrance door, and, with its back to the window, was in a sombre and gloomy light which rendered it barely distinguishable.

This was an official portrait, on a grand scale, of a gentleman in a dark grey velvet coat, lined with fur, over which was some light armour padded with orange satin.

Round his shoulders was a Polish pelisse lined with leopard skin, fastened by heavy gilt cords; and on his breast were several orders, some of which even I, a foreigner, could recognize, so famous were they: the Eagle of Poland, the Eagle of Prussia, and The Golden Fleece. In a delicate right hand, half hidden by elaborate ruffles of lace, he grasped a baton, sprinkled with fleurs de lis; the other hand, resting on the huge silk knot of the dark orange sash at the hip, was hidden in a military gauntlet, fringed and embroidered.

These details were those of many a grandiloquent and imposing picture of this period.

The man had been a prince and a general. I looked curiously at his face, and thought it the most vital countenance I had ever seen gaze from any canvas. Whether this was due to the skill of the artist or the personality of the sitter, I do not know; but the effect was remarkable—as if some one alive, eager and arrogant, had entered the lofty, deserted room.

The hair was arranged fantastically, after some transient fashion: full curls on the shoulders, and from a buckle behind, pomaded and powdered to a silver hue; but the man's face was dark, almost Oriental in dusky bloom. He was young, and handsome to an almost foppish degree. The short, regular features were composed and smooth, yet expressed an unconquerable energy, inflexible purpose and immutable will. How this was achieved in a face almost masklike in its serenity, I do not know. It seemed to emanate from the mere stare of the black eyes, the mere curl of the full lips, the mere pose of the erect head.

In the sombre, murky background, where there was the usual flaming fort and the usual charge of cavalry, bursting bombs and falling banners in a sulphurous gloom of tempestuous battle, I saw a coat of arms unknown to me, and a ducal coronet.

"Who was he?" I asked—but more of myself than of the guide, already fumbling at the door. A Polish or a Hungarian prince, for there was something Eastern about the man, despite the Western luxury of his elaborate and elegant attire.

"The House of Kurland," muttered the guide, impatiently; "of the House of Ketlar, which has long been extinct; but he had no name; he was an adventurer, a mercenary soldier. But everything about him has been forgotten." And with a sudden leer, the old man asked me if I had seen the vaults in the Church of the Capucine at Vienna—the Impedal vaults—"where," he said, "you will find ashes with stupendous titles writ above, and splendid coffins bearing the Imperial Crown and Sceptre, and adorned with scrolls of laurel and palm leaves."

I had seen them, and knew the heavy, classic elegance that adorned these gorgeous coffins in the damp vaults of the Capucine Church at Vienna. Yes, I had seen them—but lingered there a brief moment only, passing no further than the massive bronze door at the entrance to the vaults, glimpsing the immense sarcophagi within, behind railings and gates of iron, each sumptuously housing an Imperial tenant. While they were alive they filled the world with their fame; now they are dead, it is not good to visit them.

I asked the guide why he had reminded me of a charnel house, at this moment and in this place? And I was glad of the pale, insistent sunshine, and the airy freedom behind the lofty windows, though it was but the airy freedom of a ruined park with broken alleys and decayed statues. Then I looked again at the haughty and flourishing portrait, and saw now, beneath the hand that held the baton, a map upon a cushion—a map of Kurland.

"He seems to interest you," grinned the withered guide. "He was nobody."

"I can hardly believe that," I mused. It seemed to me as if the portrait would not allow me to depart, but stared me down, keeping me where I stood.

Yet I left it, in its emblazoned magnificence, and passed the great windows one by one, walking slowly down that long, deserted, sumptuous room. Faint, lustrous clouds were collecting in the translucent heavens; shadows were sailing lightly over the bleached hues of the garden; a watery wind had arisen—it came from the river, which I could not see, but knew to be quite near, beneath the hanging terraces which had once been so lavishly embellished with all the richness of exotic blossoms, and all the grandeur of elaborate trees.

"Who was he?" I asked. "A fop, a dandy, a courtier?"

"A great soldier," said the old man, as he descended the wide, painted, tattered staircase before me. "He won many victories, and took many towns."

"I should like to know his story," I said.

The old man shook his head.

"There is no story," he replied. "I told you he was nothing and no one knows anything about him."

I knew better: elegant, insolent, brave, superb, with his high pretension to chains, orders and coronet, sumptuously armed and gorgeously bedizened, and by all forgotten!

I feed the man at the entrance to the Château, and prepared to take my departure. His sunken eyes gleamed with satisfaction at seeing the last of me.

I had been a troublesome visitor, who had asked too many questions and overstayed my time; and still I lingered, glancing up at the huge and florid facade, which had something monstrous in its flaunting show of pride.

"What was his name?" I asked. "What did they call him?"

The old man asked, suspiciously:

"Who? Whom do you mean?"

"That portrait," I insisted; "the portrait in the corner."

The old man, hobbling away, rattling his keys, answered, over his shoulder:

"They called him General Crack."

Then he hesitated, and, with a flash of malice, called me back, and said that there was one more object in the Château that I might care to see, and he returned to that mournful desertion of the Château and entered a room on the ground floor which was dark and damp. The guide pulled back tarnished, heavy curtains and pointed to an old stained print hanging on the panelled wall.

A funeral procession, black with lugubrious solemnity, mourning sable robes, weepers, a coach with eight horses whose trappings touched the ground, whose plumes rose, monstrous, above the cortege, a pall bedizened with the arms I had seen in the portrait, and underneath:

The Pompous Obsequies of His Highness Prince Christian Rudolph Augustus Christopher Ketlar, Maréchal de France, Prince of The Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Orders of Poland and Saxony.

The guide made no remark, and his sunken eyes seemed to dare me to question him; I left the Château for the last time, looking back at it as one looks back at a place one is never likely to see again. By the scrolled rusty iron gates that enclosed this neglected domain, I saw through the litter of mouldering pine needles beneath a gaunt, black fir, one small bright green leaf.

The Author.

December, 1927.