The Salzburg Tales (13 page)

In the arena the public cry, “Another bull!” and the Corregidor scratches his ear; so they finish the afternoon off with a little dessert. That was a great Corrida!

And poor Sganarelle, as he well deserved, found, when he got to Cadiz, that the report of the bullion ship was all a hoax, and he looked for another position as squire to a gentleman: but did not find it, for what was Sganarelle without Don Juan?

Only the Thousand and Three wept piteously and prayed, “Send again, O merciful heavens, his like.” (Whether this prayer was granted, I take leave to ask the gentlemen here: I dare not ask the ladies!)

T
HE
company laughed. Then the Lawyer from Buda-Pesth said: “This is an excellent idea. Look, they are going to give the play in the Garden Theatre, here, at hand; but it is not yet time. Let someone else tell us a tale! And why shouldn't we fill in our leisure hours this way, listening to tales! What a company we are! We come from every corner of the earth: we have seen the world; we know Life. Let us amuse each other.”

“Or even if we ignore life,” said the English Gentleman, “let us amuse each other.”

“For that,” said the Viennese Conductor, “you must tell the next tale.”

“I appeal to established authority,” said the Englishman.

“We refer you to precedent,” said the Solicitor.

“Two tales have been told.''

The Frenchwoman laughed at them and cried, “It is absolutely necessary to have a Master of Ceremonies: we will be a democracy headed by an autocrat. The Viennese Conductor holds the baton with grace, he does not fear society, he does not tremble to command: he must be our Master of Tongues.”

The Viennese Conductor had the suffrages of all, and he designated the English Gentleman as the next speaker. This one shook his head, but began to speak without further ado.

 

T
HERE
was, in recent years, a Spanish youth of pure race who married a Moorish beauty and took her to Paris, where lived his cousin Ferdinand, a rich man of fashion. The sacrifices that the marriage had cost him, and his wife's youth and ardent beauty, put him into such an extremity of passion that he could never leave her by day or night, but spent his time with her in the house and garden, interrupting all she did with kisses, and sometimes washing her hands and feet with tears. But he was naturally frail and in a few months this peculiar flame had so burned up his blood that he had to take to his bed. Then he sent for a black dress for Zelis, and ordered from a wellknown sculptor a statue of her to serve him for a headstone.

When the statue was finished and Zelis came to see it, she saw that it was naked, of full height and cast in gold. At the foot was engraved, “Death, my Bride.” She cried and begged Carlos to put away his freaks, and to live, and love her with a calmer and more honest passion. But he continued to be consumed by his insatiable love, was reduced to a shadow by these extravagances, and was only cured by an accident.

His cousin Ferdinand, a handsome, lively man, whose rake's progress before marriage had amused all fashionable Paris and Madrid, began to call on Zelis and entertain her. He came every day and they walked in the gardens. A few days after his first visit Carlos was able to get up and look out of the window at the terrace where they took tea, and in a week or so he was so much better that he could walk about the house without help. Zelis was rejoiced at this recovery. Some time after this she brought into the world a son. Ferdinand took a violent fancy to his nephew, was for ever in the house dandling the child, and chatting with its mother, and Carlos was displeased to find him several times standing before the naked golden statue with
a lively, covetous expression. Once he said to his cousin, “I will pay you a very high price for that fine piece of workmanship, when you want to sell it!” Carlos replied, “You know I do not want to sell it.” “Why do you call it ‘Death?'” said Ferdinand, gaily: “It is liker life than death. Do you call it Death, to veil, with decent melancholy, its imprudent grace?” And Carlos grew anxious and jealous.

One day he was obliged to go out for a few hours and when he returned he heard a loud outcry in the house. He rushed in and found his wife lying on an ottoman, dead, and Ferdinand weeping beside her. With clamour and confused details, his servants and his cousin told Carlos that Zelis had flung herself from the window into the paved court and had so killed herself. Carlos stared at the body and murmured, “It isn't possible: I can't believe it!” and from that time on for many days did not say a word to his household. He watched with his oldest servant by his wife's body, which was embalmed in their presence. A goldsmith came and took away the gold statue, but returned it on the day of the burial, and there was now engraved at the foot, “Zelis, my Life.”

Then began a weary time for the household. Ferdinand's wife, forgetting the jealousy which had destroyed her peace in these last days, came and took in charge the ailing and neglected child; and Carlos did not even notice that his son was gone. He dressed in black, put ashes on his head, and day and night scarcely ate or slept. The statue was put behind a thick curtain at one end of a gallery and Carlos slept at the foot of the pedestal on a mattress. He had to walk about on the arm of the old servant, and all were sure he would soon die. The smooth figure he covered with a thousand kisses, ten times repeated, and would often fall asleep clasping it. The right foot of the statue, advanced a little, as if the woman had just taken a small light step on a carpet, was polished by his lips. His hair was white, his clothes hung on him like sacks: the house decayed, his servants robbed him and ran away, his banker neglected to send him notices of his dividends, and his factors, his accounts, and his whole estate fell away from him as if it had turned to water.

Presently he had only one servant left him, this old man who had watched with him, and who stayed on because he could without much concealment get rid of the works of art in the house to dealers; he wore Carlos's clothes and kept his own family and friends on the provisions which he was still able to order. He emptied the cellar, the pantry, the attics, the salons and left a bare furniture: and when there was nothing more to filch, and nothing to eat, he disappeared one day, after leaving Carlos a tin box which he put by the statue, and which contained a woollen shirt, a pair of shoes, a cloak and a gold piece. He came back and substituted a silver piece for the gold piece, and then went away altogether.

Presently creditors were knocking at all the doors, and all the doors were opened to them by the wind, and they were said good-day to by the barnyard which had installed itself there. The house was sold. His cousin Ferdinand came to Carlos then and said, “Where is your golden statue? You must sell it to pay your creditors!” Carlos did not answer. Ferdinand said more gently, “Carlos, tell me where your statue is and I will put it into my house and keep it for you as security, until you have put your estate in order, and can pay me back the expenses I have been put to!” Carlos looked vaguely at his cousin. “I offer you a very high price for your statue,” said Ferdinand: “enough to set you up again in a decent way till your affairs are settled, or to get back to Spain in a proper condition: listen, Carlos, sell me the statue of Zelis, your dead wife!” Carlos at last spoke softly and said, “I have no statue, Ferdinand: only my wife. That is all I have in the world.”

But Ferdinand followed him and found out where he had hidden the statue, in a box, buried in a corner of the park: then he took it from him, and had it carried to his own house, reasoning that he was really doing Carlos a service, and that Carlos might some day get back his senses, and be able to redeem it. He then put Carlos in a private lunatic asylum and went home to his wife who was not quite satisfied with the whole business.

Carlos was in that institution eleven years, and did not cease to mourn the loss of his golden wife. He was soft and mild to
the attendants, answered the director intelligently and devised a thousand means for escaping. When visitors came twice a week they would delight to talk with this pathetic figure, and when he had their sympathy, he would suddenly fall on his knees, and beg them to get him out, because he was sane and kept there wrongfully by his jealous adulterous cousin, the engineer of his ruin. Then, one day, the visitors who came on a Sunday, left the illustrated Sunday newspaper which featured the social activities of the rich. It was Tuesday by the time it reached Carlos. He scarcely glanced at it, yet he saw immediately as if it had been written in red ink, his wife's name, and above this he found a photograph of the golden statue, garlanded with roses and chains, and at its foot the words “Zelis, my Life.” It had been chief piece at a fête given to society by Ferdinand on the twelfth birthday of his ward, Carlos's lost son.

After this day, Carlos began to walk in the gardens of the hospital, not affable as before, but holding his hand over his heart as if he had a mortal wound, and often, leaning against a tree or against the wall where plumtrees were trained like Lorraine crosses, he would say, “My head, heart and entrails are in ashes.” At night they heard him calling to Zelis, to leave her elegant home and sinful love, to come and succour him who had spent his whole life and poured out, on her alone, his passion, affection and intelligence. Sometimes, it seemed, in the night she came, and put her hands on his head and breast, and left them there for an hour or two while he slept.

Now, when the son of Carlos asked where were his father and mother, his adoptive mother said that his father had been killed in a foreign country and his mother had died of grief. When Ferdinand heard this explanation he always made a wry face, but said nothing. His wife begged him many times to return the gold statue to Carlos or Carlos to the statue, and so perhaps restore him to health, but her husband always refused. He kept the statue in his own apartment, draped in a black veil, and only brought it out when, his wife being away, he gave fantastic parties. Ferdinand's wife had always held
Zelis in disfavour and now she roundly reproached her husband for the bad influence the Moorish beauty had had on his life, in bringing him back gradually to his former wild ways, and in making him put away his own cousin.

When April came and the household packed up to move to the country house, Ferdinand's wife breathed freer, but the first thing she saw when she went into the newly-aired hall of their villa was the golden statue, standing grave and fine as ever, and at her feet the words, “Zelis, my Life.”

Then she had an attack of nerves (for the season had been trying), and told her husband she would sell the creature, or have it put in safe deposit for the boy when he grew older. The next day the statue had vanished. Ferdinand began to make long solitary rides, with his gun and dog, into the forested country which surrounded the estate, stayed away all day and only returned at nightfall with the homing birds, his horse looking plump and rested, his gun idle and his bag empty. She followed Ferdinand in a hunter's costume one day, and found that he spent the day in a lonely cottage, heavily shuttered and barricaded, in which was the golden statue. As astonished as angry, she asked him if he left that priceless thing out all night in the lonely woods, for anyone to steal. “My servants watch over it,” he said: and as he persisted and became always more gloomy and unnatural, she was obliged to have the strange metal woman back in the house, but she began to fear her unreasonably. Ferdinand now kept the statue entirely in his own apartment and refused to let the growing boy see it, for fear he would learn its history and claim it; and he spent long hours by its side hopelessly desiring the dead woman.

A little later his affliction had increased so that he insisted on having the image to sleep with him, and had it wrapped in a silk sheet each night and put in his own bed. He said that then under its wrappings the body began to breathe gently, and he heard soft sighs as of a young woman gratefully asleep. At other times he heard a voice as if the young woman were speaking, not to him, but to someone
at a distance: at last, one night he broke out of his apartment, forced his servants to bring sticks and a dog, and said that Carlos was there, in the dark conversing with Zelis, and begging her to return to him.

Then he acknowledged that for many nights now his ears had been full of Carlos's sobbing, and his head stuffed to desperation with his prayers: and that the statue itself was restless in the daytime and moved about the room, and now at night was as still as a stone, as if its soul had gone elsewhere. To keep the statue at home he would be forced to satisfy it.

Therefore he sent for Carlos and brought him home, and kept him there, under his eye, but never let him speak to or see the people in the house. So they lived together for a short time, Carlos, Zelis and Ferdinand. The blinds were lowered in that part of the house, and the attendants that served them were blindfolded before they entered the room, and guided themselves from the door by ropes placed there for them. Thus nobody knew what went on, but the servants invented a legend, and eventually this spread discreetly, so that the white turrets of the house, behind trees, would be pointed out by travellers from the railway.

The son was now fourteen years old and heard a distorted tale of what happened in the forbidden wing from a servant-girl who had fallen in love with him. He crept in one day behind one of the blindfold servants and saw two old men, both yellow as gold, and both sitting motionless, as if they were paralysed, only moving their white eyes, in the midst of the faded hangings of the apartment. One was Ferdinand his foster-father, and the other was unknown. Yellow dust covered everything in the room, and the summer sun through the windows made the statue glitter inconceivably. As he looked he imagined that the subtle mouth of the golden idol smiled sidelong at him; the old men never moved their heads and he escaped unseen. He thought of it for two days, with his heart beating hard and his dreams troubled, and then he said, “I will get goldsmiths and have it melted down, and then its fascination, which is entirely a question of lines and contours, will vanish,” for he wanted to restore to his
foster-mother her long-mourned husband. At the same time, he was marvellously affected by the statue's grace, and wondered what this personage could be that was so exquisitely modelled.