Blanche Part 1

Blanche.

by Ossip Schubin.

INTRODUCTION

A few years since we chose to spend the summer in a chlet among the Dolomites of South Tyrol. Weird, fantastic, inaccessible, mysterious, grotesque, and yet often wearing a jewelled crown of eternal ice, these peaks soared into the ether above and around us. "Nothing," says a recent traveller, "can surpa.s.s the majesty and beauty of the towers and ramparts, the battlemented walls, impregnable castles, and gracefully pinnacled cathedrals into the forms of which their summits are built up. Their colouring is another striking characteristic; many of them rivet the eye with the richness of the tints,--deep reds, bright yellows, silvery whites, and the dark blues and blacks of the rocks.

But all these colours are modified and softened by a peculiar grayish white tint. The mountains look as if powdered over with some substance less hard and cold than newly fallen snow."

Although within a day's drive of Pieve di Cadore,--t.i.tian's birthplace--and not far from Cortina, we could hardly have found a more isolated spot. It was a hermitage, and we knew literally no one within hundreds of miles.

Ossip Schubin, the popular German novelist at that time, had sent us a volume of stories, with the request that we would translate them. We selected the story now offered as being most in sympathy with our romantic surroundings.

A learned Englishman has said, "If histories were written as histories should be, boys and girls would cry to read them." But alas! how is the spirit, the tone, of a dead century to be made to breathe again and report itself? The landscape alone is permanent; new figures constantly fill the foreground. Poetry, legend, myths, help us to divine some of the strange chords in the human chant, which, heavily burdened with sorrow, come down to us through the ages.

In this twentieth century no one sentiment or emotion is allowed so far to dominate as to crush out all others. But how was it in the days of the Crusaders, of the Minnesingers, of the Troubadours? If we would realise the seclusion, the loneliness of many lives centuries ago, we have only to enter either "The Wartburg" or the castle of Solmes Brauenfels in the Rhine valley, which dates back a thousand years. Look into the gloomy keeps; hear the shrieking of the bars in the heavy portcullis; gaze down into the damp, ugly moats; or listen to the soughing of the stormy winds in the branches of the tall forest trees which closely environ these grim abodes. It is conceivable that Elizabeth languished and died at "The Wartburg," when the chivalrous Tannhuser no longer came to inspire with love and song. Could even Martin Luther have lived in these cold, black walls without his work which daily rekindled his soul as he studied the inspired pages of the Bible?

Among the annals of a wicked old past, this story appears as a legend dimly connected with the pathetic face of the "Maid of Lille" a copy of which is in the Boston Art Museum.

There is no appeal here to the modern girl. The word "altruism" had not been invented. Yet there was genius in loving as Blanche did--what trustful, boundless love, what exaggeration of the object loved! And while to-day we strive to master a useless sorrow by a useful activity, we can still appreciate the beauty and holiness of such love.

SARAH H. ADAMS.

BLANCHE

In the museum at Lille, somewhat aside from the bewildering ma.s.s of pictures, stands, in a gla.s.s case, a masterpiece of unknown origin--the "tte de cire,"--a maiden's bust moulded in coloured wax.

You will smile when you hear of a coloured wax bust and think of Madame Tussaud's collection, or of a pretty, insignificant doll's head; but should you ever see the "tte de cire," instead of laughing you will fold your hands, and, instead of Madame Tussaud's gla.s.s-eyed puppets, will think of a lovely girl cut off in her early bloom, whom you once saw at rest on the hard pillow of her coffin. Pale, with exquisite features, reddish brown hair, eyes slightly blinking, as if afraid of too much sun, a painfully resigned smile about her mouth, and with neck slightly bent forward, as if awaiting her death-stroke, full of touching innocence and of a languid grace, this waxen bust stands out of its dull gold case,--the image of an angel who had lived an earthly life and whose heart was broken by a mortal pain.

Whence came this masterly production? n.o.body knows! One ascribes it to Leonardo, another to Raphael, while still others have sought for its origin in antiquity. Upon one point only all agree,--that the bust was made from a cast taken after death.

The painter, Wickar, brought it out of Italy into France. 'Twas said that he found it in a Tuscan convent.

The lovely girl smiles, pleased at the critical debates of the curious, who wish to attribute this graceful creation to one of the ill.u.s.trious Heroes of Art: smiles and dreams!

I

No, it could not be--'twould be a sacrilege!

He was forty-five and she scarcely seventeen. It could not be!

After a series of adventurous campaigns, after mourning over many defeats and celebrating many victories, and finally losing his left leg in the memorable battle of Marignano, Gottfried de Montalme, finding himself disabled for the rough work of a soldier, had returned to France and to his father's castle, whose gates his brother, the duke, hospitably opened to him.

He found this brother a widower, and at the point of death; but beside the dying man's couch was a lovely little maiden who offered her cheeks to be kissed in welcome to the wanderer. She was the Duke of Montalme's only child--Blanche, a heart's balm! the light of his eyes!

Leaving no male heir, the entire inheritance of the Duke of Montalme--his castle and lands, with all the feudal rights appertaining thereto,--would devolve upon the returned warrior, Gottfried. The little maiden was badly provided for, and this the duke knew full well, and it made his dying heart sad.

Gottfried sat by the bedside of his brother through the warm May nights. He heard the ticking of the death-watch in the wainscoting of the old walls, heard the dewdrops, as they slowly rustled through the leaves of the giant lindens outside, heard the laboured breath of the dying man--but more distinctly than all did he hear the beating of his own heart.

Toward morning, when the first slant sunbeams shed a rosy glimmer into the gray twilight of the sick man's room, this beating grew louder, for, with the early sun, Blanche slipped into the chamber, and, leaning compa.s.sionately over the sufferer, whispered, "Are you better, my father?"

Ah! for the Duke of Montalme there was no better, and one night he laid his damp, cold hand upon his brother's warm and powerful one, saying, with the directness his near relations.h.i.+p warranted, "Gottfried, it would be a great comfort to me if you would take Blanche for your wife."

At this Gottfried blushed up to the roots of his gray hair, and murmured, "What an idea to come into your head--I an old cripple, and this young blossom! It would be a sacrilege!"

"She does not dislike you," said the duke.

The brave Gottfried blushed deeper, and said, "She is but a child."

"Oh, these conscientious notions!" grumbled the exhausted man. But notions or not, Gottfried was firm, and of a marriage-bond with the child would not hear; he promised to afford the little maiden loving care and protection--promised to guard her as the apple of his eye--as his own child, until he could, with confidence, lay her hand into that of a worthy lover's.

And while he promised this, his voice sounded hollow and sad like the tolling of a funeral bell. The duke, with the clear-sightedness of the dying, cast a glance into his brother's heart, and discovered there a holy secret.

"You're an angel, Gottfried," he murmured, "but you make a mistake,"

and shortly after breathed his last.

On the day of the funeral Dame Isabella von Auberive, a distant relative whom Gottfried, for propriety's sake, had summoned hither, arrived at the castle to share with him in the care of the young girl.

Beside her father's bier, surrounded by the dim, flickering candles, he kissed the sweet orphan reverently on the brow, as one kisses the hem of a Madonna's robe; and promised her his loving care. But when she, in a torrent of childish grief, wound her arms about his neck and pressed her little head against his shoulder, he became almost as white as the dead man in his coffin, and tenderly but firmly released himself from her.

It could not be--'twould be sacrilege.

II

During the brilliant period in the reign of King Francis I., it happened that in the marvellously fair, luxuriant Touraine, through whose velvet green meadows ran the "gay-jewel-glistening Loire,--the frolicsome, flippant Loire,"--there arose on its banks, one by one, the stately dwellings of many a proud lord.

Somewhat apart from the others, in a retired spot, where King Francis's elegant hunters seldom found their way, towered up the Castle of Montalme; large, ma.s.sive, with gloomy little windows sunk into deep holes in the walls, and with a round turret on either wing. Stern and forbidding, it looked down into the moat in whose waterless bed toads and frogs revelled amid the moist green foliage; for the age was fast drawing to a close in which every n.o.bleman had been a little king, and the simple heroic French feudality, blinded by the nimbus of Francis I., were rapidly being transformed into a mere host of courtiers.

The dull uniformity in the architecture of Montalme stood out in striking contrast to the rest of the castles of sunny, pleasure-loving Touraine. The internal arrangement corresponded to the plain exterior, and to the nave pretensions of a century when, even in Blois and Amboise, the favourite castles of the king, the doors were so low that Francis himself, who is known to have been of regal stature, had to stoop to enter them. The scantiness of the furniture in this huge Castle of Montalme added to its forlorn aspect; nor was the slightest deference paid to prevailing fas.h.i.+on. The ladies wore sombre-coloured dresses, cut high in the neck, and covering the arms down to the very end of the wrists; skirts hanging in long, heavy folds, allowing only the pointed toe of the leather shoe to peep out. The gentlemen wore the hair long, and their faces smoothly shaved; their doublets reached in folds almost to the knees, as had been the fas.h.i.+on under the simple, economical rule of the late king.

A year had glided by since the death of the duke. Blanche enjoyed the happiness of youth, free from care, and Gottfried the peace of honest, high-souled self-denial. A guardian angel, he limped about modestly at the side of his niece, rejoicing to be able to remove every stone which threatened to mar the smoothness of her path, or to scare away the hawks lurking in ambush to surprise her innocence.

And when considering the charms of his dear little niece, Gottfried thought of the orgies in the Amboise Castle, of the "pet.i.te bande" and the merry raids of the king, the real aim of which was nothing higher than some foolish love-adventure, he shuddered. Deeply and often he pondered the matter. Blanche was eighteen--it was time for her to be married--and yet his brave, faithful heart shrank with anguish at the bare thought of it. He would not hesitate (at least he believed this of himself) to part with her if only he could find a true-hearted, honourable man. But in this age of beauty and song--the age of King Francis such an one was hard to find.