Why with the regard, the voice, the air of Sabran had some vague intangible remembrance always come before him?'
Why, as he had gazed on the sleeping child had the vague uncertainty suddenly resolved itself into distinct revelation?
'He is Vassia Kazán! He is Vassia Kazán!' he said to himself a score of times stupidly, persistently, as one speaks in a dream. Yet he knew he must be a prey to delusion, to phantasy, to accidental resemblance. He told himself so. He resisted his own folly, and all the while a subtler inner consciousness seemed to be speaking in him, and saying to him:
'That man is Vassia Kazán. Surely he is Vassia Kazán.'
And then the loyal soul of him strengthened itself and made him think:
'Even if he be Vassia Kazán he is her husband. He is what she loves; he is the father of those children that are hers.'
He never went to his bed that night. When the music ceased at an hour before dawn, and the great house grew silent, he still sat there by the open casement, glad of the cold air that blew in from over the Szalrassee, as with daybreak a fine film of rain began to come down the mountain sides.
Once he heard the voice of Sabran, who passed the door on his way to his own apartment. Sabran was saying in German with a little laugh:
'My lady!' I am jealous of your crown prince. When I left him now in his chamber I was disposed to immortalise myself by regicide. He adores you!'
Then he heard Wanda laugh in answer, with some words that did not reach his ear as they passed on further down the corridor. Vàsàrhely shivered, and instinctively rose to his feet. He felt as if he must seek him out and cry out to him:
'Am I mad or is it true? Let me see your shoulder—have you the mark of the wound that I gave? Your little child has the face of Vassia Kazán. Are you Vassia Kazán? Are you the bastard of Zabaroff? Are you the wolf of the steppes?'
He had desired to go from Hohenszalras, where every hour was pain to him, but now he felt an irresistible fascination in the vicinity of Sabran. His mind was in that dual state which at once rejects a fact as incredible, and believes in it absolutely. His reason told him that his suspicion was a folly; his instinct told him that it was a truth.
When in the forenoon the castle again became animated, and the guests met to the mid-day breakfast in the hall of the knights, he descended, moved by an eagerness that made him for the first time in his life nervous. When Sabran addressed him he felt himself grow pale; he followed the movements, he watched the features, he studied the tones of his successful rival, with an intense absorption in them. Through the hunting breakfast, at which only men were present, he was conscious of nothing that was addressed to him; he only seemed to hear a voice in his ear saying perpetually——'Yonder is Vassia Kazán.'
The day was spent in sport, sport rough and real, that gave fair play to the beasts and perilous exposure to the hunters. For the first time in his life, Egon Vàsàrhely let a brown bear go by him untouched, and missed more than one roebuck. His eyes were continually seeking his host; a mile off down a forest glade the figure of Sabran seemed to fill his vision, a figure full of grace and dignity, clad in a hunting-dress of russet velvet, with a hunting-horn slung at his side on a broad chain of gold, the gift of his wife in memory of the fateful day when he had aimed at thekuttengeierin her woods.
Sabran of necessity devoted himself to the crown prince throughout the day's sport; only in the twilight as they returned he spoke to Vàsàrhely.
'Wanda is so full of regret that you wish to leave us,' he said, with graceful cordiality; 'if only I can persuade you to remain, I shall take her the most welcome of all tidings from the forest. Stay at the least another week, the weather has cleared.'
As he spoke he thought that Vàsàrhely looked at him strangely; but he knew that he could not be much loved by his wife's cousin, and continued with good humour to persist in his request. Abruptly, the other answered him at last.
'Wanda wishes me to stay? Well, I will stay then. It seems strange to hear a stranger invitemeto Hohenszalras.'
Sabran coloured; he said with hauteur:
'That I am a stranger to Prince Vàsàrhely is not my fault. That I have the right to invite him to Hohenszalras is my happiness, due to his cousin's goodness, which has been far beyond my merit.'
Vàsàrhely's eyes dwelt on him gloomily; he was sensible of the dignity, the self-command, and the delicacy of reproof which were blent in the answer he had received; he felt humbled and convicted of ill-breeding. He said after a pause:
'I should ask your pardon. My cousin would be the first to condemn my words; they sounded ill, but I meant them literally. Hohenszalras has been one of my homes from boyhood; it will be your son's when we are both dead. How like he is to you; he has nothing of his mother.'
Sabran, somewhat surprised, smiled as he answered:
'He is very like me. I regret it; but you know the poets and the physiologists are for once agreed as to the cause of that. It is a truth proved a million times:l'enfant de l'amour ressemble toujours au père.'
Egon Vàsàrhely grew white under the olive hue of his sun-bronzed cheek. Theripostehad been made with a thrust that went home. Otto at that moment approached his master for orders for the morrow. They were no more alone. They entered the house; the long and ceremonious dinner succeeded. Vàsàrhely was silent and stern. Sabran was the most brilliant of hosts, the happiest of men; all the women present were in love with him, his wife the most of all.
'Réné tells me you will stay, Egon. I am so very glad,' his cousin said to him during the evening, and she added with a little hesitation, 'If you would take time to know him well, you would find him so worthy of your regard; he has all the qualities that most men esteem in each other. It would make me so happy if you were friends at heart, not only in mere courtesy.'
'You know that can never be,' said Vàsàrhely, almost rudely. 'Even you cannot work miracles. He is your husband. It is a reason that I should respect him, but it is also a reason why I shall for ever hate him.'
He said the last words in a tone scarcely audible, but low as it was, there was a force in it that affected her painfully.
'What you say there is quite unworthy of you,' she said with gentleness but coldness. 'He has done you no wrong. Long ere I met him I told you that what you wished was not what I wished, never would be so. You are too great a gentleman, Egon, to nourish an injustice in your heart.'
He looked down; every fibre in him thrilled and burned under the sound of her voice, the sense of her presence.
'I saw your children asleep last night,' he said abruptly. 'They have nothing of you in them; they are his image.'
'Is it so unusual for children to resemble their father?' she said with a smile, whilst vaguely disquieted by his tone.
'No, I suppose not; but the Szalras have always been of one type. How came your husband by that face? I have seen it amongst the Circassians, the Persians, the Georgians; but you say he is a Breton.'
'The Sabrans of Romaris are Bretons; you have only to consult history. Very beautiful faces like his have seldom much impress of nationality; they always seem as though they followed the old Greek laws, and were cast in the divine heroic mould of another time than ours.'
'Who was his mother?'
'A Spanish Mexican.'
Vàsàrhely was silent.
His cousin left him and went amongst her guests. A vague sense of uneasiness went with her at her consciousness of his hostility to Sabran. She wished she had not asked him to remain.
'You have never offended Egon?' she asked Sabran anxiously that night. 'You have always been forbearing and patient with him?'
'I have obeyed you in that as all things, my angel,', he answered her lightly. 'What would you? He is in love with you still, and I have married you! It is even a crime in his eyes that my children resemble me! One can never argue with a passion that is unhappy. It is a kind of frenzy.'
She heard with some impatience.
'He has no right to cherish such a resentment. He keeps it alive by brooding on it. I had hoped that when he saw you here, saw how happy you render me, saw your children too, he would grow calmer, wiser, more reconciled to the inevitable.'
'You did not know men, my love,' said Sabran, with a smile.
To him the unhappiness and the ill-will of Egon Vàsàrhely were matters of supreme indifference; in a manner they gratified him, they even supplied that stimulant of rivalry which a man's passion needs to keep at its height in the calm of safe possession. That Egon Vàsàrhely saw his perfect happiness lent it pungency and a keener sense of victory. When he kissed his wife's hand in the sight of her cousin, the sense of the pain it dealt to the spectator gave the trivial action to him all the sweetness and the ardour of the first caresses of his accepted passion.
Of that she knew nothing. It would have seemed to her ignoble, as so much that makes up men's desire always does seem to a woman of her temperament, even whilst it dominates and solicits her, and forces her to share something of its own intoxication.
'Egon is very unreasonable,' said Mdme. Ottilie. 'He believes that if you had not met Réné you would have in time loved himself. It is foolish. Love is a destiny. Had you married him you would not have loved him. He would soon have perceived that and been miserable, much more miserable than he is now, for he would have been unable to release you. I think he should not have come here at all if he could not have met M. de Sabran with at least equanimity.'
'I think so, too,' said Wanda, and an impatience against her cousin began to grow into anger; without being conscious of it, she had placed Sabran so high in her own esteem that she could forgive none who did not adore her own idol. It was a weakness in her that was lovely and touching in a character that had had before hardly enough of the usual foibles of humanity. Every error of love is lovable.
Vàsàrhely could not dismiss from his mind the impression which haunted him.
'I conclude you knew the Marquis de Sabran well in France?' he said one day to Baron Kaulnitz, who was still there.
Kaulnitz demurred.
'No, I cannot say that I did. I knew him by repute; that was not very pure. However, the Faubourg always received and sustained him; the Comte de Chambord did the same; they were the most interested. One cannot presume to think they could be deceived.'
'Deceived!' echoed Prince Egon. 'What a singular word to use. Do you mean to imply the possibility of—of any falsity on his part—any intrigue to appear what he is not?'
'No,' said Kaulnitz, with hesitation. 'Honestly, I cannot say so much. An impression was given me at the moment of his signing his marriage contract that he concealed something; but it was a mere suspicion. As I told you, the whole Legitimist world, the most difficult to enter, the most incredulous of assumption, received him with open arms. All his papers were of unimpeachable regularity. There was never a doubt hinted by anyone, and yet I will confess to you, my dear Egon, since we are speaking in confidence, that I have had always my own doubts as to his marquisate of Sabran.'
'Grosser Gott!' exclaimed Vàsàrhely, as he started from his seat. 'Why did you not stop the marriage?'
'One does not stop a marriage by a mere baseless suspicion,' replied Kaulnitz. 'I have not one shadow of reason for my probably quite unwarranted conjecture. It merely came into my mind also at the signing of the contracts. I had already done all I could to oppose the marriage, but Wanda was inflexible—you are witness of the charm he still possesses for her—and even the Princess was scarcely less infatuated. Besides, it must be granted that few men are more attractive in every way; and as heisone of us, whatever else he be, his honour is now our honour, as you said yourself the other day.'
'One could always kill him,' muttered Vàsàrhely, 'and set her free so, if one were sure.'
'Sure of what?' said Kaulnitz, rather alarmed at the effect of his own words. 'You Magyar gentlemen always think that every knot can be cut with a sword. If he were a mere adventurer (which is hardly possible) it would not mend matters for you to run him through the heart; there are his children.'
'Would the marriage be legal if his name were assumed?'
'Oh, no! She could have it annulled, of course, both by Church and Law. All those pretty children would have no rights and no name. But we are talking very wildly and in a theatrical fashion. He is as certainly Marquis de Sabran as I am Karl von Kaulnitz.'
Vàsàrhely said nothing; his mind was in tumult, his heart oppressed by a sense of secrecy and of a hope that was guilty and mean.
He did not speak to his companion of Vassia Kazán, but his conjecture seemed to hover before his sight like a black cloud which grew bigger every hour.
He remained at Hohenszalras throughout the autumnal festivities. He felt as if he could not go away with that doubt still unsolved, that suspicion either confirmed or uprooted. His cousin grew as uneasy at his presence there as she had before been uneasy at his absence. Her instinct told her that he was the foe of the one dearest to her on earth. She felt that the gallant and generous temper of him had changed and grown morose; he was taciturn, moody, solitary.
He spent almost all his time out of doors, and devoted himself to the hardy sport of the mountains and forests with a sort of rage. Guests came and went at the castle; some were imperial, some royal people; there was always a brilliant circle of notable persons there, and Sabran played his part as their host, with admirable tact, talent, and good humour. His wit, his amiability, his many accomplishments, and his social charm were in striking contrast to the sombre indifference of Vàsàrhely, whom men had no power to amuse and women no power to interest. Prince Egon was like a magnificent picture by Rembrandt, as he sat in his superb uniform in a corner of a ball-room with the collars of his orders blazing with jewels, and his hands crossed on the diamond-studded hilt of his sword; but he was so mute, so gloomy, so austere, that the vainest, coquette there ceased to hope to please him, and his most cordial friends found his curt contemptuous replies destroy their desire for his companionship.
Wanda, who was frankly and fondly attached to him, began to long for his departure. The gaze of his black eyes, fixed in their fire and gloom on the little gay figures of her children, filled her with a vague apprehension.
'If he would only find some one and be happy,' she thought, with anger at this undesired and criminal love which clung to her so persistently.
'Am I made of wax?' he said to her with scorn, when she ventured to hint at her wishes.
'How I wish I had not asked him to remain here!' she said to herself many times. It was not possible for her to dismiss her cousin, who had been from his infancy accustomed to look on the Hohenszalrasburg as his second home. But as circle after circle of guests came, went, and were replaced by others, and Egon Vàsàrhely still retained the rooms in the west tower that had been his from boyhood, his continual presence grew irksome and irritating to her.
'He forgets that it is now my husband's house!' she thought.
There was only one living creature in all the place to whom Vàsàrhely unbent from his sullen and haughty reserve, and that one was the child Bela.
Bela was as beautiful as the morning, with his shower of golden hair, and his eyes like sapphires, and his skin like a lily. With curious self-torture Vàsàrhely would attract the child to him by tales of daring and of sport, and would watch with intent eyes every line of the small face, trying therein to read the secret of the man by whom this child had been begotten. Bela, all unconscious, was proud of this interest displayed in him by this mighty soldier, of whose deeds in war Ulrich and Hubert and Otto told such Homeric tales.
'Bela will fight with you when he is big,' he would say, trying to inclose the jewelled hilt of Vàsàrhely's sword in his tiny fingers, or trotting after him through the silence of the tapestried corridors. When she saw them thus together she felt that she could understand the superstitious fear of oriental women when their children are looked at fixedly.
'You are very good to my boy,' she said once to Vàsàrhely, when he had let the child chatter by his side for hours.
Vàsàrhely turned away abruptly.
'There are times when I could kill your son, because he is his,' he muttered, 'and there are times when I could worship him, because he is yours.'
'Do not talk so, Egon,'she said, gravely. 'If you will feel so, it is best—I must say it—it is best that you should see neither my child nor me.'
He took no notice of her words.
'The children would always be yours,' he muttered. 'You would never leave him, never disgrace him for their sake; even if one knew—it would be of no use.'
'Dear Egon,' she said in real distress, 'what strange things are you saying? Are you mad? Whose disgrace do you mean?'
'Let us suppose an extreme case,' he said, with a hard laugh. 'Suppose their father were base, or vile, or faithless, would you hate the children? Surely you would.'
'I have not imagination enough to suppose any such thing,'she said very coldly. 'And you do not know what a mother's love is, my cousin.'
He walked away, leaving her abruptly.
'How strange he grows!' she thought. 'Surely his mind must be touched; jealousy is a sort of madness.'
She bade the children's attendants keep Count Bela more in the nurseries; she told them that the child teased her guests, and must not be allowed to run so often at his will and whim over the house.' She never seriously feared that Egon would harm the child: his noble and chivalrous nature could not have changed so cruelly as that; but it hurt her to see his eyes fixed on the son of Sabran with such persistent interrogation and so strange an intensity of observation. It made her think of old Italian tales of the evil eye.
She did not know that Vàsàrhely had come thither with a sincere and devout intention to conquer his jealous hatred of her husband, and to habituate himself to the sight of her in the new relations of her life. She did not know that he would probably have honestly tried to do his duty, and honestly striven to feel at least esteem for one so near to her, if the suspicion which had become almost certainty in his own mind had not made him believe that he saw in Sabran a traitor, a bastard, and a criminal whose offences were the deepest of all possible offences, and whose degradation was the lowest of all possible degradation, in the sight of the haughty magnate of Hungary, steeped to the lips in all the traditions and the convictions of an unsullied nobility. If what he believed were, indeed, the truth, he would hold Sabran lower than any beggar crouching at the gate of his palace in Buda, than any gipsy wandering in the woods of his mountain fortress of Taróc. If what he believed were the truth, no leper would seem to him so loathsome as this brilliant and courtly gentleman to whom his cousin had given her hand, her honour, and her life.
'Doubt, like a raging tooth,' gnawed at his heart, and a hope, which he knew was dishonourable to his chivalry, sprang up in him, vague, timid, and ashamed. If, indeed, it were as he believed, would not such crime, proven on the sinner, part him for ever from the pure, proud life of Wanda von Szalras? And then, as he thought thus, he groaned in spirit, remembering the children—the children with their father's face and their father's taint in them, for ever living witnesses of their mother's surrender to a lying hound.
'Your cousin cannot be said to contribute to the gaiety of your house parties, my love,' Sabran observed with a smile one day, when they received the announcement of an intended visit from one of the archdukes. Egon Vàsàrhely was still there, and even his cousin, much as she longed for his departure, could not openly urge it upon him; relationship and hospitality alike forbade.
'He is sadly changed,' she answered. 'He was always silent, but he is now morose. Perhaps he lives too much at Taróc, where all is very wild and solitary.'
'He lives too much in your memory,' said Sabran, with no compassion. 'Could he determine to forgive my marriage with you, there would be a chance for him to recover his peace of mind. Only, my Wanda, it is not possible for any man to be consoled for the loss of you.'
'But that is nothing new,' she answered, with impatience. 'If he felt so strongly against you, why did he come here? It was not like his high, chivalrous honour.'
'Perhaps he came with the frank will to be reconciled to his fate,' said Sabran, not knowing how closely he struck the truth, 'and at the sight of you, of all that he lost and that I gained, he cannot keep his resolution.'
'Then he should go away,' she said, with that indifference to all others save the one beloved which all love begets.
'I think he should. But who can tell him so?'
'I did myself the other day. I shall tell him so more plainly, if needful. Who cannot honour you shall be no friend of mine, no guest of ours.'
'Oh, my love!' said Sabran, whose conscience was touched. 'Do not have feud with your relatives for my sake. They are worthier than I.'
The Archduke, with his wife, arrived there on the following day, and Hohenszalras was gorgeous in the September sun, with all the pomp with which the lords of it had always welcomed their Imperial friends. Vàsàrhely looked on as a spectator at a play when he watched its present master receive the Imperial Prince with that supreme ease, grace, and dignity which were so admirably blent in him.
'Can he be but a marvellous comedian?' wondered the man, to whom a bastard was less even than a peasant.
There was nothing of vanity, of effort, of assumption visible in the perfect manner of his host. He seemed to the backbone, in all the difficult subtleties of society, as in the simple, frank intercourse of man and man, that which even Kaulnitz had conceded that he was,gentilhomme de race.Could he have been born a serf—bred from the hour's caprice of a voluptuary for a serving-woman?
Vàsàrhely sat mute, sunk so deeply in his own thoughts that all the festivities round him went by like a pageantry on a stage, in which he had no part.
'He looks like the statue of the Commendatore,' said Olga Brancka, who had returned for the archducal visit, as she glanced at the sombre, stately figure of her brother-in-law, Sabran, to whom she spoke, laughed with a little uneasiness. Would the hand of Egon Vàsàrhely ever seize him and drag him downward like the hand of the statue inDon Giovanni?
'What a pity that Wanda did not marry him, and that I did not marry you!' said Mdme. Brancka, saucily, but with a certain significance of meaning.
'You do me infinite honour!' he answered. 'But, at the risk of seeming most ungallant, I must confess the truth. I am grateful that the gods arranged matters as they are. You are enchanting, Madame Olga, as a guest, but as a wife—alas! who can drinkkümmelevery day?'
She smiled enchantingly, showing her pretty teeth, but she was bitterly angered. She had wished for a compliment at the least. 'What can these men see in Wanda?' she thought savagely. 'She is handsome, it is true; but she has no coquetry, no animation, no passion. She is dressed by Worth, and has a marvellous quantity of old jewels; but for that no one would say anything of her except that she was much too tall and had a German face!' And she persuaded herself that it was so; if the Venus de Medici could be animated into life, women would only remark that her waist was large.
Mdme. Olga was still very lovely, and took care to be never seen except at her loveliest. She always treated Sabran with a great familiarity, which his wife was annoyed by, though she did not display her annoyance. Mdme Brancka always called himmon cousinorbeau cousinin the language she usually used, and affected much more previous knowledge of him than their acquaintance warranted, since it had been merely such slight intimacy as results from moving in the same society. She was small and slight, but of great spirit; she shot, fished, rode, and played billiards with equal skill; she affected an adoration of the most dangerous sports, and even made a point of sharing the bear and the boar hunt. Wanda, who, though a person of much greater real courage, abhorred all the cruelties and ferocities that perforce accompany sport, saw her with some irritation go out with Sabran on these expeditions.
'Women are utterly out of place in such sport as that, Olga,' she urged to her; 'and indeed are very apt to bring the men into peril, for of course no man can take care of himself whilst he has the safety of a woman to attend to; she must of necessity distract and trouble him.'
But the Countess Stefan only laughed, and slipped with affectation her jewelled hunting-knife into its place in her girdle.
Throughout the Archduke's visit, and after the Prince's departure, Vàsàrhely continued to stay on, whilst a succession of other guests came and went, and the summer deepened into autumn. He felt that he could not leave his cousin's house with that doubt unsolved; yet he knew that he might stay on for ever with no more certainty to reward him and confirm his suspicions than he possessed now. His presence annoyed his host, but Sabran was too polished a gentleman to betray his irritation; sometimes Vàsàrhely shunned his presence and his conversation for days together, at other times he sought them and rode with him, shot with him, and played cards with him, in the vain hope of gathering from some chance admission or allusion some clue to Sabran's early days. But a perfectly happy man is not given at any time to retrospection, and Sabran less than most men loved his past. He would gladly have forgotten everything that he had ever done or said before his marriage at the Hofburg.
The intellectual powers and accomplishments of Sabran dazzled Vàsàrhely with a saddened sense of inferiority. Like most great soldiers he had a genuine humility in his measurement of himself. He knew that he had no talents except as a leader of cavalry. 'It is natural that she never looked at me,' he thought, 'when she had once seen this man, with his wit, his grace, his facility.' He could not even regard the skill of Sabran in the arts, in the salon, in the theatre with the contempt which the 'Wild Boar of Taróc' might have felt for a mere maker of music, a squire of dames, a writer of sparkling little comedies, a painter of screens, because he knew that both at Idrac and in France Sabran had showed himself the possessor of those martial and virile qualities, by the presence or the absence of which the Hungarian noble measured all men. He himself could only love well and live well: he reflected sadly that honesty and honour are not alone enough to draw love in return.
As the weeks passed on, his host grew so accustomed to his presence there that it ceased to give him offence or cause him anxiety.
'He is not amusing, and he is not always polite,' he said to his wife, 'but if he likes to consume his soul in gazing at you, I am not jealous, my Wanda; and so taciturn a rival would hardly ever be a dangerous one.'
'Do not jest about it,' she answered him, with some real pain. 'I should be very vexed at his remaining here, were it not that I feel sure he will in time learn to live down his regrets, and to esteem and appreciate you.'
'Who knows but his estimation of me may not be the right one?' said Sabran, with a pang of sad self-knowledge. And although he did not attach any significance to the prolonged sojourn of the lord of Taróc and Mohacs, he began to desire once more that his guest would return to the solitudes of the Carlowitz vineyards, or of the Karpathian mountains and gorges of snow.
When over seven weeks had passed by, Vàsàrhely himself began to think that to stay in the Iselthal was useless and impossible, and he had heard from Taróc tidings which annoyed him—that his brother Stefan and his wife, availing themselves of his general permission to visit any one of his places when they chose had so strained the meaning of the permission that they had gone to his castle, with a score of their Parisian friends, and were there keeping high holiday and festival, to the scandal of his grave old stewards, and their own exceeding diversion. Hospitable to excess as he was, the liberty displeased him, especially as his, men wrote him word that his favourite horses; were being ruined by over-driving, and in the list of the guests which they sent him were the names of more than one too notorious lady, against whose acquaintance he had repeatedly counselled Olga Brancka. He would not have cared much what they had done at any other of his houses, but at Taróc, his mother, whom he had adored, had lived and died, and the place was sacred to him.
He determined to tear himself away from Hohenszalras, and go and scatter these gay unbidden revellers in the dusky Karpathian ravines. 'I cannot stay here for ever,' he thought, 'and I might be here for years without acquiring any more certainty than my own conviction. Either I am wrong, or he has nothing to conceal, or if I be right he is too wary to betray himself. If only I could see his shoulder where I struck the dagger—but I cannot go into his bath-room and say to him, "You are Vassia Kazán!"'
He resolved to leave on the day after the morrow. For the next day there was organised on a large scale a hunting party, to which the nobility of the Tauern had been bidden. There were only some half-dozen men then staying in the Burg, most of them Austrian soldiers. The delay gave him the chance he longed for, which but for an accident he might never have had, though he had tarried there half a century.
Early in the morning there was a great breakfast in the Rittersaal, at which Wanda did not appear. Sabran received the nobles and gentry of the province, and did the honours of his table with his habitual courtliness and grace. He was not hospitable in Vàsàrhely's sense of the word: he was too easily wearied by others, and too contemptuous of ordinary humanity; but he was alive to the pleasure of being lord of Hohenszalras, and sensible of the favour with which he was looked upon by a nobility commonly so exclusive and intolerant of foreign invasion.
Breakfast over, the whole party went out and up into the high woods. The sport at Hohenszalras always gave fair play to beast and bird. In deference to the wishes of his wife, Sabran would have none of those battues which make of the covert or the forest a slaughterhouse. He himself disdained that sort of sport, and liked danger and adventure to mingle with his out-of-door pastimes. Game fairly found by the spaniel or the pointer; the boar, the wolf, the bear, honestly started and given its fair chance of escape or revenge; the steinbock stalked in a long hard day with peril and effort—these were all delightful to him on occasion; but for the crowded drive, the horde of beaters, the terrified bewildered troop of forest denizens driven with sticks on to the very barrels of the gunners, for this he had the boundless contempt of a man who had chased the buffalo over the prairie, and lassoed the wild horse and the wild bull leaning down from the saddle of his mustang. The day passed off well, and his guests were all content: he alone was not, because a large brown bear which he had sighted and tired at twice had escaped him, and roused that blood-lust in him which is in the hearts of all men.
'Will you come out alone with me to-morrow and try for that grand brute?' he said to Vàsàrhely, as the last of his guests took their departure.
Vàsàrhely hesitated.
'I intended to leave to-morrow; I have been here too long. But since you are so good, I will stay twenty-four hours longer.'
He was ashamed in his own heart of the willingness with which he caught at the excuse to remain within sight of his cousin and within watch of Sabran.
'I am charmed,' said his host, in himself regretful that he had suggested a reason for delay; he had not known that the other had intended to leave so soon. They remained together on the terrace giving directions to thejägermeisterfor the next day.
Vàsàrhely looked at his successful rival and said to himself: 'It is impossible. I must be mad to dream it. I am misled by a mere chance resemblance, and even my own memory may have deceived me; I was but a child.
In the forenoon they both went out into the high hills again, where the wild creatures had their lairs and were but seldom troubled by a rifle-shot. They brought down some black grouse and hazel grouse and mountain partridges on their upward way. The jägers were scattered in the woods; the day was still and cloudy, a true sportsman's day, with no gleam of sun to shine in their eyes and on the barrels of their rifles. Sabran shooting to the right, Vàsàrhely to the left, they went through the grassy drives that climbed upward and upward, and many a mountain hare was rolled over in their path, and many a ptarmigan and capercailzie. But when they reached the high pine forests where the big game harboured, they ceased to shoot, and advanced silently, waiting and reserving their fire for any large beast the jägers might start and drive towards them from above. In the greyness of the day the upper woods were almost dusky, so thickly, stood the cembras and the Siberian pines. There was everywhere the sound of rushing waters, some above some underground.
'The first beast to you, the second to me,' said Sabran, in a whisper to his companion, who demurred and declared that the first fire should be his host's.
'No,' said Sabran. 'I am at home. Permit me so small a courtesy to my guest.'
Vàsàrhely flushed darkly. In his very politeness this man seemed to him to contrive to sting and wound him.
Sabran, however, who had meant nothing more than he had said, did not observe the displeasure he had caused, and paused at the spot agreed upon with Otto, a grassy spot where four drives met. There they both in absolute silence waited and watched for what the hunter's patron, good S. Hubert, might vouchsafe to send them. They had so waited about a quarter of an hour, when down one of the drives made dusky by the low hanging arolla boughs, there came towards them a great dark beast, and would have gone by them had not Vàsàrhely fired twice as it approached. The bear rolled over, shot through the head and heart.
'Well done,' cried Sabran, but scarcely were the words off his lips when another bear burst through the boughs ahead of him by fifty yards. He levelled his rifle and received its approach with two bullets in rapid succession. But neither had entered a vital part, and the animal, only rendered furious by pain, reared and came towards him with deadliest intent, its great fangs grinning. He fired again, and this shot struck home. The poor brute fell with a crash, the blood pouring from its mouth. It was not dead and its agony was great.
'I will give it thecoup de grâce,' said Sabran, who, for his wife's sake', was as humane as any hunter ever can be to the beasts he slew.
'Take care,' said Vàsàrhely. 'It is dangerous to touch a wounded bear. I have known one that looked stone dead rise up and kill a man.'
Sabran did not heed. He went up to the poor, panting, groaning mass of fur and flesh, and drew his hunting-knife to give it the only mercy that it was now possible for it to receive. But as he stooped to plunge the knife into its heart the bear verified the warning he had been given. Gathering all its oozing strength in one dying effort to avenge its murder, it leaped on him, dashed him to the earth, and clung to him with claw and tooth fast in his flesh. He freed his right arm from its ponderous weight, its horrible grip, and stabbed it with his knife as it clung to and lacerated him where he lay upon the grass. In an instant, Vàsàrhely and the jäger who was with them were by his side, freed him from the animal, and raised him from the ground. He was deluged with its blood and his own. Vàsàrhely, for one moment of terrible joy, for which he loathed himself afterwards, thought, 'Is he dead?' Men had died of lesser things than this.
He stood erect and smiled, and said that it was nothing, but even as he spoke a faintness came over him, and his lips turned grey.
The jäger supported him tenderly, and would have had him sit down upon a boulder of rock, but he resisted.
'Let me get to that water, he said feebly, looking to a spot a few yards off, where one of the many torrents of the Hohe Tauern tumbled from the wooded cliff above through birch and beechwood, and rushing underground left a clear round brown pool amongst the ferns. He took a draught from the flask of brandy; tendered him by the lad, and leaning on the youth, and struggling against the sinking swoon that was coming on him, walked to the edge of the pool, and dropped down there on one of the mossy stones which served as a rough chair.
'Strip me, and wash the blood away, he said to the huntsman, whilst the green wood and the daylight, and the face of the man grew dim to him, and seemed to recede further and further in a misty darkness. The youth obeyed, and cut away the velvet coat, the cambric shirt, till he was naked to his waist; then, making sponges of handkerchiefs, the jäger began to wash the blood from him and staunch it as best he could.
Egon Vàsàrhely stood by, without offering any aid; his eyes were fastened on the magnificent bust of Sabran, as the sunlight fell on the fair blue-veined flesh, the firm muscles, the symmetrical throat, the slender, yet sinewy arms, round one of which was clasped a bracelet of fair hair. He had the chance he needed.
He approached and told the lad roughly to leave the Marquis to him, he was doing him more harm than good; he himself had seen many battle-fields, and many men bleeding to death upon their mother earth. By this time Sabran's eyes were closed; he was hardly conscious of anything, a great numbness and infinite exhaustion had fallen upon him; his lips moved feebly. 'Wanda!' he said once or twice,'Wanda!'
The face of the man who leaned above him grew dark as night; he gnashed his teeth as he begun his errand of mercy.
Leave me with your lord,' he said to the young jäger. 'Go you to the castle. Find Herr Greswold, bring him; do not alarm the Countess, and say nothing to the household.'
The huntsman went, fleet as a roe. Vàsàrhely remained alone with Sabran, who only heard the sound of the rushing water magnified a million times on his dulled ear.
Vàsàrhely tore the shirt in shreds, and laved and bathed the wounds, and then began to bind them with the skill of a soldier who had often aided his own wounded troopers. But first of all, when he had washed the blood away, he searched with keen and eager eyes for a scar on the white skin—and found it.
On the right shoulder was a small triangular mark; the mark of what, to a soldier's eyes, told of an old wound. When he saw it he smiled a cruel smile, and went on with his work of healing.
Sabran leaned against the rock behind him; his eyes were still closed, the pulsations of his heart were irregular. He had lost a great quantity of blood, and the pool at his feet was red. They were but flesh wounds, and there was no danger in them themselves, but great veins had been severed, and the stream of life had hurried forth in torrents. Vàsàrhely thrust the flask between his lips, but he could not swallow.
All had been done that could be for the immediate moment. The stillness of the deep woods was around them; the body of the brown bear lay on the soaked grass; a vulture scenting death, was circling above against the blue sky. Over the mind of his foe swept at the sight of them one of those hideous temptations which assail the noblest natures in an hour of hatred. If he tore the bandages he had placed there off the rent veins of the unconscious man whom he watched, the blood would leap out again in floods, and so weaken the labouring heart that in ten minutes more its powers would fall so low that all aid would be useless. Never more would the lips of Sabran meet his wife! Never more would his dreams be dreamed upon her breast! For the moment the temptation seemed to curl about him like a flame; he shuddered, and crossed himself. Was he a soldier to slay in cold blood by treachery a powerless rival?
He leaned over Sabran again, and again tried to force the mouthpiece of his wine-flask through his teeth. A few drops passed them, and he revived a little, and swallowed a few drops more. The blood was arrested in its escape, and the pulsations of the heart were returning to their normal measure; after a while he unclosed his eyes, and looked up at the green leaves, at the blue sky.
'Do not alarm Wanda,' he said feebly. 'It is a scratch; it will be nothing. Take me home.'
With his left hand he felt for the hair bracelet on his right arm, between the shoulder and the wrist. It was stiff with his own blood.
Then Vàsàrhely leaned over him and met his upward gaze, and said in his ear, that seemed still filled with the rushing of many waters, 'You are Vassia Kazán!'
When a little later the huntsman returned, bringing the physician, whom he had met a mile nearer the house in the woods, and some peasants bearing a litter made out of pine branches and wood moss, they found Sabran stretched insensible beside the water-pool; and Egon Vàsàrhely, who stood erect beside him, said in a strange tone:
'I have stanched the blood, and he has swooned, you see. I commit him to your hands. I am not needed.'
And, to their surprise, he turned and walked away with swift steps into the green gloom of the dense forest.
Sabran was still insensible when he was carried to the house.
When he regained consciousness he was on his own bed, and his wife was bending over him. A convulsion of grief crossed his face as he lifted his eyelids and looked at her.
'Wanda,' he murmured feebly, 'Wanda, you will forgive——'
She kissed him passionately, while her tears fell like rain upon his forehead. She did not hear his words distinctly; she was only alive to the intense joy of his recovered consciousness, of the sound of his voice, of the sense of his safety. She kneeled by his bed, covering his hands with caresses, prodigal of a thousand names of love, given up to an abandonment of terror and of hope which broke down all the serenity and self-command of her habitual temper. She was not even aware of the presence of others. The over-mastering emotions of anguish and of joy filled her soul, and made her seem deaf, indifferent to all living things save one.
Sabran lay motionless. He felt her lips, he heard her voice; he did not look up again, nor did he speak again. He shut his eyes, and slowly remembered all that had passed. Greswold approached him and held his fingers on his wrist, and held a little glass to his mouth. Sabran put it away. 'It is an opiate,' he said feebly; 'I will not have it.'
He was resolute; he closed his teeth, he thrust the calming draught away.
He was thinking to himself: 'Sometimes in unconsciousness one speaks.'
'You are not in great pain?' asked the physician. He made a negative movement of his head. What were the fire and the smart of his lacerated flesh, of his torn muscles, to the torments of his fears, to the agony of his long stifled conscience?
'Do not torment him, let him be still,' she said to the physician; she held his hand in both her own and pressed it to her heart. His languid eyes thanked her, then closed again.
Herr Greswold withdrew to a little distance and waited. It seemed to him strange that a man of the high courage and strong constitution of Sabran should be thus utterly broken down by any wound that was not mortal; should be thus sunk into dejection and apathy, making no effort to raise himself, even to console and reassure his wife. It was not like his careless and gallant temper, his virile and healthful strength.
It was true, the doctor reflected, that he had lost a great amount of blood. Such a loss he knew sometimes affects the heart and shatters the nervous system in many unlooked-for ways. Yet, he thought, there was something beyond this; the attitude and the regard of Egon Vàsàrhely had been unnatural at such an hour of peril. 'When he said just now "forgive," what did he mean?' reflected the old man, whose ear had caught the word which had escaped that of Wanda, who had been only alive to the voice she adored.
The next four days were anxious and terrible. Sabran did not recover as the physician expected that he would, seeing the nature of his wounds and the naturally elastic and sanguine temperament he possessed. He slept little, had considerable fever, woke from the little rest he had, startled, alarmed, bathed in cold sweats; at other times he lay still in an apathy almost comatose, from which all the caresses and entreaties of his wife failed to rouse him. They began to fear that the discharge from the arteries had in some subtle and dangerous manner affected the action of the heart, the composition of the blood, and produced aneurism or pyæmia. 'The hero of Idrac to be prostrated by a mere flesh wound!' thought Herr Greswold in sore perplexity. He sent for a great man of science from Vienna, who, when he came, declared the treatment admirable, the wounds healthy, the heart in a normal state, but added it was evident the nervous system had received a severe shock, the effects of which still remained.
'But it is that which I cannot understand,' said the old man in despair. 'If you only knew the Marquis de Sabran as I know him; the most courageous, the most gay, the most resolute of men! A man to laugh at death in its face! A man absolutely without fear!'
The other assented.
'Every one knows what he did in the floods at Idrac,' he answered; 'but he has a sensitive temperament for all that. If you did not tell me it is impossible, I should say that he had had some mental shock, some great grief. The prostration seems to me more of the mind than the body. But you have assured me it is impossible?'
'Impossible! There does not live on earth a man so happy, so fortunate, so blessed in all the world as he.'
'Men have a past that troubles them sometimes,' said the Vienna physician. 'Nay, I mean nothing, but I believe that M. de Sabran was a man of pleasure. The cup of pleasure sometimes has dregs that one must drink long afterwards. I do not mean anything; I merely suggest. The prostration has to my view its most probable origin in mental trouble; but it would do him more harm than good to excite him by any effort to certify this. To the Countess von Szalras I have merely said, that his state is the result of the large loss of blood, and, indeed, after all it may be so.'
On the fifth day, Sabran, still lying in that almost comatose silence which had been scarcely broken since his accident, said in a scarce audible voice to his wife:
'Is your cousin here?'
She stooped towards him and answered:
'Yes; he is here, love. All the others went immediately, but Egon remained. I suppose he thought it looked kinder to do so. I have scarcely seen him, of course.'
The pallor of his face grew greyer; he turned his head away restlessly.
'Why does he not go?' he muttered in his throat. 'Does he wait for my death?'
'Oh, Réné! hush, hush!' she said, with horror and amaze. 'My love, how can you say such things? You are in no danger; the doctor assures me so. In a week or two you will be well, you will be yourself.'
'Send your cousin away.'
She hesitated; troubled by his unreasoning, restless jealousy, which seemed to be the only consciousness of life remaining with him. 'I will obey you, love; you are lord here,' she said softly; 'but will it not look strange? No guest can well be told to go.'
'A guest!—he is an enemy!'
She sighed, knowing how hopelessly reason can struggle against the delusions of a sick bed. 'I will tell him to go to-morrow,' she said, to soothe him. 'To-night it is too late.'
'Write to him—do not leave me.'
There was a childlike appeal in his voice, that from a man so strong had a piteous pathos. Her eyes swam with tears as she heard.
'Oh, my dearest, I will not leave you!' she said passionately, 'not for one moment whilst I live; and oh, my beloved! what could death ever change inme? Have you so little faith?'
'You do not know,' he said, so low that his breath scarcely stirred the air.
She thought that he was tormented by a doubt that she would not be faithful to him if he died. She stooped and kissed him.
'My own, I would sooner be faithless to you in your life than after death. Surely you know me well enough to know that at the least?'
He was silent. A great sigh struggled from his breast and escaped his pale lips like a parting breath.
'Kiss me again,' he murmured; 'kiss me again, whilst——That gives me life,' he said, as he drew her head down upon his bosom, where his heart throbbed labouredly. A little while later he fell asleep. He slept some hours. When he awoke he was consumed by a nameless fear.
'Is your cousin gone?' he asked.
She told him that it was one o'clock in the same night; she had not written yet.
'Let him stay,' he said feverishly. 'He shall not think I fear him. Do you hear me? Let him stay.'
The words seemed to her the causeless caprice of a jealousy magnified and distorted by the weakness of fever. She strove to answer him calmly. 'He shall go or stay as you please,' she assured him. 'What does it matter, dear, what Egon does? You always speak of Egon. You have never spoken of the children once.'
She wanted to distract his thoughts. She was pained to think how deep, though unspoken, his antagonism to her cousin must have been, that now in his feebleness it—was the one paramount absorbing thought.
A great sadness came upon his face as she spoke; his lips trembled a little.
'Ah! the children,' he repeated. 'Yes, bring them to me to-morrow. Bela is too like me. Poor Bela, it will be his curse.'
'It is my joy of joys,' she murmured, afraid to see how his mind seemed astray.
A shudder that was almost a spasm passed over him. He did not reply. He turned his face away from her, and seemed to sleep.
The day following he was somewhat calmer, somewhat stronger, though his fever was high.
The species of paralysis that had seemed to; fall on all his faculties had in a great measure left him. 'You wish, me to recover,' he said to her. 'I will do so, though perhaps it were, better not?'
'He says strange things,' she said to Greswold. 'I cannot think why he has such thoughts.'
'It is not he, himself, that has them, it is his fever,' answered the doctor. 'Why, in fever, do people often hate what they most adore when they are in health?'
She was reassured, but not contented.
The children were brought to see him. Bela had with him an ivory air-gun, with which he was accustomed to blow down his metal soldiers; he looked at his father with awed, dilated eyes, and said that he would go out with the gun and kill the brothers of the bear that had done the harm.
'The bear was quite right,' said Sabran. 'It was I who was wrong to take a life not my own.'
'That is beyond Bela,' said his wife. 'But I will translate it to him into language he shall understand, though I fear very much, say what I will, he will be a hunter and a soldier one day.'
Bela looked from one to the other, knitting, his fair brows as he sat on the edge of the bed.
'Bela will be like Egon,' he said, 'with all gold and fur to dress up in, and a big jewelled sword, and ten hundred men and horses, and Bela will be a great killer of things!'
Sabran smiled languidly, but she saw that he flinched at her cousin's name.
'I shall not love you, Bela, if you are a killer of things that are God's dear creatures,' she said, as she sent the child away.
His blue eyes grew dark with anger.
'God only cares about Bela,' he said in innocent profanity, with a profound sense of his own vastness in the sight of heaven, 'and Gela,' he added, with the condescending tenderness wherewith he always associated his brother and himself.
'Where could he get all that overwhelming pride?' she said, as he was led away. 'I have tried to rear him so simply. Do what I may he will grow arrogant and selfish.'
'My dear,' said Sabran, very bitterly, 'what avails that he was borne in your bosom? He is my son!'
'Gela is your son, and he is so different,' she answered, not seeking to combat the self-censure to which she was accustomed in him, and which she attributed to faults or follies of a past life, magnified by a conscience too sensitive.
'He is all yours then,' he said, with a wan smile. 'You have prevailed over evil.'
In a few days later his recovery had progressed so far that he had regained his usual tone and look; his wounds were healing, and his strength was returning. He seemed to the keen eyes of Greswold to have made a supreme effort to conquer the moral depression into which he had sunk, and to have thrust away his malady almost by force of will. As he grew better he never spoke of Egon Vàsàrhely.
On the fifteenth day from his accident he was restored enough to health for apprehension to cease. He passed some hours seated at an open window in his own room. He never asked if Vàsàrhely were still there or not.
Wanda, who never left him, wondered at that silence, but she forbore to bring forward a name which had had such power to agitate him. She was troubled at the nervousness which still remained to him. The opening of a door, the sound of a step, the entrance of a servant made him start and turn pale. When she spoke of it with anxiety to Herr Joachim, he said vague sentences as to the nervousness which was consequent on great loss of blood, and brought forward instances of soldiers who had lost their nerve from the same cause. It did not satisfy her. She was the descendant of a long line of warriors; she could not easily believe that her husband's intrepid and careless courage could have been shattered by a flesh wound.
'Did you really mean,' he said abruptly to her that afternoon, as he sat for the first time beside the open panes of the oriel; 'did you really mean that were I to die you would never forget me for any other?'
She rose quickly as if she had been stung, and her face flushed.
'Do I merit that doubt from you? she said. 'I think not.'
She spoke rather in sadness than in anger. He had hurt her, he could not anger her. He felt the rebuke.
'Even if I were dead, should I have all your life?' he murmured, in wonder at that priceless gift.
'You and your children,' she said gravely. 'Ah! what can death do against great love? Make its bands stronger perhaps, its power purer. Nothing else.'
'I thank you,' he said very low, with great humility, with intense emotion. For a moment he thought——should he tell her, should he trust this deep tenderness which could brave death; and might brave even shame unblenching? He looked at her from under his drooped eyelids, and then—he dared not. He knew the pride which was in her better than she did——her pride, which was inherited by her firstborn, and had been the sign manual of all her imperious race.
He looked at her where she stood with the light falling on her through the amber hues of painted glass; worn, wan, and tired by so many days and nights of anxious vigil, she yet looked a woman whom a nation might salute with thepro rege nostro!that Maria Theresa heard. All that a great race possesses and rejoices in of valour, of tradition, of dignity, of high honour, and of blameless truth were expressed in her; every movement, attitude, and gesture spoke of the aristocracy of blood. All that potent and subtle sense of patrician descent which had most allured and intoxicated him in other days now awed and daunted him. He dared not tell her of his treason. He dared not. He was as a false conspirator before a great queen he has betrayed.
'Are you faint, my love?' she asked him, alarmed to see the change upon his face and the exhaustion with which he sunk, backward against the cushions of his chair.
'Mere weakness; it will pass,' he said, smiling as best he might, to reassure her. He felt like a man who slides down a crevasse, and has time and consciousness enough to see the treacherous ice go by him, the black abyss yawning below him, the cold, dark death awaiting him beyond, whilst on the heights the sun is shining.
That night he entreated her to leave him and rest. He assured her he felt well; he feigned a need of sleep. For fifteen nights she had not herself lain down. To please him she obeyed, and the deep slumber of tired nature soon fell upon her. When he thought she slept, he rose noiselessly and threw on a long velvet coat, sable-lined, that was by his bedside, and looked at his watch. It was midnight.
He crossed the threshold of the open door into his wife's chamber and stood beside her bed for a moment, gazing at her as she slept. She seemed like the marble statue of some sleeping saint; she lay in the attitude of S. Cecilia on her bier at Home. The faint lamplight made her fair skin white as snow. Bound her arm was a bracelet of his hair like the one which he wore of hers. He stood and gazed on her, then slowly turned away. Great tears fell down his cheeks as he left her chamber. He opened the door of his own room, the outer one which led into the corridor, and walked down the long tapestry-hung gallery leading to the guest-chambers. It was the first time that he had walked without assistance; his limbs felt strange and broken, but he held on, leaning now and then to rest against the arras. The whole house was still.
He took his way straight to the apartments set aside for guests. All was dark. The little lamp he carried shed a circle of light about his steps but none beyond him. When he reached the chamber which he knew was Egon Vàsàrhely's he did not pause. He struck on its panels with a firm hand.
The voice of Vàsàrhely asked from within, 'Who is there? Is there anything wrong?'
'It is I! Open,' answered Sabran.
In a moment more the door unclosed. Vàsàrhely stood within it; he was not undressed. There were a dozen wax candles burning in silver sconces on the table within. The tapestried figures on the walls grew pale and colossal in their light. He did not speak, but waited.
Sabran entered and closed the door behind him. His face was bloodless, but he carried himself erect despite the sense of faintness which assailed him.
'You know who I am?' he said simply, without preface or supplication.
Vàsàrhely gave a gesture of assent.
'How did you know it?'
'I remembered,' answered the other.
There was a moment's silence. If Vàsàrhely could have withered to the earth by a gaze of scorn the man before him, Sabran would have fallen dead. As it was his eyes dropped beneath the look, but the courage and the dignity of his attitude did not alter. He had played his part of a great noble for so long that it had ceased to be assumption and had become his nature.
'You will tell her?' he said, and his voice did not tremble, though his very soul seemed to swoon within him.
'I shall not tell her!'
Vàsàrhely spoke with effort; his words were hoarse and stern.
'You will not?'
An immense joy, unlooked for, undreamed of, sprang up in him, checked as it rose by incredulity.
'But you loved her!' he said, on an impulse which he regretted even as the exclamation escaped him. Vàsàrhely threw his head back with a gesture of fine anger.
'If I loved' her what is that to you?' he said, with a restrained violence vibrating in his words. 'It is, perhaps, because I once loved her that your foul secret is safe with me now. I shall not tell her. I waited to say this to you. I could not write it lest it should meet her eyes. You came to ask me this? Be satisfied and go.'
'I came to ask you this because, had you said otherwise, I would have shot myself ere she could have heard.'
Vàsàrhely said nothing; a great scorn was still set like the grimness of death upon his face. He looked far away at the dim figures on the tapestries; he shrunk from the sight of his boyhood's enemy as from some loathly unclean thing he must not kill.
'Suicide!' he thought, 'the Slav's courage, the serf's refuge!
Before the sight of Sabran the room went round, the lights grew dull, the figures on the walls became, fantastic and unreal. His heart beat with painful effort, yet his ears, his throat, his brain seemed full of blood. The nerves of his whole body seemed to shrink and thrill and quiver, but the force of habit kept him composed and erect before this man who was his foe, yet did for him what few friends would have done.
'I do not thank you,' he said at last. 'I understand; you spare me for her sake, not mine.'
'But for her, I would treat you so.'
As he spoke he broke in two a slender agate ruler which lay on the writing-table at his elbow.
'Go,' he added, 'you have had my word; though we live fifty years you are safe from me, because——because——God forgive you! you are hers.'
He made a gesture towards the door. Sabran shivered under the insult which his conscience could not resent, his hand dared not avenge.
Hearing this there fell away from him the arrogance that had been his mask, the courage that had been his shield. He saw himself for the first time as this man saw him, as all the world would see him if once it knew his secret. For the first time his past offences rose up like ghosts naked from their graves. The calmness, the indifference, the cynicism, the pride which had been so long in his manner and in his nature deserted him. He felt base-born before a noble, a liar before a gentleman, a coward before a man of honour.
Where he stood, leaning on a high caned chair to support himself against the sickly weakness which still came on him from his scarce healed wounds, he felt for the first time to cower and shrink before this man who was his judge, and might become his accuser did he choose. Something in the last words of Egon Vàsàrhely suddenly brought home to him the enormity of his own sin, the immensity of the other's forbearance. He suddenly realised all the offence to honour, all the outrage to pride, all the ineffaceable indignity which he had brought upon a great race: all that he had done, never to be undone by any expiation of his own, in making Wanda von Szalras the mother of his sons. Submissive, he turned without a word of gesture or of pleading, and felt his way out of the chamber through the dusky mists of the faintness stealing on him.
He reached his own room unseen, feeling his way with his hands against the tapestry of the wall, and had presence of mind enough to fling his clothes off him and stagger to his bed, where he sank down insensible.
She was still asleep.
When dawn broke they found him ill, exhausted, with a return of fever. He had once a fit of weeping like a child. He could not bear his wife a moment from his sight. She reproached herself for having acceded to his desire and left him unattended whilst she slept.
But of that midnight interview she guessed nothing.
Her cousin Egon sent her a few lines, saying that he had been summoned to represent his monarch at the autumn manœuvres of Prussia, and had left at daybreak without being able to make his farewell in person, as he had previously to go to his castle of Taróc. She attached no importance to it. When Sabran was told of his departure he said nothing. He had recovered his power of self-control: the oriental impassibility under emotion which was in his blood from his Persian mother. If he betrayed himself he knew that it would be of little use to have been spared by his enemy. The depression upon him his wife attributed to his incapacity to move and lead his usual life; a trial always so heavy to a strong man. As little by little his strength returned, he became more like himself. In addressing her he had a gentleness almost timid; and now and then she caught his gaze fastened upon her with a strange appeal.
One day, when he had persuaded her to ride in the forest, and he was certain to be alone for two or three hours, he wrote the following words to his foe and his judge:
'Sir,——You will perhaps refuse to read anything written by me. Yet I send you this letter, because I desire to say to you what the physical weakness which was upon me the other night prevented my having time or strength to explain. I desire also to put in your hands a proof absolute against myself, with which you can do as you please, so that the forbearance which you exercised, if it be your pleasure to continue it, shall not be surprised from you by any momentary generosity, but shall be your deliberate choice and decision. I have another course of action to propose to you, to which I will come later. For the present permit me to give you the outline of all the circumstances which have governed my acts. I am not coward enough to throw the blame on fate or chance; I am well aware that good men and great men combat and govern both. Yet, something of course there lies in these, or, if not, excuse at least explanation. You knew me (when you were a boy) as Vassia Kazán, the natural son of the Prince Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff. Up to nine years old I dwelt with my grandmother, a Persian woman, on the great plain between the Volga water and the Ural range. Thence I was taken to the Lycée Clovis, a famous college. Prince Zabaroff I never saw but one day in my Volga village, until, when I was fifteen years old, I was sent to his house, Fleur de Roi, near Villerville, where I remained two months, and where you insulted me and I chastised you, and you gave me the wound that I have the mark of to this day. I then returned to the Lycée, and stayed there two years unnoticed by him. One day I was summoned by the principal, and told abruptly that the Prince Zabaroff was dead—my protector, as they termed him—and that I was penniless, with the world before me. I could not hope to make you understand the passions that raged in me. You, who have always been in the light of fortune, and always the head of a mighty family, could comprehend nothing of the sombre hatreds, the futile revolts, the bitter wrath against heaven and humanity which consumed me then, thus left alone without even the remembrance of a word from my father. I should have returned straightway to the Volga plains, and buried my fevered griefs under their snows, had not I known that my grandmother Maritza, the only living being I had ever loved, had died half a year after I had been taken from her to be sent to the school in Paris. You see, had I been left there I should have been a hunter of wild things or a raftsman on the Volga all my years, and have done no harm. I had a great passion in my childhood for an open-air, free life; my vices, like my artificial tastes, were all learned in Paris. They, and the love of pleasure they created, checked in me that socialistic spirit which is the usual outcome of such â social anomaly as they had made of me. I might have been a Nihilist but for that, and for the instinctive tendency towards aristocratic and absolutist theories which were in my blood. I was a true Russian noble, though a bastard one; and those three months which I had passed at Fleur de Roi had intoxicated me with the thirst for pleasure and enervated me with the longing to be rich and idle. An actress whom I knew intimately also at that time did me much harm. When Paul Zabaroff died he left me nothing, not even a word. It is true that he died suddenly. I quitted the Lycée Clovis with my clothes and my books; I had nothing else in the world. I sold some of these and got to Havre. There I took a passage on a barque going to Mexico with wine. The craft was unseaworthy; she went down with all hands off the Pinos Island, and I, swimming for miles, alone reached the shore. Women there were good to me. I got away in a canoe, and rowed many miles and many days; the sea was calm, and I had bread, fruit, and water enough to last two weeks. At the end of ten days I neared a brig, which took me to Yucatan. My adventurous voyage made me popular there. I gave a false name, of course, for I hated the name of Vassia Kazán. War was going on at the time in Mexico, and I went there and offered myself to the military adventurer who was at the moment uppermost. I saw a good deal of guerilla warfare for a year. I liked it: I fear I was cruel. The ruler of the hour, who was scarcely more than a brigand, was defeated and assassinated. At the time of his fall I was at the head of a few troopers far away in the interior. Bands of Indians fell on us in great numbers. I was shot down and left for dead. A stranger found me on the morning after, carried me to his hut, and saved my life by his skill and care. This stranger was the Marquis Xavier de Sabran, who had dwelt for nearly seventy years in the solitude of those virgin forests, which nothing ever disturbed excepts the hiss of an Indian's arrow or the roar of woods on fire. How he lived there, and why, is all told in the monograph I have published of him. He was a great and a good man. His life, lost under the shadows of those virgin forests was the life of a saint and of a philosopher in one. His influence upon me was the noblest that I had ever been subject to; he did me nothing but good. His son had died early, having wedded a Spanish Mexican ere he was twenty. His grandson had died of snake-bite: he had been of my age. At times: he almost seemed to think that this lad lived again in me. I spent eight years of my life with him. His profound studies attracted me; his vast learning awed me. The free life of the woods and sierras, the perilous sports, the dangers from the Indian tribes, the researches into the lost history of the perished nation, all these interested and occupied me. I was glad to forget that I had ever lived another existence. Wholly unlike as it was in climate, in scenery, in custom, the liberty of life on the pampas and in the forests recalled to me my childhood on the steppes of the Volga. I saw no European all those years. The only men I came in contact with were Indians and half breeds; the only woman I loved was an Indian girl; there was not even a Mexicanranchnear, within hundreds of miles. The dense close-woven forest was between us and the rest of the world; our only highway was a river, made almost inaccessible by dense fields of reeds and banks of jungle and swamps covered with huge lilies. It was a very simple existence, but in it all the wants of nature were satisfied, all healthy desires could be gratified, and it was elevated from brutishness by the lofty studies which I prosecuted under the direction of the Marquis Xavier. Eight whole years passed so. I was twenty-five years old when my protector and friend died of sheer old age in one burning summer, against whose heat he had no strength. He talked long and tenderly with me ere he died; told me where to find all his papers, and gave me everything he owned. It was not much. He made me one last request, that I would collect his manuscripts, complete them, and publish them in France. For some weeks after his death I could think of nothing but his loss. I buried him myself, with the aid of an Indian who had loved him; and his grave is there beside the ruins that he revered, beneath a grove of cypress. I carved a cross in cedar wood, and raised it above the grave. I found all his papers where he had indicated, underneath one of the temple porticoes; his manuscripts I had already in my possession: all those which had been brought with him from France by his Jesuit tutors, and the certificates of his own and his father's births and marriages, with those of his son, and of his grandson. There was also a paper containing directions how to find other documents, with the orders and patents of nobility of the Sabrans of Romaris, which had been hidden in the oak wood upon their sea-shore in Finisterre. All these he had desired me to seek and take. Now came upon me the temptation to a great sin. The age of his grandson, the young Réné de Sabran, had been mine: he also had perished from snake-bite, as I said, without any human being knowing of it save his grandfather and a few natives. It seemed to me that if I assumed his name I should do no one any wrong. It boots not to dwell on the sophisms with which I persuaded myself that I had the right to repair an injustice done to me by human law ere I was born. Men less intelligent than I can always find a million plausible reasons for doing that which they desire to do; and although the years I had spent beside the Marquis Xavier had purified my character and purged it of much of the vice and the cynicism I had learned in Paris, yet I had little moral conscientiousness. I lived outside the law in many ways, and was indifferent to those measures of right and wrong which too often appeared to me mere puerilities. Do not suppose that I ceased to be grateful to my benefactor; I adored his memory, but it seemed to me I should do him no wrong whatever. Again and again he had deplored to me that I was not his heir; he had loved me very truly, and had given me all he held most dear——the fruits of his researches. To be brief, I was sorely tempted, and I gave way to the temptation. I had no difficulty in claiming recognition in the city of Mexico as the Marquis de Sabran. The documents were there, and no creature knew that they were not mine except a few wild Puebla Indians, who spoke no tongue but their own, and never left their forest solitudes. I was recognised by all the necessary authorities of that country. I returned to France as the Marquis de Sabran. On my voyage I made acquaintance with two Frenchmen of very high station, who proved true friends to me, and had power enough to protect me from the consequences of not having served a military term in France. On my arrival in Europe, I went first to the Bay of Romaris: there I found at once all that had been indicated to me as hidden in the oak wood above the sea. The priest of Romaris, and the peasantry, at the first utterance of the name, welcomed me with rapture; they had forgotten nothing——Bretons never do forget. Vassia Kazán had been numbered with the drowned dead men who had gone down when theEstellehad foundered off the Pinos. I had therefore no fear of recognition. I had grown and changed, so much during my seven years' absence from Paris that I did not suppose anyone would recognise the Russian collegian in the Marquis de Sabran. And I was not in error. Even you, most probably, would never have known me again had not your perceptions been abnormally quickened by hatred of me as your cousin's husband; and had you even had suspicions you could never have presumed to formulate them but for that accident in the forest. It is always some such unforeseen trifle which breaks down the wariest schemes. I will not linger on all the causes that made me take the name I did. I can honestly say that had there been any fortune involved, or any even distant heir to be wronged, I should not have done it. As there was nothing save some insignia of knightly orders and some acres of utterly unproductive sea-coast, I wronged no one. What was left of the old manor I purchased with the little money I took over with me. I repeat that I have wronged no one except your cousin, who is my wife. The rest of my life you know. Society in Paris became gracious and cordial to me. You will say that I must have had every moral sense perverted before I could take such a course. But I did not regard it as an immorality. Here was an empty title, like an empty shell, lying ready for any occupant. Its usurpation harmed no one. I intended to justify my assumption of it by a distinguished career, and I was aware that my education had been beyond that of most gentlemen. It is true that when I was fairly launched on a Parisian life pleasure governed me more than ambition; and I found, which had not before occurred to me, that the aristocratic creeds and the political loyalties which I had perforce adopted with the name of the Sabrans de Romaris completely closed all the portals of political ambition to me. Hence I became almost by necessity afainéant, and fate smiled upon me more than I merited. I discharged my duty to the dead by the publication of all his manuscripts. In this at least I was faithful. Paris applauded me. I became in a manner celebrated. I need not say more, except that I can declare to you the position I had entered upon soon became so natural to me that I absolutely forgot it was assumed. Nature had made me arrogant, contemptuous, courageous; it was quite natural to me to act the part of a great noble. My want of fortune often hampered and irritated me, but I had that instinct in public events which we callflair.I made with slender means some audacious and happy ventures on the Bourse. I was also, famous forla main heureusein all forms of gambling. I led a selfish and perhaps even a vicious life, but I kept always within those lines which the usages of the world has prescribed to gentlemen even in their licence. I never did anything that degraded the name I had taken, as men of the world read degradation. I should not have satisfied severe moralists, but, my one crime apart, I was a man of honour until——I loved your cousin. I do not attempt to defend my marriage with her. It was a fraud, a crime; I am well aware of that. If you had struck me the other night, I would not have denied your perfect right to do so. I will say no more. You have loved her. You know what my temptation was: my crime is one you cannot pardon. It is a treason to your rank, to your relatives, to all the traditions of your order. When you were a little lad you said a bitter truth to me. I was born a serf in Russia. There are serfs no more in Russia, but Alexander, who affranchised them, cannot affranchise me. I am base-born. I am like those cross-bred hounds cursed by conflicting elements in their blood: I am an aristocrat in temper and in taste and mind. I am a bastard in class, the chance child of a peasant begotten by a great lord's momentaryennuiand caprice! But if you will stoop so far——if you will consider me ennobled byherenough to meet you as an equal would do——we can find with facility some pretext of quarrel, and under cover and semblance of a duel you can kill me. You will be only taking the just vengeance of a race of which you are the only male champion—what her brothers would surely have taken had they been living. She will mourn for me without shame, since you have passed me your promise never to tell her of my past. I await your commands. That my little sons will transmit the infamy of my blood to their descendants will be disgrace to them for ever in your sight. Yet you will not utterly hate them, for children are more their mother's than their father's, and she will rear them in all noble ways.'