Then he signed the letter with the name of Vassia Kazán, and addressed it to Egon Vàsàrhely at his castle of Taróc, there to await the return of Vàsàrhely from the Prussian camp. That done, he felt more at peace with himself, more nearly a gentleman, less heavily weighted with his own cowardice and shame.
It was not until three weeks later that he received the reply of Vàsàrhely written from the castle of Taróc. It was very brief:——
'I have read your letter and I have burned it. I cannot kill you, for she would never pardon me. Live on in such peace as you may find.
(Signed) 'PRINCE VÀSÀRHELY.'
To his cousin Vàsàrhely wrote at the same time, and to her said:
'Forgive me that I left you so abruptly. It was necessary, and I did not rebel against necessity, for so I avoided some pain. The world has seen me at Hohenszalras; let that suffice. Do not ask me to return. It hurts me to refuse you anything, but residence there is only a prolonged suffering to me and must cause irritation to your lord. I go to my soldiers in Central Hungary, amongst whom I make my family. If ever you need me you will know that I am at your service; but I hope this will never be, since it will mean that some evil has befallen you.' Rear your sons in the traditions of your race, and teach them to be worthy of yourself: being so they will be also worthy of your name. Adieu, my ever beloved Wanda! Show what I have said herein to your husband, and give me a remembrance in your prayers.
(Signed) 'EGON.'
The Countess Brancka meanwhile had been staying at Taróc for the autumn shooting when her brother-in-law had returned there unexpectedly, and to her chagrin, since she had filled the old castle with friends of her own, such as Egon Vàsàrhely little favoured, and it amused her to play the châtelaine there and organise all manner of extravagant and eccentric pastimes. When he arrived she could no longer enjoy this unchecked independence of folly, and he did not hesitate to make it plain to her that the sooner Taróc should be cleared of its Parisian world the better would he be pleased. Indeed she knew well that it was only his sense of hospitality, as the first duty of a gentleman, which restrained him from enforcing a rough and sudden exodus upon her guests. He returned, moreover, unusually silent, reserved, and what she termed ill-tempered. It was clear to her that his sojourn at Hohenszalras had been painful to him; and whenever she spoke to him of it he replied to her in a tone which forbade her further interrogation. If she feared anyone in the world it was Egon, who had again and again paid her debts to spare his brother annoyance, and who received her and her caprices with a contemptuous unalterable disdain.
'Wanda has ruined him!' she always thought angrily. 'He always expects every other woman to have a soul abovechiffonsand to bury herself in the country with children and horses.'
Her quick instincts perceived that the hold upon his thoughts which his cousin always possessed had been only strengthened by his visit to her, and she attributed the gloom which had settled down on him to the pain which the happiness that reigned at Hohenszalras had given him. Little souls always try to cram great ones into their own narrowed measurements. As he did not absolutely dismiss her she continued to entertain her own people at Taróc, ignoring his tacit disapproval, and was still there when the letter of Sabran reached her brother-in-law. She had very quick eyes; she was present when the letters, which only came to Taróc once a week, being fetched over many leagues of wild forest, and hill, and torrent, and ravine, were brought to Vàsàrhely, and she noticed that his face changed as he took out a thick envelope, which she, standing by his shoulder, with her hand outstretched for her own correspondence from Paris and Petersburg, could see bore the post-mark of Matrey. He threw it amongst a mass of other letters, and soon after took all his papers away with him into the room which was called a library, being full of Hungarian black-letter and monkish literature, gathered in centuries gone by by great priests of the race of Vàsàrhely.
What was in that letter?
She attended to none of her own, so absorbed was she in the impression which gained upon her that the packet which had brought so much surprise and even emotion upon his face came from the hand of Wanda. 'If even she should be no saint at all?' she thought, with a malicious amusement. She did not see Egon Vàsàrhely for many hours, but she did not lose her curiosity nor cease to cast about for a method of gratifying it. At the close of the day when she came back from hunting she went into the library, which was then empty. She did not seriously expect to see anything that would reward her enterprise, but she knew he read his letters there and wrote the few he was obliged to write: like most soldiers he disliked using pen and ink. It was dusk, and there were a few lights burning in the old silver sconces fixed upon the horns of forest animals against the walls. With a quick, calm touch, she moved all the litter of papers lying on the huge table where he was wont to do such business as he was compelled to transact. She found nothing that gratified her inquisitiveness. She was about to leave the room in baffled impatience——impatience of she knew not what——when her eyes fell upon a pile of charred paper lying on the stove.
It was one of those monumental polychrome stoves of fifteenth-century work in which the country-houses of Central Europe are so rich; a grand pile of fretted pottery, towering half way to the ceiling, with the crown and arms of the Vàsàrhely princes on its summit. There was no fire in it, for the weather was not cold, and Vàsàrhely, who alone used the room, was an ascetic in such matters; but upon its jutting step, which was guarded by lions of gilded bronze, there had been some paper burned: the ashes lay there in a little heap. Almost all of it was ash, but a few torn pieces were only blackened and coloured. With the eager curiosity of a woman who is longing to find another woman at fault, she kneeled down by the stove and patiently examined these pieces. Only one was so little burned that it had a word or two legible upon it; two of those words were Vassia Kazán. Nothing else was traceable; she recognised the handwriting of Sabran. She attached no importance to it, yet she slipped the little scrap, burnt and black as it was, within one of her gauntlets; then, as quickly as she had come there, she retreated and in another half hour, smiling and radiant, covered with jewels, and with no trace of fatigue or of weather, she descended the great banqueting-hall, clad as though the heart of the Greater Karpathians was the centre of the Boulevard S. Germain.
Who was Vassia Kazán?
The question floated above all her thoughts all that evening. Who was he, she, or it, and what could Sabran have to say of him, or her, or it to Egon Vàsàrhely? A less wise woman might have asked straightway what the unknown name might mean, but straight ways are not those which commend themselves to temperaments like hers. The pleasure and the purpose of her life was intrigue. In great things she deemed it necessity; in trifles it was an amusement; without it life was flavourless.
The next day her brother-in-law abandoned Taróc, to join his hussars and prepare for the autumn manœuvres in the plains, and left her and Stefan in possession of the great place, half palace, half fortress, which had withstood more than one siege of Ottoman armies, where it stood across a deep gorge with the water foaming black below. But she kept the charred, torn, triangular scrap of paper; and she treasured in her memory the two words Vassia Kazán; and she said again and again and again to herself: 'Why should he write to Egon? Why should Egon burn what he writes?' Deep down in her mind there was always at work a bitter jealousy of Wanda von Szalras; jealousy of her regular and perfect beauty, of her vast possessions, of her influence at the Court, of her serene and unspotted repute, and now of her ascendency over the lives of Sabran and of Vàsàrhely.
'Why should they both love that woman so much?' she thought very often. 'She is always alike. She has no temptations. She goes over life as if it were frozen snow. She did one senseless thing, but then she was rich enough to do it with impunity. She is so habitually fortunate that she is utterly uninteresting; and yet they are both her slaves!'
She went home and wrote to a cousin of her own who had been a member of the famous Third Section at Petersburg. She said in her letter: 'Is there anyone known in Russia as Vassia Kazán? I want you to learn for me to what or to whom this name belongs. It is certainly Russian, and appears to me to have been taken by some one who has been namedmore hebrœofrom the city of Kazán. You, who know everything past, present, and to come, will be able to know this.'
In a few days she received an answer from Petersburg. Her cousin wrote: 'I cannot give you the information you desire. It must be a thing of the past. But I will keep it in mind, and sooner or later you shall have the knowledge you wish. You will do us the justice to admit that we are not easily baffled.'
She was not satisfied, but knew how to be patient.
Strangely enough the consciousness that one person lived who knew his secret unnerved him. He had said truly that so much were all his instincts and temper those of an aristocrat that he had long ceased to remember that he was not the true Marquis de Sabran. The admiration men frankly gave him, and the ascendency he exercised over women, had alike concurred in fostering his self-delusion. Since his recognition by the foe of his boyhood a vivid sense of his own shamefulness, however, had come upon him; a morbid consciousness that he was not what he seemed, and what all the world believed him, had returned to him. Egon would never speak, but he himself could never forget. He said to himself in his solitude, 'I am Vassia Kazán! and what he had done appeared to him intolerable, infamous, beyond all expiation.
It was like an impalpable but impassable wall built up between himself and her. Nothing was changed except that one man knew his secret, but this one fact seemed to change the face of the world. For the first time all the deference, all the homage with which the people of the Tauern treated him seemed to him a derision. Naturally of proud temper, and of an intellect which gave him ascendency over others, he had from the first moment he had assumed the marquisate of Sabran received all the acknowledgments of his rank with an honest unconsciousness of imposture. After all he had in his veins blood as patrician as that of the Sabrans; but now that Egon Vàsàrhely knew the truth he was perpetually conscious of not being what he seemed. The mere sense that about the world there was another living being who knew what he knew, shook down all the self-possession and philosophy which had so long made him assure himself that the assumption of a name was an immaterial circumstance, which, harming no one, could concern no one. Egon Vàsàrhely seemed to have seized his sophisms in a rude grasp, and shaken them down as blossoms fall in wind. He thought with bitter self-contempt how true the cynic was who said that no sin exists so long as it is not found out; that discovery is the sole form which remorse takes.
At times his remorse made him almost afraid of Wanda, almost shrink from her, almost tremble at her regard; at other times it intensified his passion and infused into his embraces a kind of ferocity of triumph. He would show an almost brutal ardour in his caresses, and would think with an almost cruel exultation, 'I was born a serf, and I am her lover, her lord! Strangely enough, she began to lose something of her high influence upon him, of her spiritual superiority in his sight. She was so entirely, so perpetually his, that she became in a manner tainted with his own degradation. She could no longer check him with a word, calm him with a gesture of restraint. She was conscious of a change in him which she could not explain to herself. His sweetness of temper was broken by occasional irritability that she had never seen before. He was at times melancholy and absorbed; he at times displayed a jealousy which appeared unworthy of herself and him; at other moments he adored her, submitted to her with too great a humility. They were still happy, but their happiness was more uncertain, more disturbed by passing shadows. She told herself that it was always so in marriage, that in the old trite phrase nothing mortal was ever perfect long. But this philosophy failed to reconcile her. She found herself continually pondering on the alteration that she perceived in him, without being able to explain it to herself in any satisfactory manner.
One day he announced to her without preface that he had decided to renounce the name of Sabran; that he preferred to any other the title which she had given him in the Countship of Idrac. She was astonished, but on reflection only saw, in his choice, devotion and deference to herself. Perhaps, too, she reflected with a pang, he desired some foreign mission such as she had once proposed to him; perhaps the life at Hohenszalras was monotonous and too quiet for a man so long used to the movement and excitation of Paris. She suggested the invitation of a circle of guests more often, but he rejected the idea with some impatience. He, who had previously amused himself so well with the part of host to a brilliant society, now professed that he saw nothing but trouble andennuiin a house full of people, who changed every week, and of royal personages who exacted ceremonious observances that were tedious and burdensome. So they remained alone, for even the Princess Ottilie had gone away to Lilienslust. For her own part she asked nothing better. Her people, her lands, her occupations, her responsibilities, were always interest enough. She loved the stately, serene tread of Time in these mountain solitudes. Life always seemed to her a purer, graver, more august thing when no echo of the world without jarred on the solemnity of the woods and hills. She wanted her children to grow up to love Hohenszalras, as she had always done, far above all pomps and pleasures of courts and cities.
The winter went by, and he spent most of the days out of doors in violent exercise, sledging, skating, wolf hunting. In the evenings he made music for her in the white room: beautiful, dreamy music, that carried her soul from earth. He played for hours and hours far into the night; he seemed more willing to do anything than to converse. When he talked to her she was sensible of an effort of constraint; it was no longer the careless, happy, spontaneous conversation of a man certain of receiving sympathy in all his opinions, indulgence in all his errors, comprehension in even his vaguest or most eccentric ideas: a certain charm was gone out of their intercourse. She thought sometimes humbly enough, was it because a man always wearies of a woman? Yet she could scarcely think that, for his reverential deference to her alternated with a passion that had lost nothing of its voluptuous intensity.
So the winter passed away. Madame Ottilie was in the South for her health, with her relatives of Lilienhöhe; they invited no one, and so no one could approach them. The children grew and throve. Bela and his brother had a little sledge of their own, drawn by two Spanish donkeys, white as the snows that wrapped the Iselthal in their serenity and silence. In their little sable coats and their sable-lined hoods the two little boys looked like rosebuds wrapped in brown moss. They were a pretty spectacle upon the ice, with their stately Heiduck, wrapped in his scarlet and black cloak, walking by the gilded shell-shaped sledge.
'Bela loves the ice best. Bela wishes the summer never was!' said the little heir of the Counts of Szalras one day, as he leaped out from under the bearskin of his snow-carriage. His father heard him, and smiled a little bitterly.
'You have the snow in your blood,' he thought. 'I, too, know how I loved the winter with all its privations, how I skimmed like a swallow down the frozen Volga, how I breasted the wind of the North Sea, sad with the dying cries of the swans! But I had an empty stomach and naked limbs under my rough goatskin, and you ride there in your sables and velvets, a proud little prince, and yet you are my son!'
Was he almost angered against his own child for the great heirship to which he was born, as kings are often of their dauphins? Bela looked up at him a little timidly, always being in a certain awe of his father.
'May Bela go with you some day with the big black horses, one day when you go very far?'
'Ask your mother,' said Sabran.
'She will like it,' said the child. 'Yesterday she said you never do think of Bela. She did not say ittoBela, but he heard.'
'I will think of him,' said Sabran, with some emotion: he had a certain antagonism to the child, of which he was vaguely ashamed; he was sorry that she should have noticed it. He disliked him because Bela so visibly resembled himself that he was a perpetual reproach; a living sign of how the blood of a Russian lord and of a Persian peasant had been infused into the blood of the Austrian nobles.
The next day he took the child with him on a drive of many leagues, through the frozen highways winding through the frosted forests under the huge snow-covered range of the Glöckner mountains. Bela was in raptures; the grand black Russian horses, whose speed was as the wind, were much more to his taste than the sedate and solemn Spanish asses. When they returned, and Sabran lifted him out of the sledge in the twilight, the child kissed his hand.
'Bela loves you,' he said timidly.
'Why do you?' said his father, surprised and touched. 'Because you are your mother's child?'
Bela did not understand. He said, after a moment of reflection:
'Bela is afraid, when you are angry; very afraid. But Bela does love you.'
Sabran laid his hand on the child's shoulder. 'I shall never be angry if Bela obey his mother, and never pain her. Remember that.'
'He will remember,' said Bela. 'And may he go with the big black horses very soon again?'
'Your mother's horses are just as big, and just as black. Is it not the same thing to go with her?'
'No. Because she takes Bela often; you never.'
'You are ungrateful,' said Sabran, in the tone which always alarmed and awed the bold, bright spirit of his child. 'Your mother's love beside mine is like the great mountain beside the speck of dust. Can you understand? You will when you are a man. Obey her and adore her. So you will best please me.'
Bela looked at him with troubled suffused eyes; he went within doors a little sadly, led away by Hubert, and when he reached his nursery and had his furs taken from off him he was still serious, and for once he did not tell his thoughts to Gela, for they were too many for him to be able to master them in words. His father was a beautiful, august, terrible, magnificent figure in his eyes; with the confused fancies of a child's scarce-opened mind he blended together in his admiration Sabran and the great marble form of S. Johann of Prague which stretched its arm towards the lake from the doors of the great entrance, and, as Bela always understood, controlled the waters and the storms at will. Bela feared no one else in all the world, but he feared his father, and for that reason loved him as he loved nothing else in his somewhat selfish and imperious little life.
'It is so good of you to have given Bela that pleasure,' his wife said to him when he entered the white room. 'I know you cannot care to hear a child chatter as I do. It can only be tiresome to you.'
'I will drive him every day if it pleaseyou,' said Sabran.
'No, no; that would be too much to exact from you. Besides, he would soon despise his donkeys, and desert poor Gela. I take him but seldom myself for that reason. He has an idea that he is immeasurably older than Gela. It is true a year at their ages is more difference than are ten years at ours.'
'The child said something to me, as if he had heard you say I do not care for him?'
'You do not, very much. Surely you are inclined to be harsh to him?'
'If I be so, it is only because I see so much of myself in him.'
He looked at her, assailed once more by the longing which at times came over him to tell her the truth of himself, to risk everything rather than deceive her longer, to throw himself upon her mercy, and cut short this life which had so much of duplicity, so much of concealment, that every year added to it was a stone added to the mountain of his sins. But when he looked at her he dared not. The very grace and serenity of her daunted him; all the signs of nobility in her, from the repose of her manner to the very beauty of her hands, with their great rings gleaming on the long and slender fingers, seemed to awe him into silence. She was so proud a woman, so great a lady, so patrician in all her prejudices, her habits, her hereditary qualities, he dared not tell her that he had betrayed her thus. An infidelity, a folly, even any other crime he thought he could have summoned courage to confess to her; but to say to her, the daughter of a line of princes: 'I, who have made you the mother of my children, I was born a bastard and a serf!' How could he dare say that? Anything else she might forgive, he thought, since love is great, but never that. Nay, a cold sickness stole over him as he thought again that she came of great lords who had meted justice out over whole provinces for a thousand years; and he had wronged her so deeply that the human tongue scarcely held any word of infamy enough to name his crime. The law would set her free, if she chose, from a man who had so betrayed her, and his children would be bastards like himself.
He had stretched himself on a great couch, covered with white bear-skins. He was in shadow; she was in the light that came from the fire on the wide hearth, and from the oriel window near, a red warm dusky light, that fell on the jewels on her hands, the furs on her skirts, the very pearls about her throat.
She glanced at him anxiously, seeing how motionless he lay there, with his head turned backward on the cushions.
'I am afraid you are weak still from that wound,' she said, as she rose and approached him. 'Greswold assures me it has left no trace, but I am always afraid. And you look often so pale. Perhaps you exert yourself too much? Let the wolves be. Perhaps it is too cold for you? Would you like to go to the south? Do not think of me; my only happiness is to do whatever you wish.'
He kissed her hand with deep unfeigned emotion. 'I believe in angels since I knew you,' he murmured. 'No; I will not take you away from the winter and the people that you love. I am well enough. Greswold is right. I could not master those horses if I were not strong; be sure of that.'
'But I always fear that it is dull here for you?'
'Dull! with you? "Custom cannot stale her infinite variety." That was written in prophecy of your charm for me.'
'You will always flatter me! And I am not "various" at all; I am too grave to be entertaining. I am just the German house-mother who cares for the children and for you.'
He laughed.
'Is that your portrait of yourself? I think Carolus Duran's is truer, my grand châtelaine. When you are at Court the whole circle seems to fade to nothing before your presence. Though there are so many women high-born and beautiful there, you eclipse them all.'
'Only in your eyes! And you know I care nothing for courts. What I like is the life here, where one quiet day is the pattern of all the other days. If I were sure that you were content in it——'
'Why should you think of that?'
'My love, tell me honestly, do you never miss the world?'
He rose and walked to the hearth. He, whose life was a long lie, never lied to her if he could avoid it; and he knew very well that he did miss the world with all its folly, stimulant, and sin. Sometimes the moral air here seemed to him too pure, too clear.
'Did I do so I should be thankless indeed—thankless as madmen are who do not know the good done to them. I am like a ship that has anchored in a fair haven after press of weather. I infinitely prefer to see none but yourself: when others are here we are of necessity so much apart. If the weather,' he added more lightly, 'did not so very often wear Milton's grey sandals, there would be nothing one could ever wish changed in the life here. For such great riders as we are, that is a matter of regret. Wet saddles are too often our fate, but in compensation our forests are so green.'
She did not press the question.
But the next day she wrote a letter to a relative who was a great minister and had preponderating influence in the council chamber of the Austrian Empire. She did not speak to Sabran of the letter that she sent.
She had not known any of that disillusion which befalls most women in their love. Her husband had remained her lover, passionately, ardently, jealously; and the sincerity of his devotion to her had spared her all that terrible consciousness of the man's satiety which usually confronts a woman in the earliest years of union. She shrank now with horror from the fear which came to her that this passion might, like so many others, alter and fade under the dulness of habit. She had high courage and clear vision; she met half-way the evil that she dreaded.
In the spring a Foreign Office despatch from Vienna came to him and surprised and moved him strongly. With it in his hand he sought her at once.
'You did this!' he said quickly. 'They offer me the Russian mission.'
She grew a little pale, but had courage to smile. She had seen by a glance at his face the pleasure the offer gave him.
'I only told my cousin Kunst that I thought you might be persuaded to try public life, if he proposed it to you.'
'When did you say that?'
'One day in the winter, when I asked you if you did not miss the world.'
'I never thought I betrayed that I did so.'
'You were only over eager to deny it. And I know your generosity, my love. You miss the world; we will go back to it for a little. It will only make our life here dearer—I hope.'
He was silent; emotion mastered him. 'You have the most unselfish nature that was!' he said brokenly. 'It will be a cruel sacrifice to you, and yet you urge it for my sake.'
'Dear, will you not understand? What is for your sake is what is most for mine. I see you long, despite yourself, to be amidst men once more, and use your rare talents as you cannot use them here. It is only right that you should have the power to do so. If our life here has taken the hold on your heart then, I think you will come back to it all the more gladly. And then I too have my vanity; I shall be proud for the world to see how you can fill a great station, conduct a difficult negotiation, distinguish yourself in every way. When they praise you, I shall be repaid a thousand times for any sacrifice of my own tastes that there may be.'
He heard her with many conflicting emotions, of which a passionate gratitude was the first and highest.
'You make me ashamed,' he said in a low voice. 'No man can be worthy of such goodness as yours; and I——'
Once more the avowal of the truth rose to his lips, but stayed unuttered. His want of courage took refuge in procrastination.
'We need not decide for a day or two,' he added; 'they give me time; we will think well. When do you think I must reply?'
'Surely soon; your delay would seem disrespect. You know we Austrians are very ceremonious.'
'And if I accept, it will not make you unhappy?'
'My love, no, a thousand times, no; your choice is always mine.'
He stooped and kissed her hand.
'You are ever the same,' he murmured. 'The noblest, the most generous——'
She smiled bravely. 'I am quite sure you have decided already. Go to my table yonder, and write a graceful acceptance to my cousin Kunst. You will be happier when it is posted.'
'No, I will think a little. It is not a thing to be done in haste. It will be irrevocable.'
'Irrevocable? A diplomatic mission? You can throw it up when you please. You are not bound to serve longer than you choose.'
He was silent: what he had thought himself had been of the irrevocable insult he would be held to have offered to the emperor, the nation, and the world, if ever they knew.
'It will not be liked if I accept for a mere caprice. One must never treat a State as Bela treats his playthings,' he said as he rang, and when the servant answered the summons ordered them to saddle his horse.
'No; there is no haste. Glearemberg is not definitely recalled, I think.'
But as she spoke she knew very well that, unknown to himself, he had already decided; that the joy and triumph the offer had brought to him were both too great for him eventually to resist them. He sat down and re-read the letter.
She had said the truth to him, but she had not said all the truth. She had a certain desire that he should justify her marriage in the eyes of the world by some political career brilliantly followed; but this was not her chief motive in wishing him to return to the life of cities. She had seen that he was in a manner disquieted, discontented, and attributed it to discontent at the even routine of their lives. The change in his moods and tempers, the arbitrary violence of his love for her, vaguely alarmed and troubled her; she seemed to see the germ of much that might render their lives far less happy. She realised that she had given herself to one who had the capacity of becoming a tyrannical possessor, and retained, even after six years of marriage, the irritable ardour of a lover. She knew that it was better for them both that the distraction and the restraint of the life of the world should occupy some of his thoughts, and check the over-indulgence of a passion which in solitude grew feverish and morbid. She had not the secret of the change in him, of which the result alone was apparent to her, and she could only act according to her light. If he grew morose, tyrannical, violent, all the joy of their life would be gone. She knew that men alter curiously under the sense of possession. She felt that her influence, though strong, was not paramount as it had been, and she perceived that he no longer took much interest in the administration of the estates, in which he had shown great ability in the first years of their marriage. She had been forced to resume her old governance of all those matters, and she knew that it was not good for him to live without occupation. She feared that the sameness of the days, to her so delightful, to him grew tiresome. To ride constantly, to hunt sometimes, to make music in the evenings——this was scarcely enough to fill up the life of a man who had been aviveuron the bitumen of the boulevards for so long.
A woman of a lesser nature would have been too vain to doubt the all-sufficiency of her own presence to enthral and to content him; but she was without vanity, and had more wisdom than most women. It did not even once occur to her, as it would have done incessantly to most, that the magnificence of all her gifts to him were title-deeds to his content for life.
Public life would be her enemy, would take her from the solitudes she loved, would change her plans for her children's education, would bring the world continually betwixt herself and her husband; but since he wished it that was all she thought of, all her law.
'Surely he will accept?' said Mdme. Ottilie, who had returned from the south of France.
'Yes, he will accept,' said his wife. 'He does not know it, but he will.'
'I cannot imagine why he should affect to hesitate. It is the career he is made for, with his talents, his social graces.'
'He does not affect; he hesitates for my sake. He knows I am never happy away from Hohenszalras.'
'Why did you write then to Kunst?'
'Because it will be better for him; he is neither a poet nor a philosopher, to be able to live away from the world.'
'Which are you?'
'Neither; only a woman who loves the home she was born in, and the people she——'
'Reigns over,' added the Princess. 'Admit, my beloved, that a part of your passion for Hohenszalras comes of the fact that you cannot be quite as omnipotent in the world as you are here!'
Wanda von Szalras smiled. 'Perhaps; the best motive is always mixed with a baser. But I adore the country and country life. I abhor cities.'
'Men are always like Horace,' said the Princess. 'They admire rural life, but they remain for all that with Augustus.'
At that moment they heard the hoofs of his horse galloping up the great avenue. A quarter of an hour went by, for he changed his dress before coming into his wife's presence. He would no more have gone to her with the dust or the mud of the roads upon him than he would have gone in such disarray into the inner circle of the Kaiserin.
When he entered, she did not speak, but the Princess Ottilie said with vivacity:
'Well! you accept, of course?
'I will neither accept nor decline. I will do what Wanda wishes.'
The Princess gave an impatient movement of her little foot on the carpet.
'Wanda is a hermit,' she said; 'she should have dwelt in a cave, and lived on berries with S. Scholastica. What is the use of leaving it to her? She will say No. She loves her mountains.'
'Then she shall stay amidst her mountains.'
'And you will throw all your future away?'
'Dear mother, I have no future——should have had none but for her.'
'All that is very pretty, but after nearly six years of marriage it is not necessary tofaire des madrigaux.'
The Princess sat a little more erect, angrily, and continued to tap her foot upon the floor. His wife was silent for a little while; then she went over to her writing-table, and wrote with a firm hand a few lines in German. She rose and gave the sheet to Sabran.
'Copy that,' she said, 'or give it as many graces of style as you like.'
His heart beat, his sight seemed dim as he read what she had written.
It was an acceptance.
'See, my dear Réné!' said the Princess, when she understood; 'never combat a woman on her own ground and with her own weapon— unselfishness! The man must always lose in a conflict of that sort.'
The tears stood in his eyes as he answered her——
'Ah, madame! if I say what I think, you will accuse me again offaisant des madrigaux!'
A week or two later Sabran arrived alone at their palace in Vienna, and was cordially received by the great minister whom Wanda called her cousin Kunst. He had also an audience of his Imperial master, who showed him great kindness and esteem; he had been always popular and welcome at the Hofburg. His new career awaited him under auspices the most engaging; his intelligence, which was great, took pleasure at the prospect of the field awaiting it; and his personal pride was gratified and flattered at the personal success which he enjoyed. He was aware that the brain he was gifted with would amply sustain all the demands forfinesseand penetration that a high diplomatic mission would make upon it, and he knew that the immense fortune he commanded through his wife would enable him to fill his place with the social brilliancy and splendour it required.
He felt happier than he had done ever since the day in the forest when the name of Vassia Kazán had been said in his ear; he had recovered his nerve, his self-command, hisinsouciance; he was once more capable of honestly forgetting that he was anything besides the great gentleman he appeared. There was an additional pungency for him in the fact of his mission being to Russia. He hated the country as a renegade hates a religion he has abandoned. The undying hereditary enmity which must always exist,sub rosa, betwixt Austria and Russia was in accordance with the antagonism he himself felt for every rood of the soil, for every syllable of the tongue, of the Muscovite. He knew that Paul Zabaroff, his father's legitimate son, was a mighty prince, a keen politician, a favourite courtier at the Court of St. Petersburg. The prospect of himself appearing at that Court as the representative of a great nation, with the occasion and the power to meet Paul Zabaroff as an equal, and defeat his most cherished intrigues, his most subtle projects, gave an intensity to his triumph such as no mere social honours or gratified ambition could alone have given him. If the minister had searched the whole of the Austrian empire through, in all the ranks of men he could have found no one so eager to serve the purpose and the interests of his Imperial master against the rivalry of Russia, as he found in one who had been born a nakedmoujikin theisbaof a Persian peasant.
Even though this distinction which was offered him would rest like all else on a false basis, yet it intoxicated him, and would gratify his desires to be something above and beyond the mere prince-consort that he was. He knew that his talents were real, that his tact and perception were unerring, that his power to analyse and influence men was great. All these qualities he felt would enable him in a public career to conquer admiration and eminence. He was not yet old enough to be content to regard the future as a thing belonging to his sons, nor had he enough philo-progenitiveness ever to do so at any age.
'To return so to Russia!' he thought, with rapture. All the ambition that had been in him in his college days at the Lycée Clovis, which had never taken definite shape, partly from indolence and partly from circumstance, and had not been satisfied even by the brilliancy of his marriage, was often awakened and spurred by the greatness of the social position of all those with whom he associated. In his better moments be sometimes thought, 'I am only the husband of the Countess von Szalras; I am only the father of the future lords of Hohenszalras;' and the reflection that the world might regard him so made him restless and ill at ease.
He knew that, being what he was, he would add to his crime tenfold by acceptance of the honour offered to him. He knew that the more prominent he was in the sight of men, the deeper would be his fall if ever the truth were told. What gauge had he that some old school-mate, dowered with as long a memory as Vàsàrhely's, might not confront him with the same charge and challenge? True, this danger had always seemed to him so remote that never since he had landed at Romaris bay had he been troubled by any apprehension of it. His own assured position, his own hauteur of bearing, his own perfect presence of mind, would have always enabled him to brave safely such an ordeal under the suspicion of any other than Vàsàrhely; with any other he could have relied on his own coolness and courage to have borne him with immunity through any such recognition. Besides, he had always reckoned, and reckoned justly, that no one would ever dare to insult the Marquis de Sabran with a suspicion that could have no proof to sustain it. So he had always reasoned, and events had justified his expectations and deductions.
This month that he now passed in Vienna was the proudest of his life; not perhaps the happiest, for beneath his contentment there was a jarring remembrance that he was deceiving a great sovereign and his ministers. But he thrust this sting of conscience aside whenever it touched him, and abandoned himself with almost youthful gladness to the felicitations he received, the arrangements he had to make, and the contemplation of the future before him. The pleasures of the gay and witty city surrounded him, and he was too handsome, too seductive, and too popular not to be sought by women of all ranks, who rallied him on his long devotion to his wife, and did their best to make him ashamed of constancy.
'What beasts we are!' he thought, as he left Damn's at the flush of dawn, after a supper there which he had given, and which had nearly degenerated into an orgie. 'Yet is it unfaithfulness to her? My soul is always hers and my love.'
Still his conscience smote him, and he felt ashamed as he thought of her proud frank eyes, of her noble trust in him, of her pure and lofty life led there under the show summits of her hills.
He worshipped her, with all his life he worshipped her; a moment's caprice, a mere fume and fever of senses surprised and astray, were not infidelity to her. So he told himself, with such sophisms as men most use when most they are at fault, as he walked home in the rose of the daybreak to her great palace, which like all else of hers was his.
As he ascended the grand staircase, with the escutcheon of the Szalras repeated on the gilded bronze of its balustrade, a chill and a depression stole upon him. He loved her with intensity and ardour and truth, yet he had been disloyal to her; he had forgotten her, he had been unworthy of her. What worth were all the women in the world beside her? What did they seem to him now, those Delilahs who had beguiled him? He loathed the memory of them; he wondered at himself. He went through the great house slowly towards his own rooms, pausing now and then, as though he had never seen them before, to glance at some portrait, some stand of arms, some banner commemorative of battle, some quiver, bow, and pussikan taken from the Turk.
On his table he found a telegram sent from Lienz:
'I am so glad you are amused and happy. We are all well here.
(Signed) 'WANDA.'
No torrents of rebuke, no scenes of rage, no passion of reproaches could have carried reproach to him like those simple words of trustful affection.
'An angel of God should have descended to be worthy her!' he thought.
The next evening there was a ball at the Hof. It was later in the season than such things were usually, but the visit to the court of the sovereign of a neighbouring nation had detained their majesties and the nobility in Vienna. The ball was accompanied by all that pomp and magnificence which characterise such festivities, and Sabran, present at it, was the object of universal congratulation and much observation, as the ambassador-designate to Russia.
Court dress became him, and his great height and elegance of manner made him noticeable even in that brilliant crowd of notables. All the greatest ladies distinguished him with their smiles, but he gave them no more than courtesy. He saw only before the 'eye of memory' his wife as he had seen her at the last court ball, with the famous pearls about her throat, and her train of silver tissue sown with pearls and looped up with white lilac.
'It is the flower I like best,' she had said to him. 'It brought me your first love-message in Paris, do you remember? It said little; it was very discreet, but it said enough!'
'You are always thinking of Wanda!' said the Countess Brancka to him now, with a tinge of impatience in her tone.
He coloured a little, and said with that hauteur with which he always repressed any passing jest at his love for his wife:
'When both one's duty and joy point the same way it is easy to follow them in thought.'
'I hope you follow them in action too,' said Mdme. Brancka.
'If I do not, I am at least only responsible to Wanda.'
'Who would be a lenient judge you mean? said the Countess, with a certain smile that displeased him. 'Do not be too sure; she is a von Szalras. They are not agreeable persons when they are angered.'
'I have not been so unhappy as to see her so,' said Sabran coldly, with a vague sense of uneasiness. As much as it is possible for a man to dislike a woman who is very lovely, and young enough to be still charming in the eyes of the world, he disliked Olga Brancka. He had known her for many years in Paris, not intimately, but by force of being in the same society, and, like many men who do not lead very decent lives themselves, he frankly detestedcocodettes.
'If we want these manners we have ourlionnes,' he was wont to say, at a time when Cochonette was seen every day behind his horses by the Cascade, and it had been the height of the Countess Olga's ambition at that time to be called like Cochonette. A certain resemblance there was between the great lady and the wicked one; they had the same small delicate sarcastic features, the same red gold curls, the same perfect colourless complexion; but where Cochonette had eyes of the slightest blue, the wife of Count Stefan had the luminous piercing black eyes of the Muscovite physiognomy. Still the likeness was there, and it made the sight of Mdme. Brancka distasteful to him, since his memories of the other were far from welcome. It was for Cochonette that he had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, and into her lap that he had thrown all the gold rouleaux at a time when in his soul he had already adored Wanda von Szalras, and had despised himself for returning to the slough of his old pleasures. It was Cochonette who had sold his secrets to the Prussians, and brought them down upon him in the farmhouse amongst the orchards of the Orléannais, whilst she passed safely through, the German lines and across the frontier, laden with her jewels and hervaleursof all kinds, saying in her teeth as she went: 'He will never see that Austrian woman again!' That had been the end of all he had known of Cochonette, and a presentiment of perfidy, of danger, of animosity always came over him whenever he saw thejoli petit minoiswhich in profile was so like Cochonette's, looking up from under the loose auburn curls that Mdme. Olga had copied from her.
Olga Brancka now looked at him with some malice and with more admiration; she was very pretty that night, blazing with diamonds; and with her beautifully shaped person as bare as Court etiquette would permit. In her red gold curls she had some butterflies in jewels flashing all the colours of the rainbow and glowing like sunbeams. There was such a butterfly, big as the great Emperor moth, between her breasts, making their whiteness look like snow.
Instinctively Sabran glanced away from her. He felt anétourdissementthat irritated him. The movement did not escape her. She took his arm.
'We will move about a little while,' she said. 'Let us talk of Wanda,mon beaucousin; since you can think of no one else. And so you are really going to Russia?'
'I believe so.'
'It will be a great sacrifice to her; any other woman would be in paradise in St. Petersburg, but she will be wretched.'
'I hope not; if I thought so I would not go.'
'You cannot but go now; you have made your choice. You will be happy enough. You will play again enormously, and Wanda has so much money that if you lose millions it will not ruin her.'
'I shall certainly not play with my wife's money. I have never played since my marriage.'
'For all that you will play in St. Petersburg. It is in the air. A saint could not help doing it, and you are not a saint by nature, though you have become one since marriage. But you know conversions by marriage do not last. They are like compulsory confessions. They mean nothing.'
'You are very malicious to-night, madame,' said Sabran, absently; he was in no mood for banter, and was disinclined to take up her challenge.
'Call me at leastcousinette,' said Mdme. Olga; 'we are cousins, you know, thanks to Wanda. Oh! she will be very unhappy in St. Petersburg; she will not amuse herself, she never does. She is incapable of a flirtation; she never touches a card. When she dances it is only because she must, and then it is only a quadrille or a contre-dance. She always reminds me of Marie Thérèse's "In our position nothing is a trifle." You remember the Empress's letters to Versailles?'
Sabran was very much angered, but he was afraid to express his anger lest it should seem to make him absurd.
'Madame,' he said, with ill-repressed irritation, 'I know you speak only in jest, but I must take the liberty to tell you——however bourgeois it appear——that I do not allow a jest even from you upon my wife. Anything she does is perfect in my sight, and if she be imbued with the old traditions of gentle blood, too many ladies desert them in these days for me not to be grateful to her for her loyalty.'
She listened, with her bright black eyes fixed on him; then she leaned a little more closely on his arm.
'Do you know that you said that very well? Most men are ridiculous when they are in love with their wives, but it becomes you, Wanda is perfect, we all know that; you are not alone in thinking so. Ask Egon!'
The face of Sabran changed as he heard that name. As she saw the change she thought: 'Can it be possible that he is jealous?'
Aloud she said with a little laugh: 'I almost wonder Egon did not run you through the heart before you married. Now, of course, he is reconciled to the inevitable; or, if not reconciled, he has to submit to it as we all have to do. He grows veryfarouche; he lives between his troopers and his castle of Taróc, like a barbaric lord of the Middle Ages. Were you ever at Taróc? It is worth seeing——a huge fortress, old as the days of Ottokar, in the very heart of the Karpathians. He leads a wild, fierce life enough there. If he keep the memory of Wanda with him it is as some men keep an idolatry for what is dead.'
Sabran listened with a sombre irritation. 'Suppose we leave my wife's name in peace,' he said coldly. 'Thegrosser cotillonis about to begin; may I aspire to the honour?'
As he led her out, and the light fell on her red gold curls, on her dazzling butterflies, her armour of diamonds, her snow-white skin, a thousand memories of Cochonette came over him, though the scene around him was the ball-room of the Hofburg, and the woman whose great bouquet ofrêve d'orroses touched his hand was a great lady who had been the wife of Gela von Szalras, and the daughter of the Prince Serriatine. He distrusted her, he despised her, he disliked her so strongly that he was almost ashamed of his own antagonism; and yet her contact, her grace of movement, the mere scent of the bouquet of roses had a sort of painful and unwilling intoxication for the moment for him.
He was glad when the long and gorgeous figures of the cotillon had tired out even her steel-like nerves, and he was free to leave the palace and go home to sleep. He looked at a miniature of his wife as he undressed; the face of it, with its tenderness and its nobility, seemed to him, after the face of this other woman, like the pure high air of the Iselthal after the heated and unhealthy atmosphere of a gambling-room.
The next day there was a review of troops in the Prater. His presence was especially desired; he rode his favourite horse Siegfried, which had been brought up from the Tauern for the occasion. The weather was brilliant, the spectacle was grand; his spirits rose, his natural gaiety of temper returned. He was addressed repeatedly by the sovereigns present. Other men spoke of him, some with admiration, some with envy, as one who would become a power at the court and in the empire.
As he rode homeward, when the manœuvres were over, making his way slowly through the merry crowds of the good-humoured populace, through the streets thronged with glittering troops and hung with banners, and odorous with flowers, he thought to himself with a light heart: 'After all, I may do her some honour before I die.'
When he reached home and his horse was led away, a servant approached him with a sealed letter lying on a gold salver. A courier, who said that he had travelled with it without stopping from Taróc, had brought it from the Most High the Prince Vàsàrhely.
Sabran's heart stood still as he took the letter and passed up the staircase to his own apartments. Once there he ordered his servants away, locked the doors, and, then only, broke the seal.
There were two lines written on the sheet inside. They said:
'I forbid you to serve my Sovereign. If you persist, I must relate to him, under secrecy, what I know.'
They were fully signed——'Egon Vàsàrhely.' They had been sent by a courier, to insure delivery and avoid the publicity of the telegraph. They had been written as soon as the tidings of his appointment to the Russian mission had become known at the mountain fortress of Taróc.
As the carriage of the Countess Olga rolled home through the Graben after the military spectacle, she stopped it suddenly, and signed to an old man in the crowd who was waiting to cross the road until a regiment of cuirassiers had rolled by. He was eyeing them critically, as only an old soldier does look at troops.
'Is it you, Georg?' said Madame Olga. 'What brings you here?'
'I came from Taróc with a letter from the Prince, my master,' answered the man, an old hussar who had carried Vàsàrhely in his arms off the field of Königsgrätz, after dragging him from under a heap of dead men and horses.
'A letter! To whom?' asked Olga, who always was curious and persistent in investigation of all her brother-in-law's movements and actions.
Vàsàrhely had not laid any injunction as to secrecy, only as to speed, upon his faithful servant; so that Georg replied, unwitting of harm, 'To the Markgraf von Sabran, my Countess.'
'A letter that could not go by post—how strange! And from Egon to Wanda's husband!' she thought, with her inquisitive eagerness awakened. Aloud she bade the old trooper call at her palace for a packet for Taróc, to make excuse for having stopped and questioned him, and drove onward lost in thought.
'Perhaps it is a challenge late in the day!' she thought, with a laugh; but she was astonished and perplexed that any communication should take place between these men; she perplexed her mind in vain in the effort to imagine what tie could connect them, what mystery mutually affecting them could lie beneath the secret of Vassia Kazán.
When, on the morrow, she heard at Court that the Emperor was deeply incensed at the caprice and disrespect of the Count von Idrac, as he was called at Court, who, at the eleventh hour, had declined a mission already accepted by him, and of which the offer had been in itself an unprecedented mark of honour and confidence, her swift sagacity instantly associated the action, apparently so excuseless and inexcusable, with the letter sent up from Taróc. It was still as great a mystery to her as it had been before what the contents of the letter could have been, but she had no doubt that in some way or another it had brought about the resignation of the appointment. It awakened a still more intense curiosity in her, but she was too wise to whisper her suspicion to anyone. To her friends at the Court she said, with laughter: 'A night or two ago I chanced to tell Sabran that his wife would be wretched at St. Petersburg. That is sure to have been enough for him. He is such a devoted husband.'
No one of course believed her, but they received the impression that she knew the real cause of his resignation, though she could not be induced to say it.
What did it matter to her? Nothing, indeed. But the sense of a secret withheld from her was to Mdme. Olga like the slot of the fox to a young hound. She might have a thousand secrets of her own if it pleased her, but she could not endure anyone else to guard one. Besides, in a vague, feverish, angry way, she was almost in love with the man who was so faithful to his wife that he had looked away from her as from some unclean thing when she had wished to dazzle him. She had no perception that the secret could concern him himself very nearly, but she thought it was probably one which he and Egon Vàsàrhely, for reasons of their own, chose to share and keep hidden. And if it were a secret that prevented Sabran from going to the Court of Russia? Then, surely, it was one worth knowing? And if she gained a knowledge of it, and his wife had none?——what a superiority would be hers, what a weapon always to hand!
She did not intend any especial cruelty or compass any especial end: she was actuated by a vague desire to interrupt a current of happiness that flowed on smoothly without her, to interfere where she had no earthly title or reason to do so, merely because she was disregarded by persons content with each other. It is not always definite motives which have the most influence; the subtlest poisons are those which enter the system we know not how, and penetrate it ere we are aware. The only thing which had ever held her back from any extremes of evil had been the mere habit of good-breeding and an absolute egotism which had saved her from all strong passions. Now something that was like passion had touched her under the sting of Sabran's indifference, and with it she became tenacious, malignant, and unsparing: adroit she had always been. Instinct is seldom at fault when we are conscious of an enemy, and Sabran's had not erred when it had warned him against the wife of Stefan Brancka as the serpent who would bring woe and disaster to his paradise.
In some three months' time she received a more explicit answer from her cousin in St. Petersburg. Giving the precise dates, he told her that Vassia Kazán was the name given to the son of Count Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff by a wayside amour with one of his own serfs at a village near the border line of Astrachan. He narrated the early history of the youth, and said that he had been amongst the passengers on board a Havre ship, which had foundered with all hands. So far the brief record of Vassia Kazán was clear and complete. But it told her nothing. She was unreasonably enraged, and looked at the little piece of burnt paper as though she would wrench the secret out of it.
'There must be so much more to know,' she thought. 'What would a mere drowned boy be to either of those men——a boy dead too all these years before?'
She wrote insolently to her cousin, that the Third Section, with its eyes of Argus and its limbs of Vishnoo, had always been but an overgrown imbecile, and set her woman's wits to accomplish what the Third Section had failed to do for her. So much she thought of it that the name seemed forced into her very brain; she seemed to hear every one saying——'Vassia Kazán.' It was a word to conjure with, at least: she could at the least try the effect of its utterance any day upon either of those who had made it the key of their correspondence. Russia had written down Vassia Kazán as dead, and the mystery which enveloped the name would not open to her. She knew her country too well not to know that this bold statement might cover some political secret, some story wholly unlike that which was given her. Vassia Kazán might have lived and have incurred the suspicions of the police, and be dwelling far away in the death in life of Siberian mines, or deep sunk in some fortress, like a stone at the bottom of a well. The reply not only did not beget her belief in it, but gave her range for the widest and wildest conjectures of imagination. 'It is some fault, some folly, some crime, who can tell? And Vassia Kazán is the victim or the associate, or the confidant of it. But what is it? And how does Egon know of it?'
She passed the summer in pleasures of all kinds, but the subject did not lose its power over her, nor did she forget the face of Sabran as he had turned it away from her in the ball-room of the Hofburg.
He himself had left the capital, after affirming to the minister that private reasons, which he could not enter into, had induced him to entreat the Imperial pardon for so sudden a change of resolve, and to solicit permission to decline the high honour that had been vouchsafed to him.
'What shall I say to Wanda?' he asked himself incessantly, as the express train swung through the grand green country towards Salzburg.
She was sitting on the lake terrace with the Princess, when a telegram from her cousin Kunst was brought to her. Bela and Gela were playing near with squadrons of painted cuirassiers, and the great dogs were lying on the marble pavement at her feet. It was a golden close to a sunless but fine day; the snow peaks were growing rosy as the sun shone for an instant behind the Venediger range, and the lake was calm and still and green, one little boat going noiselessly across it from the Holy Isle to the further side.
'What a pity to leave it all!' she thought as she took the telegram.
The Minister's message was curt and angered:
'Your husband has resigned; he makes himself and me ridiculous. Unable to guess his motive, I am troubled and embarrassed beyond expression.'
The other, from Sabran, said simply: 'I am coming home. I give up Russia.'
'Any bad news?' the Princess asked, seeing the seriousness of her face. Her niece rose and gave her the papers.
'Is Réné mad!' she exclaimed as she read. His wife, who was startled and dismayed at the affront to her cousin and to her sovereign, yet had been unable to repress a movement of personal gladness, hastened to say in his defence:
'Be sure he has some grave, good reason, dear mother. He knows the world too well to commit a folly. Unexplained, it looks strange, certainly; but he will be home to-night or in the early morning; then we shall know; and be sure we shall find him right.'
'Right!' echoed the Princess, lifting the little girl who was her namesake off her knee, a child white as a snowdrop, with golden curls, who looked as if she had come out of a band of Correggio's baby angels.
'He is always right,' said his wife, with a gesture towards Bela, who had paused in his play to listen, with a leaden cuirassier of the guard suspended in the air.
'You are an admirable wife, Wanda,' said the Princess, with extreme displeasure on her delicate features. 'You defend your lord when through him you are probablybrouilléewith your Sovereign for life.'
She added, her voice tremulous with astonishment and anger: 'It is a caprice, an insolence, that no Sovereign and no minister could pardon. I am most truly your husband's friend, but I can conceive no possible excuse for such a change at the very last moment in a matter of such vast importance.'
'Let us wait, dear mother,' said Wanda softly. 'It is not you who would condemn Réné unheard?'
'But such a breach of etiquette! What explanation can ever annul it?'
'Perhaps none. I know it is a very grave offence that he has committed, and yet I cannot help being happy,' said his wife with a smile, as she lifted up the little Ottilie, and murmured over the child's fair curls, 'Ah, my dear little dove! We are not going to Russia after all. You little birds will not leave your nest!'
'Bela is not going to the snow palace?' said he, whose ears were very quick, and to whom his attendants had told marvellous narratives of an utterly imaginary Russia.
'No; are not you glad, my dear?'
He thought very gravely for a moment.
'Bela is not sure. Marc says Bela would have slaves in Russia, and might beat them.'
'Bela would be beaten himself if he did, and by my own hand, said his mother very gravely. 'Oh, child! where did you get your cruelty?'
'He is not cruel,' said the Princess. 'He is only masterful.'
'Alas! it is the same thing.'
She sent the children indoors, and remained after the sun-glow had all faded, and Mdme. Ottilie had gone away to her own rooms, and paced to and fro the length of the terrace, troubled by an anxiety which she would have owned to no one. What could have happened to make him so offend alike the State and the Court? She tormented herself with wondering again and again whether she had used any incautious expression in her letters which could have betrayed to him the poignant regret the coming exile gave her. No! she was sure she had not done so. She had only written twice, preferring telegrams as quicker, and, to a man, less troublesome than letters. She knew courts and cabinets too well not to know that the step her husband had taken was one which would wholly ruin the favour he enjoyed with the former, and wholly take away all chance of his being ever called again to serve the latter. Personally she was indifferent to that kind of ambition; but her attachment to the Imperial house was too strong, and her loyalty to it too hereditary, for her not to be alarmed at the idea of losing its good-will. Disquieted and afraid of all kinds of formless unknown ills, she went with a heavy heart into the Rittersaal to a dinner for which she could find no appetite. The Princess also, so talkative and vivacious at other times, was silent and pre-occupied. The evening passed tediously. He did not come.
It was past midnight, and she had given up all hope of his arrival, when she heard the returning trot of the horses, who had been sent over to Matrey in the evening on the chance of his being there. She was in her own chamber, having dismissed her women, and was trying in vain to keep her thoughts to nightly prayer. At the sound of the horses' feet without, she threw on anégligéof white satin and lace, and went, out on to the staircase to meet him. As he came up the broad stairs, with Donau and Neva gladly leaping on him, he looked up and saw her against the background of oak and tapestry and old armour, with the light of a great Persian lamp in metal that swung above shed full upon her. She had never looked more lovely to him than as she stood so, her eyes eagerly searching the dim shadow for him, and the loose white folds embroidered in silk with pale roses flowing downward from her throat to her feet. He drew her within her chamber, and took her in his arms with a passionate gesture.
'Let us forget everything,' he murmured, 'except that we have been parted nearly a month!'
In the morning, after breakfast in the little Saxe room, she said to him with gentle firmness: 'Réné, you must tell me now—why have you refused Russia?'
He had known that the question must come, and all the way on his homeward journey he had been revolving in his mind the answer he would give to it. He was very pale, but otherwise he betrayed no agitation as he turned and looked at her.
'That is what I cannot tell you,' he replied.
She could not believe she heard aright.
'What do you mean?' she asked him. 'I have had a message from Kunst; he is deeply angered. I understand that, after all was arranged, you abruptly resigned the Russian mission. I ask your reasons. It is a very grave step to have taken. I suppose your motives must be very strong ones?'
'They are so,' said Sabran; and he continued in the forced and measured tone of one who recites what he has taught himself to say: 'It is quite natural that your cousin Kunst should be offended; the Emperor also. You perhaps will be the same when I say to you that I cannot tell you, as I cannot tell them, the grounds of my withdrawal. Perhaps you, like them, will not forgive it.'
Her nostrils dilated and her breast heaved: she was startled, mortified, amazed. 'You do not choose to tellme!' she said in stupefaction.
'I cannot tell you.'
'She gazed at him with the first bitterness of wrath that he had ever seen upon her face. She had been used to perfect submission of others all her life. She had the blood in her of stern princes, who had meted out rule and justice against which there had been no appeal. She was accustomed even in him to deference, homage, consideration, to be consulted always, deferred to often. His answer for the moment seemed to her an unwarrantable insult.
Her influence, her relatives, her sovereign, had given him one of the highest honours conceivable, and he did not choose to even say why he was thankless for it! Passionate and withering words rose to her lips, but she restrained their utterance. Not even in that moment could she bring herself to speak what might seem to rebuke him with the weight of all his debt to her. She remained silent, but he understood all the intense indignation that held her speechless there. He approached her more nearly, and spoke with emotion, but with a certain sternness in his voice——
'I know very well that I must offend and even outrage you. But I cannot tell you my motives. It is the first time that I have ever acted independently of you or failed to consult your wishes. I only venture to remind you that marriage does give to the man the right to do so, though I have never availed myself of it. Nay, even now, I owe you too much to be ingrate enough to take refuge in my authority as your husband. I prefer to owe more, as I have owed so much, to your tenderness. I prefer to ask of you, by your love for me, not to press me for an answer that I am not in a position to make; to be content with what I say—that I have relinquished the Russian mission because I have no choice but to do so.'
He spoke firmly, because he spoke only the truth, although not all the truth.
A great anger rose up in her, the first that she had ever been moved to by him. All the pride of her temper and all her dignity were outraged by this refusal to have confidence in her. It seemed incredible to her. She still thought herself the prey of some dream, of some hallucination. Her lips parted to speak, but again she withheld the words she was about to utter. Her strong justice compelled her to admit that he was but within his rights, and her sense of duty was stronger than her sense of self-love.
She did not look at him, nor could she trust her voice. She turned from him without a syllable, and left the room. She was afraid of the violence of the anger that she felt.
'If it had been only to myself I would pardon it,' she thought; 'but an insult to my people, to my country, to my sovereign!—an insult without excuse, or explanation, or apology——'
She shut herself alone within her oratory and passed the most bitter hour of her life. The imperious and violent temper of the Szalras was dormant in her character, though she had chastened and tamed it, and the natural sweetness and serenity of her disposition had been a counterpoise to it so strong that the latter had become the only thing visible in her. But all the wrath of her race was now aroused and in arms against what she loved best on earth.
'If it had been anything else,' she thought; 'but a public act like this—an ingratitude to the Crown itself! A caprice for all the world to chatter of and blame!'