But she knew very well that it was not 'blague.' She knew very well, too, that though he was subjugated by a certain sorcery when in her presence, when absent, his good taste condemned, and his good sense escaped, her. She was one of those women who have a thousand means of usurping a man's time, and are not scrupulous if some of those measures are bold ones. All her admirers tacitly left the field open to one for whom she made no scruple of her preference; and, under pretext of her relationship to him, she contrived many ways to bring him beside her. Every day he said to himself that he would go home on the morrow; but each day bore its diversions, its claims, its interests, and each day found him in Paris, sometimes driving her to the Cascade, to St. Germain, to Versailles, sometimes escorting her to the tribune of a race-course, or apremièreat a theatre, sometimes dining with her in her pretty room, the table strewn with rose-leaves, and the windows open upon flowering orange trees.
When he wrote home he wrote eloquent, witty, clever letters; but he did not speak in them of the woman with whom he spent so much of his time, and his wife as she read them wished that they had been less clever, and had said more. She began to fear lest she had done unwisely. She did not repent, for it seemed to her that she could have done nothing else with any self-esteem; but she dreaded lest she had over-estimated the power of her own memory upon him. Yet even so, she thought, it was better that he should degrade himself and her in her absence than her presence; and she still felt a certainty—baseless, perhaps—that he would yet pause in time before he actually gave her a rival in her cousin's wife.
'If it were any other,' she thought, 'he might fall; but with Olga, never! never!'
And she prayed for him half the night, till her prayer seemed to beat against the very gates of heaven. But in the day, to her children, to the Princess, to the household, she seemed always tranquil, cheerful, and at ease. She applied herself arduously to all those duties which her great estates had always brought with them, and in occupation and exertion strove to keep her anxiety at bay, and attain that self-control which enabled her to write in return to him letters which had no shade of reproach in them, no hint of distrust.
It was now June.
The Paris of the world of fashion was soon about to take wing, to disperse itself to country-houses, sea-shores, and foreign baths; to change its place, but to take with it wheresoever it should go all its agitation, its weariness, its fever, its delirium, and its intrigues. Olga Brancka saw the close of the season approach with regret yet expectation. She knew that Sabran must escape her or succumb to her; and she had a bitter, enraged sense that the power of his wife was stronger over him than her own. 'Il faut brusquer la chose,' she said again and again to herself. She grew reckless, imprudent, and was tempted to discard even that external decency which her station in the world had made her assume. She would have compromised herself for him with any publicity he might have chosen to exact. But she had never been able to beguile him into any sort of declaration. When he most felt the danger of her attraction, when he was nearest forgetting honour and decency, nearest submitting, the memory of his wife saved him. He recovered his coolness; he drew back from the abyss. Once or twice she was tempted to throw the name of Vassia Kazán between them and watch its effect; but she refrained—she knew so little!
'You will not take me to Romaris?' she said, for the hundredth time, one evening, as they rode towards St. Germain's.
He laughed.
'Cousinette! if you and I went off to Finisterre you will confess that we should make a pretty paragraph for the papers, and Count Stefan would have a very good right to run me through the lungs.'
'Stefan!' she echoed, with contempt. 'It would be the first time he ever——Besides, you have had duels; you are not afraid of them; and, yet again, besides I do not see what harm we should do if we looked at yourchouansandchasse-maréesfor a few days. No one need even know it.'
She spoke quite innocently, but her black eyes watched him with the 'Teufelinne' cunning and passion. He caught the look. He put his hand in the breast-pocket of his coat, where a letter of his wife's was lying.
'It is out of the question,' he said, almost rudely. 'I have no wish to furnishFigarowith so good a jest. Romaris,' he added, with a smile, 'is of course at your service, like all I possess, if you are so bent upon seeing its desolation. But you must pardon my receiving you by deputy, in the person of the curé, who is seventy years old and is the son of a fisherman.'
She cut her mare across the ears with a fierce gesture and galloped away from him. Sabran as he galloped after her thought with a vague apprehension, 'Why does she dwell on Romaris? Does she suspect that I abhor the place? Can she have seen anything in my looks or in my words that has raised any doubts in her?' But he told himself that this was impossible. As she rode her heart swelled with rage and mortification. There were many men in the world who would have been happy to go at her call to Breton wilds, or any other solitude; and he refused her, bluntly, coldly, because away there in the heart of Austria a woman, who was the mother of his children, span, and read, and said her prayers, and led her stupid, blameless, stately life! He escaped her just because that woman lived! All that hot, cruel caprice which she called love fastened upon him, and swore that it would not be denied. She had a sense of a grand white figure which stood for ever betwixt him and her. She brought herself almost to believe that it was Wanda von Szalras who wronged her.
Two nights later she was present at the last night of a gay comic opera which had made all Paris laugh ever since the first fogs of winter; a dazzling little opera, with a stage crowded by Louis Treize costumes, and music that went as trippingly as a shepherdess's feet in a pastoral. Sabran went to her box after a dinner-party which he had given to a score of men. She looked well, in a gown of many shades of yellow, which few women could have braved, but which suited her night-like eyes and her pearly skin; she had deep yellow roses, natural ones, in her bosom and hair.
'I am flattered that you wear my yellow roses,' he murmured.
'If you had sent me white ones you would have outraged the spirit of Wanda.'
He made an impatient movement.
'When are you going home?' she said, suddenly.
'Soon!' he answered, with the same impatience.
'Soon means anything, from an hour to a year. Besides, you have said it for the last six weeks.'
'Do you go to Noisettiers?'
'Of course I go to Noisettiers; you can come there if you please. I am more hospitable than you.'
He was silent. Noisettiers was a little place on the Norman coast, which Stefan Brancka had given to her on his marriage; a pleasure-house, with Swiss roofs, Cairene windows, Italian balconies and a Persian court, which was bowered amongst lime-trees and filbert trees, near Villeville, and had been the scene of much riotous midsummer gaiety when she had filled it with Parisians and Russians.
'You are always too good to me,' murmured Sabran, in the meaningless compliment of usage, as other men entered her box. But she knew by the coldness of his eyes, by the slightness of his smile, that he would no more go to Noisettiers than to Romaris.
'If Wanda had only remained here,' she thought angrily, opening and shutting her tortoiseshell fan, 'he would have done whatever I had chosen. Men are mere children; thwart them and they pine.
'I suppose,' she said aloud to him, 'you will have your own house-parties at Hohenszalras, as stiff as a minuet, crammed with grand dukes and grand duchesses, all decorum and dignity, all ennui and etiquette? By-the-by, are you restored again to the Emperor's good graces?'
'It is not likely that I shall be so,' replied Sabran, who always dreaded the subject. 'If ever I be so fortunate I shall owe it to the influence Wanda possesses.'
'Why did you offend him?' she said, bending her inquisitive glance upon him.
'All sovereigns are offended when not obeyed. We have discussed this so often. Need we discuss it again in a theatre?'
'You are very impenetrable,' she said. 'Your rule of conduct must follow the lines of M. de. Nothomb's 'il ne faut jamais se brouiller, ni se familiariser, avec qui que ce soit: c'est le secret de durer.'
'M. de Nothomb only meant his rule to apply to his own sex,' replied Sabran. 'With yours, unless a man be eitherfamiliariséorbrouillé, his life must be dull and his experience small.'
'Which will you be with me?' she said, with significance. 'The choice is open.'
He understood that the words contained a menace.
'I am your cousin and your humble servitor,' he said with gallantry, giving his place up to a young Spanish noble.
'Take me home,' she said to him an hour later, before the last scene of the opera. 'Come to supper. I told them to have ortolans and bisque. One is always hungry after a theatre, and we must have a last long talk, since you go to your duties and I to my sea-bathing.'
He desired to refuse; he dreaded her inquisitiveness and her solicitation; but she had a magic about her, she subdued him to her side even while he mentally resisted it. The fleshly charm of the 'Teufelinne' was potent as he wrapped her cloak about her and touched the yellow roses as he fastened it. Almost in silence he entered her carriage, and drove beside her to her house. She was silent also, affecting to yawn and be tired, but by the gleam of the lamp he saw her great black eyes glowing in the darkness, as he had seen those of a jaguar in the forests of America glow, as it watched to seize a sleeping lizard or unweary capybara.
The few streets were soon traversed by her rapid Russian horses, and together they entered the little hotel, with its strong perfume of orange flowers and jessamine from the garden about it. The midsummer stars were brilliant overhead; he looked up at them, pausing on the threshold.
'You are thinking how they shine on Wanda?' she said, with the laugh he hated. 'Probably they do nothing of the kind. I dare say she is wrapped in fog and cloud: those are the joys of the heights.'
The little supper was perfectly prepared, and served with a fine claret and some tokayer; the lights burned mellowly in the transparent gourds; the windows were open, the moonlight touched the great gold birds, the silver lilies on the walls. She had studied how to live and how to please. She held that love was born as much out of scenic effects as of the senses. In her own way she was a true artist. She had left him a few moments to change her attire to a tea-gown, which was one cloud and cascade of lace from head to foot; the yellow roses still nestled at her breast.
Stretched on a divan of oriental stuff, she put out her hand for a cigar he lighted for her, and said with a little smile:
'You cannot say I do not know how to live.'
A brutal response rose to his lips; she did not know how to bridle her life: but he could not say it. He murmured a compliment, and added: 'What a supreme artist the theatre has lost by your being born with a Countess'scouronne!'
'Yes,' she said, with her eyes on the rings of smoke that her crimson lips parted to send upward. 'Sometimes when Stefan does not give me liberty, or Egon does not pay my accounts, I make them both tremble by a threat that I will go on the stage. I should certainly draw all Paris and all Vienna too. But perhaps it is too late; in a few more years I shall have to marry my daughters. Can you realise that? I am sure I cannot. Now it will suit Wanda perfectly to do that, andherdaughter is not three years old; she is always so fortunate.'
He listened impatiently.
'If we left Wanda's name alone it might be better. Did you bring me to supper to talk of her?'
'No; she is your Madonna, I know. One must not be sacrilegious, but one cannot always worship. You do not touch the tokayer; it came from the Kaiser; you are always so abstemious—you irritate me.'
She poured out some of the wine, into a jewel-like goblet of Venice, and gave it him and made him drink it. She sat up on her divan and leaned towards him; the breeze from the garden stirred the laces of her gown and made the golden roses nod.
Wine openeth the heart of man,' she cried gaily. 'Open yours and tell me frankly why you refused to go to Russia? We are not in a theatre now.'
'Are we not?' he said, with the smile which she feared as her greatest foe. 'Whether or not, I fear I must refuse to please you; the matter lies between me and—the Emperor.'
She remarked the hesitation which made him pause before the last word.
'Between him and Egon,' she thought; but after all, what was the secret to her except as a means of influence over him. She believed that she had here present subtler and surer methods of influence which could attain their end without coercion.
She ceased to pursue the theme, and grew gentle and winning; she felt that he was on the defensive. He had come weakly enough into the very heart of temptation, but he was on his guard against her sorceries. Lying back amongst her cushions she amused him with that gay and discursive chatter of which she had the secret, and which imperceptibly induced him to relax his vigilance and to feel her charm. There was that about, her which made all scruples seem ridiculous; there was a contagion of levity and mockery in her which awakened in him the cynicism of earlier years, and made him only heed the marvellous force of seduction of which she was mistress.
'You ought to be ambitious,' she continued softly. 'I think you might achieve any eminence if you chose to seek it.'
'Surely I have enough blessings from fortune not to tempt it by that last infirmity?'
'You mean you have married a very rich aristocrat,' she said drily. 'Oh, yes; you have made one of the finest marriages in Europe; but that is not quite the same thing as "winning off your own hand." It is a luckycoup, like breaking the bank atroulette, but it cannot give you the same feeling that a successful soldier or a successful politician has, nor the same eminence. Indeed, I am not sure that your wife's possession of every possible good and great thing has not prevented you gathering laurels for yourself. You have dropped into a nest lined with rose-leaves; to have fallen on the rocks might have been better. Do you know,' she added, with a little smile, 'if I had been your wife I should have given you no rest until you had become the foremost man of the empire. I should not have cared about horses and peasants and children; but I should have lovedyou.'
He moved uneasily, conscious of the implied satire upon his wife, conscious also of a vibration of intense passion in the last words. He remained silent.
He knew well that had she been his wife, she would have been as false to him as she was false to Stefan Brancka. But the words sent a thrill through him half of emotion, half of repugnance. There was little light on the divan where she reclined, the dewy darkness of the garden was behind her; he could see the outlines of her form, the glister of rings on her hands, and jewels at her throat, the shine of her eyes watching him ardently.
His heart beat with a certain excitation; he vaguely felt that some hour of fate had come.
They were as utterly alone as though they had been in a desert; no one of her household would have ventured to approach that room without a summons from her. A little drummer in silver beat twelve strokes upon his drum, which was a clock. A nightingale was singing in the Cape jessamine beneath one of the casements. The light was low and soft, so faint that the moonbeams could be seen where they strayed over the cranes and lilies on the wall. She said to herself once more: 'Il faut brusquer la chose.' If she let him go now he would escape her for ever.
Ever and again there came to him the memory of his wife, but he shrank from it as he would have shrunk from seeing her in a gambling den. It seemed almost a profanity to remember her here. He longed to rise and get away, yet he desired to remain. He knew that every moment increased his danger, and yet he prolonged those moments with irresistible pleasure. Every gesture, glance, and breath of this woman was provocative and alluring, yet he thought as he felt her power always the same thing—'ihr seyd eine Teufelinne.' Willingly he would have embraced her and then killed her, that she might no more haunt him and do no more harm on earth.
As he sat with his face half averted from her she gazed at him with her burning, covetous eyes; the droop of his eyelids, the curves of his lips, the fairness of his features all seemed to her more beautiful than they had ever done; the very disquiet and coldness that were in them only allured her the more. She leaned nearer still and took his wrist in her fingers.
'Come to Noisettiers,' she murmured.
'No,' he said, sharply and sternly, but he did not withdraw his hand.
'Why not?' she said, with her whole person swayed towards him as by an irresistible impulse. 'Why do you affect to be of ice? You are not indifferent to me. You only obey what you think a law of honour. Why do you try to do that? There is only one law—love.'
He strove to draw away from him, but feebly, the clinging of her warm fingers. The caress of her breath on his cheek, the scent of the roses in her breast intoxicated him for the instant. She bent nearer and nearer, and still held him closely in her slender hands, which were as strong as steel.
'You love me?' she murmured, so low that it scarce stirred the air, and yet had all the potency of hell in it. A shudder went over him;. the baseness of voluptuous impulse and the revulsion of conscious shamefulness shook his strength as though it were a reed in the wind. For a moment his arms enclosed her, his heart beat against hers; then he thrust her away from him and rose to his feet.
'Love, you? No, a thousand times, no!' he said with unutterable scorn. 'You are a shameless temptress; you can rouse the beast that lies hid in all men. I despise you, I detest you—I could kiss you and kill you in a breath; but love!—how dare you speak the word? Mine is hers; I am hers: if I sinned to her with you I would strangle you when I awoke!'
All the fierceness and the barbaric strength of the blood of desert and of steppe broke up in him from underneath the courtesy and calm of many long years of culture. He was born of men who had slain their mistresses for a glance, and ravished; their captives in war, and yielded them to no release but death, and his hereditary instincts broke the bonds of custom and of habit, and spoke in him now as a wild animal breaks its bars and leaps up in frank brutality of wrath. He thrust her backward and backward from him, rose to his feet, wrenched aside with rude hand the eastern stuffs that hung before the door, and left her presence and her house before any power of voice or movement had come back to her.
As he pushed past the waiting servants in the vestibule, and went through the courtyard and the gateway, he looked up once again at the stars shining overhead.
'Wanda! Wanda!' he said with a deep breath, as men may call in their extremity on God.
Within half an hour he had given a few orders to his major-domo, and had taken a special train to overtake the express, already for on its way that night towards Strasburg. No steam could fly as fast as his own wishes flew. Never had he felt happier than as the train rushed across the windy level country of the north-east, bearing him back to the peace and tenderness and honour which waited for him at Hohenszalrasburg. He was content with himself, and the future smiled on him. He slept soundly all that night, undisturbed by the panting and oscillating of the carriage, and visited by tranquil dreams. He did not break the journey till he reached S. Johann. The weather in the German lands was wild and rough. The sound of the winds and rushing rains brought the remembrance of that year of the floods which had been the sweetest of his life. Amidst the Austrian Alps the cold was still keen, and the brisk buoyant air and the strength, that seems always to come on winds that blow over glaciers and snow-fields were welcome to him, like a familiar and trusty friend. The servants who met him in answer to his message, the horses who knew him and whinnied with pleasure, the summits of the Glöckner, on which a noon-day sun was shining, all were delightful to him: he thought of the Catullian 'laugh in the dimples of home.'
Their ways of life renewed themselves as if they had never been broken. She divined what had passed, but she never spoke of it. She was happy in his return, and never disturbed its happiness by inquiry or allusion. He entered with eagerness into plans and projects which had of recent years ceased to interest him, and he resumed his old occupations and pursuits with almost boyish ardour. His restlessness was appeased, and if a dull apprehension beat at his heart with warning now and then, it was scarcely heeded in his deep sense of the intense and forbearing love his wife bore to him. She never asked him how he had escaped from Olga Brancka. She was satisfied that if he had been faithless to herself, he would not have returned with such single-hearted contentment and such lover-like fervour.
'You are the only woman in the world who can forbear from putting questions,' said Madame Ottilie to her.
She answered smiling:
'I remember Psyche's lamp.'
'That is very pretty,' said the Princess, 'and I do believe you would never have cared for the lamp. But, all the same, if the god had been as honest as he ought to have been, would he have minded the light?'
'I do not think that enters into the story,' said Wanda. 'He did not resent the light either; he resented the inquisitiveness.'
'You are the only woman who has none,' said the Princess, taking up her netting, and at times she called her niece Pschye, little imagining the terrible suitability of the name, and the secret that was hidden in darkness from that noble confidence of the last of the Szalras.
The remembrance of that night of base temptation left a sense of uneasiness and of insecurity upon Sabran, but the influence his temptress had possessed with him was of that kind which fades instantly in absence. He honestly abhorred the memory of her, and never spoke her name.
His wife, to whom the utter degradation of her cousin's wife would never have seemed possible in a woman nobly born and nurtured, never imagined the truth or anything similar to it.
Another woman would have tormented herself and him with innuendo or direct reference to what had passed in those weeks when she had not been beside him, and on which he was absolutely silent. But she put all baseness of curiosity from her; she was content to know that her own influence in absence had been strong enough to bring him back to his allegiance. She would not have wished to hear, had he offered to reveal them, all the various, conflicts of good and evil which had gone on in his mind, all the subtle changes by which her own power had been for a moment obscured, only to regain still stronger and purer ascendency. She was indulgent because she knew human nature well, and expected no miracles. That he had returned of his own accord, and was content so to return, was all she desired to know. If to attain that equanimity had cost her many a struggle, the fact was shut in her own soul and could concern no other. She esteemed it a poor love which could not bear to be sometimes shut out in silence.
'For a man to be manly he must be free,' she thought; 'and how can he be free if there be someone to whom he must confess every trifle? He owes allegiance to no one but his own conscience.'
If in their intercourse she had found his honour less scrupulous, his code less fine than her own; if she had been ever pained by a certain levity and looseness of principle betrayed by him at times, she always strove not to attach too much importance to these. The creeds of a man of pleasure were necessarily different, she told herself, to those of a woman reared in austere tenets, and guarded by natural pride and purity of disposition. Whenever the fear crossed her that he might not be always faithful to her she put it away from her thoughts. 'What I have to do,' she thought, 'is to be true to him, not to question or to doubt him: a man's faithfulness has always such a different reading to a woman's.'
Sabran never quite understood the perfect indulgence to him which she combined with the greatest severity to herself. He thought that the same measure she gave she would exact. The' serenity and grandeur of her character made it seem to him impossible that she would ever have compassion for weakness or for falsehood. He fancied, wrongly, that a woman less noble herself would be more indulgent than she would be to error. He did not realise that it is only a great nature which can wholly understand the full force of the wordsaimer c'est pardonner.And then again, he said to himself, she might have pardoned a fault, a crime even, of high passion, of bold mutiny against moral, law, but how could she ever pardon a meanness, a treason, a lie?
So he let the months slide away, and did not say to her whilst he still might have said it himself, 'I am not what you think me.'
But he was impressed and profoundly affected by that mute magnanimity, which never vaunted itself or claimed any praise for itself by any hint or suggestion. He felt disgust at his own folly in ever having cared to be a single instant in the presence of the woman of whose libertinage and inconstancy his yellow roses had been the fitting symbol. When he had cast her from him, rejected and despised, the glamour she had thrown over him had fallen like scales from the eyes of one blind. Her memory made the beauty of his wife's nature and thoughts seem to him more than ever things for reverence and worship. More than ever his soul shrank within him when he recollected the treachery and the deception with which, he had rewarded this noblest of friends.
Ah! why when she had stretched out her hand to him in that supreme gift of herself, in, that golden sunset hour after the autumn floods of Idrac, had he not had courage to kneel at her feet and tell her all? Perchance she might have still have loved him, might have still stooped to him!
He strove his utmost to conceal these anxious self-reproaches from her, lest she should imagine that his hours of gloom were caused by any lingering shadows of the fatal folly which had been forced on him, like a drug by Olga Brancka. The sorceress had failed, and he had flung down and shivered in atoms the glass out of which she had bidden him drink; she was to him as utterly forgotten, as though she were in her grave; but not so easily could he banish the memory of his own treachery to his wife. The very forbearance of her made him the more conscious of guilt, when he remembered that one man lived who knew that he was unworthy even to kiss the hem of her garment. He had been faithful to her in the present, and so could greet her with clean hands and honest lips; but in the past he had betrayed her foully; he had done her what in her sight, if ever she knew it would be the darkest dishonour the treachery of ä human life could hold.
The sense of crime, which had slept quiet and mute in his conscience so many years, was now awake and seldom to be stilled.
The time passed serenely; the autumn brought its hardy sports, the winter its vigorous pastimes. With the new year she gave him another son; she named him after Egon Vàsàrhely, without opposition from Sabran.
'He is worthier to give them a name than I,' he thought bitterly.
They did not care to move from the green Iselthal. Of Olga Brancka they heard but rarely. Now and then she sent a little witty flippant note to Hohenszalras, dated from Paris or Trouville, or Biarritz, or Vienna, or Monaco, or St. Petersburg, according to the season and her caprices. Of these little meaningless notes Wanda did not speak to her husband. She could not bring herself to talk to him of the woman who had so nearly wrecked their peace, and it seemed to her that the old saw was wise: 'Let sleeping dogs lie.' It appeared to her, too, that theirs and Madame Brancka's paths in life would henceforth very seldom, if ever, meet.
Sabran believed that her overtures towards him had sprung from one of those insane unhealthy passions which sometimes are created by their very sense of their own immorality; he fancied it had died of its own fire. He did not credit her with the tenacity and endurance she really possessed. He had little doubt that long ere now some dandy of the boulevards, some soldier of the palace, had supplanted him in that brazier of heated senses which she called by courtesy her heart. He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.
The summer was a soft and sunny one, and they enjoyed it in simple and healthful pleasures of the open air and of the affections. The children throve and never ailed a day. Sabran had lost all desire to return to the excitations and passions of the world; his wife was more than content in the joys of her home; and if above her a storm brooded, if in his heart there fretted ceaselessly the chafing sense of a gross treachery, of an incessant peril, she was as ignorant of what menaced her as the child to whom she had given birth. With present security also, the sense of dread often wore away from him.
The months sped on swiftly and serenely for the mistress of Hohenszalras, the only shadows cast on them coming from accidents to her poor people through flood or avalanche, and the occasional waywardness and turbulence of her eldest born. Bela had not been the better for his sojourn in a great city, where parasites are never lacking to the heir of wealth, and where his companions had been small coquettes and dandiespétris du mondeat six years old. The bright vigorous hardihood of the child had escaped the contagion of affectation, but he had arrived at an inordinate sense of his own importance and dignity, despite the memory of the Dauphin which often came to him. He grew quite beyond the management of his governantes, and though he never disobeyed his mother, gave little heed to anyone else's authority. Of Sabran he was alone afraid; but at the same time he preserved for him that silent intense admiration which a young child sometimes nourishes for a man by whom he is little noticed, but who is his ideal of all power, force, and achievement, and of whom he hears heroic tales.
He was now seven years old. It was time to think of a tutor for him, since he was beyond the control of the women entrusted with his education. When she spoke of it to his father, he answered at once:
'Take Greswold. He has the best temper in the world to govern a child, and he is a great scholar.'
'But he is a physician,' she objected.
'He has studied the mind no less than the body. He adores the boy, and will influence him as a stranger could not. Speak to him; he will be only too happy. As no one is ever ill here,' he added with a smile, 'his present position is a sinecure; he can very well combine another office with it.'
'I wanted you to take Bela in your hands,' he said later to the old doctor, 'because I say to you what I should not care to say to a stranger. The boy has all my faults in him. As he exactly resembles me physically so he does morally. There is in him, too, I am afraid, a tendency to tyranny that I have never had. I am not cruel to anything, though I am indifferent to most things; he would be cruel if he were allowed; perhaps it is mere masterfulness which may be conquered by time. I imagine he has also my fatal facility. I call it fatal because it renders acquisition and proficiency so easy that it prevents laboriousness and depth of knowledge. You are much wiser than I am, and will know how to educate the child much better than I can tell you how to do. Only remember two things: first, that he is cursed by certain hereditary passions coming to him from me which must be checked and calmed, or he will grow up with a character dangerous to himself, and odious to others in the great position he will one day occupy. Secondly, that if any child of mine ever bring any kind of sorrow upon her, I shall be of all men the most wretched. You have always been my good friend. Be yet more so in preventing my suffering from the pain of seeing my own moral deformities face me and accuse me in the life of her eldest son.'
The old physician listened with emotion and with surprise. Of the moral defects Sabran spoke of, he had seen none. Since his marriage his tenderness to his wife, his kindliness to his dependants, his courage in field sports, and his courtesy as a host had been all that anyone had seen in him; whilst his abstinence from all interference with and all appropriation of his wife's vast possessions had aroused a yet deeper esteem in all who surrounded him. As he heard, over the old man's mind drifted the memories of all he had observed at the time of Sabran's accident in the forest and subsequent prostration of nerve and will. But he thrust these vague suspicions away, for he was blameless in his loyalty to the house he served, and honoured as his master the husband of the Countess von Szalras.
'I will do my uttermost to deserve so precious a trust,' he said, with deep feeling. 'I think that you exaggerate childish foibles, and attach too much importance to them. The little Count Bela is imperious and high-spirited, nothing more; and in this great household, where everyone salutes him as the heir, it is difficult to keep him wholly unspoiled by adulation and consciousness of his own future power. But a great pride has been always the mark of the race of Szalras, although my lady has so chastened hers that you may well believe the line she springs from has been always faultless as—if one may say so of any mortal—one may say she herself is. It is not from you alone that the child inherits his arrogance, if arrogant he be. As for his facility, it is like a fairy's wand, a caduceus of the gods; it may be used for good unspeakable. At least believe this, my dear lord, what any human teacher can do I will do, thankful to pay my debt so easily. I have always,' he added less gravely, 'had my own theories as to the education of young princes, and like all theorists believe everyone else who has had any doctrine on that subject to be wrong. I shall be charmed to have so happy an occasion in which to put my theories to the test. I think nature and learning together, the woods and the study, should be the preparation for the world.'
'I have entire confidence in your judgment,' said Sabran. 'Above all, try and keep the boy from pride. Train him, as Madame de Genlis trained the d'Orléans boys, for any reverse of fortune. He is born with that temper which would make any humiliation, any loss of position, unbearable to him; and who can say——'
He paused abruptly: what he thought was, who could say that in future years Egon Vàsàrhely might not tell his son of that secret shame which hung over Hohenszalras, a cloud unseen, but big with tempest? Greswold looked at him in a surprise which he could not conceal, and Sabran left his presence hastily, under excuse of visiting some stallions arrived that morning from Tunis; he was afraid of the interrogations which the old man might be led in all innocence to make. Greswold looked after him with some anxiety; he had become sincerely attached to his lord, whose life he had saved in Pregratten; but the unevenness of his spirits, the unhappiness which evidently came over him at times in the midst of his serene and fortunate life, the strangeness of a few words which from time to time he let fall, had not escaped the quick perception of the wise physician, and gave him at intervals a vague, uncertain feeling of apprehension.
'Pride!' he thought now. 'If the little Count were not proud he would be no Szalras; and if his father have not also that superb sin he must be a greater philosopher than I have ever thought him, and no fit mate for our lady. What should overtake the child? If war or revolution ruin him when he grows up that will be no humiliation; he will be none the less Bela von Szalras, and if he be like my lady he will be quite content with being that. Nevertheless, one must try and teach him humility—that is, one must try and make the stork creep and the oak bend!'
Sabran, as he examined his Eastern horses and conversed about them with Ulrich, was haunted by the thoughts which his own words had called up in him. It was possible, it was always possible, that if she ever knew, she might divorce him, and the children would become bastards. The Law would certainly give her her divorce, and the Church also. The most severe of judges, the most austere of pontiffs, would not hold her bound to a man who had so grossly deceived her.
By his own act he had rendered it possible for her, if she knew, to sever herself entirely from him, and make his sons nameless. Of course he had always known this. But in the first ardours of his passion, the first ecstasies of his triumph, he had scarcely thought of it. He had been certain that Vassia Kazán was dead to the whole world. Then, as the years had rolled on, the security of his position, the calmness of his happiness, had lulled all this remembrance in him. But now tranquillity had departed from him, and there were hours when an intense dread possessed him.
True, he did justice to the veracity and honour of his foe. He believed that Vàsàrhely would never speak whilst he himself was living; but then again he himself might die at any moment, a gun accident, a false step on a glacier, a thrust from a boar or a bear, ten thousand hazards might kill him in full health, and were he dead his antagonist might be tempted to break his word. Vàsàrhely had always loved her; would it not be a temptation beyond the power of humanity to resist, when by a word he could show to her that she had been betrayed and outraged by a traitor?
And then the children?
Though were he himself dead, she would in all likelihood never do aught that would let the world know his sin, yet she would surely change to his offspring, most probably would hate them when she saw in their lives only the evidence of her own dishonour, and knew that in their veins was the blood of a man born a serf.
'Born a serf! I!' he thought, incredulous of his own memories, of his own knowledge, as he left the haras and mounted a young half-broken English horse, and rode out into the silent, fragrant forest ways. Almost to himself it seemed a dream that he had ever been a little peasant on the Volga plains. Almost to himself it seemed an impossible fable that he had been the natural son of Paul Zabaroff and a poor maiden who had deemed herself honoured when she had been bidden to bear drink to thebarinein his bedchamber. He had once said that he was that best of all actors, one who believes in the part he plays; and at all times, and above all since his marriage, he had been identified in his own persuasions, and his own instincts and habits, with that character of a great noble, which, when he paused to remember, he knew was but assumed. Patrician in all his temper and tone, it seemed to him, when he did so remember, incredible that he could be actually only a son of hazard, without name, right, or station in the world. Was he even the husband of Wanda von Szalras? Law and Church would both deny it were his fraud once known.
It was not very often that these gloomy terrors seized him—his temper was elastic and his mind sanguine; but when they did so they overcame him utterly; he felt like Orestes pursued by the Furies. What smote him most deeply and hardly of all was his consciousness of the wrong done to his wife.
He rode fast and recklessly in the soft, grey atmosphere of the still day, making his young horse leap brawling stream and fallen tree-trunk, and dash headlong through the dusky greenery of the forests.
When he returned Wanda was seated on the lawn under the great yews and cedars by the keep. She kissed her hand to him as he rode in the distance up the avenue.
A little while later he joined her in her garden retreat, calm and even gay. With her greeting his terror seemed to have faded away; his home was here, he possessed her entire devotion—what was there to fear? Never had the serenity of his life here appeared more precise to him; never had the respect and honour which surrounded him seemed more needful as the bulwarks of a contented career. What could the furnace of ambition, the fatigue of exhausted pleasure give, that could equal this profound sense of peace, this cultured leisure, and this untainted atmosphere. The moral loveliness of his wife seemed to him almost more than mortal in its absolute and unconscious rejection of all things mean or base. 'The world would find the spring by following her,' seemed to him to have been written for her—the spring of hope, of faith, of strength, of purity. Perhaps a better man might have less intensely perceived and worshipped that spiritual beauty.
'Shall we have any house-parties this year or not?' she asked him as he joined her. 'I fear you must feel lonely here after your crowded days in Paris last year?'
'No,' he said quickly. 'Let us be without people. We had enough of the world in Paris, too much of it. How can I be lonely whilst I have you? And the weather for once is superb, and promises to remain so.'
'I do not know how it seems to you,' she replied, 'but when I came from the glare and the asphalte of Paris, these deep shadows, these cool fresh greens, these cloud-bathed mountains seemed to me to have the very calm of eternity in them. They seemed to say to me in such reproach, "Why will you wander? What can you find nobler and gladder than we are?" I want the children to grow up with that love of country in them; it is such a refuge, such an abiding, innocent joy. What does the old English poet say: 'It is to go from the world as it is man's to the world as it is God's.'
'Well, then, I now do plainly seeThis busy world and I shall ne'er agree,'
he said, with a smile. 'Cowley was a very wise man; wiser than Socrates, when all is counted. But, then, Cowley forgot, and you, perhaps, forget that one must be born with that wiser, holier love in one; like any other poetic faculty or insight, it is scarcely to be taught, certainly not to be acquired. I hope your children may inherit it from you. There is no surer safeguard, no simpler happiness!'
'But since you are content, may it not be acquired?'
'Ah, my beloved!' he said with a sigh. 'Do not compare the retreat of the soldier tired of his wounds, of the gambler wearied by his losses, with the poet or the saint who is at peace with himself and sees all his life long what he at least believes to be the smile of God. Loyola and Francis d'Assisi are not the same thing, are not on the same plane.'
'What matter what brought them,' she said softly, 'if they reach the same goal?'
'You think any sin may be forgiven?' he said irrelevantly, with his face averted.
'That is a very wide question. I do not think S. Augustine himself could answer it in a word or in a moment. Forgiveness, I think, would surely depend on repentance.'
'Repentance in secret—would that avail?'
'Scarcely—would it?—if it did not attain some sacrifice. It would have to prove its sincerity to be accepted.'
'You believe in public penance?' said Sabran, with some impatience and contempt.
'Not necessarily public,' she said, with a sense of perplexity at the turn his words had taken. 'But of what use is it for one to say he repents unless in some measure he makes atonement?'
'But where atonement is impossible?'
'That could never be.'
'Yes. There are crimes whose consequences can never be undone. What then? Is he who did them shut out from all hope?'
'I am no casuist,' she said, vaguely troubled. 'But if no atonement were possible I still think——nay, I am sure—-a sincere and intense regret which is, after all, what we mean by repentance, must be accepted, must be enough.'
'Enough to efface it in the eyes of one who had never sinned?'
'Where is there such an one? I thought you spoke of heaven.'
'I spoke of earth. It is all we can be sure to have to do with; it is our one poor heritage.'
'I hope it is but an ante-chamber which we pass through, and fill with beautiful things, or befoul with dust and blood, at our own will.'
'Hardly at our own will. In your ante-chamber a capricious tyrant waits us all at birth. Some come in chained; some free.'
They were seated at her favourite garden-seat, where the great yews spread before the keep, and far down below the Szalrassee rippled away in shining silver and emerald hues, bearing the Holy Isle upon its waters, and parting the mountains as with a field of light. The impression which had pursued her once or twice before came to her now. Was there any error in his own life, any cruel, crooked twist of circumstance concealed from her? An exceeding tenderness and pity yearned in her towards him as the thought arose. Was he, with all his talent, power, pride, grace, and strength, conscious of fault or failure, weighted with any burden? It seemed impossible. Yet to her fine instinct, her accurate ear, there was in these generalities the more painful, the more passionate, tone of personal remorse. She might have spoken, might once more have said to him what she had once said, and invited him to place a fearless confidence in her affection; but she remembered Olga Brancka; she shrank from seeking an avowal which might be so painful to him and her alike.
At that moment the pretty figure of the Princess Ottilie appeared in the distance, a lace hood over her head, a broad red sunshade held above that, and Sabran rose to go forward and offer her his arm.
'You are always lovers still, and one is afraid of interrupting you,' she said, as she took one of the gilded wicker chairs. 'I have had a letter from Olga Brancka; the post is come in. She says she will honour you in the autumn on her way to waiting at Gödöllö.'
'It is impossible!' cried Sabran, who grew first red, then pale.
'Nothing is impossible with Olga,' said the Princess, drily. 'I see even yet you are not acquainted with her many qualities, which include among them a will of steel.'
'She cannot come here,' he said in haste under his breath.
Wanda looked at him a moment.
'My aunt shall tell her that it will not suit us. She can go to Gödöllö by way of Gratz,' she said quietly.
The Princess shifted her sunshade.
'What effect do you think that will have? She will cross your mountains, and she will call up a snowstorm by incantation, so that you will be compelled to take her in. You who know so much of the world, Réné, can you inform me how it is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these butterflies have a volition of iron.'
'It is egotism,' he replied with effort, unable to recover his astonishment and disgust. 'Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. That is in itself a great force; they do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.'
'Olga's energies are certainly not wasted in that direction,' said Madame Ottilie.
Sabran rose and went in for his letters. It was intolerable to him to hear the name of this woman, whom he had only escaped by brutal violence, spoken in the presence of his wife; and even to him, hardened to the vices of the world though experience had made him, it had never occurred as possible that she would have the audacity to come thither; he had too hastily taken it for granted that conscience would have kept her clear of their path for ever, unless the hazards of society should have brought them perforce together. The most secretive of men is always more sincere than an insincere and crafty woman, and he was overwhelmed for the moment at the infamy and the hardihood of a character which he had flattered himself he had understood at a glance. He forgot the truth that 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.'
'There is not adéclasséein Paris who would not have more decency!' he thought bitterly. He stood in the Rittersaal and affected to be occupied with his letters; but his eyes only followed their lines, his mind was absent. He saw no way to prevent her continued intimacy with them, if she were vile enough to persist in enforcing it. He could not tell Egon Vàsàrhely or Stefan Brancka; a man cannot betray a woman, however base she may be. He could not tell his wife of that hateful hour, which seemed burnt into his brain as aquafortis bites into metal. He shuddered as he thought of her here, in this house which had known so many centuries of honour. He cursed the weak and culpable folly which had first led him into her snares. If he had not dallied with this Delilah, she would have been vile of purpose and of nature in vain. He had escaped her indeed at the last; he had indeed remained faithful in act to his wife; but had it been such fidelity of the soul and the mind as she deserved? Would not even the semi-betrayal bring its punishment soon or late? Could he ever endure to see her beside the woman who so nearly had tempted him? He felt that he would sooner kill the other, as he had threatened, rather than let her set foot across the sacred threshold of Hohenszalras.
'I knew what she was,' he thought with endless self-accusation. 'Why did I ever loiter an hour by her side, why did I ever look once at her hateful eyes?'
If she had been a stranger he would have braved his wife's scorn of himself and told her all, but when it was her cousin's wife—one who even had once been in a still nearer relationship to her—he could not do it. It seemed to him as if such nearness of shame would be so horrible to her that he would be included in her righteous hatred of it.
Moreover, long habit had made him reticent, and silence always seemed to him safety.
After some meditation he took his way to the library and there wrote a brief letter. He said in it, with no preamble, ceremony, or courtesy, that he begged to decline for himself and his wife the honour of the Countess Brancka's presence at Hohenszalras. He sealed it with his arms, and sent a special messenger with it to Matrey. He said nothing of what he had done to his wife or her aunt.
He knew that if his antagonist were so disposed she could make feud between him and her husband for the insult which that curt rejection of her offered visit bore with it. But that did not weigh on him; he would have been glad to have a man to deal with in the matter. All he cared to do was to preserve his home from the pollution of her presence. Moreover, he knew that it would not be like thefinesseand secrecy of Olga Brancka to do aught so simple or so frank as to seek the support of her lord.
Meantime, the Princess was saying to his wife:
'Will you receive Olga? She will not give up her wishes; she will force her way to you.'
'How can I refuse to receive Stefan's wife?'
'It would be difficult, but you would be justified. She endeavoured to draw your husband into an intrigue.'
'Are we sure? Let us be charitable.'
'My dear Wanda, you are a truer Christian than I am.'
'Justice existed before Christianity, if you do not think me profane to say so. I try to be just.'
'Justice is blind,' said the Princess, drily. 'I never understood very well how, being so, she can see her own scales.'
Wanda made no reply. She had not been blind, but she would have never said to any living being all that she had suffered in those weeks when he had stayed behind her in Paris. That he had returned to her blameless she was certain; she had put far behind her for ever the remembrance of those the only hours of anxiety and pain which he had given her since their marriage.
The Princess, communing with herself, wrote a letter to the Countess Brancka, chill and austere, in which she conveyed in delicate, but sufficiently clear, language, her sense that the same roof should not shelter her and Sabran, especially when the roof was that of Hohenszalras. She sent it because she believed it to be her duty to do so, but she had little faith in its efficacy. She would have written also to Stefan Brancka, but she knew him to be a weak, indulgent, careless man, still young, who had been lenient to his wife's follies and frailties, and who was only kept from ruin by the strong hand of his brother. If she told him what was after all mere conjecture, he might only laugh; if he did not laugh he might kill Sabran in a duel, were his Magyar blood fired by suspicion. No one could be ever sure what Count Stefan would or would not do; the only thing sure was that he would be never wise. To his wife herself he was absolutely indifferent, but this did not prevent him from having occasional moods of furious resentment against her. He was too unstable and too perilous a person to resort to in any difficulty.
In a few days she received her answer, though Sabran received none. It was brief and playful and pathetic.
'Beloved and reverend Mother,—You never like me, you always lecture me, but I am glad that you honour me by remembrance, even if it be to upbraid. I know not of what mysterious crime you suspect me, nor do I understand your allusions to M. de Sabran. I have always found him charming, and I think if he had not married so rich a woman he would have been eminent in some way; but content slays ambition. Salute Wanda lovingly and the pretty children. How is your little Ottilie? My Mila and Marie are grown out of knowledge. We shall soon have to be thinking of theirdots—alas! where will these come from? Stefan and I have been the prey of unjust stewards and extortionate tradesfolk till scarce anything is left except the mine at Schermnitz. Pity me a little, and pray for me much.'Your ever devoted'OLGA.'
'Beloved and reverend Mother,—You never like me, you always lecture me, but I am glad that you honour me by remembrance, even if it be to upbraid. I know not of what mysterious crime you suspect me, nor do I understand your allusions to M. de Sabran. I have always found him charming, and I think if he had not married so rich a woman he would have been eminent in some way; but content slays ambition. Salute Wanda lovingly and the pretty children. How is your little Ottilie? My Mila and Marie are grown out of knowledge. We shall soon have to be thinking of theirdots—alas! where will these come from? Stefan and I have been the prey of unjust stewards and extortionate tradesfolk till scarce anything is left except the mine at Schermnitz. Pity me a little, and pray for me much.
'Your ever devoted
'OLGA.'
Princess Ottilie was a holy woman, and knew that rage was a sin against herself and heaven, but when she had read this note she tore it in a hundred pieces, and stamped her small foot upon it, trembling with passion the while.
Two months went on; the Countess Olga wrote no more; they deemed themselves delivered from her threatened presence. She had not replied to his refusal to permit her to come thither, and Sabran felt relieved from an intolerable position. Had she persisted, he had decided to make full confession to his wife rather than permit her to receive ignorantly the insult of such a visit.
It was now the end of September, and the weather remained fine and open. He spent a great deal of his time out of doors, and took his old interest in the forests, the stud, and the hunting. The letter of Olga Brancka had brought close to him again the peril from which he had so hardly escaped in Paris, and the peace and sweetness of his home-life seemed the more precious to him by contrast. The high intelligence, the serene temper of his wife, and her profound affection seemed to him treasures for which he could be never grateful enough to fate and fortune; their days passed in tranquil and sunny happiness; but ever and again a word, a look, the merest trifle, sufficed to awake the sleeping snake of remorse which was, dormant in his breast.
One day he took Bela with him when he rode—a rare honour for the child, who rode superbly. His pony kept fair pace with his father's English hunter, and even the leaping did not scare either it or its rider.
'Bravo, Bela!' said Sabran, when they at last drew rein; 'you ride like a centaur. Is your education advanced enough to know what centaurs were?'
'Oh! they were what I should love to be,' replied Bela rapturously. 'They were joined on to the horse!'
Sabran laughed. 'Well, a good rider is one with his horse, so you may come very near your ideal. Ulrich has taught you an admirable seat. You are worthy of your mother in the saddle.'
Bela coloured with pleasure.
'In the study you are not so, I fear?' Sabran continued. 'You do not like learning, do you?'
'I like some sorts,' said the child with a little timidity; 'I like history, knowing what the people did in the other ages. Now the Herr Professor lets us do our lessons out of doors, I do not mind them at all. As for Gela, he likes nothing but books and pictures,' he added, with a sense of his one grief against his brother.
'Happy Gela! whatever his fate in life he will never be alone,' said his father, as he dismounted to let his hunter take breathing space. The child leapt lightly from his saddle, took his little silver folding cup out of his pocket, and drank at a spring, one of the innumerable springs rushing over the mossy stones and flower-filled grass.
'One is never alone with horses?' he said shyly, for he never lost his awe of Sabran.
'Unless one be ill; then a horse is sorry consolation, and books and art are faithful companions.'
'I have never been ill,' said Bela, with a little wonder at himself. 'I do not know what it is like.'
'It is to be dependent upon others. A hero or a king grows as helpless as a lame beggar when he is ill; you will not escape the common lot; and when you stay in your bed, and your pony in his stall, then you will be glad of Gela and his books.'
'Oh! I do love Gela always,' said the child hastily and generously; 'and the Herr Professor says he is ever—ever—so much cleverer than I am; a million times more clever!'
'You are clever enough,' said Sabran. 'If you do not let yourself be vain and overbearing you will do well. Try and remember that if your pony made a false slip to-day and you fell badly, all your good health would vanish at a stroke, and all your greatness would serve you nothing. You would envy any one of the boys going with whole limbs up into the hills, and, perhaps, all your mother's love and wealth could do nothing to mend your bones again.'
Bela listened with a grave face; when women, even his fearless mother, spoke to him in such a way, he was apt to think with disdain that they over-rated danger because they were women; and when his tutor so addressed him, he was also apt to think that it was because the good professor was a bookworm and cared for weeds, stones, and butterflies. But when his father said so, he was awed; he had heard Ulrich and Otto tell a hundred stories of their lord's prowess and courage and magnificent strength, for the deeds of Sabran in the floods and on the mountains had become almost legendary in their heroism to all the mountaineers of the Hohe Tauern, and all the dwellers on the Danube forest.
'But ought one not to be brave?' he said with hesitation. 'You are.'
'We ought to be brave, certainly, or we are not fit to live; but we must not be vain of being brave, nor rely upon it too much. Courage is a mere gift of '—he was about to say 'chance,' but seeing the blue eyes of the child fastened upon him, changed the word and said 'a gift of God.'
'What a handsome boy he is,' he thought, as he looked thus at his little son. 'And how wise it is to leave children wholly to their mothers when their mothers are wise!'
'I will remember,' said Bela thoughtfully; 'when I am a man I want to be just what you are.'
Sabran turned away at the innocent words. 'Be what your mother's people were, and I shall be content,' he said gravely.
'But your people too,' said Bela; 'they were very great and very good. The Herr Professor reads us things out of that big book on Mexico, and the Marquis Xavier was a saint,' he says. Gela likes the book better than I because it is all about birds, and beasts, and flowers; but the part about the Indians, and the Incas, that pleases me; and then there are the Breton stories too that are in real history, they are quite beautiful, and I would die like that.'
Bela's tongue once loosened seldom paused of its own accord; his eyes were dark and animated, his face was eager and proud.
'The Marquis Xavier was a saint, indeed,' said his father abruptly. 'Revere his name. All my children should revere his name and memory. But lean most to your mother's people; you are Austrian born, and the chief of your duties and possessions will be in Austria. I think you would die heroically, my boy, but you will find that it is harder to live so. The horses are rested, let us ride home; it grows late for you.'
Bela, whose mind was quick in intuition, felt that his father did not care to talk about Mexico or Bretagne.
'I will ask the Herr Professor if I did wrong to speak to him of the big book,' he said to himself as he mounted his pony; he was very anxious to please his father, but he was afraid he had missed the way. 'I suppose it is because they were only saints, and the Szalras were all soldiers,' he thought on reflection, soldiers being by far the foremost in his esteem.
'He says it is harder to live well than to die well,' said Bela over his bread and milk that night to his brother.
'I suppose that is because dying is over so soon,' said the meditative Gela; 'and you know it must take anenormoustime to live to be old—quite old—like Aunt Ottilie.'
'I should like to die very grandly,' said Bela with shining eyes, 'and have all the world remember me for ever and for ever, as they do great Rudolph.'
'I should like to die saving somebody,' said Gela, 'just as Uncle Bela saved the pilgrims; that would please our mother best.'
'I should like to die in battle,' said the living Bela; 'and that would please our mother, because so many of us have always died so fighting the French, or the Prussians, or the Turks. When I am a man I shall die like Wallenstein.'
'But Wallenstein was killed in a room,' said Gela, who was very accurate.
'You are always so particular!' said Bela impatiently, who had himself only a vague idea of Wallenstein, as of someone who had gone on fighting without stopping for thirty years.
'The Herr Professor says it is just being particular which makes the difference between the scholar and the sciolist,' said Gela solemnly, his pretty rosy lips closing carefully over the long wordhalbgelehrte.
This night after the ride he and she dined quite alone. As he sat in the Rittersaal and looked at the long line of knights, the many blazoned shields, the weapons borne in gallant warfare, a sudden sensation came to him of the vile thing that he did in being in this place. It seemed to him that those armoured figures should grow animate and descend and drive him out. Bela, then sleeping happily, dreaming of the glories of his ride, had raised with his innocent words a torturing spirit in his father's breast. What had he brought to this haughty and chivalrous race?—the servile Slav, the barbaric Persian, blood, and all the dishonour that their creed would hold the basest upon earth. Besides, to lie toherchildren! Even the blue eyes of the boy had made him embarrassed and humiliated, as if she were judging him through her first-born's gaze. What would it be when that child, grown to man's estate, should speak to him of his people, of his forefathers?
For the first time it occurred to him that these boys would inevitably, as they grew older, ask him many questions, wish to know many things. He could turn aside a child's inquisitive interest, but it would be more painful, less easy, to refuse to supply a grown youth's legitimate interrogations. All these children would some time or another make many inquiries of him that his wife, out of delicate sympathy, never had intruded upon him. The fallen fortunes of the Sabran race had always seemed to her one of those blameless misfortunes for which the best respect is shown by silence. But her sons would naturally, one day or another, be more interested in learning more of those from whom they were descended.
The lie in reply would be easy and secure. There were all the traditions and recollections of the Sabrans of Romaris to be gathered from the tongues of the people in Finisterre, and the private papers of their race which he possessed. He could answer well enough, but it would be a lie, and a lie seemed to him now a disgrace? Before his marriage he had looked on falsehood as a necessary part of the world's furniture, but he had not lived all these years beside a noble nature, to which even a prevarication was impossible, without growing ashamed of his former laxities.
'There is not a dead man amongst all those knights who bore these arms that should not rise to punish and disown me!' he thought with poignant hatred of his past.
When he went to his room the impulse once more came over him to tell his wife all; to throw himself on her mercy, and let her do the worst she would; but he had a certain fear of her which acted like a spell on that moral cowardice, which his Slav temperament and his hidden secret combined to bind in a dead weight on the physical courage and natural pride of his character.
He resolved to do his uttermost as they grew older to rear his sons to worthiness of that great race whose name they bore; to uproot in them by all means in his power any falser or darker faults they might have inherited from him. He promised himself so to watch over his own words and deeds that as they grew to manhood they should find no palliative or example of wrong-doing in his life. The closeness of his peril, the folly of his dalliance with Olga Brancka, had left him distrustful and diffident of his own powers to resist evil. He said to himself that he would seek the world no more; his wife was happiest in her own dominion, amidst her own people; he would court neither pleasure nor ambition again. Here he had peace; here he loved and was beloved; here he would abide, and let courts and cities hold those less blessed than he.
In the morning he awoke refreshed and tranquil; a beautiful sunrise was tinging with rose the snows of the opposite Venediger peaks; the flush of early autumn was upon the lower woods, but no snow had fallen even on the mountains. The lake was deeply green as a laurel leaf, and its waters rolled briskly under a strong breeze. It was a brilliant day for the hills, and thejägermeisterand his men were in waiting, for he had arranged over night to go chamois-hunting on those steep alps and glaciers which towered above the hindmost forests of Hohenszalras. He did not very often give rein to his natural love of field sports, for he knew that his wife liked to feel that the innocent creatures of the mountains were safe wherever she ruled. But there was real sport to be had here, with every variety of danger accompanying to excuse it, and Otto and his men were proud of their lord's prowess and perseverance on the high hills, and only sorrowed that he so often let his rifles lie unused in the gun-room. He went out whilst the day was still red and young, like a rose yet in bud, and climbed easily and willingly the steep paths and precipitous slopes which led to the glaciers.
'Count Bela wants sadly to come with us one of these days,' said Otto, with a broad smile. 'He can use his crampons right manfully; will not the Countess soon let me teach him to shoot?'
'I think not willingly, Otto,' said Sabran. 'She thinks children's hands are best free of bloodshed; and so do I. It can do a child no good to see the dying agony of an innocent creature. Teach Herr Bela to climb as much as you like, but leave powder and shot alone.'
'I am sure the Herr Marquis himself must have been a line shot very early?'
'I was at a semi-military college,' said Sabran, thinking of those days at the Lycée Clovis when he had sought thesalle d'armeswith such eagerness, as being the scene of those lessons which would most surely enable him to meet men as their equal or their master.
'If only Count Bela might be taught to shoot at a mark?' said the old huntsman, wistfully.
'You know very well, Otto, that your lady decides everything for her children, and that all her decisions I uphold,' said his master. 'Be sure they are wiser than either yours or mine would be. She can teach him herself, too; she can hit a running mark as well as you or I. Do you remember the day when you arrested me in these woods?'
'Ah, my lord!' said Otto, with a rolling oath; 'never can I pardon myself, though you have so mercifully pardoned me!'
'And my good rifle is still lying in the bed of the lake,' said Sabran, glancing backward at the Szalrassee, now many hundred feet below them, a mere green ribbon shining through the deeper green of fir and pine woods.
'Yes, my lord!' answered the man, cheerily. 'The good English rifle indeed was lost; but it seems to me that the Herr Marquis did not make wholly a bad exchange!'
'No, indeed,' said his master, as he paused and looked down to where the towers and spires of Hohenszalras glimmered like mere points of glittering metal in the sunshine far below.
They were now at the highest altitude at whichgemsbocksare found, and the business of the day commenced as they sighted what looked like a mere brown speck against the greyness of the opposite glacier. Before the day was done Sabran had shot to his own gun eight chamois on the heights, and some score of ptarmigan and black-cock on the lower level. He saw more than onekuttengeierandlammergeier, but, in deference to the traditions of the Szalras, did not fire on them. The healthful fatigue, the rarefied air, the buoyant exhilaration which comes with the atmosphere of the great heights, made him feel happy, and gave him back all his confidence in the present and the future. When he rested on a ledge of rock, listening to Otto's hunter's tales, and making a frugal meal of some hard biscuit and a draught of Voslauer, he wondered at himself for having so recently been beguiled by the febrile excitations of Paris, or having desired the fret and wear of a public career. What could be better than this life was? To have sought to leave it was folly and ingratitude. The peace and the calm of the great mountains which she loved so well seemed to descend into his soul.
It was twilight when they reached the lower slopes of the hills, the jägers loaded with game, he and Otto walking in front of them. From the still far-off islet oh the lake, and from the belfry of the Schloss, the Ave Maria was chiming; the deep-toned bells of the latter ringing the Emperor's Hymn.
Talking gaily with Otto, with that frank kindliness which endeared him to all these mountaineers, he approached the house slowly, fatigued with the pleasant tire of a healthy and vigorous man after a long day's pastime on the hills, and entered by a back entrance, which led through the stables into the wing of the building where his own private rooms were situated. He took his bath and dressed himself for the evening, then went on his way across the vast house to the white salon, where his wife and her aunt were usually to be found at the time of the children's hour before dinner. With some words on his lips to claim her praise for having spared the vultures, he pushed aside theportièreand entered, but the words died on his tongue, half spoken.