His wife was there, but before the hearth, seated with her profile turned towards him, also was Olga Brancka. His wife, who was standing, came towards him.
'My cousin Olga took us by surprise an hour ago. The telegram must have missed us which she says she sent yesterday from Salzburg.'
Her eyes had a cold gaze as she spoke; her sense of the duties of hospitality and of high breeding had alone compelled her to give any form of welcome to her guest. Madame Brancka, playing with a feather screen, looked up with a little quiet self-satisfied smile.
'Unexpected guests are the most welcome. When there is an old proverb, pretty if musty, all ready made for you, Réné, why do you not repeat it? I am truly sorry, though, that my telegram miscarried. I suspect it comes from Wanda's old-fashioned prejudice against having a wire of her own here from Lienz. I dare say they never send you half your messages.'
Sabran had mechanically bowed over the hand she held out to him, but he scarcely touched it with his own. He was deadly pale. The amazement that her effrontery produced on him was stupefaction. Versed in the ways of women and of the world though he was, he was speechless and helpless before this incredible audacity. She looked at him, she smiled, she spoke, like the most innocent and unconscious creature. For a moment an impulse seized him to unmask her then and there, and hound her out of his wife's presence; the next he knew that it was impossible to do so. Men cannot betray women in that way, nor was he even wholly free enough from blame himself to have the right to do so. But an intense rage, the more intense because perforce mute, seized him against this intruder by his hearth. Only to see her beside his wife was an intolerable suffering and shame. When he recovered himself a little, feeling his wife's gaze upon him, he said with some plain incredulity in his contemptuous words:
'The failure of messages is often caused by the senders of them; the people are extremely careful at Lienz. I do not think the fault liesthere.We can, however, only regret the want of due warning, for the reason that we can give no fit or flattering reception of an honoured guest. You come from Paris?'
For the first time a slight sudden flush rose upon Olga Brancka's cheek, callous though she was. She felt the irony and the disdain. She perceived that she had in him an inexorable foe, beyond all allurement and all entreaty.
'I passed by Paris,' she answered, easily enough. 'Of course I had to see my tailors, like everyone else in September. I have been first to Noissetiers, then to London, then to Homburg, then to Russia. I do not know where I have not been since we met. And you good people have been vegetating beneath your forests all that time? I was curious to come and see you in your felicity. Hohenszalrasburg used to be called the vulture's nest; it appears to have become a dove's!'
'I spared a whole family oflammergeierto-day in deference to your forest law,' he said, turning to his wife, whilst to himself he thought what a far worse beast of prey was sitting here, smoothing her glossy feathers in the warmth of his own hearth. She noticed the extreme pallor of his face, the sound of anger and emotion forcibly restrained; she imagined something of what he felt, though she could guess neither its intensity nor its extent. She had done herself violence in meeting with courtesy and tranquillity the woman who now sat between them, but she could not measure or imagine the guilt and the audacity of her.
When, that evening, as twilight came on, she had heard the sound of wheels beneath the terraces, and in a little while had been informed by Hubert that the Countess Brancka had arrived, her first movement had been to refuse to receive her, her next to remember that to one who had been Gela's wife, and now was Stefan Brancka's, the doors of Hohenszalras could not be shut without an open quarrel and scandal, which would regale the world and make feud inevitable between her husband and the whole race of Vàsàrhely. The Vàsàrhely knew the worthlessness of Stefan's wife, but for the honour of their name they would never admit that they did so; they would never fail to defend her. Moreover, hospitality of a high and antique type had always been the first of obligations upon all those whom she descended from and represented. They would not have refused to harbour their worst foe if he had demanded asylum. They would not have turned away sovereign or beggar from their gates. Those days were gone, indeed, but their high and generous temper lived in her. In the brief space in which Hubert, having made the announcement, waited for her commands, she had struggled with her own repugnance and conquered it. She had told herself that to turn Stefan's wife from her doors would be the mere vulgar melodrama of a common and undignified anger. After all she knew nothing; therefore she traversed the house to receive her unasked guest, and gave her welcome without any pretence of cordiality or friendship, but with a perfect and unhesitating politeness void of all offence.
She was thankful that the Princess Ottilie was again in the south of France with her sister-in-law of Lilienhöhe, so that her indignation, her interrogation, and her quick regard were spared to them. Now that her niece was no longer alone, the Princess did not think it her bounden duty to endure these northern winds, blowing from Poland and the Baltic over the old duchy of Austria, which she had at all times so peculiarly detested, though she had been born a thousand miles nearer the Baltic herself.
Olga Brancka had been profuse in her apologies and expressions of regret, but she had at once let her carriage, hired at S. Johann, with its four post-horses changed at Matrey, be taken to the stables, and had gone herself to her old apartments, where in little time her two maids had altered her heavy furs and travelling clothes to the costume of consummate simplicity and elegance in which she now sat, putting forth her small feet in rose satin shoes to the warmth from the great Hirschvogel stove, which, with its burnished and enamelled colour, illumined one side of the white salon.
Sabran and his wife both remained standing, he leaning his arm on the scroll work of the great stove, she playing with the delicate ears of one of the hounds. Madame Brancka alone sat and leaned back in her low seat, quite content; she was aware that she was unwelcome, and that her presence was an embarrassment and worse. But the sense of the wrong and cruel position in which she placed them was sweet and pungent to her; she was refreshed by the very sense of dilemma and of danger which surrounded her. She had her vengeance in her hand, and she would not exhaust it quickly, but tasted its savour with the slow care and patient appetite of the connoisseur in such things. She had a Chinese-like skill in patiently drawing out the prolonged pangs of an ingeniously invented martyrdom.
'Why do you both stand?' she said, looking up at him between her half-closed lids. 'Are you standing to imply to me as we do with monarchs, 'This house is yours whilst you are in it?' I am much obliged, but I should sell it at once if it were really mine. It is a splendid, barbaric solitude, like Taróc. We have not been to Taróc this year. Stefan says Egon lives altogether with his troopers and grows very morose. You hear from him sometimes, I suppose?'
To Sabran it seemed as if her half shut black eyes shot forth actual sparks of fire, as she spoke the name which he could never hear without an inward spasm of fear.
'Of course I hear from Egon,' said his wife. 'But he writes very briefly; he was never much of a penman. He prefers a rifle, a sword, a riding-whip.'
'I hear you have called the last child after him? Where are the boys? They cannot be in bed. Let me see them. It is surely their hour to be here. Réné, ring, and send for them.'
His brow contracted.
'No; it is late,' he said abruptly. 'They would only weary you; they are barbaric, like the house.'
He felt an extreme reluctance to bring his children into her presence, to see her speak to them, touch them; he was longing passionately to seize her and thrust her out of the doors. As she sat there in the full light of the many wax candles burning around, sparkling, imperturbable, like a coquette of a vaudeville, with her rose satin, and her white taffetas, and her lace ruff, and her pink coral necklace and ear-rings, and a little pink coral hand upholding her curls in the most studied disorder, she seemed to him the loath-liest thing that he had ever seen. He hated her more intensely than he had ever hated anyone in all his life; even more than he had hated the traitress who had sold him to the Prussians.
'Pray let me see the children; I know you never dine till eight,' she was persisting to his wife, who knew well that she was entirely indifferent to the children, but who was not unwilling for their entrance to break the constraint of what was to her an intolerable trial. She did ring, and ordered their presence. They soon came, making their obeisances with the pretty grave courtliness which they were taught from infancy; the boys in white velvet dresses, while their sister, in a frock of old Venetian point, looked like a Stuart child painted by Vandyck.
'Ah, quels amours!' cried Olga Brancka, with admirable effusion, as they kissed her hand. Sabran turned away abruptly, and muttering a word as to some orders he had to give the stud-groom, left the chamber without ceremony, as she, with an ardour wholly unknown to her own daughters, lifted the little Ottilie on her knee and kissed the child's rose-leaf cheek.
'What lovely creatures they are,' she said in German; 'and how they have grown since they left Paris. They are all the image of Réné; he must be very proud. They have all his eyes—those deep dark-blue eyes, like jewels, like the depths of the sea.'
'You are very poetic,' said Wanda; 'but I should be glad if you would speak their praises in some tongue they do not understand. The boys may not be hurt; but Lili, as we call her, is a little vain already, though she is so young.'
'Would you deny her the birthright of her sex?' said Madame Brancka, clasping her coral necklace round the child's throat. 'Surely she will have lectures enough from her godmother against all feminine foibles. By the way, where is the Princess?'
'My aunt is with the Lilienhöhe.'
'I am grieved not to have the pleasure,' murmured Madame Brancka, indifferently, letting Ottilie glide from her lap.
'Give back the necklace,liebling,' said Wanda, as she unclasped it.
'No, no; I entreat you—let her keep it. It is leagues too large, but she likes it, and when she grows up she will wear it and think of me.'
'Pray take it,' said Wanda, lifting it from the child's little breast. 'You are too kind; but they must not be given what they admire. It teaches them bad habits.'
'What severe rules!' cried Madame Brancka. 'Are these poor babies brought up on S. Chrysostom and S. Basil? Is Lili already doomed to the cloister? You are too austere; you should have been an abbess instead of having all these golden-curled cupidons about you. Where is the youngest one, Egon's namesake?'
'He is in his cot,' said Gela, who was always very direct in his replies, and who found himself addressed by her.
Meantime Bela took hold of his mother's hand and whispered to her, 'Mütterchen, she is rude to you. Send her away.'
'My darling,' answered Wanda, 'when people laugh in our own house we must let them do it, even if it be at ourselves. And, Bela, to whisper isveryrude.'
'Egon is so little,' continued Gela, plaintively. 'He cannot read; I do not think he ever will read!'
'But you could not when you were as small as he?'
'Could I not?' said Gela, doubtfully, to whom that time seemed many centuries back.
'And Lili, can she read?' said Madame Olga, suppressing a yawn.
'Oh yes,' said Gela; 'at least, two-letter words she can; and me, I read to her.'
'What model children!' cried Madame Brancka, with a little laugh. 'And the naughty boy who was in a rage because he was not permitted to go to Chantilly? That was Bela, was it not? Bela, do you remember how cruel your mother was, and how you cried?'
Bela looked at her, with his blue eyes growing as stern and cold as his father's.
'My mother is always right,' he said gallantly. 'She knows what I ought to do. I do not think I cried,meine gnädige Frau; I never cry.'
'Even the naughty boy has become an angel! What a wonderful disciplinarian you are, Wanda! If your children were not so handsome they would be insufferable with their goodness. They are very handsome; they are just like Sabran, and yet they are not at all a Russian type.'
'Why should they be Russian? We have no Russian blood,' said their mother, in surprise.
Madame Brancka laughed a little confusedly, and fluttered her feather screen.
'I do not know what I was thinking of. Réné always reminds me of my old friend Paul Zabaroff; they are very alike.'
'I have seen the present Prince Zabaroff,' said Wanda, wondering what the purpose of her guest's words were. 'He was not, as I remember him, much like M. de Sabran.'
'Oh, of course he was not equal to your Apollo,' said Madame Brancka, winding Ottilie's long hair round her fingers.
'You have had enough of them; they must not worry you,' said their mother, and she dismissed the children with a word.
'In what marvellous control you keep them,' said Madame Olga. 'Now, my children never obeyed me, let me scream at them as I would.'
'I do not think screaming has much effect on anyone, young or old.'
'It paralyses a man. But I suppose a child can always out-scream one?'
'Probably. A child never respects any person who loses their calmness. As for men, you are better versed in their follies than I.'
'But do you and Réné absolutely never quarrel?'
'Quarrel! My dear Olga, how verybürgerlichan idea.'
'Do you suppose only the bourgeois quarrel?' said Madame Brancka. 'Really you live in your enchanted forest until you forget what the world is like,' and she began an interminable history of the scenes between a friend of hers and her husband and her family, a quarrel which had ended inconseils judiciairesand separation. 'It is a cruel thing that there is not one law of divorce for all the world,' she said with a sigh, as she ended the unsavoury relation. 'If Stefan and I could only set each other free, we should have done it years and years ago.'
'I did not know your griefs against Stefan were so great?'
'Oh, I have no great griefs against him; he isbon enfant: but we are both ruined, and we both detest each other; we do not know very well why.'
'Poor Mila and Marie!'
'What has it to do with them? They are happy at Sacré Cœur, and when they come out they will marry. Egon will be sure to portion them; we cannot. We are not like you, who will be able to give a couple of millions to Lili without hurting her brothers.'
'Lili'sdotis far enough in the future,' said Lili's mother, who, very weary of the conversation, saw with relief the doors open, and heard Hubert announce that dinner could be served. By an opposite door Sabran entered also, a moment later. The dinner was tedious to both him and her; they alike found it an almost intolerable penance. Their guest alone was gay, ironical, at her ease, and never at a loss for a topic. Sabran looked at her now and then with absolute wonder coming over him as to whether he had not dreamed of that evening in Paris, alone beside her, with the smell of the jasmine and orange-buds, and the moonbeams crossing her white throat, her auburn curls. Was it possible that a woman lived with such incredible self-control, insolence, shamelessness? There was not a shadow of consciousness in her regard, not a moment of uneasiness in her manner. Except the one passing faint flush which had come on her face at his words of greeting, there was not a single sign that she was other than the most innocent of women. The impatience, the disgust, the amazement which were in him were too strong for his worldly tact and composure altogether to conquer them; his eyes were downcast, his words were studied or irrelevant, his discomposure was evident; he felt as reluctant to meet the gaze of his wife as of his enemy. In vain did he endeavour to sustain equably the airy nothings of the usual dinner-table conversation. He was sensible of an effort too great for art to cover it; he felt that there was a strange sound in his voice, he fancied the very men waiting upon him must be conscious of his embarrassment. If he could have turned her out of the house he would have been at peace, for, after all, her offences were much greater than his own; but to be compelled to sit motionless whilst she called his wife caressing names, broke her bread, and would sleep under her roof, was absolute torture to him.
When they went back again to the white room he sat down at the piano, glad to find a temporary refuge in music from the embarrassment of her presence.
'He cannot have spoken to Wanda?' she thought, uneasy for the first time, as she glanced at Sabran, who was playing with his usualmaestriaa concerto of Schubert's. With the plea that her long post journey had fatigued her, she asked leave to retire when half an hour had elapsed, filled with scientific and intricate melody, which had spared them the effort of further conversation. Her host and hostess accompanied her to the guest-chambers, with the courtesy which was an antique custom of the Schloss, as of all Austrian country-houses. Their leave-taking on the threshold was cold, but studied in politeness; the door closed on her, and Sabran and his wife returned along the corridor together.
His heart beat heavily with apprehension: he dreaded her next word. To his relief, to his surprise, she said simply to him:
'It is very early. I will go and write to Rothwand about the mines. Will you come and tell me again all you said about them? I have half forgotten. Or if you would rather do nothing to-night, I have other letters to look over, and I will go to my own room.'
'I will come there,' he said; and though he was well used to her strong self-control and forbearance, he felt amazed at the force of these now, and was moved to a passionate gratitude. 'Any other woman,' he thought, 'would have torn me asunder to know what there has been between me and her guest. She does not even speak; and yet God knows how she loves me! She trusts me, and she will not weary me, nor importune me, nor seem to suspect me with doubt. Who shall be worthy of that? How can I rid her house of this insult? The other shall go; she shall go if I put her out with public shame before my servants. Would to heaven that to kill such as she is were no more murder than to slay a vicious beast or a poisonous worm!'
He followed his wife into the octagon-room, where all her private papers were. There were details of a mine in Galicia which were disquieting and troublesome; on the previous day they had agreed together what to do, but before she had answered her inspector, fresh details had come in by the post-bag, whilst he had been chamois-hunting. She sat down and handed him these fresh reports.
'I do not think there is anything that will alter your decisions,' she said. 'But read them, and tell me, and I will then write.'
He drew the documents from her, and began to peruse them, but his hand shook a little as he held the papers; his eyes were not clear, his mind was not free. He laid them down and looked at her; she was seated near him. She was paler than usual and her face was grave, but she seemed quite absorbed in what she did, as she added figures together, and made a quickprécisof the reports she had received. Her left hand lay on the table as she wrote; on the great diamond of thebague d'alliance, the only gift which he had presumed to offer her on their marriage, the light was sparkling; it looked like a cluster of dewdrops on a lily. He took that hand on a sudden impulse of infinite reverence, and raised it to his lips.
She looked at him, and a mist of tears came into her eyes which were tears of pleasure, of relief, of restrained emotion comforted; the gesture gave her all the reassurance that she cared, to have; she was sure then that Olga Brancka had never made him false to his honour and hers. She said nothing to him of what was foremost in the minds of both. She held the value of silence high. She thought that there were things of which merely to speak seemed a species of dishonour. A single word ill-said is so often the 'little rift within the lute which makes the music dumb.'
She went to rest content; but he was none the less ill at ease, disturbed, offended, and violently offended, at the presence of his temptress under the roof of Hohenszalras. It was an outrage to all he loved and respected; an outrage to which he was determined to put an end. The only possible way to do so was to see his guest himself alone. He could not visit her in her apartments; he could not summon her to his; if he waited for chance, he might wait for days. The insolence which had brought her here would probably, he reasoned, keep her here some time, and he was resolved that she should not pass another night in the same house with his wife and his children.
Long after Wanda had gone to sleep he sat alone, thinking and perplexing himself with many a scheme, each of which he dismissed as impracticable and likely to draw that attention from his household which he most desired to avoid. He slept ill, scarcely at all, and rose before daybreak. When he was dressed he sent his man to ask Greswold to come to him. The old physician, who usually got up before the sun, soon obeyed his summons, and anxiously inquired what need there was of him.
'Dear Professor,' said Sabran, with that gracious kindliness which always won his listener's heart, 'you were my earliest friend here; you are the tutor of my sons; you are an old man, a wise man, and a prudent man. I want you to understand something without my explaining it; I do not desire or intend the Countess Brancka to be the guest of my wife for another day.'
Greswold looked up quickly: he knew the character of Stefan Brancka's wife, he guessed the rest.
'What can I do?' he said simply. 'Pray command me.'
'Do this,' said Sabran. 'Make some excuse to see her; say that the chaplain, or that my wife, has sent you, say anything you choose to get admitted to her rooms in the visitors' gallery. When you see her alone, say to her frankly, brutally if you like, thatIsay she must leave Hohenszalras. She can make any excuse she pleases, invent any despatch to recall herself; but she must go. I do not pretend to put any gloss upon it; I do not wish to do so. I want her to know that I do not permit her to remain under the same roof with my wife.'
The old physician's face grew grave and troubled; he foresaw difficulty and pain for those whom he loved, and to whom he owed his bread.
'I am to give her no explanation?' he said doubtfully.
'She will need none,' said Sabran, curtly.
Greswold was mute. After a pause of some moments he said with hesitation:
'By all I have heard of the Countess Brancka, I am much afraid she will not be moved by such a message, delivered by anyone so insignificant as myself; but what you desire me to do I will do, only I pray you do not blame me if I fail. You are, of course, indifferent to her certain indignation, to her possible violence?'
'I am indifferent to everything,' said Sabran, with rising impatience, 'except to the outrage which her presence here is to the Countess von Szalras.'
'Allow me one question, my Marquis,' said Greswold. 'Is our lady, your wife, aware that the presence of her cousin's wife is an indignity to herself?'
Sabran hesitated.
'Yes and no,' he answered at last. 'She knew something in Paris, but she does not know or imagine all, nor a tithe part; of what Madame Brancka is.'
'I go at once,' said the old man, without more words, 'though of course the lady will not be awake for some hours. I will ask to see her maids. I shall learn then when I can with any chance of success get admittance. You will not write a word by me? Would it not offend her less?'
'I desire to offend her,' said Sabran, with a vibration of intense passion in his voice. 'No; I will not write to her. She is a woman who has studied Talleyrand; she would hang you if she had a single line from your pen. If I wrote, God knows what evil she would not twist out of it. She hates me and she hates my wife. It must be war to the knife.'
Greswold bowed and went out, asking no more.
Sabran passed the next three hours in a state of almost uncontrollable impatience.
It was the pleasant custom at Hohenszalras for everyone to have their first meal in their own apartments at any hour that they chose, but he and Wanda usually breakfasted together by choice in the little Saxe room, when the weather was cold. The cold without made the fire-glow dancing on the embroidered roses, and the gay Watteau panels, and the carpet of lamb-skins, and the coquettish Meissen shepherds and shepherdesses, seem all the warmer and more cheerful by contrast. Here he had been received on the first morning of his visit to Hohenszalras; here they had breakfasted in the early days after their marriage; here they had a thousand happy memories.
Into that room he could not go this morning. He sent his valet with a message to his wife, saying that he would remain in his own room, being fatigued from the sport of the previous day. When they brought him his breakfast he could not touch it. He drank a little strong coffee and a great glass of iced water; he could take nothing else. He paced up and down his own chambers in almost unendurable suspense. If he had been wholly innocent he would have been less agitated; but he could not pardon himself the mad imprudences and follies with which he had pandered to the vanities and provoked the passions of this hateful woman. If she refused to go he almost resolved to tell all as it had passed to his wife, not sparing himself. The three or four hours that went by after Greswold had left him appeared to him like whole, long, tedious days.
The men came as usual to him for his orders as to horses, sport, or other matters, but he could not attend to them; he hardly even heard what they said, and dismissed them impatiently. When at last the heavy, slow tread of the old physician sounded in the corridor, he went eagerly to his door, and himself admitted Greswold.
The Professor spread out his hands with a deprecating gesture.
'I have done my best. But may I never pass such a quarter of an hour again! She will not go.'
'She will not?' Sabran's face flushed darkly, his eyes kindled with deep wrath. 'She defies me, then?'
'She evidently deems herself strong enough to defy you. She laughed at me; she spoke to me as though I were one of the scullions or the sweepers; she menaced me as if we were still in the Middle Ages. In a word, she is not to be moved by me. She bade me tell you that if you wish her out of your wife's house you must have the courage to say so yourself.'
'Courage!' echoed Sabran. 'It is not courage that will be any match for her; it is not courage that will rid one of her; she knows the difficulty in which I am. I cannot betray her to her husband. No man can ever do that. I cannot risk a quarrel, a scandal, a duel with the relatives of my wife. I cannot put her out of the house as I might do if she had no relationship with the Vàsàrhely and the Szalras. She knows that; she relies upon it.'
'My lord,' said the physician very gently, 'will you pardon me one question? Is the offence done to the Countess von Szalras by Madame Brancka altogether on her side? Are you wholly (pardon me the word) blameless?'
'Not altogether,' said Sabran, frankly, with a deep colour on his face. 'I have been culpable of folly, but in the sense you mean I have been quite guiltless. If I had been guilty in that sense, I would not have returned to Hohenszalras!'
'I thank you for so much confidence in me,' said Greswold. 'I only wanted to know so far, because I would suggest that you should send for Prince Egon and simply tell him as much as you have told me. Egon Vàsàrhely is the soul of honour, and he has great authority over the members of his own family. He will make his sister-in-law leave here without any scandal.'
'There are reasons why I cannot take Prince Vàsàrhely into my confidence in this matter,' said Sabran, with hesitation. 'That is not to be thought of for a moment. Is there no other way?'
'See her yourself. She imagines you will not, perhaps she thinks you dare not, say these things to her yourself.'
'See her alone? What will my wife suppose?'
'Would it not be better frankly to say to my lady that you have need to see her so? Pardon me, my dear lord, but I am quite sure that the straight way is the best to take with our Countess Wanda. The only thing which she might very bitterly resent, which she might perhaps never forgive, would be concealment, insincerity, want of good faith. If you will allow me to counsel you, I would most strongly advocate your saying honestly to her that you know that of Madame Brancka which makes you hold her an unfit guest here, and that you are about to see that lady alone to induce her to leave the castle without open rupture.'
Sabran listened, stung sharply in his conscience by every one of the simple and honest words. When Greswold spoke of his wife as ready to pardon any offences except those of falseness and concealment his soul shrank as the flesh shrinks from the touch of caustic.
'You are right,' he said with effort. 'But, my dear Greswold, though I am not absolutely guilty, as you were led for a moment to think, I am not altogether absolutely blameless. I was sensible of the fatal attraction of an unscrupulous person. I was never faithless to my wife, either in spirit or act, but you know there are miserable sensual temptations which counterfeit passion, though they do not possess it; there are unspeakable follies from which men at no age are safe. I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind, and throw the blame upon a woman; but it is certain that the old answer is often still the true one, "The woman tempted me." I am not wholly innocent; I played with fire and was surprised, like an idiot, when it burnt me. I would say as much as this to my wife (and it is the whole truth) if it were only myself who would be hurt or lowered by the telling of it; but I cannot do her such dishonour as I should seem to do by the mere relation of it. She esteems me as so much stronger and wiser than I am; she has so very noble an ideal of me; how can I pull all that down with my own hands, and say to her, "I am as weak and unstable as any one of them"?'
Greswold listened and smiled a little.
'Perhaps the Countess knows more than you think, dear sir; she is capable of immense self-control, and her feeling for you is not the ordinary selfish love of ordinary women. If I were you I should tell her everything. Speak to her as you speak to me.'
'I cannot!'
'That is for you to judge, sir,' said the old physician.
'I cannot!' repeated Sabran, with a look of infinite distress. 'I cannot tell my wife that any other woman has had influence over me, even for five seconds. I think it is S. Augustine who says that it is possible, in the endeavour to be truthful, to convey an entirely false impression. An utterly false impression would be conveyed to her if I made her suppose that any other than herself had ever been loved by me in any measure since my marriage; and how should one make such a mind as hers comprehend all the baseness and fever and folly of a man's mere caprice of the senses? It would be impossible.'
Greswold was silent.
'You do not see how difficult even such a confession as that would be,' Sabran insisted, with irritation. 'Were you in my place you would feel as I feel.'
'Perhaps,' said Greswold. 'But I believe not. I believe, sir, that you underrate the knowledge of the world and of humanity which the Countess von Szalras possesses, and that you also underrate the extent of her sympathy and the elasticity of her pardon.'
Sabran sighed restlessly.
'I do not know what to do. One thing only I know—the wife of Stefan Brancka shall not remain here.'
'Then, sir, you must be the one to say so or to write it. She will heed no one except yourself. Perhaps it is natural. I am nothing more in the sight of a great lady like that than Hubert or Otto would be. She does not think I am of fit station to go to her as your ambassador.'
'You would disown her if she were your daughter!' said Sabran, with bitter contempt. 'Well, I will see her; I will say a word to the Countess von Szalras first.'
'Say all,' suggested Greswold.
Sabran shook his head and passed quickly through the suite of sleeping and dressing chambers to the little Saxe salon, where he thought it possible that Wanda might still be. He found her there alone. She had opened one of the casements and was speaking with a gardener. The autumnal scent of wet earth and fallen leaves came into the room; the air without was cold, but sunbeams were piercing the mist; the darkness of the cedars and the yews made the airy and brilliant grace of the eighteenth-century room seem all the brighter. She herself, in a sacque of brocaded silk, with quantities of old French lace falling down it, seemed of the time of those gracious ladies that were painted on the panels. She turned as she heard his step, a red rose in her fingers which she had just gathered from the boughs about the windows.
'The last rose of the year, I am afraid, for I never count those of the hothouses,' she said, as she brought it to him.
He kissed her hand as he took it from her; he suddenly perceived the expression of distress and of preoccupation on his face.
'Is there anything the matter?' she asked; 'did you overstrain yourself yesterday on the hills?'
'No, no,' he said quickly; then added, with hesitation: 'Wanda, I have to see Madame Brancka alone this morning. Will you be angered, or will you trust me?'
For a moment her eyebrows drew together, and the haughtier, colder look that he dreaded came on her face; the look which came there when her children disobeyed or her stewards offended her, The look which told how, beneath the womanly sweetness and serenity of her temper, were the imperious habit and the instincts of authority inherited from centuries of dominant nobility. In another instant or two she had controlled her impulse of displeasure. She said gravely, but very gently:
'Of course I trust you. You know best what you wish, what you are called on to do. Never think that you need give explanation, or ask permission to or of me. That is not the man's part in marriage.'
'But I would not have you suspect—'
'I never suspect,' she said, more haughtily. 'Suspicion degrades two people. Listen, my love. In Paris I saw, I heard more than you thought. The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace. I neither suspected you nor spied upon you. I left you free. You returned to me, and I knew then that I had done wisely. I could never comprehend the passion and pleasure that some women take in hawks only kept by a hood, in hounds only held by a leash. What is allegiance worth unless it be voluntary? For the rest, if the wife of my cousin be a worse woman than I think, do not tell me so. I do not desire to know it. She was the idol of my dead brother's youth; she once entered this house as his bride. Her honour is ours.'
A flush passed over her husband's face. 'You are the noblest woman that lives,' he said, in a hushed and reverent voice. He stooped almost timidly and kissed her; then he bowed very low, as though she were a queen and he her courtier, and left her.
'That devil shall leave her house before another night is down!' he said in his own thoughts, as he took his way across the great building to Olga Brancka's apartments. He had the red autumn rose, she had gathered in his hand as he went. Instinctively he slipped it within his coat as he drew near the doors of the guests' corridor; it was too sacred for him to have it made the subject of sneer or of a smile.
Wanda remained in the little Watteau room. A certain sense of fear—a thing so unfamiliar, so almost unknown to her—came upon her as the flowered satin of the door-hangings fell behind him, and his steps passed away down the passages without. The bright pictured panels of the shepherds in court suits, and the milkmaids in hoops and paniers, smiling amidst the sunny landscapes of their artificial Arcadia; the gay and courtly figures of the Meissen china, and the huge bowls filled with the gorgeous deep-hued flowers of the autumn season; the singing of a little wren perched on a branch of a yew, the distant trot of ponies' feet as the children rode along the unseen avenues, the happy barking of dogs that were going with them, the smell of wet grass and of leaves freshly dropped, the swish of a gardener's birch-broom sweeping the turf beneath the cedars—all these remained on her mind for ever afterwards, with that cruel distinctness which always paints the scene of our last happy hours in such undying colours on the memory of the brain. She never, from that day, willingly entered the pretty chamber, with its air of coquetry and stateliness, and its little gay court of porcelain people. She had gathered there the last rose of the year.
He was so passionately angered against the invader of his domestic peace, he was so profoundly touched by the nobility and faith of his wife, that he went to Olga Brancka's presence without fear or hesitation, possessed only by a man's natural and honest indignation at an insult passed upon what he most venerated upon earth.
One of his own servants, who was seated in the corridor, in readiness for the Countess Brancka's orders, flung wide the door which opened into the vestibule of the suite of guest-chambers allotted to this most hated guest, and said to his master:
'The most noble lady bade me say that she waited for your Excellency.'
'The brazen wretch!' murmured Sabran, as he crossed the ante-chamber, and entered the small saloon adjoining it; a room hung with Flemish tapestries, and looking out on the Szalrassee.
Olga Brancka was seated in one of the long low tapestried chairs; she did not move or speak as he approached; she only looked up with a smile in her eyes. He wished she would have risen in fury; it would have made his errand easier. It was difficult to say to her in cold blood that which he had to say. But he loathed her so utterly as he saw her indolent and graceful posture, and the calm smile in her eyes, that he was indifferent how he should hurt her, what outrage he should offer to her. He went straight up to where she sat, and without any preface said, almost brutally:
'Madame Brancka, you affected not to understand my message through Greswold; you will not misunderstand me now when I repeat that you must leave the house of my wife before another night.'
'Ah!' said Olga Brancka, with nonchalance, moving the Indian bangles on her wrist, and gazing calmly into the air. 'I am to leave the house of your wife—of my cousin, who was once my sister-in-law? And will you tell me why?'
Sabran flushed with passion.
'You have a short memory, I believe, Countess; at least your lovers have said so in Paris,' he answered recklessly. 'But I think if your remembrance could carry you back to the last evening I had the honour to see you in your hotel, you will not force me to the brutality and coarseness of further explanation.'
'Ah!' she said tranquilly once more, in an unvaried tone, clasping her hands behind her head and leaning both backward against the cushions of her chair, whilst her eyes still smiled with an abstracted gaze. 'How scrupulous you are about trifles. Why not about great things, my friend? What does Holy Writ tell us? One strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. I have heard a professor of Hebrew say that the Latin translation is not correct, but——'
'Madame,' said Sabran sternly, controlling his rage with difficulty, 'pardon me, but I can have no trifling. I give you time and occasion to make any excuses that you please; but once for all, you will leave here before nightfall.'
'Ah!' said Olga Brancka, for the third time; 'and if I do not choose to comply with your desire, how do you intend to enforce it?'
'That will be my affair.'
'You will make a scene with my husband? That will be theatrical and useless. Stefan is one of those men who are always swearing at their wives in private, but in public never admit that their wives are otherwise than saints. Those men do not mind being cheated, but they will never let others say that they are so:amour-propre d'homme.'
Sabran could have struck her. He reined in his wrath with more difficulty every moment.
'I have no doubt your psychology is correct, and has taught you all the weaknesses of our idiotic sex,' he said bitterly. 'But you must pardon me if I cannot spare time to listen to your experiences. The Countess von Szalras is aware that I have come to visit you, and I tell you frankly that I will not stay more than ten minutes in your rooms.'
'You have told her?'
A wicked gleam flashed from under her half-shut eyelids.
'I would have told her—told her all,' said Sabran, 'but she stopped me with my words unspoken. What think you she said, madame, of you, who are the vilest enemy, the only enemy, she has? That if you had graver faults than she knew she wished not to hear them. You were her relative, and once had been her brother's wife.'
His voice had sternness and strong emotion in it. He looked to see her touched to some shame, some humiliation. But she only laughed a little languidly, not changing her attitude.
'Poor Wanda!' she said softly, 'she was always so exaggerated—so terriblymoyen âgeand heroic!'
The veins swelled on his forehead with his endeavour to keep down his rage. He did not wish to honour this woman by bringing his wife's name into their contention, and he strove not to forget the sex of his antagonist.
'Madame Brancka,' he said, with a coldness and calmness which it cost him hard to preserve, 'this conversation is of no use that I can see. I came to tell you a hard fact—simply this, that you must leave Hohenszalras within the next few hours. As the master of this house, I insist on it.'
'But how will you accomplish it?'
'I will compel you to go,' said Sabran, between his teeth, 'if I disgrace you publicly before all my household. The fault will not be mine. I have endeavoured to spare you; but if you be so dead to all feeling and decency as to think it possible that the same roof can shelter you and my wife, I must undeceive you, however roughly.'
She heard him patiently and smiled a little. 'Disgraceme?' she echoed gently. 'Count Brancka will kill you.'
Sabran signified by a gesture that the possibility was profoundly indifferent to him. He turned to leave her.
'Understand me plainly,' he said, as he moved away. 'I leave it at your option to invent any summons, any excuse, as your reason for your departure; but if you do not announce your departure for this afternoon, I shall do what I have said. I have the honour to wish you good-morning.'
'Wait a moment,' said Madame Brancka, still very softly. 'Are you judicious to make an enemy of me?'
'I much prefer you as an enemy,' said Sabran, curtly; and he added, with contemptuous irony, 'your friendship is far more perilous than your animosity; your compliments are like the Borgia's banquets.'
'Ah!' said Olga Brancka, once again, 'you are ungrateful like all men, and you are not very wise either. You forget that I am the sister-in-law of Egon Vàsàrhely.'
Sabran could never hear that name mentioned without a certain inward tremor, a self-consciousness which he could not entirely conceal. But he was infuriated, and he answered with reckless scorn:
'Prince Vàsàrhely is a man of honour. He would disown you if he knew that you offer yourself with the shamelessness of adéclassée, and that you outrage a noble and unsuspecting woman, by forcing yourself into her home when you have failed in tempting her husband to offer her the last dishonour.'
Her face paled under the unveiled and unsparing insults, but she did not lose her equanimity.
'We are very like a scene of Sardou's,' she said, with her unchangeable smile. 'You would have made your fortune on the boards of the Français. Why did you not go there instead of calling yourself Marquis de Sabran? It would have been wiser.'
He felt as if a knife had been plunged through his loins; all the colour left his face. Had Vàsàrhely toldher? No! it was impossible. They were mere chance words of a woman eager to insult, not knowing what she said. He affected not to hear, and with a bow to her he moved once more to leave the chamber. But her voice again arrested him.
'Tell me one thing before you go,' she said, very gently. 'Does Wanda know that you are Vassia Kazán?'
She spoke with perfect moderation and simplicity, not altering her posture as she lay back in her tapestried chair, but she watched him with trepidation. She was not altogether sure of facts she had half-guessed, half-gathered. She had pieced details together with infinite skill, but she could not be absolutely certain of her conclusions. She watched him with eager avidity beneath her smiling calmness. If he showed no consciousness her cast was wrong; she would miss her vengeance; she would remain in his power. But at a glance she saw her shaft had pierced straight home. He had strong control and even strong power of dissimulation in need; but that name thrown at him stunned him as a stone might have done. His face grew livid, he stood motionless, he had no falsehood ready, he was taken off his guard: all he realised was that his ruin was in the grasp of his mortal foe. His hold on her was lost. His authority, his strength, his dignity, all fell before those two hateful words, 'Vassia Kazán!'
'He has told her!' he thought, and the blood surged in his brain and made him dazed and giddy. He had not told her. By private investigation, by keen wit, by careful and cruel comparison of various information, she had arrived at the conclusion that Vassia Kazán and he who had come from Mexico as the grandson of the Marquis Xavier de Sabran were one and the same. Certain she could not be, but she was near enough to certainty to dare to cast her stone at a venture. If it missed—she was a woman. He could not kill or harm a woman, or call her to account.
Even now, if he had preserved his composure and turned on her with a calm challenge, she would have been powerless.
But he had lost the habit of falsehood; self-consciousness made him weak; he believed that Egon Vàsàrhely had betrayed him. His lips were mute, his tongue seemed to cleave to his mouth. A less keen-sighted woman would have read confession on his face. She was satisfied.
'You have not answered my question,' she said quietly. 'Does Wanda know it? Does such a saintly woman "compound a felony"? I believe a false name is a sort of felony, is it not?'
He breathed heavily; his eyes had a terrible look in them; he put his hand on his heart. For a moment the longing assailed him to spring upon her and throttle her as a man may a dangerous beast. He could not speak, a leaden weight seemed to shut his lips.
He never doubted that she knew his whole history from Vàsàrhely.
'It was an ingenious device,' she pursued, in her honeyed, even tones, 'but it was scarcely wise. Things are always found out some time or another—at least, men's secrets are. A woman can keep hers. My dear friend, you are really a criminal. It is very strange that Wanda of all people should have made such a misalliance, and had such an imposture passed off on her! I belong to her family; I ought to abhor you; and yet I can imagine your temptation if I cannot forgive it. Still it was a foolish thing to do, not worthy a man of your wit; and in France, I believe, the punishment for such an assumption is some years' imprisonment; and here, you know (perhaps you do not know?), your marriage would be null and void if she chose.'
He made a movement towards her, and for the moment, though she was a woman of great courage, her spirit quailed before the look she met.
'Hold your peace!' he said savagely. 'Speak truth, if you can. What has Vàsàrhely told you?'
Vàsàrhely had told her nothing, but she looked him full in the face with perfect serenity, and answered—'All!'
He never doubted her, he could not doubt her; what she said was met by too full confirmation from his memory and his conscience.
'He gave me his word,' he muttered.
She smiled. 'His word toyou,when he is in love with your wife? The miracle is that he has not told her. She would divorce you, and after a decent interval I dare say she would marry him, if onlypour balayer la chose.For a man so devoted to her as you are, you have certainly contrived to outrage and injure her in the most complete manner.Mon beau Marquis!to think how fooled we all were all the time by you. How haughty you were, how fastidious, how patrician!'
He leaned against the high column of the enamelled stove and covered his eyes with his hands. He was unnerved, unstrung, half-paralysed. The blow had fallen on him without preparation or defence being possible to him. His thoughts were all in confusion; one thing alone he knew—he, and all he loved, were in the power of a merciless woman, who would no more spare them than thesloughiastride the antelope will let go its quivering flesh.
She looked at him, and a contemptuous wonder came upon her that a man could be so easily beaten, so easily betrayed into tacit confession. She ignored the power of conscience, for she did not know it herself.
She thought, with scorn: 'Why did he not deny, deny boldly, as I should have done in his place? He would have twisted my weapon out of my hand at once. I know so little, and I could prove nothing! But he is unnerved at once, just because it is true! Men are all imbeciles. If he had only denied and questioned me he must have found that Egon had told me nothing.'
And she watched him with derision.
In truth, she knew so little; she had scarce more to guide her than coincidence and conjecture. She longed to know everything from himself, but strong as was her curiosity, her prudence and her cruelty were stronger still, and she admirably assumed a knowledge that she had not, guided in all her dagger-strokes by the suffering she caused.
Yet her passion for him which, unslaked, was as ardent as ever, became not the less, but the greater, because she had him in her power. She was one of those women to whom love is only delightful if it possess the means to torture. Besides, it was not himself whom she hated, it was his wife. To make him faithless to his wife would be a more exquisite triumph than to betray him to her.
'He would be wax—in my hands,' she thought. A vision of the future passed before her, with her dominion absolute over him, her knowledge of his shame holding him down with a chain never to be broken. She would compel him to wound, to deceive, to torment his wife; she would dictate his every word, his every act; she would make him ridiculous to the world, so servile should be his obedience to her, so great should be his terror of her anger. He should be her lover, weak as water in all semblance, because the puppet of her pleasure. This would be a vengeance worthy of herself when she should see him kneel at her feet for permission for every slightest act, and she should scourge him as with whips, knowing he dare not rise; when she should say softly in his ear a thousand times a year: 'You are Vassia Kazán!'
She was silent a few moments, lost in the witchery of the vision she conjured up; then she looked up at him and said very caressingly, in her sweetest voice:
'Why are you so dejected? Your secret may be safe with me. You know—you know—I was willing ever to be your friend; I am not less willing now. I told you that you were unwise to make an enemy of me. Wanda's regard would not outlive such a trial, but perhaps mine may, if you be discerning enough, grateful enough to trust to it. I know your crime, for a crime it is, and a foul one: we must not attempt to palliate it. When we last met you offended, you outraged me. Only a few moments since you insulted me as though I were the lowest creature on the Paris asphalte. Yet all this I—I—should be tempted to forgive if you love me as I believe that you do. I loveyou, not as that cold, calm, unerring woman yonder may, but as those only can who know and care for no heaven but earth. Réné—Vassia—who, knowing your sin, your shame, your birth, your treachery, would say to you what I say? Not Wanda!'
He seemed not to hear, he did not hear. He leaned his forehead upon his arms; he was sunk in the apathy of an intense woe; only the name of his wife reached him, and he shivered a little as with cold.
At his silence, his indifference, her eyes grew alight with flame; but she controlled herself; she rose and clasped her hands upon his arm.
'Listen,' she murmured, 'I love you, I love you! I care nothing what you were born, what sins you have sinned; I love you! Love me, and she shall never know. I will silence Egon. I will bury your secret as though it were one that would cost me my life were it known.'
Only at the touch of her hands did he arouse himself to any consciousness of what she was saying, of how she tempted him. Then he shook off her clasp with a rude gesture; he looked down on her with the bitterest of scorn: not for a single instant did he dream of purchasing her silence so.
'You are even viler than I thought,' he said in his throat, with a dreary laugh of mockery. 'How long would you spare me if I sinned against her with you? Go, do your worst, say your worst! But if you stay beneath my wife's roof to-night, I will drive you out of the house before all her people, if it be my last act of authority in Hohenszalras!'
'I love you!' she murmured, and almost knelt to him; but he thrust her away from him, and stood erect, his arms folded on his chest.
'How dare you speak of love to me? You force me to employ the language of the gutter. If Egon Vàsàrhely have put me in your power, use it, like the incarnate fiend you are. I ask no mercy of you, but if you dare to speak of love to me I will strangle you where you stand. Since you call me the wolf of the steppes you shall feel my grip.'
She fell a few steps backward and stretched her hand behind her, and rung a little silver bell. Absorbed in his own bitterness of thought he did not hear the sound or see the movement. She had already, between Greswold's visit to her and his master's, written a little letter:
'Loved Wanda,—Will you be so good as to come to me for a moment at once?—Yours,'OLGA.'
'Loved Wanda,—Will you be so good as to come to me for a moment at once?—Yours,'OLGA.'
She had said to one of her women, who was in the next apartment: 'When I ring you will take that note at once to my cousin, the Countess, yourself, without coming to me.' She had had no fear of leaving the woman in the adjoining room, who was a Russian, wholly ignorant of the French tongue, which she herself always used.
She recoiled from him, frightened for the moment, but only for that; she had nerves of steel, and many men had cursed her and menaced her for the ruin of their lives, and she had lived on none the worse. 'On crie—et puis c'est fini,' she was wont to say, with her airy cynicism. Something in his look, in his voice, told her that here it would not finish thus.
'He will shoot himself if he do not strangle me; and he will escape so,' she thought, and a faint sort of fear touched her. She was alone before him; she had said enough to drive him out of all calmness and all reason. She had left him nothing to hope for; she had made him believe that she knew all his fatal past. If he had struck her down into the dumbness of death he would have been scarcely guilty.
But it was only for a moment that such a dread as this passed over her.
'Pshaw! we are people of the world,' she thought. 'Society is with us even in our solitude. Those violent crimes are not ours: we strike otherwise than with our hands.'
And, reassured, she sank down into her chair again, a delicate figure in a cloud of muslin of the Deccan and old lace of Flanders, and clasped her fingers gracefully behind her head, and waited.
He did not move; his eyes were fastened on her, glittering and cold as ice, and full of unspeakable hatred. He was deadly pale. She thought she had never seen his face more beautiful than in that intense mute wrath which was like the iron frost of his own land.
'When he goes he will go and kill himself,' she mused, and she listened with passionate eagerness for the passing of steps down the corridor.
But he did not stir; he was absorbed in wondering how he could deal with this woman so that his wife should be spared. Was there any way save that vile way to which she had tempted him? He could see none. From a passion rejected and despised there can be no chance of mercy. He had ceased altogether to think of himself.
To take his own life did not pass over his thoughts then. It would have spared Wanda nothing. His shame, told when he were dead, would hurt her almost more than when he were living. He had too much courage to evade so the consequences of his own acts. In the confusion of his mind only this one thing was present to it—the memory of his wife. All that he had dreaded of disgrace, of divorce, of banishment, of ruin, were nothing to him; what he thought of was the loss of her herself, her adoration, her honour, her sweet obedience, her perfect faith. Would ever he touch even her hand again if once she knew?
His remorse and his grief for his wife overwhelmed and destroyed every personal remembrance. If to spare her he could have undergone any extremity of torture he would have welcomed it with rapture. But it is not thus that a false step can be retrieved; not thus that a false word can be effaced. It, and the fate it brings, must be faced to the bitter end.
He had no illusions; he was certain that the woman who would have tempted him to be false to her would spare her nothing. He would not even stoop to solicit a respite for her from Olga Brancka. He knew the only price at which it could be obtained.
He stood there, leaning his shoulders on the high cornice of the stove, his arms crossed upon his chest, repressing every expression or gesture that could have delighted his enemy by revelation of what he suffered. In himself he felt paralysed; he felt as though neither his brain nor his limbs would ever serve him again. He had the sensation of having fallen from a great height; the same numbness and exhaustion which he had felt when he had dropped down the frozen side of the Umbal glacier. Both he and she were silent; he from the stupefaction of horror, she from the eagerness with which she was listening for the coming of Wanda von Szalras.
After a short interval of her thirsty and cruel anxiety, the page, who was in waiting outside, entered with a note for his master.
Sabran strove to recover his composure as he stretched his hand out and took the letter off the salver. It contained only two lines from his wife:
'Olga asks me to come to her. Do you wish me to do so?'
A convulsion passed over his face.
'Oh! most faithful of all friends!' he thought with a pang, touched to the quick by those simple words of a woman whose fidelity was to be repaid by shame.
'Where is the Countess?' he asked of the young servant, who answered that she was in the library.
'Say that I will be with her there in a few moments.'
The page withdrew.
Olga Brancka was mute; there was a great anger in her veiled eyes. Her last stroke had missed, through the loyalty of the woman whom she hated.
He took a step towards her.
'You dared to send for her then?'
She laughed aloud, and with insolence.
'Dare? Is that a word to be used by a Russianmoujik, as you are, to me, the daughter of Fedor Demetrivitch Serriatine? Certainly, I sent for your wife, my cousin. Who should know what I know, if not she? Egon might make you what promises he would; he is a man and a fool. I make none. If you prevent my seeing Wanda, I shall write to her; if you stop her letters, I shall telegraph to her; if you stop the telegrams, I will put your story in the Paris journals, where the Marquis de Sabran is as well known as the Arc de l'Étoile. You were born a serf, you shall feel the knout. It would have been well for you if you had smarted under it in your youth.'
So absorbed was he in the memory of his wife, and in the thought of the misery about to fall upon her innocent life, that the insults to himself struck on him harmless, as hail on iron.
'Spare your threats,' he said coldly. 'No one shall tell her but myself. You know her present condition; it will most likely kill her.'
'Oh, no,' said the Countess Brancka, with a little smile. 'Her nerves are of iron. She will divorce you, that is all.'
'She will be in her right,' he said, with the same coldness. Then, without another word, he turned and left her chamber.
'For a bastard, he crows well!' she said, loud enough to be heard by him, in the old twelfth-century French of the words she quoted.
Sabran went onward with a quick step; if he had paused, if he had looked back, he felt that he would have murdered her.
'Talk of the cruelty of men! What beast that lives,' he thought, 'has the slow unsparing brutality of a jealous woman?'
He went on, without pausing once, across the great house. So much he could spare his wife, he could save her from her enemy's triumph in her suffering; he could do as men did in the Indian Mutiny, plunge the knife himself into the heart that loved him, and spare her further outrage.
When he reached the door of the library, he stopped and drew a deep breath. He would have gone to his death with calmness and a smile; but here he had no courage. A sickening spasm of pain seemed to suffocate him. He knew that he met only his just punishment. If he could only have suffered alone he would not have rebelled against his doom. But to smite her!——
With greater courage than is needed in the battle-field he turned the handle of the door and entered. She was seated at one of the writing-tables with a mass of correspondence before her, to which she had been vainly striving to give her attention. Her thoughts had been with him and Olga Brancka. She looked up with the light on her face which always came there when she saw him after any absence, long or short. But that light was clouded as she perceived the change in his look in his carriage, in his very features, which were aged, and drawn, and bloodless. She rose with an exclamation of alarm, as he came to her across the length of the noble room, where he had first seen her seated by her own hearth, and heard her welcome him a stranger and unknown beneath her roof.
'Wanda! Wanda!' he said, and his voice seemed strangled, his lips seemed dumb.
'My God, what is it?' she cried faintly. 'Are the children——'
'No, no,'he muttered. 'The children are well. It is worse than death. Wanda, I have come to tell you the sin of my life, the shame of it. Oh! how will you ever believe that I loved you since I wronged you so?'
A great sob broke down his words.
She put her hand to her heart.
'Tell me,' she said, in a low whisper, 'tell me everything. Why not have trusted me? Tell me—I am strong.'
Then he told her the whole history of his past, and spared nothing.
She listened in unbroken silence, standing all the while, leaning one hand upon the ebony table by her.
When he had ceased to speak he buried his face in her skirts where he knelt at her feet; he did not dare to look at her. She was still silent; her breath came and went with shuddering effort. She drew her velvet gown from him with a gesture of unspeakable horror.
'You!—you!' she said, and could find no other word.
Then all grew dark around her; she threw her arms out in the void, and fell from her full height as a stone drops from a rock into the gulf below; struck dumb and senseless for the first time in all the years that she had lived.
Twelve hours later she gave premature birth to a male child, dead. Once in those hours when her physical agony lulled for a moment and her consciousness returned, she said to her physician:
'Tell him to send for Egon. Egon betrays no one.'
They were the first words she had spoken. Greswold understood nothing; but he saw that some great calamity had fallen on those he loved and honoured, and that her lord never came nigh her chamber, but only pacing to and fro the corridors and passages of the house, with restless, ceaseless steps, paused ever and again to whisper—'Does she live?'
'Come to her,' said the old man once; but Sabran shuddered and turned aside.
'I dare not,' he answered, 'I dare not. If she die, it is I who shall have killed her.'
Greswold did not venture to ask what had happened; he knew it must be some disaster of which the Countess Brancka was the origin or the messenger.
'My lady has spoken a few words,' he said later to his master. 'She bade me tell you to send for Prince Vàsàrhely. She said he would betray no one. I could ask nothing, for her agony returned.'
Sabran was silent; the thought came to him for the first time that it might be possible Olga Brancka had used the name of her brother-in-law falsely.
'Send for him yourself,' he said wearily; 'What she wishes must be done. Nothing matters to me.'
'I think the Prince is in Vienna,' said Greswold; and he sent an urgent message thither, entreating Vàsàrhely's immediate presence at Hohenszalras, in the name of his cousin.
Olga Brancka remained in her own apartments, uncertain what to do.
'If Wanda die,' she thought, 'it will all have been of no use; he will be neither divorced nor disgraced. Perhaps one might plead the marriage invalid, and disinherit the children; but one would want so much proof, and I have none. If he had not been so stunned and taken off his guard, he might easily have defied me. Egon may know more, but if Wanda dies he will not move. He would care for nothing on earth. He will forget the children were Sabran's. He will only remember they were hers!'
No one who loved her could have been more anxious for Wanda von Szalras to live than was this cruellest of her enemies, who passed the time in a perpetual agitation, and, as her women brought her tidings from hour to hour, testified so much genuine alternation of hope and terror, that they were amazed to see so much feeling in one so indifferent usually to all woes not her own. She was miserably dull; she had no one to speak to; she had no lover, friend, rival, or foe to give her the stimulant to life that was indispensable to her. Even she did not dare to approach the man whose happiness she had ruined, any more than she would have dared to touch a lion wounded to the death. Yet she could not tear herself away from the scene of her vengeance.
The whole house was hushed like a grave; the servants were full of grief at the danger of a mistress they adored; even the young children, understanding that their mother was in peril, did not play or laugh; but sat unhappy and silent over their books, or wandered aimlessly along the leafless gardens. They knew that there was something terrible, though they knew not what.
'What is death?' said Lili to her brothers.
'It is to go and live with God, theysay,' answered Bela, doubtfully.
'But how can God be happy Himself,' said Gela, 'when He causes so much sorrow?'
'Our mother will never go away from us,' said the little Lili, who listened. 'They may call her from heaven ever—ever so much; she will not leaveus.'
Bela sighed; he had a heavy, hopeless impression of death as a thing that was stronger than himself.
'Pride can do naught against death, my little lord,' one of the foresters had once said to him. 'You will find your master there one day.'
A day and a night passed; puerperal convulsions succeeded to the birth of the dead boy, and Wanda was unconscious alike of her bodily and her mental torture. The physicians, whom Greswold had summoned instantly, were around her bed, grave and anxious. The only chance for her lay in the magnificent health and strength with which nature had dowered her. Her constitution might, they said, enable her to resist what weaker women would have gone down under like boats in an ocean storm.
It was towards dawn on the second day when Egon Vàsàrhely arrived.
'She lives?' he said, as he entered.
'That is all,' said Greswold, with tears in his voice.
'Can I see her?'
'It would be useless. She would not know your Excellency.'
Sabran came forward from the further end of the Rittersaal, where the lights were burning with a yellow glare as the grey light of the dawn was stealing through the unshuttered windows.
'Allow me the honour of a word with you, Prince;' he said. 'I understand; you have come at her summons—not at mine.'