Sabran, that same afternoon, as he had walked down the Rue de la Paix,
had been signalled and stopped by a pretty woman wrapped to the eyes
in blue fox furs, who was being driven in a low carriage by Hungarian
horses, glorious in silver chains and trappings.
'My dear Réné,' had cried Madame Olga, 'do you not know me, that
you compel me to flourish my parasol? Yes: I am come to Paris. My
sister-in-law, Zdenka, will do my waiting. I wanted to consult my
physician; I am very unwell, though you look so incredulous. So Wanda
has all the Noira collection? What a fortunate woman she is. The
eighteenth century is the least suited to her taste. She will heartily
despise all those shepherdesses _en panier_ and those smiling deities
on lacquer. How could the Duc leave such frivolities to so serious a
person? What is her doubled rose-leaf amidst all her good luck? She
must have one. I suppose it is you? Well, you will find me at home in
an hour. I am only a stone's throw from your hotel. Have you brought
all the homespun virtues with you from Hohenszalras? I am afraid they
will wither in the air of the boulevards. _Au revoir!_
And then she had laughed again and kissed her finger-tips to him, and
driven away wrapped up in her shining furs, and he was conscious of a
stinging sense of excitement, annoyance, pleasure, and confusion, as if
he had drunk some irritant and heady wine.
He had gone on to his clubs with an uneasy sense of something
perilous and distasteful having come into his life, yet also with a
consciousness of a certain zest added to the reductions of this his
favourite city. He did not go to the Hôtel Brancka in the next hour,
and was sensible of having to exercise a certain control over himself
to refrain from doing so.
'Did you know that Olga was in Paris?' she said, in some surprise, to
him when they met in the evening.
'I believe she arrived this morning,' he answered, with a certain
effort. 'I met her an hour or two ago. She came unexpectedly; she had
not even told her servants to open her hotel.'
'Is Stefan with her?'
'I believe not.'
'But surely it is her term of waiting in Vienna?'
He gave a gesture of indifference.
'I believed it was. I think it was. She will be sure to write to you
this evening, so she said. We cannot escape her, you see; she is our
fate.'
'We can go back to Hohenszalras.'
'That would be too absurd. We cannot spend our lives running away from
Madame Brancka. We have a hundred engagements here. Besides, your Noira
affair is not one half settled as yet, and it is only now that Paris is
really agreeable. We will go back in May, after Chantilly.'
'As you like,' she said, with a smile of ready acquiescence.
She was only there for his sake. She, would not spoil his contentment
by showing that she made a sacrifice. She was never really happy away
from her mountains, but she did not wish him to suspect that.
The Hôtel Brancka was a charming little temple of luxury, ordered
after the last mode, and as _pimpant_ as its mistress. It had cost
enormous sums of money, and its walls had been painted by famous
artists with fantastic and voluptuous subjects, which had not been paid
for at the present.
In finance, indeed, she was much like a king of recent time, who never
had any money to give, but always said to his mistresses, 'Order
whatever you like; the Civil List will always pay my bills.' She had
never any money, but she knew that her brother-in-law, like the king's
ministers, would always pay her bills.
'One expects to hear the "Decamerone" read here,' said Wanda, with some
disdain, as she glanced around her on her first visit.
'At Hohenszalras one would never dare to read anything but the
"Imitationis Christi,"' said Madame Olga, with contempt of another sort.
The little hotel was but a few streets distance off their own grand and
spacious residence, which had undergone scarcely any change since the
days of Louis XV. They saw the Countess Brancka very often, could not
choose but see her when she chose, and that was almost perpetually.
He had honestly, and even intensely, desired not to be subjected to her
vicinity. But it was difficult to resist its seduction when she lived
within a few yards of him, when she met him at every turn, when the
changing scenes of society were like those of a kaleidoscope, always
composed of the same pieces. The closeness of her relationship to his
wife made an avoidance of her, which would have been easy with a mere
acquaintance, wholly out of possibility. She pleaded her 'poverty' very
prettily, as a plea to borrow their riding-horses, use their boxes
at the Opéra and the Théâtre Français, and be constantly, under one
pretext or another, seeking their advice. Wanda, who knew the enormous
extravagance of both the Branckas, and the inroads which their debts
made on even the magnificent fortunes of Egon Vàsàrhely, had not as
much patience as usual in her before these plaintive pretences.
'_Wanda me boude_', said Madame Brancka, with touching reproachfulness,
and sought a refuge and a confidant in the sympathy of Sabran, which
was not given very cordially, yet could not be altogether refused. Not
only were they in the same world, but she made a thousand claims on
their friendship, on their relationship. Stefan Brancka was in Hungary.
She wanted Sabran's advice about her horses, about her tradespeople,
about her disputes with the artists who had decorated her house; she
sent for him without ceremony, and, with insistence, made him ride with
her, drive with her, dance with her, made him take her to see certain
diversions which were not wholly fitted for a woman of her rank, and so
rapidly and imperceptibly gained ascendency over him that before making
any engagement he involuntarily paused to learn whether she had any
claim on his time. It caused his wife the same vague impatience which
she had felt when Olga Brancka had persisted in going out with him on
hunting excursions at home. But she thrust away her observation of it
as unworthy of her.
'If she tire him,' she thought, 'he will very soon put her aside.'
But he did not do so.
Once she said to him, with a little irony, 'You do not dislike Olga so
very much now?' and to her surprise he coloured and answered quickly,
'I am not sure that I do not hate her.'
'She certainly does not hate you,' said Wanda, a little contemptuously.
'Who knows?' he said gloomily; 'who could ever be sure of anything with
a woman like that?'
'Mutability has a charm for some persons,' said his wife, with an
irritation for which she despised herself.
'Not for me,' said Sabran, quickly. 'My opinion of Madame Olga is
precisely what it has always been.'
'Are you very sincere to her, then?' said Wanda, and as she spoke,
regretted it. What was Olga Brancka that she should for a moment bring
any shadow of dissension between them?
'Sincere!' he echoed, with a certain embarrassment. 'Who would she
expect to be so? I told you once before that you pay her in a coin of
which she could not decipher the superscription!'
Wanda smiled, but she was pained by his tone. 'You are not the first
man, I suppose, who amuses himself with what he despises,' she
answered. 'But I do not think it is a very noble sport, or a very
healthy one. Forgive me, dear, if I seem to preach to you.'
'Preach on for ever, my beloved divine. You can never weary me,' said
Sabran, and he stooped and kissed her.
She did not return his caress.
That day as she drove with the Princess in the Bois, Bela and Gela
facing her, she saw him in the side alley riding with the Countess
Brancka. A physical pain seemed to contract her heart for a moment.
'Olga is very _accaparante_,' said the Princess, perceiving them also.
'Not content with borrowing your Arabs, she must have your husband also
as her cavalier.'
'If she amuse him I am her debtor,' said Wanda, very calmly.
'Amuse! Can a man who has lived with you be amused by her?'
'I am not amusing,' said his wife, with a smile which was not mirthful.
'Men are like Bela and Gela; they cannot always be serious.'
Then she told her coachman to leave the Bois and drive out into the
country. She did not care to meet those riders at every turn in the
avenues.
'My dear Réné,' said the Princess, when she happened to see him alone.
'Can you find no one in all Paris to divert yourself with except Stefan
Brancka's wife? I thought you disliked her.'
Sabran hesitated.
'She is related to us,' he said a little feebly. 'One sees her of
necessity a hundred times a week.'
'For our misfortune,' said the Princess, sententiously. 'But she is not
altogether friendless in Paris. Can she find no one but you to ride
with her?'
'Has Wanda been complaining to you?'
'My dear Marquis,' replied Madame Ottilie, with dignity. 'Your wife is
not a person to complain; you must understand her singularly little
after all, if you suppose that. But I think, if you would calculate the
hours you have of late passed in Madame Brancka's society, you would
be surprised to see how large a sum they make up of your time. It is
not for me to presume to dictate to you; you are your own master, of
course: only I do not think that Olga Brancka, whom I have known from
her childhood, is worth a single half-hour's annoyance to Wanda.'
Sabran rose, and his lips parted to speak, but he hesitated what to
say, and the Princess, who was not without tact, left him to receive
herself some sisters of S. Vincent de Paul. His conscience was not
wholly clear. He was conscious of a pungent, irresistible, even whilst
undesired, attraction that this Russian woman possessed for him; it was
something of the same potent yet detestable influence which Cochonette
had exercised over him. Olga Brancka had the secret of amusing men and
of exciting their baser natures; she had a trick of talk which sparkled
like wine, and, without being actually wit, illumined and diverted
her companions. She was a mistress of all the arts of provocation,
and had a cruel power of making all scruples of conscience and all
honesties and gravities of purpose seem absurd. She made no disguise of
her admiration of Sabran, and conveyed the sense of it in a thousand
delicate and subtle modes of flattery. He read her very accurately, and
had neither esteem nor regard for her, and yet she had an attraction
for him. Her boudoir, all wadded softly with golden satin like a
jewel-box, with its perpetual odour of roses and its faint light
coloured like the roses, was a little temple of all the graces, in
which men were neither wise nor calm. She had a power of turning their
very souls inside out like a glove, and after she had done so they were
never worth quite as much again. The fascination which Sabran possessed
for her was that he never gave up his soul to her as the others did; he
was always beyond her reach; she was always conscious that she was shut
out from his inmost thoughts.
The sort of passion she had conceived for him grew, because it was
fanned by many things--by his constancy to his wife, by his personal
beauty, by her vague enmity to Wanda, by the sense of guilt and of
indecency which would attach in the world's sight to such a passion.
Her palate in pleasure was at once hardened and fastidious; it required
strong food, and her audacity in search of it was not easily daunted.
She knew, too, that he had some secret which his wife did not share;
she was resolved to penetrate it. She had tried all other means; there
only now remained one----to surprise or to beguile it from himself. To
this end, cautious and patient as a cat, she had resumed her intimacy
with them as relations, and with all the delicate arts of which she was
a proficient, strove to make her companionship agreeable and necessary
to him. Before long he became sensible of a certain unwholesome charm
in her society. He went with her to the opera, he took her to pass
hours amidst the Noira collection, he rode with her often; now and then
he dined with her alone, or almost alone, in a small oval room of pure
Japanese, where great silvery birds and white lilies seemed to float on
a golden field, and the dishes were silver lotus leaves, and the lamps
burned in pale green translucent gourds hanging on silver stalks.
An artificial woman is nothing without her _mise en scène_;
transplanted amidst natural landscape and out-of-door life she is
apt to become either ridiculous or tiresome. Madame Brancka in Paris
was in her own playhouse; she looked well, and was in her own manner
irresistible. At Hohenszalras she had been as out of keeping with
all her atmosphere as her enamel buttons, her jewelled alpenstock,
her cravat of pointe d'Alençon, and her softly-tinted cheeks had been
out of place in the drenching rain-storms and mountain-winds of the
Archduchy of Austria.
He knew very well that the attraction she possessed for him was of
no higher sort than that which the theatre had; he seemed to be
always present at a perfect comedy played with exquisite grace amidst
unusually perfect decorations. But there was a certain artificial bias
in his own temperament which made him at home there. His whole life
after all had been an actor's. His wife had said rightly: 'Men cannot
be always serious.' It was just his idler, falser moods which Olga
Brancka suited, and his very fear of her gave a thrill of greater power
to his amusement. When the Princess, his devoted friend, reproved him,
he was unpleasantly aroused from his unwise indulgence in a perilous
pursuit. To pain his wife would be to commit a monstrous crime, a
crime of blackest ingratitude. He knew that; he was ever alive to the
enormity of his debt to her, he was for ever dissatisfied with himself
for being unable to become more worthy of her.
'She jealous!' he thought. It seemed to him impossible, yet his vanity
could not repress a throb of exultation; it almost seemed to him
that in making her more human it would make her more near his level.
Jealous! It was not a word which was in any keeping with her; jealousy
was a wild, coarse, undisciplined, suspicious passion, far removed from
the calmness and the strength of her nature.
At that moment she entered the room, coming from a drive in the
forenoon. It was still cold. She had a cloak of black sables reaching
to her feet; it still rested on her shoulders. Her head was uncovered;
she had never looked taller, fairer, more stately; the black furs
seemed like some northern robes of coronation. Beneath them gleamed the
great gold clasps of a belt, and gold lions' heads fastening her olive
velvet gown.
'Jealous!' he thought, 'this queen amongst women!' His heart sank.
'She would never say anything,' he thought; 'she would leave me.'
Almost he expected her to divine his thoughts. He was relieved when she
spoke to him of some mere trifle of the day. Like many men he could
not be frank, because frankness would have seemed like insult to his
wife. He could not explain to her the mingled aversion and attraction
which Olga Brancka possessed for him, the curious stinging irritation
which she produced on his nerves and his senses, so that he despised
her, disliked her, and yet could not wholly resist the charm of her
unwholesome magic. How could he say this to his wife? How could he
hope to make her understand, or if she understood, persuade her not to
resent as the bitterest of affronts this power which another woman,
and that woman nearly connected with her, possessed? Besides, even if
he went so far, if he leaned so much on the nobility of her nature as
to venture to do this, he knew very well that she would in reason say
to him, 'Let us go away from where this danger exists.' He did not
desire to go away. He was glad of this old life of pleasure, which let
him forget his secret sorrow. Amidst the excitations of Paris he could
push away the remembrance that another man knew the shame of his life.
The calm and the solitude of Hohenszalras, which had been delightful
to him once, had grown irksome when he had begun to cling to them for
fear lest any other should remember as Vàsàrhely had remembered. Here
in Paris, where he had always been popular, admired, well known, he was
as it were in his own kingdom, and the magnificence with which he could
now live there brought him troops of friends. He hoped that his wife
would not be unwilling to pass a season there in every year, and he
stifled as it rose his consciousness that she would assent to whatever
he wished, however painful or unwelcome to herself.
'It is really very unwholesome for you to be married to such a saint
as Wanda,' his tormentor said to him one day. 'You do not know what a
little opposition and contradiction would do for you.'
They were visiting the Hôtel Noira, studying the probable effects of
a new method of lighting the gallery which he contemplated, and she
continued abruptly:
'Wanda has been buying very largely in Paris, has she not? And she has
bought this hotel of the Noira heirs, I believe? You mean to keep it
altogether as it is; and of course you will come and live in it?'
'Whenever she pleases,' he answered, intent on a Lancret not well hung.
'Whenever you please,' said Madame Brancka. 'Why will you pretend
that Wanda has any separate will of her own? It is marvellous to see
so resolute a person as she was as obediently bent as a willow-wand.
But all this French property will constitute quite a fortune apart. I
suppose it will all be settled on your third son, as Gela is to have
Idrac? Will not you give him your title? Count Victor de Sabran will
sound very pretty, and you might rebuild Romaris.'
He turned from her with impatience.
'Are we so very old that you want to parcel out our succession amongst
babies? No; I do not intend to give my name to any of Wanda's children.
There is an Imperial permission for them all to bear hers.'
'You are not very loyal to your forefathers,' said Madame Brancka.
'Wanda might well spare them one of her boys. If not, what is the use
of accumulating all this property in France?'
'All that she buys is done out of respect for the Duc de Noira,' said
Sabran, curtly. 'If she bear me twenty sons they will all have her
name. It was settled so on the marriage-deeds and ratified by the
Kaiser.'
'Are prince-consorts always deposed from any throne they have of their
own?' said Madame Olga, in the tone that he hated. 'If I were you I
should rebuild Romaris. I wonder so devoted a wife has not done so
years ago.'
'There is nothing at Romaris to rebuild.'
'Decidedly,' thought his companion, 'he hates Romaris, and has no love
of his own race. Did he drown Vassia Kazán in the sea there?'
Unsparingly she renewed the subject to Wanda herself.
'You should settle the French properties on little Victor, and give him
the Sabran title,' she urged to her. 'I told Réné the other day that
I thought it very strange he should not care to have one of his sons
named after him.'
Wanda answered coldly enough: 'In my will, if I die before him,
everything goes to the Marquis de Sabran. He will make what division
he pleases between his children, subject of course to Bela's rights of
primogeniture.'
Madame Brancka was silent for a moment from surprise.
'It is odd that he should not care for Romaris,' she said, after a long
pause. 'You have much more trust in him, Wanda, than it is wise to put
in any man that lives.'
'Whom one trusts with oneself, one may well trust with everything
else,' said her sister-in-law in a tone which closed discussion. But
when she was left alone the thorn remained in her. She thought with
perplexity:
'No, he does not care for Romaris. He dislikes its very name. He would
never hear of one of the children bearing it. There must be something
he does not say.'
She remembered sadly what the Duc de Noira had once said to her:
'In morals as in metals, my dear, you cannot work gold without
supporting it by alloy.'
Madame Brancka had patience and skill perfect enough to refrain
altogether from those hints and tentatives by which a less clever woman
would have attempted to approach and surprise the key to those hidden
facts which she believed to be the theme of his correspondence with
Vàsàrhely and the cause of his rejection of the Russian appointment.
A less clever woman would have alarmed him, and betrayed herself by
perpetual allusions to the matter. But she never did this: she treated
him with an alternation of subtle compliment and ironical, malice, such
as was most certain to allure and perplex any man, and he never by the
most distant suspicion imagined that she knew anything which he desired
unknown. She was a woman of strong nerve, and her equanimity in his
and his wife's presence was wholly undisturbed by her consciousness
that she had dispatched the anonymous suggestion as a seed of discord
to Hohenszalras. She knew indeed that it was not what people of her
rank and breeding did do, that it was not honest warfare, that it was
what even the very easy morality of her own world would have condemned
with disgust; but she bore the sin of it very lightly. If she had been
driven to excuse it, she would have characterised it as mere mischief.
If her sister-in-law had shown her the letter, she would have glanced
over it with a tranquil face and an air of utter unconcern. If she
could not have done this sort of thing she would have thought herself
a very poor creature. 'I believe you could be as wicked as the Scotch
Lady Macbeth,' Stefan Brancka had said once to her; and she had
answered with much contempt: 'At least I promise you I should not walk
in my sleep if I were so. Your Lady Macbeth was a grotesque barbarian.'
A great deal of the sin of this world, which is not at all like Lady
Macbeth's, comes from the want of excitement felt by persons, only too
numerous, who have exhausted excitement in its usual shapes. She had
done so; she required what was detestable to arouse her, because she
had lived at such high pressure that any healthy diversion was vapid
and stupid to her. The destruction, if she could achieve it, of her
sister-in-law's happiness, offered her in prospect such an excitement;
and the whim she had taken for passion grew out of waywardness till
it nearly became passion in truth. She never precisely weighed or
considered its possible consequences, but she endeavoured to arouse
a response in him with all the unscrupulous skill of a mistress in
coquetry. When moved by Madame Ottilie's warning he strove honestly to
avoid her, and often excused himself from obedience to her summons,
the opposition only stimulated her endeavours, and made a smarting
mortification and anger against him supply a double motor-power for his
subjection. If she could have believed that she succeeded in making his
wife anxious, she might have been content; but Wanda always received
her with the same serenity and courtesy, which, if it covered disdain,
covered it unimpeachably with admirable grace.
'If one broke her heart, she would only make one a grand courtesy with
a bland smile,' thought Olga Brancka, irritably and impatiently. 'There
are people who die standing. Wanda would do that.'
That ill weeds grow apace is a true old saw, never truer than of
vindictive and envious passions. Sheer and causeless jealousy of her
sister-in-law had been alive in her many years, and now, by being fed
and unresisted, so grew that it became almost a restless hatred. It was
far more her enmity to his wife than any other sentiment which inspired
her with a fantastic and unhealthy desire to attract and detach Sabran
from his allegiance. Joined to it now there was a sense of some mystery
in him that baffled her, and which was to such a woman the most pungent
of all stimulants. In all her _câlineries_ and all her railleries she
never lost sight of this one purpose, of surprising from him the
secret which she believed existed. But he was always on his guard with
her; even when most influenced by her atmosphere and her magnetism
he did not once lose his self-control and his habitual coolness. At
moments when she was most nearly triumphing, the remembrance of his
wife came over him like a breath of sweet pure air that passes through
a hot-house, and restored him to self-possession and to loyalty. She
began to fear that all the ability with which she had procured her
exemption from Court duties, and had induced her husband to remain in
Vienna, was all vain, and she grew bolder and more reckless in her use
of stratagems and solicitations to keep Sabran beside her in these
early spring days given over to racing and sporting, and at all the
evening entertainments at which the great world met, and whither she
carried with so much effect her gleaming sapphires and her black pearls.
'Black pearls argue a perverted taste,' said the Princess Ottilie once
to her, and she unabashed answered:
'It is perverted tastes that make any noise in the world or possess
any flavour. White pearls are much more beautiful, no doubt, but then
they are everywhere, from the Crown jewel-cases to the peasant's necks;
but my black pearls! you cannot find their match--and how white one's
throat looks with them. I only want a green rose.'
'Chemicals can supply any deformity,' said the Princess, drily. 'Doing
so is called science, I believe.'
'Do you call me a deformity?' she asked, with some annoyance.
'You are an elaborate production of the laboratory,' said the Princess,
calmly. 'I am sure you will admit yourself that nature has had very
little to do with you.'
'My pearls are black by a freak of nature,' said Madame Olga. 'Perhaps
I am the same.'
The Princess made a little gesture signifying that politeness forbade
her from assent, but she thought: 'Yes; you were never a white pearl,
but you have steeped yourself in acids and solutions of all degrees of
poison till you are darker than you need have been, and you think your
darkness light, and some men think so too.'
Sabran had grown to look for that necklace of black pearls with
eagerness in the society to which they both belonged. Few evenings
found him where Madame Brancka was not. She had known his Paris of the
Second Empire; she had known Compiègne and Pierrefonds as he had known
them; she knew all the friendships and the bywords of his old life,
and all the _dessous des cartes_ of that which was now around them. She
amused him. She comprehended all he said, half uttered. She remembered
all he recalled. At Hohenszalras he had not found any charm in this,
but here he did find one. She suited Paris; she knew it profoundly,
she liked all its pastimes, she understood all its sports and all
its slang. She hunted at Chantilly, betted at La Marche, plunged at
baccara, shot and fenced well and gaily, had the theatres and all their
jargon at her fingers' ends; all this made her no mean aspirant to
the post of mistress of his thoughts. All which had seemed tiresome,
artificial, even ridiculous, amidst the grand forests and healthful air
of the Iselthal became in Paris agreeable and even bewitching. Once he
said almost angrily to his wife:
'You, who ride so superbly, should surely show yourself at the Duc's
hunts. What is the use of long gallops in the Bois before anyone else
is out of bed?'
'I never rode for show yet,' said Wanda, in surprise. 'And you know I
never would join in any sort of chase.'
'Surely such humanitarianism is exaggeration,' he said impatiently.
'Olga Brancka rides every day they meet at Chantilly, and she is by no
means of your form in the saddle.'
'I have never yet imitated Olga,' said his wife, a little coldly; but
she did not object when day after day her finest horses were lent to
Madame Brancka. She never by a word or a hint reminded him that he
was not absolute master of all which belonged to her. Only when her
sister-in-law wanted to take Bela and his pony to Chantilly, she made
her will strongly felt in refusal.
The child, whose fancy had been fired by what he had heard of the ducal
hunting, of the great hounds and the stately gatherings, like pictures
of the Valois time, was passionately angered at being forbidden to go,
and made his mother's heart ache with his flashing eyes and his flaming
cheeks. 'Cannot she leave even the children alone?' she thought, with
more bitterness than she had ever felt against anyone.
A few nights later they were both at the Grand Opéra, in the box which
was allotted to the name of the Countess von Szalras. She was herself
not very well; she was pale, she sat a little away from the light.
Her gown was of white velvet; she had no ornament except a cluster of
gardenias and stephanotis, and her habitual necklace of pearls. Olga
Brancka, in a costume of many shaded reds, marvellously embroidered
in gold cords, was as gorgeous as a tropical bird, and sat with her
arms upon the front of the box, playing with a fan of red feathers, or
looking through her glass round the house. He talked most with her, but
he looked most at his wife. There was no woman, in a full and brilliant
house, who could compare with her. A thrill of the pride of possession
passed through him. The malicious eyes of the other, glancing towards
him over her shoulder, read his thoughts. She smiled provokingly.
'_Le mari amoureux!_' she murmured. 'Really I did not believe in the
existence of that type. But it is quite admirable that it should exist.
Its example is very much wanted in Paris.'
He felt himself colour like a youth, but it was with irritation; he was
at a loss for an answer. To have defended his admiration of his wife
at the sword's point would have been easy; to defend it from a woman's
ridicule was more difficult. Wanda did not hear; she was listening
to the song of Dinorah, and was dreamily regretting the solitude of
Hohenszalras, and thinking of what pleasure it would be to return. All
the news that Greswold and her stewards sent her thence was precious to
her; no details seemed to her insignificant or without interest; and
her own letters in return were full of minute attention to the welfare
of everyone and of everything she had left there. She was roused from
her home reverie by the voice of her sister-in-law, raised more highly
and saying impatiently:
'Why should you object, Réné, when I say that I wish it?'
'What do you wish?' said Wanda, who always felt a singular annoyance
whenever she heard him thus familiarly addressed. 'Whatever you may
wish, I am sure M. de Sabran can require no second bidding to procure
it for you, if it be within the limits of the possible.'
'I wish to see a Breton Pardon,' said Olga Brancka, with a gesture of
her fan towards the stage. 'There is one next week in his own country;
I want him to invite me--us--to Romaris.'
Wanda, who knew that he always shrank from the mention of Romaris,
interposed to save him from persecution.
'There is nothing at Romaris to invite us to,' she said for him.
'Neither you nor I can live in a cabin or a fishing-boat; especially
can we not in March weather.'
'You can live in a hut on your Alps,' returned the other, 'and I do
not dislike tent life in the Karpathians. If he sent his major-domo
down, he would soon make the sands and rocks blossom like the rose, and
villages would arise as fast as they did before the great Katherine.
Why not? It would be charming. Has he no feeling for the cradle of his
ancestors? We must put him through a course of Lamartine.'
'An unfortunate allusion; he lived to lose Milly,' said Sabran, finding
himself forced to say something. 'In midsummer, Mesdames, you might
perhaps rough it, _tant bien que mal_; but now!--there is nothing to
be seen except fog and surf at sea, and mud and pools inland. Even
a Pardon would not reconcile you; not even the Breton jackets with
scriptural stories embroidered on them, nor the bagpipes.'
'Positively, you will not take us?'
'I must disobey even your wishes in the Ides of March.'
'But whether in March or July--why do you never go yourself?'
'There is nothing to go there for,' he answered, almost losing his
patience; 'a people to whom I am only a name, a strip of shore on which
I only own a few wind-tormented oak-trees!'
'Only imagine the duties that Wanda would evolve in your place out of
those people and those oaks!'
'I have not Wanda's virtues,' he said, half sadly, half jestingly.
'We have none of us, or the Millennium would have arrived. I cannot
understand your dislike to your melancholy sea-shore. Most of your
countrymen are for ever home-sick away from their _landes_ and their
_dolmen._ You seem to feel no throb for the _mater patria_, even when
listening to Dinorah, which sets every other Breton's heart beating.'
'My heart is Austrian,' said Sabran, with a bow towards his wife.
'That is very pretty, and what you are also obliged to say,'
interrupted Madame Brancka. 'But why hate Romaris? For my part, I
believe you see ghosts there.'
His wife said, with a quick reproach in her words: 'The ghosts of men
who knew how to live and to die nobly? He would not be afraid to meet
them.'
The simplicity of the words and the trustfulness of them sank into his
soul. A pang of terrible consciousness went through him like poisoned
steel. As his wife's eyes sought his the lights swam round with him,
the music was only a confused murmur on his ear; he heard as if from
afar off the voice of Olga Brancka saying: 'My dear Wanda, you are
always so exalted!'
At that moment some one knocked at the door: he was glad to rise and
open it to admit Count Kaulnitz and two other gentlemen.
Hardly anything else which his wife could have said would have hurt
him quite so much.
As he sat there in the brilliant illumination and the hot-house
warmth, with her delicate profile clear as a cameo against the light,
a sensation of physical cold passed through him. He saw himself as he
was, an actor, a traitor, a perjured and dishonoured man. What right
had he there more than any galley-slave at the hulks?--he, Vassia Kazán?
Well tutored by the ways of the world, he laughed, and spoke, and
criticised the rendering of the opera with his usual readiness of
grace; but Olga Brancka had marked the fleeting expression of his face,
and said to herself: 'Whatever the secret be, the key of it lies in the
sands of Romaris.'
As she took his arm, when they left the box, she murmured to him: 'I
shall go to Romaris, and you will take me.'
'I think not,' he said curtly, without his usual suavity. 'I am the
servant of all your sex, it is true, but like all servants I am only
willing to be commanded by my mistress.'
'O most faithful of lovers, I understand!' she said, with a
contemptuous laugh. 'And she never commands you, she only obeys. You
are very fortunate, even though you do have ghosts at your ruined tower
by the sea.'
'Yes, I am fortunate, indeed,' he answered gravely, and his eyes
glanced towards his wife, who was standing a stair or two below
conversing with her cousin Kaulnitz.
'Even though you had to abandon Russia,' murmured Olga Brancka,
dreamily. She could feel that a certain thrill passed through him.
He was startled and alarmed. Was it possible that Egon Vàsàrhely had
betrayed him?
'Paris is much more agreeable than St. Petersburg,' he answered
carelessly. 'I am no loser. Wanda would have been unhappy, and, what
would have been worse, she would never have said so.'
'No, she would never have said so. She is like the Sioux, the Stoics,
and the people who died in lace ruffles in '89. I beg your pardon,
those are your people, I forgot; the people whose ghosts forbid you to
entertain us at Romaris.'
'I would brave an army of ghosts to please Madame Brancka,' said
Sabran, with his usual gallantry.
'Call me _Cousinette_, at the least,' she murmured, as they descended
the last stair.
'_Bon soir_, madame!' he said, as he closed the door of her carriage.
'Are you coming with me?' said Wanda, as she went to hers.
He hesitated. 'I think I will go for an hour to the clubs,' he
answered. He kissed her hand. As he drew the fur rug over her skirts,
she thought his face was very pale as she saw it by the lamplight. She
wished to ask him if he were quite well, but she restrained herself,
knowing how intolerable such importunities are to men. Instead, she
smiled at him, as she said, '_Amusez-vous bien_,' and left him to
divert himself as he chose.
'How little women understand men, and how poorly they love them when
they do not leave them alone!' she thought, as her carriage rolled
homeward. She never troubled him, never interrogated him, never even
tried to conjecture what he did when away from her. Sometimes, when
he returned at sunrise, she had already risen, and had said a prayer
with her children, written her letters, or visited her horses, but she
always met him with a smile and without a question.
It hurt her with an ever-deepening wound to perceive the attraction
which Olga Brancka possessed for him. She did not for a moment believe
that it was love, but she saw that it was an influence which had
audacity enough to compete with her own, a sort, of fascination which,
commencing with dislike, increased to an unhealthy and morbid potency.
She could not bring herself to speak of it to him. She was not one of
those women who reproach and implore. It would have seemed to her as
if both he and she would have lost all dignity in each other's sight
if once they had stooped to what society calls jestingly 'a scene.' He
guessed aright that if she had really believed herself displaced in his
heart she would have left him without a word. She was too conscious of
his entire worship of her to be moved to anything like that jealous
passion which would have seemed to her the last depths of humiliation;
but she was pained, fretted, stirred to a scornful wonder by the power
this frivolous woman possessed of usurping his time and giving colour
to his thoughts.
It hurt her to think he feared her too much to tell her of any trouble,
any folly, any memory. She reproached herself with having perhaps
alienated his confidence by the gravity of her temper, the seriousness
of her opinions. It would be hard to think that frivolous shallow women
could inspire men with more confidence than a deeper nature could
do, but perhaps it might be so. He had sometimes said to her, half
jestingly: 'You should dwell among the angels; the human world is unfit
for you!' Was it that which alarmed him?
With that subtle sense of what is in the air around which so often
makes us aware of what is never spoken in our hearing, she was sensible
that the great world in which they lived began to speak of the intimacy
between her husband and the wife of her cousin Stefan. She became
sensible that the world was in general disposed to resent for her, to
pity her, and to censure them, whilst it coupled their names together.
The very suspicion brought her an intolerable shame. When she was
quite alone, thinking of it, her face burned with angry blushes. No
one hinted it to her, no one breathed it to her, no one even expressed
it by a glance in her presence; yet she was as well aware of what they
were saying as though she had been in a hundred salons when they talked
of her.
She knew the character of Olga Brancka, also, too well not to know that
her own mortification would be the sweetest triumph for one of whose
latent envy she had long been conscious. Ever since she had become the
sole owner of the vast fortunes of the Szalras she had felt for ever
upon her the evil eye of a foiled covetousness. The other had been very
young, and had waited long and patiently, but her hour had now come.
She said nothing to her husband, and she preserved to her cousin's
wife the same perfect courtesy of manner; but in her own soul she
began to suffer keenly, more from a sense of littleness in him than any
mere personal feeling. To blame him, to entreat him, to seek to detach
him--all these things were impossible to her.
'If all our years of union do not hold him, what will?' she thought;
and the great natural hauteur of her temper could never have let her
bend to the solicitation of a constancy denied to her.
One night, when they had no engagements but a ball, to which they could
go at midnight, he did not come in to dinner. Always before, when he
had not returned to dine, he had sent her a message to beg her not to
wait. This evening there was no message. She and the Princess dined
alone.
'He was never discourteous before,' said the Princess, who disliked
such omissions.
'It is his own house,' said Wanda. 'He has a right to come or not to
come as he likes, without ceremony.'
'There can never be too much ceremony,' said the Princess. 'It
preserves amiability, self-respect, and good manners. It is the silver
sheath which saves them from friction. It is the distinguishing mark
between the gentleman and the boor. When politeness is only for the
street or the salon, it is but a poor thing. He has always been so
scrupulous in these matters.'
As Wanda later crossed the head of the grand staircase, to go and dress
for the ball, she heard her _maître d'hôtel_ in the hall below speak to
the groom of the chambers.
'Are the Marquis's horses in, do you know?' asked the former; and the
latter answered:
'Yes, hours ago; they are to go for him at the Union at eleven, but
they left him at the Hôtel Brancka.'
Then the two officials laughed a little under their breath. Their
words and their laughter came upwards distinctly to her ear. Her first
impulse was a natural and passionate one of bitter burning pain and
wonder. A sensation wholly new to her, of hatred and of impotence
combined, seemed to choke her.
'Is this what they call jealousy?' she thought, and the mere thought
checked her emotion and changed it to humiliation.
'I--I--contend with her!' she said in her soul. With a blindness before
her eyes she retraced her steps, and went to the sleeping-rooms of her
children. They were all asleep as they had been for hours. She sat down
beside the bed of the little Ottilie; and gazed on the soft flushed
loveliness of the child, bright as a rose in the dew.
She kissed the child's cheek without waking her, and sat still there
some time in the faint twilight and the perfect silence, only stirred
by the light breathing of the sleepers; the repose, the innocence, the
silence soothed and tranquillised her.
'What matter a breath of folly?' she thought. 'He is their father; he
is my love; we have all our lives to spend together.'
Then she rose and went to her chamber, and had herself clothed in a
court dress of white taffetas and white velvet, embroidered with silver
lilies.
'Make me look well,' she said to her women. 'Put on all my diamonds.'
When he entered, near midnight, repentant, self-conscious, almost
confused, she stopped his excuses with a smile.
'I heard the servants say you dined with my cousin's wife. Why not, if
it please you? But I wonder she allows you to dine without _un bout de
toilette._ Will you not make haste to dress? We shall be late.'
The words were perfectly simple and kind, but as she spoke them, so
royal did she look, standing there in the blaze of her jewels, with
her lily-laden train, that he felt abashed, ashamed, angered against
himself, yet more angered against his temptress.
The old lines of Marlowe came to his mind and his lips:
'O! thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.'
'I am not young enough to merit that quotation,' she said, with a
smile; 'ten years ago perhaps----'
Her heart contracted as she spoke; she was conscious that she had
wished to look well in his eyes that night. The sense that she was
stooping to measure weapons with such an opponent as Olga Brancka smote
her with a sense of humiliation, which did not leave her throughout the
after hours in which she carried her jewels through the gorgeous crowd
of the ball at the Austrian Embassy.
'If I lower myself to such a contest as that,' she thought, 'I shall
lose all self-respect and all his reverence. I shall seem scarcely to
him higher than an importunate mistress.'
Now and again there came to her a passionate anger against himself, a
hardening of her heart to him, since he could thus be guilty of this
inexcusable and insensate folly. But she would not harbour these; she
would not judge him; she would not blame him. Her marriage vows were
not mere dead letters to her. She conceived that obedience and silence
were her clearest duties. Only one thing was outside her duty and
beyond her force--she could not stoop to rivalry with Olga Brancka.
All at once she took a resolution of which few women would have been
capable. She resolved to leave them.
Three days after the ball she said very quietly to him:
'If you do not object, I will go home and take the children. It is time
they were at Hohenszalras. Bela, above all, is not improved by what he
sees and hears here; his studies are broken and his fancy is excited.
In a very little while he would learn quite to despise his country
pleasures, and forget all his own people. I will take them home.'
He looked at her quickly in surprise.
'I do not think I can leave Paris immediately,' he said, with
hesitation. 'I have many engagements. Of course you can send the
children.'
'I said I should go, not you. I long to see my own woods in their
first leaf,' she answered, with a smile. 'It will be better for you to
remain. No one ought to be allowed to suppose that you are bound to my
side. That is neither for your dignity nor mine.'
'Has anyone suggested----' he began, and paused in embarrassment, for
he remembered the incessant taunts and innuendoes of Olga Brancka.
'I do not listen to suggestions of that sort,' she replied tranquilly.
'You wish to remain here, and I wish to return home. We are both at
liberty to do what we like. My love, she added, with a grave tenderness
in her voice, 'have I so poor an opinion of you that I dare not leave
you alone? I think I should hardly care for a fealty which was only to
be retained by my constant presence. That is not my ideal.'
He coloured; he was uncertain what to reply: before her he felt
unworthy and disloyal. A vast sense of her immeasurable nobility swept
over him, and made him conscious of his own unworthiness.
'Whatever you wish, I wish,' he murmured, and was aware that this could
not be what she would gladly have heard him say. 'I will follow you
soon. Your heart is always in your highlands. I know that you are too
grand a creature to be happy in cities. I have the baser leaven in me
that is not above them. The forests and the mountains do not say to me
all that they do to you.'
'Men want the movement of the world, no doubt,' she said, without
showing any trace of disappointment. 'I only care for the subjective
life; I am very German, you see. The woods interest me, and the world
does not.'
No more passed between them on the subject, but she gave orders to her
people to make arrangements for her departure and her children's in two
days' time, and sent out her cards of farewell.
'Do you think you are wise?' the Princess ventured to say to her.
She answered:
'I know what you mean, dear mother; yes, I think so. To struggle for
influence with another, and that other Olga! I should indeed despise
myself if I could stoop so low. If he miss me he can follow me. If he
do not--then he has no need of me.'
'I confess I do not understand you,' said Madame Ottilie; 'to surrender
so meekly!'
'I surrender nothing,' she said, almost sternly. 'I know what I have
seen again and again in society. The woman jealous and anxious, losing
ground in his esteem and her own every hour, and rendering alike
herself and him actors in a ludicrous comedy for the mockery of the
world around them--a world which never has any sympathy for such a
struggle. Indeed, why should it have? for if the jealousy of a lover be
poetic, the jealousy of a wife is only ridiculous. I _am_ his wife; I
am not his gaoler. I refuse to admit to others or to him or to myself
that any other could be wholly to him what I am; and I should lose that
place I hold, lose it in his eyes and my own, if I once admitted my
dethronement possible.'
She spoke with more force and anger than was common with her, and her
auditor admired while she still failed to comprehend her.
'Is there a more pitiable spectacle,' she continued, 'than that of a
wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which
no philtres and no prayers can renew when once it has fled for ever?
Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song--beautiful and eloquent
when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when
sung from behind prison bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance,
by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a
man beside you, if his soul be truant from you? You all say that Olga
Brancka has power over him. If she have, let her use it and exhaust it,
it will not last long; but I will not sink to her level by contesting
it with her. For what can you take me?'
In her glance the leonine wrath of the Szalras flashed for a moment;
her face was pale, she paced the room with a hasty and uneven step.
The Princess sought a timid refuge in silence There were certain
heights in the nature and impulses of her niece of which she, a dweller
on a lower plain, never caught sight. There were times when the haughty
reserve and the admirable patience of this stronger character made a
union which awed her, and altogether escaped her comprehension.
In two days' time she left Paris, the Princess and the children
accompanying her.
He felt his heart misgive him as he let her go. What was Olga Brancka,
what was Paris, what was all the world compared to her? As he kissed
her hands in farewell before her servants at the _Gare de l'Est_,
the impulse came over him to throw himself into the carriage beside
her, and return with her to the old, fair, still, peaceful life of
Hohenszalras. But he resisted it; he heard in memory the mocking of
Olga Brancka's voice saying to him:
'_Ah, quel mari amoureux!_'
He had his establishment, his engagements, his horses, his friends, his
wagers; he would seem ridiculous to all Paris if he could not endure
a few weeks' separation from his wife. A great banquet at his house
was arranged to take place in a few days' time, at which only great
Legitimist nobles would be present, and at which the toast of '_Le
Roi!_' would be drunk with solemn honours. What would they say of him
if he failed to receive them because he had followed his wife into
Austria? With a thousand sophisms he reconciled himself to remaining
there without her, and would not face the consciousness within him that
the real motive of his staying on through the coming weeks in Paris
was that Olga Brancka was there. For herself, she parted, with him
tenderly, kindly, without any trace of doubt in him or of purpose in
her departure.
'You will come when you wish,' were her last words to him. 'You know
well dear, that Hohenszalras without you will seem like a sadly empty
eagle's nest.'
All his offences against her were heavy on him as he returned to the
great house no longer graced by her presence. He would have given
twenty years of his life to have been able to undo what he had done
when he had taken a name not his own. He was sensible of great talents
in him which might have brought him to renown had he been willing
to face hardship and laborious effort. Even as he had been at his
birth--even as Vassia Kazán--he might have achieved such eminence
as would have made him her equal in honest honour. But he had won
the world and her by a lie, and the act was irrevocable. Chance and
circumstance may be controlled or altered, but the fate which men
make for themselves always abides with them for good or ill: a spirit
either of good or ill which once incarnated by their incantations never
departs from them till death.