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 antechamber,
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
terribly _moyen âge_ and 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. 'Disgrace _me?_' 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 a _déclassée_, 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 told _her_? 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 to _you,_ 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 only _pour 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 the _sloughi_ astride 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 love _you_, 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.'
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 Russian _moujik_, 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.