In the morrow thirty or forty people arrived, amongst them Baron
Kaulnitz _en congé_ from his embassy.
'What think you of Sabran?' he asked of Egon Vàsàrhely, who answered:
'He is a perfect gentleman. He is a charming companion. He plays
admirably at _écarté._
'_Écarté_! I spoke of his moral worth: what is your impression of that?'
'If he had not satisfied her as to that, Wanda would not be his wife,'
answered the Prince gravely. 'He has given her beautiful children, and
it seems to me that he renders her perfectly happy. We should all be
grateful to him.'
'The children are certainly very beautiful,' said Baron Kaulnitz, and
said no more.
'The people all around are unfeignedly attached to him,' Vàsàrhely
continued with generous effort. 'I hear nothing but his praise. Nor do
I think it the conventional compliment which loyalty leads them to pay
the husband of their Countess; it is very genuine attachment. The men
of the old Archduchy are not easily won; it is only qualities of daring
and manliness which appeal to their sympathies. That he has gained
their affections is as great testimony to his character in one way as
that he has gained Wanda's is in another. At Idrac also the people
adore him, and Croats are usually slow to see merit in strangers.'
'In short, he is a paragon,' said the ambassador, with a little dubious
smile. 'So much the better, since he is irrevocably connected with us.'
Sabran was at no time seen to greater advantage than when he was
required to receive and entertain a large house-party. Always graceful,
easily witty, endowed with that winning tact which is to society as
cream is to the palate, the charm he possessed for women and the
ascendency he could, at times, exercise over men--even men who were
opposed to him--were never more admirably displayed than when he was
the master of Hohenszalras, with crowned heads, and princes, and
diplomatists, and beauties gathered beneath his roof. His mastery,
moreover, of all field sports, and his skill at all games that demanded
either intelligence or audacity, made him popular with a hardy and
brilliant nobility; his daring in a boar hunt at noon was equalled by
his science at whist in the evening. Strongly prejudiced against him at
the onset, the great nobles who were his guests had long ceased to feel
anything for him except respect and regard; whilst the women admired
him none the less for that unwavering devotion to his wife which made
even the conventionalities of ordinary flirtation wholly impossible to
him. With all his easy gallantry and his elegant homage to them, they
all knew that, at heart, he was as cold as the rocks to all women save
one.
'It is really the knight's love for his lady,' said the Countess
Brancka once; and Sabran, overhearing, said: 'Yes, and, I think that if
there were more like my lady on earth, knighthood might revive on other
scenes than Wagner's.'
Between him and the Countess Brancka there was a vague intangible
enmity, veiled under the perfection of courtesy. They could ill have
told why they disliked each other; but they did so. Beneath their
polite or trivial or careless speech they often aimed at each other's
feelings or foibles with accuracy and malice. She had stayed at
Hohenszalras more or less time each year in the course of her flight
between France and Vienna, and was there now. He admired his wife's
equanimity and patience under the trial of Mdme. Olga's frivolities,
but he did not himself forbear from as much sarcasm as was possible
in a man of the world to one who was his guest, and by marriage his
relative, and he was sensible of her enmity to himself, though she
paid him many compliments, and sometimes too assiduously sought his
companionship. '_Elle fait le ronron, mais gare à ses pattes!_' he said
once to his wife concerning her.
Sabran appraised her indeed with unflattering accuracy. He knew
by heart all the wiles and wisdom of such a woman as she was. Her
affectations did not blind him to her real danger, and her exterior
frivolity did not conceal from him the keen and subtle self-interest
and the strong passions which laboured beneath it.
She felt that she had an enemy in him, and partly in self-protection,
partly in malice, she set herself to convert a foe into a friend,
perhaps, without altogether confessing it to herself, into a lover as
well.
The happiness that prevailed at Hohenszalrasburg annoyed her for
no other reason than that it wearied her to witness it. She did
not envy it, because she did not want happiness at all; she wanted
perpetual change, distraction, temptation, passion, triumph--in a word,
excitement, which becomes the drug most unobtainable to those who have
early exhausted all the experiences and varieties of pleasure.
Mdme. Brancka had always an unacknowledged resentment against her
sister-in-law, for being the owner of all the vast possessions of the
Szalras. 'If Gela had lived!' she thought constantly. 'If I had only
had a son by him before he died, this woman would have had her dower
and nothing more.' That his sister should possess all, whilst she had
by her later marriage lost her right even to a share in that vast
wealth, was a perpetual bitterness to her.
Stefan Brancka was indeed rich, but he was an insensate gambler. She
was extravagant to the last degree, with all the costly caprices of
a _cocodette_ who reigned in the two most brilliant capitals of the
world. They were often troubled by their own folly, and again and again
the generosity of his elder brother had rescued them from humiliating
embarrassments. At such moments she had almost hated Wanda von Szalras
for these large possessions, of which, according to her own views,
her sister-in-law made no use whatever. Meantime, she wished Egon
Vàsàrhely to die childless, and to that end had not been unwilling
for the woman he loved to marry anyone else. She had reasoned that the
Szalras estates would go to the Crown or the Church if Wanda did not
marry; whilst all the power and possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely must, if
he had no sons, pass in due course to his brother. She had the subtle
acuteness of her race, and she had the double power of being able at
once to wait very patiently and to spring with swift rage on what she
needed. To her sister-in-law she always appeared a mere flutterer on
the breath of fashion. The grave and candid nature of the one could not
follow or perceive the intricacies of the other.
'She is a cruel woman and a perilous one,' Sabran said one day to his
wife's surprise.
She answered him that Olga Brancka had always seemed to her a mere
frivolous _mondaine_, like so many others of their world.
'No,' he persisted. 'You are wrong; she is not a butterfly. She has too
much energy. She is a profoundly immoral woman also. Look at her eyes.'
'That is Stefan's affair,' she answered, 'not ours. He is indifferent.'
'Or unsuspicious? Did your brother care for her?'
'He was madly in love with her. She was only sixteen when he married
her. He fell at Solferino half a year later. When she married my
cousin it shocked and disgusted me. Perhaps I was foolish to take it
thus, but it seemed such a sin against Gela. To die _so_, and not to be
even remembered!'
'Did your cousin Egon approve this second marriage?'
'No,' he opposed it; he had our feeling about it. But Stefan, though
very young, was beyond any control. He had the fortune as he had the
title of his mother, the Countess Brancka, and Olga bewitched him as
she had done my brother.'
'She _is_ a witch, a wicked witch,' said Sabran.
The great autumn party was brilliant and agreeable. All things went
well, and the days were never monotonous. The people were well
assorted, and the social talent of their host made their outdoor sports
and their indoor pastimes constantly varied, whilst Hungarian musicians
and Viennese comedians played waltzes that would have made a statue
dance, and represented the little comedies for which he himself had
been famous at the Mirlitons.
He was not conscious of it, but he was passionately eager for Egon
Vàsàrhely to be witness, not only of his entire happiness, but of his
social powers. To Vàsàrhely he seemed to put forward the perfection
of his life with almost insolence; with almost exaggeration to exhibit
the joys and the gifts with which nature and chance had so liberally
dowered him. The stately Magyar soldier, sitting silent and melancholy
apart, watched him with a curious pang, that in a lesser nature would
have been a consuming envy. Now and then, though Sabran and his wife
spoke rarely to each other in the presence of others, a glance, a
smile, a word passed between them that told of absolute unuttered
tenderness, profound and inexhaustible as the deep seas; in the very
sound of their laughter, in the mere accent of their voices, in a
careless caress to one of their children, in a light touch of the hand
to one another as they rode, or as they met in a room, there was the
expression of a perfect joy, of a perfect faith between them, which
pierced the heart of the watcher of it. Yet would he not have had it
otherwise at her cost.
'Since she has chosen him as the companion of her life, it is well
that he should be what she can take pride in, and what all men can
praise,' he thought, and yet the happiness of this man seemed to him an
audacity, an insolence. What human lover could merit her?
Between himself and Sabran there was the most perfect courtesy, but no
intimacy. They both knew that if for fifty years they met continually
they would never be friends. All her endeavours to produce sympathy
between them failed. Sabran was conscious of a constant observation of
him by her cousin, which seemed to him to have a hostile motive, and
which irritated him extremely, though he did not allow his irritation
any visible vent. Olga Brancka perceived, and with the objectless
malice of women of her temperament, amused herself with fanning, the
slumbering enmity, as children play at fire.
'You cannot expect Egon to love you,' she said once to her host. 'You
know he was the betrothed of Wanda from her childhood--at least in his
own hopes, and in the future sketched for them by their families.'
'I was quite aware of that before I married,' he answered her
indifferently. 'But those family arrangements are tranquil disposals of
destiny which, if they be disturbed, leave no great trace of trouble.
The Prince is young still, and a famous soldier as well as a great
noble. He has no lack of consolation if he need it, and I cannot
believe that he does.'
Mdme. Olga laughed.
'You know as well as I do that Egon adores the very stirrup your wife's
foot touches!'
'I know he is her much beloved cousin,' said Sabran, in a tone which
admitted of no reply.
To Vàsàrhely his sister-in-law said confidentially:
'Dear Egon, why did you not stay on the _pusztas_ or remain with your
hussars? You make _le beau_ Sabran jealous.'
'Jealous!' asked Vàsàrhely, with a bitter smile. 'He has much cause,
when she has neither eye nor ear, neither memory nor thought of any
kind for any living thing except himself and those children who are
all his very portraits! Why do you say these follies, Olga? You know
that my cousin Wanda chose her lord out of all the world, and loves
him as no one would have supposed she had it in her to love any mortal
creature.'
He spoke imperiously, harshly, and she was silenced.
'What do you think of him?' she said with hesitation.
'Everyone asks me that question. I am not his keeper!'
'But you must form some opinion. He is virtual lord of Hohenszalras,
and I believe she has made over to him all the appanages of Idrac, and
his children will have everything.'
'Are they not her natural heirs? Who should inherit from her if not her
sons?'
'Of course, of course they will inherit, only they inherit nothing
from him. It was certainly a great stroke of fortune for a landless
gentleman to make. Why does the _gentilhomme pauvre_ always so
captivate women?'
'What do you mean to insinuate, Olga?' he asked her, with a stern
glance of his great black eyes.'
'Oh, nothing; only his history was peculiar. I remember his arrival
in France, his first appearance in society; it is many years ago now.
All the Faubourg received him, but some said at the time that it was
too romantic to be true--those Mexican forests, that long exile of the
Sabran, the sudden appearance of this beautiful young marquis; you
will grant it was romantic. I suppose it was the romance that made
even Wanda's clear head turn a little. It is a _vin capiteux_ for many
women. And then such a life in Paris after it--duels, baccara, bonnes
fortunes, clever comedies, a touch like Liszt's, a sudden success in
the Chamber--it was all so romantic; it was bound to bring him at
last to his haven, the Prince Charmant of an enchanted castle! Only
enchanted castles sometimes grow dull, and Princes Charmants are not
always amusable by the same châtelaine!'
Egon Vàsàrhely, with his eyes sombre under their long black lashes,
listened to the easy bantering phrases with the vague suspicion of an
honest and slow-witted man that a woman is trying to drop poison into
his ear which she wishes to pass as _eau sucrée._ He did not altogether
follow her insinuation, but he understood something of her drift. They
were alone in a corner of the ball-room, whilst the cotillon was at its
height, conducted by Sabran, who had been famous for its leadership in
Paris and Vienna. He stooped his head and looked her full in her eyes.
'Look here, Olga. I am not sure what you mean, but I believe you are
tired of seeing my cousin's happiness, merely because it is something
with which you cannot interfere. For myself I would protect her
happiness as I would her honour if I thought either endangered. Whether
you or I like the Marquis de Sabran is wholly beyond the question. She
loves him, and she has made him one of us. His honour is now ours.
For myself I would defend him in his absence as though he were my own
brother. Not for his sake at all--for hers. I do not express myself
very well, but you know what I mean. Here is Max returning to claim
you.'
Silenced and a little alarmed the Countess Brancka rose and went off to
her place in the cotillon.
Vàsàrhely, sitting where she had left him, watched the mazes of the
cotillon, the rhythm of the tzigane musicians coming to his ear
freighted with a thousand familiar memories of the czardas danced madly
in the long Hungarian nights. Time had been when the throb of the
tzigane strings had stirred all his pulses like magic, but now all his
bold bright life seemed numb and frozen in him.
His eyes rested on his cousin, where she stood conversing with a crown
prince, who was her chief guest, and passed from her to follow the
movements of Sabran, who with supreme ease and elegance was leading a
new intricate measure down the ball-room.
She was happy, that he could not doubt. Every action, every word, every
glance said so with a meaning not to be doubted. He thought she had
never looked so handsome as she did to-night since that far away day
in her childhood when he had seen her with the red and white roses in
her lap and the crown upon her curls. She had the look of her childhood
in her eyes, that serene and glad light which had been dimmed by her
brothers' death, but now shone there again tranquil, radiant, and pure
as sunlight is. She wore white velvet and white brocade; her breast
was hidden in white roses; she wore her famous pearls and the ribbons
of the Starred Cross of Austria and of the Prussian Order of Merit;
she held in her hand a large painted fan which had belonged to Maria
Theresa. Every now and then, as she talked with her royal guest, her
glance strayed down the room to where her husband was, and lingered
there a moment with a little smile.
Vàsàrhely watched her for awhile, then rose abruptly, and made his way
out of the ball-room and the state apartments down the corridors of the
old house he knew so well towards his own chamber. He thought he would
write to her and leave upon the morrow. What need was there for him to
stay on in this perpetual pain? He had done enough for the world, which
had seen him under the roof of Hohenszalras.
As he took his way through the long passages, tapestry-hung or
oak-panelled, which led across the great building to his own set of
rooms in the clock tower, he passed an open door out of which a light
was streaming. As he glanced within he saw it was the children's
sleeping apartment, of which the door was open because the night was
warm, unusually warm for the heart of the Gross Glöckner mountains. An
impulse he could not have explained made him pause and enter. The three
little white beds of carved Indian work, with curtains of lace, looked
very snowy and peaceful in the pale light from a hanging lamp. The
children were all asleep; the one nearest the door was Bela.
Vàsàrhely stood and looked at him. His head was thrown back on his
pillow and his arms were above his head. His golden hair, which was
cut straight and low over his forehead, had been pushed back in his
slumber; he looked more like his father than in his waking hours,
for as he dreamed there was a look of coldness and of scorn upon his
childish face, which made him so resemble Sabran that the man who
looked on him drew his breath hard with pain.
The night-nurse rose from her seat, recognising Prince Egon, whom she
had known from his childhood.
'The little Count is so like the Marquis,' she said, approaching; 'so
is Herr Gela. Ah, my Prince, you remember the noble gentlemen whose
names they bear? God send they may be like them in their lives and not
their deaths!'
'An early death is good,' said Vàsàrhely, as he stood beside the
child's bed. He thought how good it would have been if he had fallen
at Sadowa or Königsgrätz, or earlier by the side of Gela and Victor,
charging with his White Hussars.
The old nurse rambled on, full of praise and stories of the children's
beauty, and strength, and activity, and intelligence. Vàsàrhely did not
hear her; he stood lost in thought looking down on the sleeping figure
of Bela, who, as if conscious of strange eyes upon him, moved uneasily
in his slumber, and ruffled his golden hair with his hands, and thrust
off his coverings from his beautiful round white limbs.
'Count Bela is not like our saint who died,' said the old nurse. 'He
is always masterful, and loves his own way. My lady is strict with
him, and wisely so, for he is a proud rebellious child. But he is very
generous, and has noble ways. Count Gela is a little angel; he will be
like the Heilige Graf.'
Vàsàrhely did not hear anything she said. His gaze was bent on the
sleeping child, studying the lines of the delicate brows, of the
curving lips, of the long black lashes. It was so familiar, so
familiar! Suddenly as he gazed a light seemed to leap out of the
darkness of long forgotten years, and the memory which had haunted him
stood out clear before him.
'He is like Vassia Kazán!' he cried, half aloud. The face of the child
had recalled what in the face of the man had for ever eluded his
remembrance.
He thrust a gold coin in the nurse's hand, and hurried from the
chamber. A sudden inconceivable, impossible suspicion had leaped up
before him as he had gazed on the sleeping loveliness of Sabran's
little son.
The old woman saw his sudden pallor, his uncertain gesture, and
thought, 'Poor gallant gentleman! He wishes these pretty boys were his
own. Well, it might have been better if he had been master here, though
there is nothing to say against the one who is so. Still, a stranger is
always a stranger, and foreign blood is bad.'
Then she drew the coverings over Bela's naked little limbs, and passed
on to make sure that the little Ottilie, who had been born when the
primroses where first out in the Iselthal woods, was sleeping soundly,
and wanted nothing.
Vàsàrhely made his way to his own chamber, and there sat down heavily,
mechanically, like a man waking out from a bad dream.
His memory went back to twenty years before, when he, a little lad, had
accompanied his father on a summer visit to the house of a Russian,
Prince Paul Zabaroff. It was a house, gay, magnificent, full of idle
men and women of facile charm; it was not a house for youth; but
both the Prince Vàsàrhely and the Prince Zabaroff were men of easy
morals--_viveurs_, gamesters, and philosophers, who at fifteen years
old themselves had been lovers and men of the world. At that house
had been present a youth, some years older than he was, who was known
as Vassia Kazán: a youth whose beauty and wit made him the delight of
the women there, and whose skill at games and daring in sports won him
the admiration of the men. It was understood without even being said
openly that Vassia Kazán was a natural son of the Prince Zabaroff. The
little Hungarian prince, child as he was, had wit enough and enough
knowledge of life to understand that this brilliant companion, of his
was base-born. His kind heart moved him to pity, but his intense pride
curbed his pity with contempt. Vassia Kazán had resented the latter too
bitterly to even be conscious of the first. The gentlemen assembled had
diverted themselves by the unspoken feud that had soon risen between
the boys, and the natural intelligence of the little Magyar noble had
been no match for the subtle and cultured brain of the Parisian Lycéen.
One day one of the lovely ladies there, who plundered Zabaroff and
caressed his son, amused herself with a war of words between the lads,
and so heated, stung, spurred and tormented the Hungarian boy that,
exasperated by the sallies and satires of his foe, and by the presence
of this lovely goddess of discord, he so far forgot his chivalry that
he turned on Vassia with a taunt. 'You would be a serf if you were in
Russia!' he said, with his great black eyes flashing the scorn of the
noble on the bastard. Without a word, Vassia, who had come in from
riding and had his whip in his hand, sprang on him, held him in a grip
of steel, and thrashed him. The fiery Magyar, writhing under the blows
of one who to him was as a slave, as a hound, freed his right arm,
snatched from a table near an oriental dagger lying there with other
things of value, and plunged it into the shoulder of his foe. The
cries of the lady, alarmed at her own work, brought the men in from
the adjoining room; the boys were forced apart and carried to their
chambers.
Prince Vàsàrhely left the house that evening with his son, still
furious and unappeased. Vassia Kazán remained, made a hero of and
nursed by the lovely woman who had thrown the apple of strife. His
wound was healed in three weeks' time; soon after his father's
house-party was scattered, and he himself returned to his college. Not
a syllable passed between him and Zabaroff as to his quarrel with the
little Hungarian magnate. To the woman who had wrought the mischief
Zabaroff said: 'Almost I wish he were my lawful son. He is a true wolf
of the steppes. Paris has only combed his hide and given him a silken
coat; he is still a wolf, like all true Russians.'
Looking on the sleeping child of Sabran, all that half-forgotten scene
had risen up before the eyes of Egon Vàsàrhely. He seemed to see the
beautiful fair face of Vassia Kazán, with the anger on the knitted
brows, and the ferocity on the delicate stern lips as he had raised his
arm to strike. Twenty years had gone by; he himself, whenever he had
remembered the scene, had long grown ashamed of the taunt he had cast,
not of the blow he had given, for the sole reproof his father had ever
made him was to say: 'A noble, only insults his equals. To insult an
inferior is ungenerous, it is derogatory; whom you offend you raise for
the hour to a level with yourself. Remember to choose your foes not
less carefully than you choose your friends.'
Why with the regard, the voice, the air of Sabran had some vague
intangible remembrance always come before him?'
Why, as he had gazed on the sleeping child had the vague uncertainty
suddenly resolved itself into distinct revelation?
'He is Vassia Kazán! He is Vassia Kazán!' he said to himself a score
of times stupidly, persistently, as one speaks in a dream. Yet he knew
he must be a prey to delusion, to phantasy, to accidental resemblance.
He told himself so. He resisted his own folly, and all the while a
subtler inner consciousness seemed to be speaking in him, and saying to
him:
'That man is Vassia Kazán. Surely he is Vassia Kazán.'
And then the loyal soul of him strengthened itself and made him think:
'Even if he be Vassia Kazán he is her husband. He is what she loves; he
is the father of those children that are hers.'
He never went to his bed that night. When the music ceased at an hour
before dawn, and the great house grew silent, he still sat there by
the open casement, glad of the cold air that blew in from over the
Szalrassee, as with daybreak a fine film of rain began to come down the
mountain sides.
Once he heard the voice of Sabran, who passed the door on his way to
his own apartment. Sabran was saying in German with a little laugh:
'My lady!' I am jealous of your crown prince. When I left him now in
his chamber I was disposed to immortalise myself by regicide. He adores
you!'
Then he heard Wanda laugh in answer, with some words that did not
reach his ear as they passed on further down the corridor. Vàsàrhely
shivered, and instinctively rose to his feet. He felt as if he must
seek him out and cry out to him:
'Am I mad or is it true? Let me see your shoulder--have you the mark of
the wound that I gave? Your little child has the face of Vassia Kazán.
Are you Vassia Kazán? Are you the bastard of Zabaroff? Are you the wolf
of the steppes?'
He had desired to go from Hohenszalras, where every hour was pain to
him, but now he felt an irresistible fascination in the vicinity of
Sabran. His mind was in that dual state which at once rejects a fact as
incredible, and believes in it absolutely. His reason told him that his
suspicion was a folly; his instinct told him that it was a truth.
When in the forenoon the castle again became animated, and the guests
met to the mid-day breakfast in the hall of the knights, he descended,
moved by an eagerness that made him for the first time in his life
nervous. When Sabran addressed him he felt himself grow pale; he
followed the movements, he watched the features, he studied the tones
of his successful rival, with an intense absorption in them. Through
the hunting breakfast, at which only men were present, he was conscious
of nothing that was addressed to him; he only seemed to hear a voice in
his ear saying perpetually----'Yonder is Vassia Kazán.'
The day was spent in sport, sport rough and real, that gave fair play
to the beasts and perilous exposure to the hunters. For the first time
in his life, Egon Vàsàrhely let a brown bear go by him untouched,
and missed more than one roebuck. His eyes were continually seeking
his host; a mile off down a forest glade the figure of Sabran seemed
to fill his vision, a figure full of grace and dignity, clad in a
hunting-dress of russet velvet, with a hunting-horn slung at his side
on a broad chain of gold, the gift of his wife in memory of the fateful
day when he had aimed at the _kuttengeier_ in her woods.
Sabran of necessity devoted himself to the crown prince throughout
the day's sport; only in the twilight as they returned he spoke to
Vàsàrhely.
'Wanda is so full of regret that you wish to leave us,' he said, with
graceful cordiality; 'if only I can persuade you to remain, I shall
take her the most welcome of all tidings from the forest. Stay at the
least another week, the weather has cleared.'
As he spoke he thought that Vàsàrhely looked at him strangely; but
he knew that he could not be much loved by his wife's cousin, and
continued with good humour to persist in his request. Abruptly, the
other answered him at last.
'Wanda wishes me to stay? Well, I will stay then. It seems strange to
hear a stranger invite _me_ to Hohenszalras.'
Sabran coloured; he said with hauteur:
'That I am a stranger to Prince Vàsàrhely is not my fault. That I have
the right to invite him to Hohenszalras is my happiness, due to his
cousin's goodness, which has been far beyond my merit.'
Vàsàrhely's eyes dwelt on him gloomily; he was sensible of the dignity,
the self-command, and the delicacy of reproof which were blent in the
answer he had received; he felt humbled and convicted of ill-breeding.
He said after a pause:
'I should ask your pardon. My cousin would be the first to condemn my
words; they sounded ill, but I meant them literally. Hohenszalras has
been one of my homes from boyhood; it will be your son's when we are
both dead. How like he is to you; he has nothing of his mother.'
Sabran, somewhat surprised, smiled as he answered:
'He is very like me. I regret it; but you know the poets and the
physiologists are for once agreed as to the cause of that. It is a
truth proved a million times: _l'enfant de l'amour ressemble toujours
au père._'
Egon Vàsàrhely grew white under the olive hue of his sun-bronzed
cheek. The _riposte_ had been made with a thrust that went home. Otto
at that moment approached his master for orders for the morrow. They
were no more alone. They entered the house; the long and ceremonious
dinner succeeded. Vàsàrhely was silent and stern. Sabran was the most
brilliant of hosts, the happiest of men; all the women present were in
love with him, his wife the most of all.
'Réné tells me you will stay, Egon. I am so very glad,' his cousin said
to him during the evening, and she added with a little hesitation, 'If
you would take time to know him well, you would find him so worthy of
your regard; he has all the qualities that most men esteem in each
other. It would make me so happy if you were friends at heart, not only
in mere courtesy.'
'You know that can never be,' said Vàsàrhely, almost rudely. 'Even you
cannot work miracles. He is your husband. It is a reason that I should
respect him, but it is also a reason why I shall for ever hate him.'
He said the last words in a tone scarcely audible, but low as it was,
there was a force in it that affected her painfully.
'What you say there is quite unworthy of you,' she said with gentleness
but coldness. 'He has done you no wrong. Long ere I met him I told you
that what you wished was not what I wished, never would be so. You are
too great a gentleman, Egon, to nourish an injustice in your heart.'
He looked down; every fibre in him thrilled and burned under the sound
of her voice, the sense of her presence.
'I saw your children asleep last night,' he said abruptly. 'They have
nothing of you in them; they are his image.'
'Is it so unusual for children to resemble their father?' she said with
a smile, whilst vaguely disquieted by his tone.
'No, I suppose not; but the Szalras have always been of one type. How
came your husband by that face? I have seen it amongst the Circassians,
the Persians, the Georgians; but you say he is a Breton.'
'The Sabrans of Romaris are Bretons; you have only to consult history.
Very beautiful faces like his have seldom much impress of nationality;
they always seem as though they followed the old Greek laws, and were
cast in the divine heroic mould of another time than ours.'
'Who was his mother?'
'A Spanish Mexican.'
Vàsàrhely was silent.
His cousin left him and went amongst her guests. A vague sense of
uneasiness went with her at her consciousness of his hostility to
Sabran. She wished she had not asked him to remain.
'You have never offended Egon?' she asked Sabran anxiously that night.
'You have always been forbearing and patient with him?'
'I have obeyed you in that as all things, my angel,', he answered her
lightly. 'What would you? He is in love with you still, and I have
married you! It is even a crime in his eyes that my children resemble
me! One can never argue with a passion that is unhappy. It is a kind of
frenzy.'
She heard with some impatience.
'He has no right to cherish such a resentment. He keeps it alive by
brooding on it. I had hoped that when he saw you here, saw how happy
you render me, saw your children too, he would grow calmer, wiser, more
reconciled to the inevitable.'
'You did not know men, my love,' said Sabran, with a smile.
To him the unhappiness and the ill-will of Egon Vàsàrhely were matters
of supreme indifference; in a manner they gratified him, they even
supplied that stimulant of rivalry which a man's passion needs to keep
at its height in the calm of safe possession. That Egon Vàsàrhely saw
his perfect happiness lent it pungency and a keener sense of victory.
When he kissed his wife's hand in the sight of her cousin, the sense
of the pain it dealt to the spectator gave the trivial action to him
all the sweetness and the ardour of the first caresses of his accepted
passion.
Of that she knew nothing. It would have seemed to her ignoble, as so
much that makes up men's desire always does seem to a woman of her
temperament, even whilst it dominates and solicits her, and forces her
to share something of its own intoxication.
'Egon is very unreasonable,' said Mdme. Ottilie. 'He believes that
if you had not met Réné you would have in time loved himself. It is
foolish. Love is a destiny. Had you married him you would not have
loved him. He would soon have perceived that and been miserable, much
more miserable than he is now, for he would have been unable to release
you. I think he should not have come here at all if he could not have
met M. de Sabran with at least equanimity.'
'I think so, too,' said Wanda, and an impatience against her cousin
began to grow into anger; without being conscious of it, she had placed
Sabran so high in her own esteem that she could forgive none who did
not adore her own idol. It was a weakness in her that was lovely and
touching in a character that had had before hardly enough of the usual
foibles of humanity. Every error of love is lovable.
Vàsàrhely could not dismiss from his mind the impression which haunted
him.
'I conclude you knew the Marquis de Sabran well in France?' he said one
day to Baron Kaulnitz, who was still there.
Kaulnitz demurred.
'No, I cannot say that I did. I knew him by repute; that was not very
pure. However, the Faubourg always received and sustained him; the
Comte de Chambord did the same; they were the most interested. One
cannot presume to think they could be deceived.'
'Deceived!' echoed Prince Egon. 'What a singular word to use. Do you
mean to imply the possibility of--of any falsity on his part--any
intrigue to appear what he is not?'
'No,' said Kaulnitz, with hesitation. 'Honestly, I cannot say so much.
An impression was given me at the moment of his signing his marriage
contract that he concealed something; but it was a mere suspicion. As I
told you, the whole Legitimist world, the most difficult to enter, the
most incredulous of assumption, received him with open arms. All his
papers were of unimpeachable regularity. There was never a doubt hinted
by anyone, and yet I will confess to you, my dear Egon, since we are
speaking in confidence, that I have had always my own doubts as to his
marquisate of Sabran.'
'_Grosser Gott!_' exclaimed Vàsàrhely, as he started from his seat.
'Why did you not stop the marriage?'
'One does not stop a marriage by a mere baseless suspicion,' replied
Kaulnitz. 'I have not one shadow of reason for my probably quite
unwarranted conjecture. It merely came into my mind also at the
signing of the contracts. I had already done all I could to oppose
the marriage, but Wanda was inflexible--you are witness of the charm
he still possesses for her--and even the Princess was scarcely
less infatuated. Besides, it must be granted that few men are more
attractive in every way; and as he _is_ one of us, whatever else he be,
his honour is now our honour, as you said yourself the other day.'
'One could always kill him,' muttered Vàsàrhely, 'and set her free so,
if one were sure.'
'Sure of what?' said Kaulnitz, rather alarmed at the effect of his own
words. 'You Magyar gentlemen always think that every knot can be cut
with a sword. If he were a mere adventurer (which is hardly possible)
it would not mend matters for you to run him through the heart; there
are his children.'
'Would the marriage be legal if his name were assumed?'
'Oh, no! She could have it annulled, of course, both by Church and Law.
All those pretty children would have no rights and no name. But we are
talking very wildly and in a theatrical fashion. He is as certainly
Marquis de Sabran as I am Karl von Kaulnitz.'
Vàsàrhely said nothing; his mind was in tumult, his heart oppressed by
a sense of secrecy and of a hope that was guilty and mean.
He did not speak to his companion of Vassia Kazán, but his conjecture
seemed to hover before his sight like a black cloud which grew bigger
every hour.
He remained at Hohenszalras throughout the autumnal festivities. He
felt as if he could not go away with that doubt still unsolved, that
suspicion either confirmed or uprooted. His cousin grew as uneasy at
his presence there as she had before been uneasy at his absence. Her
instinct told her that he was the foe of the one dearest to her on
earth. She felt that the gallant and generous temper of him had changed
and grown morose; he was taciturn, moody, solitary.
He spent almost all his time out of doors, and devoted himself to the
hardy sport of the mountains and forests with a sort of rage. Guests
came and went at the castle; some were imperial, some royal people;
there was always a brilliant circle of notable persons there, and
Sabran played his part as their host, with admirable tact, talent, and
good humour. His wit, his amiability, his many accomplishments, and
his social charm were in striking contrast to the sombre indifference
of Vàsàrhely, whom men had no power to amuse and women no power to
interest. Prince Egon was like a magnificent picture by Rembrandt,
as he sat in his superb uniform in a corner of a ball-room with the
collars of his orders blazing with jewels, and his hands crossed on
the diamond-studded hilt of his sword; but he was so mute, so gloomy,
so austere, that the vainest, coquette there ceased to hope to please
him, and his most cordial friends found his curt contemptuous replies
destroy their desire for his companionship.
Wanda, who was frankly and fondly attached to him, began to long for
his departure. The gaze of his black eyes, fixed in their fire and
gloom on the little gay figures of her children, filled her with a
vague apprehension.
'If he would only find some one and be happy,' she thought, with anger
at this undesired and criminal love which clung to her so persistently.
'Am I made of wax?' he said to her with scorn, when she ventured to
hint at her wishes.
'How I wish I had not asked him to remain here!' she said to herself
many times. It was not possible for her to dismiss her cousin, who had
been from his infancy accustomed to look on the Hohenszalrasburg as his
second home. But as circle after circle of guests came, went, and were
replaced by others, and Egon Vàsàrhely still retained the rooms in the
west tower that had been his from boyhood, his continual presence grew
irksome and irritating to her.
'He forgets that it is now my husband's house!' she thought.
There was only one living creature in all the place to whom Vàsàrhely
unbent from his sullen and haughty reserve, and that one was the child
Bela.
Bela was as beautiful as the morning, with his shower of golden hair,
and his eyes like sapphires, and his skin like a lily. With curious
self-torture Vàsàrhely would attract the child to him by tales of
daring and of sport, and would watch with intent eyes every line of
the small face, trying therein to read the secret of the man by whom
this child had been begotten. Bela, all unconscious, was proud of this
interest displayed in him by this mighty soldier, of whose deeds in war
Ulrich and Hubert and Otto told such Homeric tales.
'Bela will fight with you when he is big,' he would say, trying to
inclose the jewelled hilt of Vàsàrhely's sword in his tiny fingers, or
trotting after him through the silence of the tapestried corridors.
When she saw them thus together she felt that she could understand the
superstitious fear of oriental women when their children are looked at
fixedly.
'You are very good to my boy,' she said once to Vàsàrhely, when he had
let the child chatter by his side for hours.
Vàsàrhely turned away abruptly.
'There are times when I could kill your son, because he is his,' he
muttered, 'and there are times when I could worship him, because he is
yours.'
'Do not talk so, Egon,'she said, gravely. 'If you will feel so, it is
best--I must say it--it is best that you should see neither my child
nor me.'
He took no notice of her words.
'The children would always be yours,' he muttered. 'You would never
leave him, never disgrace him for their sake; even if one knew--it
would be of no use.'
'Dear Egon,' she said in real distress, 'what strange things are you
saying? Are you mad? Whose disgrace do you mean?'
'Let us suppose an extreme case,' he said, with a hard laugh. 'Suppose
their father were base, or vile, or faithless, would you hate the
children? Surely you would.'
'I have not imagination enough to suppose any such thing,'she said very
coldly. 'And you do not know what a mother's love is, my cousin.'
He walked away, leaving her abruptly.
'How strange he grows!' she thought. 'Surely his mind must be touched;
jealousy is a sort of madness.'
She bade the children's attendants keep Count Bela more in the
nurseries; she told them that the child teased her guests, and must
not be allowed to run so often at his will and whim over the house.'
She never seriously feared that Egon would harm the child: his noble
and chivalrous nature could not have changed so cruelly as that; but
it hurt her to see his eyes fixed on the son of Sabran with such
persistent interrogation and so strange an intensity of observation. It
made her think of old Italian tales of the evil eye.
She did not know that Vàsàrhely had come thither with a sincere and
devout intention to conquer his jealous hatred of her husband, and
to habituate himself to the sight of her in the new relations of her
life. She did not know that he would probably have honestly tried to
do his duty, and honestly striven to feel at least esteem for one so
near to her, if the suspicion which had become almost certainty in his
own mind had not made him believe that he saw in Sabran a traitor,
a bastard, and a criminal whose offences were the deepest of all
possible offences, and whose degradation was the lowest of all possible
degradation, in the sight of the haughty magnate of Hungary, steeped
to the lips in all the traditions and the convictions of an unsullied
nobility. If what he believed were, indeed, the truth, he would hold
Sabran lower than any beggar crouching at the gate of his palace in
Buda, than any gipsy wandering in the woods of his mountain fortress
of Taróc. If what he believed were the truth, no leper would seem to
him so loathsome as this brilliant and courtly gentleman to whom his
cousin had given her hand, her honour, and her life.
'Doubt, like a raging tooth,' gnawed at his heart, and a hope, which
he knew was dishonourable to his chivalry, sprang up in him, vague,
timid, and ashamed. If, indeed, it were as he believed, would not such
crime, proven on the sinner, part him for ever from the pure, proud
life of Wanda von Szalras? And then, as he thought thus, he groaned in
spirit, remembering the children--the children with their father's face
and their father's taint in them, for ever living witnesses of their
mother's surrender to a lying hound.
'Your cousin cannot be said to contribute to the gaiety of your
house parties, my love,' Sabran observed with a smile one day, when
they received the announcement of an intended visit from one of the
archdukes. Egon Vàsàrhely was still there, and even his cousin, much
as she longed for his departure, could not openly urge it upon him;
relationship and hospitality alike forbade.
'He is sadly changed,' she answered. 'He was always silent, but he is
now morose. Perhaps he lives too much at Taróc, where all is very wild
and solitary.'
'He lives too much in your memory,' said Sabran, with no compassion.
'Could he determine to forgive my marriage with you, there would be a
chance for him to recover his peace of mind. Only, my Wanda, it is not
possible for any man to be consoled for the loss of you.'
'But that is nothing new,' she answered, with impatience. 'If he felt
so strongly against you, why did he come here? It was not like his
high, chivalrous honour.'
'Perhaps he came with the frank will to be reconciled to his fate,'
said Sabran, not knowing how closely he struck the truth, 'and at the
sight of you, of all that he lost and that I gained, he cannot keep his
resolution.'
'Then he should go away,' she said, with that indifference to all
others save the one beloved which all love begets.
'I think he should. But who can tell him so?'
'I did myself the other day. I shall tell him so more plainly, if
needful. Who cannot honour you shall be no friend of mine, no guest of
ours.'
'Oh, my love!' said Sabran, whose conscience was touched. 'Do not have
feud with your relatives for my sake. They are worthier than I.'
The Archduke, with his wife, arrived there on the following day, and
Hohenszalras was gorgeous in the September sun, with all the pomp with
which the lords of it had always welcomed their Imperial friends.
Vàsàrhely looked on as a spectator at a play when he watched its
present master receive the Imperial Prince with that supreme ease,
grace, and dignity which were so admirably blent in him.
'Can he be but a marvellous comedian?' wondered the man, to whom a
bastard was less even than a peasant.
There was nothing of vanity, of effort, of assumption visible in the
perfect manner of his host. He seemed to the backbone, in all the
difficult subtleties of society, as in the simple, frank intercourse
of man and man, that which even Kaulnitz had conceded that he was,
_gentilhomme de race._ Could he have been born a serf--bred from the
hour's caprice of a voluptuary for a serving-woman?
Vàsàrhely sat mute, sunk so deeply in his own thoughts that all the
festivities round him went by like a pageantry on a stage, in which he
had no part.
'He looks like the statue of the Commendatore,' said Olga Brancka, who
had returned for the archducal visit, as she glanced at the sombre,
stately figure of her brother-in-law, Sabran, to whom she spoke,
laughed with a little uneasiness. Would the hand of Egon Vàsàrhely ever
seize him and drag him downward like the hand of the statue in _Don
Giovanni?_
'What a pity that Wanda did not marry him, and that I did not marry
you!' said Mdme. Brancka, saucily, but with a certain significance of
meaning.
'You do me infinite honour!' he answered. 'But, at the risk of seeming
most ungallant, I must confess the truth. I am grateful that the gods
arranged matters as they are. You are enchanting, Madame Olga, as a
guest, but as a wife--alas! who can drink _kümmel_ every day?'
She smiled enchantingly, showing her pretty teeth, but she was bitterly
angered. She had wished for a compliment at the least. 'What can these
men see in Wanda?' she thought savagely. 'She is handsome, it is true;
but she has no coquetry, no animation, no passion. She is dressed by
Worth, and has a marvellous quantity of old jewels; but for that no one
would say anything of her except that she was much too tall and had a
German face!' And she persuaded herself that it was so; if the Venus
de Medici could be animated into life, women would only remark that her
waist was large.
Mdme. Olga was still very lovely, and took care to be never seen except
at her loveliest. She always treated Sabran with a great familiarity,
which his wife was annoyed by, though she did not display her
annoyance. Mdme Brancka always called him _mon cousin_ or _beau cousin_
in the language she usually used, and affected much more previous
knowledge of him than their acquaintance warranted, since it had been
merely such slight intimacy as results from moving in the same society.
She was small and slight, but of great spirit; she shot, fished, rode,
and played billiards with equal skill; she affected an adoration of
the most dangerous sports, and even made a point of sharing the bear
and the boar hunt. Wanda, who, though a person of much greater real
courage, abhorred all the cruelties and ferocities that perforce
accompany sport, saw her with some irritation go out with Sabran on
these expeditions.
'Women are utterly out of place in such sport as that, Olga,' she urged
to her; 'and indeed are very apt to bring the men into peril, for of
course no man can take care of himself whilst he has the safety of a
woman to attend to; she must of necessity distract and trouble him.'
But the Countess Stefan only laughed, and slipped with affectation her
jewelled hunting-knife into its place in her girdle.
Throughout the Archduke's visit, and after the Prince's departure,
Vàsàrhely continued to stay on, whilst a succession of other guests
came and went, and the summer deepened into autumn. He felt that he
could not leave his cousin's house with that doubt unsolved; yet he
knew that he might stay on for ever with no more certainty to reward
him and confirm his suspicions than he possessed now. His presence
annoyed his host, but Sabran was too polished a gentleman to betray
his irritation; sometimes Vàsàrhely shunned his presence and his
conversation for days together, at other times he sought them and rode
with him, shot with him, and played cards with him, in the vain hope of
gathering from some chance admission or allusion some clue to Sabran's
early days. But a perfectly happy man is not given at any time to
retrospection, and Sabran less than most men loved his past. He would
gladly have forgotten everything that he had ever done or said before
his marriage at the Hofburg.
The intellectual powers and accomplishments of Sabran dazzled Vàsàrhely
with a saddened sense of inferiority. Like most great soldiers he
had a genuine humility in his measurement of himself. He knew that he
had no talents except as a leader of cavalry. 'It is natural that she
never looked at me,' he thought, 'when she had once seen this man, with
his wit, his grace, his facility.' He could not even regard the skill
of Sabran in the arts, in the salon, in the theatre with the contempt
which the 'Wild Boar of Taróc' might have felt for a mere maker of
music, a squire of dames, a writer of sparkling little comedies, a
painter of screens, because he knew that both at Idrac and in France
Sabran had showed himself the possessor of those martial and virile
qualities, by the presence or the absence of which the Hungarian noble
measured all men. He himself could only love well and live well: he
reflected sadly that honesty and honour are not alone enough to draw
love in return.
As the weeks passed on, his host grew so accustomed to his presence
there that it ceased to give him offence or cause him anxiety.
'He is not amusing, and he is not always polite,' he said to his
wife, 'but if he likes to consume his soul in gazing at you, I am not
jealous, my Wanda; and so taciturn a rival would hardly ever be a
dangerous one.'
'Do not jest about it,' she answered him, with some real pain. 'I
should be very vexed at his remaining here, were it not that I feel
sure he will in time learn to live down his regrets, and to esteem and
appreciate you.'
'Who knows but his estimation of me may not be the right one?' said
Sabran, with a pang of sad self-knowledge. And although he did not
attach any significance to the prolonged sojourn of the lord of Taróc
and Mohacs, he began to desire once more that his guest would return
to the solitudes of the Carlowitz vineyards, or of the Karpathian
mountains and gorges of snow.
When over seven weeks had passed by, Vàsàrhely himself began to think
that to stay in the Iselthal was useless and impossible, and he had
heard from Taróc tidings which annoyed him--that his brother Stefan
and his wife, availing themselves of his general permission to visit
any one of his places when they chose had so strained the meaning of
the permission that they had gone to his castle, with a score of their
Parisian friends, and were there keeping high holiday and festival,
to the scandal of his grave old stewards, and their own exceeding
diversion. Hospitable to excess as he was, the liberty displeased him,
especially as his, men wrote him word that his favourite horses; were
being ruined by over-driving, and in the list of the guests which they
sent him were the names of more than one too notorious lady, against
whose acquaintance he had repeatedly counselled Olga Brancka. He would
not have cared much what they had done at any other of his houses, but
at Taróc, his mother, whom he had adored, had lived and died, and the
place was sacred to him.
He determined to tear himself away from Hohenszalras, and go and
scatter these gay unbidden revellers in the dusky Karpathian ravines.
'I cannot stay here for ever,' he thought, 'and I might be here for
years without acquiring any more certainty than my own conviction.
Either I am wrong, or he has nothing to conceal, or if I be right he is
too wary to betray himself. If only I could see his shoulder where I
struck the dagger--but I cannot go into his bath-room and say to him,
"You are Vassia Kazán!"'
He resolved to leave on the day after the morrow. For the next day
there was organised on a large scale a hunting party, to which the
nobility of the Tauern had been bidden. There were only some half-dozen
men then staying in the Burg, most of them Austrian soldiers. The delay
gave him the chance he longed for, which but for an accident he might
never have had, though he had tarried there half a century.
Early in the morning there was a great breakfast in the Rittersaal,
at which Wanda did not appear. Sabran received the nobles and gentry
of the province, and did the honours of his table with his habitual
courtliness and grace. He was not hospitable in Vàsàrhely's sense of
the word: he was too easily wearied by others, and too contemptuous of
ordinary humanity; but he was alive to the pleasure of being lord of
Hohenszalras, and sensible of the favour with which he was looked upon
by a nobility commonly so exclusive and intolerant of foreign invasion.
Breakfast over, the whole party went out and up into the high woods.
The sport at Hohenszalras always gave fair play to beast and bird. In
deference to the wishes of his wife, Sabran would have none of those
battues which make of the covert or the forest a slaughterhouse. He
himself disdained that sort of sport, and liked danger and adventure
to mingle with his out-of-door pastimes. Game fairly found by the
spaniel or the pointer; the boar, the wolf, the bear, honestly started
and given its fair chance of escape or revenge; the steinbock stalked
in a long hard day with peril and effort--these were all delightful
to him on occasion; but for the crowded drive, the horde of beaters,
the terrified bewildered troop of forest denizens driven with sticks
on to the very barrels of the gunners, for this he had the boundless
contempt of a man who had chased the buffalo over the prairie, and
lassoed the wild horse and the wild bull leaning down from the saddle
of his mustang. The day passed off well, and his guests were all
content: he alone was not, because a large brown bear which he had
sighted and tired at twice had escaped him, and roused that blood-lust
in him which is in the hearts of all men.
'Will you come out alone with me to-morrow and try for that grand
brute?' he said to Vàsàrhely, as the last of his guests took their
departure.
Vàsàrhely hesitated.
'I intended to leave to-morrow; I have been here too long. But since
you are so good, I will stay twenty-four hours longer.'
He was ashamed in his own heart of the willingness with which he caught
at the excuse to remain within sight of his cousin and within watch of
Sabran.
'I am charmed,' said his host, in himself regretful that he had
suggested a reason for delay; he had not known that the other had
intended to leave so soon. They remained together on the terrace giving
directions to the _jägermeister_ for the next day.
Vàsàrhely looked at his successful rival and said to himself: 'It is
impossible. I must be mad to dream it. I am misled by a mere chance
resemblance, and even my own memory may have deceived me; I was but a
child.
In the forenoon they both went out into the high hills again, where
the wild creatures had their lairs and were but seldom troubled by a
rifle-shot. They brought down some black grouse and hazel grouse and
mountain partridges on their upward way. The jägers were scattered in
the woods; the day was still and cloudy, a true sportsman's day, with
no gleam of sun to shine in their eyes and on the barrels of their
rifles. Sabran shooting to the right, Vàsàrhely to the left, they went
through the grassy drives that climbed upward and upward, and many a
mountain hare was rolled over in their path, and many a ptarmigan and
capercailzie. But when they reached the high pine forests where the big
game harboured, they ceased to shoot, and advanced silently, waiting
and reserving their fire for any large beast the jägers might start and
drive towards them from above. In the greyness of the day the upper
woods were almost dusky, so thickly, stood the cembras and the Siberian
pines. There was everywhere the sound of rushing waters, some above
some underground.
'The first beast to you, the second to me,' said Sabran, in a whisper
to his companion, who demurred and declared that the first fire should
be his host's.
'No,' said Sabran. 'I am at home. Permit me so small a courtesy to my
guest.'
Vàsàrhely flushed darkly. In his very politeness this man seemed to him
to contrive to sting and wound him.
Sabran, however, who had meant nothing more than he had said, did not
observe the displeasure he had caused, and paused at the spot agreed
upon with Otto, a grassy spot where four drives met. There they both
in absolute silence waited and watched for what the hunter's patron,
good S. Hubert, might vouchsafe to send them. They had so waited about
a quarter of an hour, when down one of the drives made dusky by the low
hanging arolla boughs, there came towards them a great dark beast, and
would have gone by them had not Vàsàrhely fired twice as it approached.
The bear rolled over, shot through the head and heart.
'Well done,' cried Sabran, but scarcely were the words off his lips
when another bear burst through the boughs ahead of him by fifty yards.
He levelled his rifle and received its approach with two bullets in
rapid succession. But neither had entered a vital part, and the animal,
only rendered furious by pain, reared and came towards him with
deadliest intent, its great fangs grinning. He fired again, and this
shot struck home. The poor brute fell with a crash, the blood pouring
from its mouth. It was not dead and its agony was great.
'I will give it the _coup de grâce_,' said Sabran, who, for his wife's
sake', was as humane as any hunter ever can be to the beasts he slew.
'Take care,' said Vàsàrhely. 'It is dangerous to touch a wounded bear.
I have known one that looked stone dead rise up and kill a man.'
Sabran did not heed. He went up to the poor, panting, groaning mass of
fur and flesh, and drew his hunting-knife to give it the only mercy
that it was now possible for it to receive. But as he stooped to
plunge the knife into its heart the bear verified the warning he had
been given. Gathering all its oozing strength in one dying effort to
avenge its murder, it leaped on him, dashed him to the earth, and clung
to him with claw and tooth fast in his flesh. He freed his right arm
from its ponderous weight, its horrible grip, and stabbed it with his
knife as it clung to and lacerated him where he lay upon the grass.
In an instant, Vàsàrhely and the jäger who was with them were by his
side, freed him from the animal, and raised him from the ground. He
was deluged with its blood and his own. Vàsàrhely, for one moment of
terrible joy, for which he loathed himself afterwards, thought, 'Is he
dead?' Men had died of lesser things than this.
He stood erect and smiled, and said that it was nothing, but even as he
spoke a faintness came over him, and his lips turned grey.
The jäger supported him tenderly, and would have had him sit down upon
a boulder of rock, but he resisted.
'Let me get to that water, he said feebly, looking to a spot a few
yards off, where one of the many torrents of the Hohe Tauern tumbled
from the wooded cliff above through birch and beechwood, and rushing
underground left a clear round brown pool amongst the ferns. He took a
draught from the flask of brandy; tendered him by the lad, and leaning
on the youth, and struggling against the sinking swoon that was coming
on him, walked to the edge of the pool, and dropped down there on one
of the mossy stones which served as a rough chair.
'Strip me, and wash the blood away, he said to the huntsman, whilst the
green wood and the daylight, and the face of the man grew dim to him,
and seemed to recede further and further in a misty darkness. The youth
obeyed, and cut away the velvet coat, the cambric shirt, till he was
naked to his waist; then, making sponges of handkerchiefs, the jäger
began to wash the blood from him and staunch it as best he could.
Egon Vàsàrhely stood by, without offering any aid; his eyes were
fastened on the magnificent bust of Sabran, as the sunlight fell on the
fair blue-veined flesh, the firm muscles, the symmetrical throat, the
slender, yet sinewy arms, round one of which was clasped a bracelet of
fair hair. He had the chance he needed.
He approached and told the lad roughly to leave the Marquis to him,
he was doing him more harm than good; he himself had seen many
battle-fields, and many men bleeding to death upon their mother earth.
By this time Sabran's eyes were closed; he was hardly conscious of
anything, a great numbness and infinite exhaustion had fallen upon him;
his lips moved feebly. 'Wanda!' he said once or twice,'Wanda!'
The face of the man who leaned above him grew dark as night; he gnashed
his teeth as he begun his errand of mercy.
Leave me with your lord,' he said to the young jäger. 'Go you to the
castle. Find Herr Greswold, bring him; do not alarm the Countess, and
say nothing to the household.'
The huntsman went, fleet as a roe. Vàsàrhely remained alone with
Sabran, who only heard the sound of the rushing water magnified a
million times on his dulled ear.
Vàsàrhely tore the shirt in shreds, and laved and bathed the wounds,
and then began to bind them with the skill of a soldier who had often
aided his own wounded troopers. But first of all, when he had washed
the blood away, he searched with keen and eager eyes for a scar on the
white skin--and found it.
On the right shoulder was a small triangular mark; the mark of what,
to a soldier's eyes, told of an old wound. When he saw it he smiled a
cruel smile, and went on with his work of healing.
Sabran leaned against the rock behind him; his eyes were still closed,
the pulsations of his heart were irregular. He had lost a great
quantity of blood, and the pool at his feet was red. They were but
flesh wounds, and there was no danger in them themselves, but great
veins had been severed, and the stream of life had hurried forth in
torrents. Vàsàrhely thrust the flask between his lips, but he could not
swallow.
All had been done that could be for the immediate moment. The stillness
of the deep woods was around them; the body of the brown bear lay on
the soaked grass; a vulture scenting death, was circling above against
the blue sky. Over the mind of his foe swept at the sight of them one
of those hideous temptations which assail the noblest natures in an
hour of hatred. If he tore the bandages he had placed there off the
rent veins of the unconscious man whom he watched, the blood would
leap out again in floods, and so weaken the labouring heart that in
ten minutes more its powers would fall so low that all aid would be
useless. Never more would the lips of Sabran meet his wife! Never
more would his dreams be dreamed upon her breast! For the moment the
temptation seemed to curl about him like a flame; he shuddered, and
crossed himself. Was he a soldier to slay in cold blood by treachery a
powerless rival?
He leaned over Sabran again, and again tried to force the mouthpiece
of his wine-flask through his teeth. A few drops passed them, and
he revived a little, and swallowed a few drops more. The blood was
arrested in its escape, and the pulsations of the heart were returning
to their normal measure; after a while he unclosed his eyes, and looked
up at the green leaves, at the blue sky.
'Do not alarm Wanda,' he said feebly. 'It is a scratch; it will be
nothing. Take me home.'
With his left hand he felt for the hair bracelet on his right arm,
between the shoulder and the wrist. It was stiff with his own blood.
Then Vàsàrhely leaned over him and met his upward gaze, and said in his
ear, that seemed still filled with the rushing of many waters, 'You are
Vassia Kazán!'
When a little later the huntsman returned, bringing the physician, whom
he had met a mile nearer the house in the woods, and some peasants
bearing a litter made out of pine branches and wood moss, they found
Sabran stretched insensible beside the water-pool; and Egon Vàsàrhely,
who stood erect beside him, said in a strange tone:
'I have stanched the blood, and he has swooned, you see. I commit him
to your hands. I am not needed.'
And, to their surprise, he turned and walked away with swift steps into
the green gloom of the dense forest.