Strangely enough the consciousness that one person lived who knew
his secret unnerved him. He had said truly that so much were all his
instincts and temper those of an aristocrat that he had long ceased to
remember that he was not the true Marquis de Sabran. The admiration men
frankly gave him, and the ascendency he exercised over women, had alike
concurred in fostering his self-delusion. Since his recognition by the
foe of his boyhood a vivid sense of his own shamefulness, however, had
come upon him; a morbid consciousness that he was not what he seemed,
and what all the world believed him, had returned to him. Egon would
never speak, but he himself could never forget. He said to himself in
his solitude, 'I am Vassia Kazán! and what he had done appeared to him
intolerable, infamous, beyond all expiation.
It was like an impalpable but impassable wall built up between himself
and her. Nothing was changed except that one man knew his secret, but
this one fact seemed to change the face of the world. For the first
time all the deference, all the homage with which the people of the
Tauern treated him seemed to him a derision. Naturally of proud temper,
and of an intellect which gave him ascendency over others, he had from
the first moment he had assumed the marquisate of Sabran received
all the acknowledgments of his rank with an honest unconsciousness
of imposture. After all he had in his veins blood as patrician as
that of the Sabrans; but now that Egon Vàsàrhely knew the truth he
was perpetually conscious of not being what he seemed. The mere sense
that about the world there was another living being who knew what he
knew, shook down all the self-possession and philosophy which had so
long made him assure himself that the assumption of a name was an
immaterial circumstance, which, harming no one, could concern no one.
Egon Vàsàrhely seemed to have seized his sophisms in a rude grasp, and
shaken them down as blossoms fall in wind. He thought with bitter
self-contempt how true the cynic was who said that no sin exists so
long as it is not found out; that discovery is the sole form which
remorse takes.
At times his remorse made him almost afraid of Wanda, almost shrink
from her, almost tremble at her regard; at other times it intensified
his passion and infused into his embraces a kind of ferocity of
triumph. He would show an almost brutal ardour in his caresses, and
would think with an almost cruel exultation, 'I was born a serf, and I
am her lover, her lord! Strangely enough, she began to lose something
of her high influence upon him, of her spiritual superiority in his
sight. She was so entirely, so perpetually his, that she became in a
manner tainted with his own degradation. She could no longer check him
with a word, calm him with a gesture of restraint. She was conscious of
a change in him which she could not explain to herself. His sweetness
of temper was broken by occasional irritability that she had never seen
before. He was at times melancholy and absorbed; he at times displayed
a jealousy which appeared unworthy of herself and him; at other moments
he adored her, submitted to her with too great a humility. They were
still happy, but their happiness was more uncertain, more disturbed by
passing shadows. She told herself that it was always so in marriage,
that in the old trite phrase nothing mortal was ever perfect long. But
this philosophy failed to reconcile her. She found herself continually
pondering on the alteration that she perceived in him, without being
able to explain it to herself in any satisfactory manner.
One day he announced to her without preface that he had decided to
renounce the name of Sabran; that he preferred to any other the title
which she had given him in the Countship of Idrac. She was astonished,
but on reflection only saw, in his choice, devotion and deference to
herself. Perhaps, too, she reflected with a pang, he desired some
foreign mission such as she had once proposed to him; perhaps the life
at Hohenszalras was monotonous and too quiet for a man so long used
to the movement and excitation of Paris. She suggested the invitation
of a circle of guests more often, but he rejected the idea with some
impatience. He, who had previously amused himself so well with the
part of host to a brilliant society, now professed that he saw nothing
but trouble and _ennui_ in a house full of people, who changed every
week, and of royal personages who exacted ceremonious observances
that were tedious and burdensome. So they remained alone, for even
the Princess Ottilie had gone away to Lilienslust. For her own part
she asked nothing better. Her people, her lands, her occupations, her
responsibilities, were always interest enough. She loved the stately,
serene tread of Time in these mountain solitudes. Life always seemed
to her a purer, graver, more august thing when no echo of the world
without jarred on the solemnity of the woods and hills. She wanted her
children to grow up to love Hohenszalras, as she had always done, far
above all pomps and pleasures of courts and cities.
The winter went by, and he spent most of the days out of doors in
violent exercise, sledging, skating, wolf hunting. In the evenings he
made music for her in the white room: beautiful, dreamy music, that
carried her soul from earth. He played for hours and hours far into the
night; he seemed more willing to do anything than to converse. When he
talked to her she was sensible of an effort of constraint; it was no
longer the careless, happy, spontaneous conversation of a man certain
of receiving sympathy in all his opinions, indulgence in all his
errors, comprehension in even his vaguest or most eccentric ideas: a
certain charm was gone out of their intercourse. She thought sometimes
humbly enough, was it because a man always wearies of a woman? Yet
she could scarcely think that, for his reverential deference to her
alternated with a passion that had lost nothing of its voluptuous
intensity.
So the winter passed away. Madame Ottilie was in the South for her
health, with her relatives of Lilienhöhe; they invited no one, and so
no one could approach them. The children grew and throve. Bela and his
brother had a little sledge of their own, drawn by two Spanish donkeys,
white as the snows that wrapped the Iselthal in their serenity and
silence. In their little sable coats and their sable-lined hoods the
two little boys looked like rosebuds wrapped in brown moss. They were a
pretty spectacle upon the ice, with their stately Heiduck, wrapped in
his scarlet and black cloak, walking by the gilded shell-shaped sledge.
'Bela loves the ice best. Bela wishes the summer never was!' said the
little heir of the Counts of Szalras one day, as he leaped out from
under the bearskin of his snow-carriage. His father heard him, and
smiled a little bitterly.
'You have the snow in your blood,' he thought. 'I, too, know how I
loved the winter with all its privations, how I skimmed like a swallow
down the frozen Volga, how I breasted the wind of the North Sea, sad
with the dying cries of the swans! But I had an empty stomach and
naked limbs under my rough goatskin, and you ride there in your sables
and velvets, a proud little prince, and yet you are my son!'
Was he almost angered against his own child for the great heirship to
which he was born, as kings are often of their dauphins? Bela looked up
at him a little timidly, always being in a certain awe of his father.
'May Bela go with you some day with the big black horses, one day when
you go very far?'
'Ask your mother,' said Sabran.
'She will like it,' said the child. 'Yesterday she said you never do
think of Bela. She did not say it _to_ Bela, but he heard.'
'I will think of him,' said Sabran, with some emotion: he had a certain
antagonism to the child, of which he was vaguely ashamed; he was sorry
that she should have noticed it. He disliked him because Bela so
visibly resembled himself that he was a perpetual reproach; a living
sign of how the blood of a Russian lord and of a Persian peasant had
been infused into the blood of the Austrian nobles.
The next day he took the child with him on a drive of many leagues,
through the frozen highways winding through the frosted forests under
the huge snow-covered range of the Glöckner mountains. Bela was in
raptures; the grand black Russian horses, whose speed was as the wind,
were much more to his taste than the sedate and solemn Spanish asses.
When they returned, and Sabran lifted him out of the sledge in the
twilight, the child kissed his hand.
'Bela loves you,' he said timidly.
'Why do you?' said his father, surprised and touched. 'Because you are
your mother's child?'
Bela did not understand. He said, after a moment of reflection:
'Bela is afraid, when you are angry; very afraid. But Bela does love
you.'
Sabran laid his hand on the child's shoulder. 'I shall never be angry
if Bela obey his mother, and never pain her. Remember that.'
'He will remember,' said Bela. 'And may he go with the big black horses
very soon again?'
'Your mother's horses are just as big, and just as black. Is it not the
same thing to go with her?'
'No. Because she takes Bela often; you never.'
'You are ungrateful,' said Sabran, in the tone which always alarmed and
awed the bold, bright spirit of his child. 'Your mother's love beside
mine is like the great mountain beside the speck of dust. Can you
understand? You will when you are a man. Obey her and adore her. So you
will best please me.'
Bela looked at him with troubled suffused eyes; he went within doors a
little sadly, led away by Hubert, and when he reached his nursery and
had his furs taken from off him he was still serious, and for once he
did not tell his thoughts to Gela, for they were too many for him to
be able to master them in words. His father was a beautiful, august,
terrible, magnificent figure in his eyes; with the confused fancies
of a child's scarce-opened mind he blended together in his admiration
Sabran and the great marble form of S. Johann of Prague which stretched
its arm towards the lake from the doors of the great entrance, and, as
Bela always understood, controlled the waters and the storms at will.
Bela feared no one else in all the world, but he feared his father,
and for that reason loved him as he loved nothing else in his somewhat
selfish and imperious little life.
'It is so good of you to have given Bela that pleasure,' his wife said
to him when he entered the white room. 'I know you cannot care to hear
a child chatter as I do. It can only be tiresome to you.'
'I will drive him every day if it please _you_,' said Sabran.
'No, no; that would be too much to exact from you. Besides, he would
soon despise his donkeys, and desert poor Gela. I take him but seldom
myself for that reason. He has an idea that he is immeasurably older
than Gela. It is true a year at their ages is more difference than are
ten years at ours.'
'The child said something to me, as if he had heard you say I do not
care for him?'
'You do not, very much. Surely you are inclined to be harsh to him?'
'If I be so, it is only because I see so much of myself in him.'
He looked at her, assailed once more by the longing which at times came
over him to tell her the truth of himself, to risk everything rather
than deceive her longer, to throw himself upon her mercy, and cut short
this life which had so much of duplicity, so much of concealment, that
every year added to it was a stone added to the mountain of his sins.
But when he looked at her he dared not. The very grace and serenity
of her daunted him; all the signs of nobility in her, from the repose
of her manner to the very beauty of her hands, with their great rings
gleaming on the long and slender fingers, seemed to awe him into
silence. She was so proud a woman, so great a lady, so patrician in
all her prejudices, her habits, her hereditary qualities, he dared not
tell her that he had betrayed her thus. An infidelity, a folly, even
any other crime he thought he could have summoned courage to confess
to her; but to say to her, the daughter of a line of princes: 'I, who
have made you the mother of my children, I was born a bastard and a
serf!' How could he dare say that? Anything else she might forgive,
he thought, since love is great, but never that. Nay, a cold sickness
stole over him as he thought again that she came of great lords who had
meted justice out over whole provinces for a thousand years; and he
had wronged her so deeply that the human tongue scarcely held any word
of infamy enough to name his crime. The law would set her free, if she
chose, from a man who had so betrayed her, and his children would be
bastards like himself.
He had stretched himself on a great couch, covered with white
bear-skins. He was in shadow; she was in the light that came from the
fire on the wide hearth, and from the oriel window near, a red warm
dusky light, that fell on the jewels on her hands, the furs on her
skirts, the very pearls about her throat.
She glanced at him anxiously, seeing how motionless he lay there, with
his head turned backward on the cushions.
'I am afraid you are weak still from that wound,' she said, as she rose
and approached him. 'Greswold assures me it has left no trace, but I am
always afraid. And you look often so pale. Perhaps you exert yourself
too much? Let the wolves be. Perhaps it is too cold for you? Would you
like to go to the south? Do not think of me; my only happiness is to do
whatever you wish.'
He kissed her hand with deep unfeigned emotion. 'I believe in angels
since I knew you,' he murmured. 'No; I will not take you away from the
winter and the people that you love. I am well enough. Greswold is
right. I could not master those horses if I were not strong; be sure of
that.'
'But I always fear that it is dull here for you?'
'Dull! with you? "Custom cannot stale her infinite variety." That was
written in prophecy of your charm for me.'
'You will always flatter me! And I am not "various" at all; I am too
grave to be entertaining. I am just the German house-mother who cares
for the children and for you.'
He laughed.
'Is that your portrait of yourself? I think Carolus Duran's is truer,
my grand châtelaine. When you are at Court the whole circle seems to
fade to nothing before your presence. Though there are so many women
high-born and beautiful there, you eclipse them all.'
'Only in your eyes! And you know I care nothing for courts. What I like
is the life here, where one quiet day is the pattern of all the other
days. If I were sure that you were content in it----'
'Why should you think of that?'
'My love, tell me honestly, do you never miss the world?'
He rose and walked to the hearth. He, whose life was a long lie, never
lied to her if he could avoid it; and he knew very well that he did
miss the world with all its folly, stimulant, and sin. Sometimes the
moral air here seemed to him too pure, too clear.
'Did I do so I should be thankless indeed--thankless as madmen are who
do not know the good done to them. I am like a ship that has anchored
in a fair haven after press of weather. I infinitely prefer to see
none but yourself: when others are here we are of necessity so much
apart. If the weather,' he added more lightly, 'did not so very often
wear Milton's grey sandals, there would be nothing one could ever
wish changed in the life here. For such great riders as we are, that
is a matter of regret. Wet saddles are too often our fate, but in
compensation our forests are so green.'
She did not press the question.
But the next day she wrote a letter to a relative who was a great
minister and had preponderating influence in the council chamber of the
Austrian Empire. She did not speak to Sabran of the letter that she
sent.
She had not known any of that disillusion which befalls most women in
their love. Her husband had remained her lover, passionately, ardently,
jealously; and the sincerity of his devotion to her had spared her
all that terrible consciousness of the man's satiety which usually
confronts a woman in the earliest years of union. She shrank now with
horror from the fear which came to her that this passion might, like so
many others, alter and fade under the dulness of habit. She had high
courage and clear vision; she met half-way the evil that she dreaded.
In the spring a Foreign Office despatch from Vienna came to him and
surprised and moved him strongly. With it in his hand he sought her at
once.
'You did this!' he said quickly. 'They offer me the Russian mission.'
She grew a little pale, but had courage to smile. She had seen by a
glance at his face the pleasure the offer gave him.
'I only told my cousin Kunst that I thought you might be persuaded to
try public life, if he proposed it to you.'
'When did you say that?'
'One day in the winter, when I asked you if you did not miss the world.'
'I never thought I betrayed that I did so.'
'You were only over eager to deny it. And I know your generosity, my
love. You miss the world; we will go back to it for a little. It will
only make our life here dearer--I hope.'
He was silent; emotion mastered him. 'You have the most unselfish
nature that was!' he said brokenly. 'It will be a cruel sacrifice to
you, and yet you urge it for my sake.'
'Dear, will you not understand? What is for your sake is what is most
for mine. I see you long, despite yourself, to be amidst men once more,
and use your rare talents as you cannot use them here. It is only right
that you should have the power to do so. If our life here has taken
the hold on your heart then, I think you will come back to it all the
more gladly. And then I too have my vanity; I shall be proud for the
world to see how you can fill a great station, conduct a difficult
negotiation, distinguish yourself in every way. When they praise you,
I shall be repaid a thousand times for any sacrifice of my own tastes
that there may be.'
He heard her with many conflicting emotions, of which a passionate
gratitude was the first and highest.
'You make me ashamed,' he said in a low voice. 'No man can be worthy of
such goodness as yours; and I----'
Once more the avowal of the truth rose to his lips, but stayed
unuttered. His want of courage took refuge in procrastination.
'We need not decide for a day or two,' he added; 'they give me time; we
will think well. When do you think I must reply?'
'Surely soon; your delay would seem disrespect. You know we Austrians
are very ceremonious.'
'And if I accept, it will not make you unhappy?'
'My love, no, a thousand times, no; your choice is always mine.'
He stooped and kissed her hand.
'You are ever the same,' he murmured. 'The noblest, the most
generous----'
She smiled bravely. 'I am quite sure you have decided already. Go to my
table yonder, and write a graceful acceptance to my cousin Kunst. You
will be happier when it is posted.'
'No, I will think a little. It is not a thing to be done in haste. It
will be irrevocable.'
'Irrevocable? A diplomatic mission? You can throw it up when you
please. You are not bound to serve longer than you choose.'
He was silent: what he had thought himself had been of the irrevocable
insult he would be held to have offered to the emperor, the nation, and
the world, if ever they knew.
'It will not be liked if I accept for a mere caprice. One must never
treat a State as Bela treats his playthings,' he said as he rang, and
when the servant answered the summons ordered them to saddle his horse.
'No; there is no haste. Glearemberg is not definitely recalled, I
think.'
But as she spoke she knew very well that, unknown to himself, he had
already decided; that the joy and triumph the offer had brought to him
were both too great for him eventually to resist them. He sat down and
re-read the letter.
She had said the truth to him, but she had not said all the truth. She
had a certain desire that he should justify her marriage in the eyes of
the world by some political career brilliantly followed; but this was
not her chief motive in wishing him to return to the life of cities.
She had seen that he was in a manner disquieted, discontented, and
attributed it to discontent at the even routine of their lives. The
change in his moods and tempers, the arbitrary violence of his love
for her, vaguely alarmed and troubled her; she seemed to see the germ
of much that might render their lives far less happy. She realised
that she had given herself to one who had the capacity of becoming a
tyrannical possessor, and retained, even after six years of marriage,
the irritable ardour of a lover. She knew that it was better for them
both that the distraction and the restraint of the life of the world
should occupy some of his thoughts, and check the over-indulgence of
a passion which in solitude grew feverish and morbid. She had not the
secret of the change in him, of which the result alone was apparent to
her, and she could only act according to her light. If he grew morose,
tyrannical, violent, all the joy of their life would be gone. She knew
that men alter curiously under the sense of possession. She felt that
her influence, though strong, was not paramount as it had been, and she
perceived that he no longer took much interest in the administration
of the estates, in which he had shown great ability in the first years
of their marriage. She had been forced to resume her old governance
of all those matters, and she knew that it was not good for him to
live without occupation. She feared that the sameness of the days, to
her so delightful, to him grew tiresome. To ride constantly, to hunt
sometimes, to make music in the evenings----this was scarcely enough to
fill up the life of a man who had been a _viveur_ on the bitumen of the
boulevards for so long.
A woman of a lesser nature would have been too vain to doubt the
all-sufficiency of her own presence to enthral and to content him; but
she was without vanity, and had more wisdom than most women. It did
not even once occur to her, as it would have done incessantly to most,
that the magnificence of all her gifts to him were title-deeds to his
content for life.
Public life would be her enemy, would take her from the solitudes she
loved, would change her plans for her children's education, would bring
the world continually betwixt herself and her husband; but since he
wished it that was all she thought of, all her law.
'Surely he will accept?' said Mdme. Ottilie, who had returned from the
south of France.
'Yes, he will accept,' said his wife. 'He does not know it, but he
will.'
'I cannot imagine why he should affect to hesitate. It is the career
he is made for, with his talents, his social graces.'
'He does not affect; he hesitates for my sake. He knows I am never
happy away from Hohenszalras.'
'Why did you write then to Kunst?'
'Because it will be better for him; he is neither a poet nor a
philosopher, to be able to live away from the world.'
'Which are you?'
'Neither; only a woman who loves the home she was born in, and the
people she----'
'Reigns over,' added the Princess. 'Admit, my beloved, that a part of
your passion for Hohenszalras comes of the fact that you cannot be
quite as omnipotent in the world as you are here!'
Wanda von Szalras smiled. 'Perhaps; the best motive is always mixed
with a baser. But I adore the country and country life. I abhor cities.'
'Men are always like Horace,' said the Princess. 'They admire rural
life, but they remain for all that with Augustus.'
At that moment they heard the hoofs of his horse galloping up the great
avenue. A quarter of an hour went by, for he changed his dress before
coming into his wife's presence. He would no more have gone to her with
the dust or the mud of the roads upon him than he would have gone in
such disarray into the inner circle of the Kaiserin.
When he entered, she did not speak, but the Princess Ottilie said with
vivacity:
'Well! you accept, of course?
'I will neither accept nor decline. I will do what Wanda wishes.'
The Princess gave an impatient movement of her little foot on the
carpet.
'Wanda is a hermit,' she said; 'she should have dwelt in a cave, and
lived on berries with S. Scholastica. What is the use of leaving it to
her? She will say No. She loves her mountains.'
'Then she shall stay amidst her mountains.'
'And you will throw all your future away?'
'Dear mother, I have no future----should have had none but for her.'
'All that is very pretty, but after nearly six years of marriage it is
not necessary to _faire des madrigaux._'
The Princess sat a little more erect, angrily, and continued to tap her
foot upon the floor. His wife was silent for a little while; then she
went over to her writing-table, and wrote with a firm hand a few lines
in German. She rose and gave the sheet to Sabran.
'Copy that,' she said, 'or give it as many graces of style as you like.'
His heart beat, his sight seemed dim as he read what she had written.
It was an acceptance.
'See, my dear Réné!' said the Princess, when she understood;
'never combat a woman on her own ground and with her own weapon--
unselfishness! The man must always lose in a conflict of that sort.'
The tears stood in his eyes as he answered her----
'Ah, madame! if I say what I think, you will accuse me again of
_faisant des madrigaux!_'