As the carriage of the Countess Olga rolled home through the Graben
after the military spectacle, she stopped it suddenly, and signed to an
old man in the crowd who was waiting to cross the road until a regiment
of cuirassiers had rolled by. He was eyeing them critically, as only an
old soldier does look at troops.
'Is it you, Georg?' said Madame Olga. 'What brings you here?'
'I came from Taróc with a letter from the Prince, my master,' answered
the man, an old hussar who had carried Vàsàrhely in his arms off the
field of Königsgrätz, after dragging him from under a heap of dead men
and horses.
'A letter! To whom?' asked Olga, who always was curious and persistent
in investigation of all her brother-in-law's movements and actions.
Vàsàrhely had not laid any injunction as to secrecy, only as to speed,
upon his faithful servant; so that Georg replied, unwitting of harm,
'To the Markgraf von Sabran, my Countess.'
'A letter that could not go by post--how strange! And from Egon to
Wanda's husband!' she thought, with her inquisitive eagerness awakened.
Aloud she bade the old trooper call at her palace for a packet for
Taróc, to make excuse for having stopped and questioned him, and drove
onward lost in thought.
'Perhaps it is a challenge late in the day!' she thought, with a laugh;
but she was astonished and perplexed that any communication should take
place between these men; she perplexed her mind in vain in the effort
to imagine what tie could connect them, what mystery mutually affecting
them could lie beneath the secret of Vassia Kazán.
When, on the morrow, she heard at Court that the Emperor was deeply
incensed at the caprice and disrespect of the Count von Idrac, as
he was called at Court, who, at the eleventh hour, had declined a
mission already accepted by him, and of which the offer had been in
itself an unprecedented mark of honour and confidence, her swift
sagacity instantly associated the action, apparently so excuseless and
inexcusable, with the letter sent up from Taróc. It was still as great
a mystery to her as it had been before what the contents of the letter
could have been, but she had no doubt that in some way or another it
had brought about the resignation of the appointment. It awakened a
still more intense curiosity in her, but she was too wise to whisper
her suspicion to anyone. To her friends at the Court she said, with
laughter: 'A night or two ago I chanced to tell Sabran that his wife
would be wretched at St. Petersburg. That is sure to have been enough
for him. He is such a devoted husband.'
No one of course believed her, but they received the impression that
she knew the real cause of his resignation, though she could not be
induced to say it.
What did it matter to her? Nothing, indeed. But the sense of a secret
withheld from her was to Mdme. Olga like the slot of the fox to a young
hound. She might have a thousand secrets of her own if it pleased her,
but she could not endure anyone else to guard one. Besides, in a vague,
feverish, angry way, she was almost in love with the man who was so
faithful to his wife that he had looked away from her as from some
unclean thing when she had wished to dazzle him. She had no perception
that the secret could concern him himself very nearly, but she thought
it was probably one which he and Egon Vàsàrhely, for reasons of their
own, chose to share and keep hidden. And if it were a secret that
prevented Sabran from going to the Court of Russia? Then, surely, it
was one worth knowing? And if she gained a knowledge of it, and his
wife had none?----what a superiority would be hers, what a weapon
always to hand!
She did not intend any especial cruelty or compass any especial end:
she was actuated by a vague desire to interrupt a current of happiness
that flowed on smoothly without her, to interfere where she had no
earthly title or reason to do so, merely because she was disregarded
by persons content with each other. It is not always definite motives
which have the most influence; the subtlest poisons are those which
enter the system we know not how, and penetrate it ere we are aware.
The only thing which had ever held her back from any extremes of evil
had been the mere habit of good-breeding and an absolute egotism which
had saved her from all strong passions. Now something that was like
passion had touched her under the sting of Sabran's indifference, and
with it she became tenacious, malignant, and unsparing: adroit she had
always been. Instinct is seldom at fault when we are conscious of an
enemy, and Sabran's had not erred when it had warned him against the
wife of Stefan Brancka as the serpent who would bring woe and disaster
to his paradise.
In some three months' time she received a more explicit answer from her
cousin in St. Petersburg. Giving the precise dates, he told her that
Vassia Kazán was the name given to the son of Count Paul Ivanovitch
Zabaroff by a wayside amour with one of his own serfs at a village
near the border line of Astrachan. He narrated the early history of
the youth, and said that he had been amongst the passengers on board a
Havre ship, which had foundered with all hands. So far the brief record
of Vassia Kazán was clear and complete. But it told her nothing. She
was unreasonably enraged, and looked at the little piece of burnt paper
as though she would wrench the secret out of it.
'There must be so much more to know,' she thought. 'What would a mere
drowned boy be to either of those men----a boy dead too all these years
before?'
She wrote insolently to her cousin, that the Third Section, with
its eyes of Argus and its limbs of Vishnoo, had always been but an
overgrown imbecile, and set her woman's wits to accomplish what the
Third Section had failed to do for her. So much she thought of it that
the name seemed forced into her very brain; she seemed to hear every
one saying----'Vassia Kazán.' It was a word to conjure with, at least:
she could at the least try the effect of its utterance any day upon
either of those who had made it the key of their correspondence. Russia
had written down Vassia Kazán as dead, and the mystery which enveloped
the name would not open to her. She knew her country too well not to
know that this bold statement might cover some political secret, some
story wholly unlike that which was given her. Vassia Kazán might have
lived and have incurred the suspicions of the police, and be dwelling
far away in the death in life of Siberian mines, or deep sunk in some
fortress, like a stone at the bottom of a well. The reply not only
did not beget her belief in it, but gave her range for the widest and
wildest conjectures of imagination. 'It is some fault, some folly, some
crime, who can tell? And Vassia Kazán is the victim or the associate,
or the confidant of it. But what is it? And how does Egon know of it?'
She passed the summer in pleasures of all kinds, but the subject did
not lose its power over her, nor did she forget the face of Sabran as
he had turned it away from her in the ball-room of the Hofburg.
He himself had left the capital, after affirming to the minister that
private reasons, which he could not enter into, had induced him to
entreat the Imperial pardon for so sudden a change of resolve, and to
solicit permission to decline the high honour that had been vouchsafed
to him.
'What shall I say to Wanda?' he asked himself incessantly, as the
express train swung through the grand green country towards Salzburg.
She was sitting on the lake terrace with the Princess, when a telegram
from her cousin Kunst was brought to her. Bela and Gela were playing
near with squadrons of painted cuirassiers, and the great dogs were
lying on the marble pavement at her feet. It was a golden close to a
sunless but fine day; the snow peaks were growing rosy as the sun shone
for an instant behind the Venediger range, and the lake was calm and
still and green, one little boat going noiselessly across it from the
Holy Isle to the further side.
'What a pity to leave it all!' she thought as she took the telegram.
The Minister's message was curt and angered:
'Your husband has resigned; he makes himself and me ridiculous. Unable
to guess his motive, I am troubled and embarrassed beyond expression.'
The other, from Sabran, said simply: 'I am coming home. I give up
Russia.'
'Any bad news?' the Princess asked, seeing the seriousness of her face.
Her niece rose and gave her the papers.
'Is Réné mad!' she exclaimed as she read. His wife, who was startled
and dismayed at the affront to her cousin and to her sovereign, yet had
been unable to repress a movement of personal gladness, hastened to say
in his defence:
'Be sure he has some grave, good reason, dear mother. He knows the
world too well to commit a folly. Unexplained, it looks strange,
certainly; but he will be home to-night or in the early morning; then
we shall know; and be sure we shall find him right.'
'Right!' echoed the Princess, lifting the little girl who was her
namesake off her knee, a child white as a snowdrop, with golden curls,
who looked as if she had come out of a band of Correggio's baby angels.
'He is always right,' said his wife, with a gesture towards Bela, who
had paused in his play to listen, with a leaden cuirassier of the guard
suspended in the air.
'You are an admirable wife, Wanda,' said the Princess, with extreme
displeasure on her delicate features. 'You defend your lord when
through him you are probably _brouillée_ with your Sovereign for life.'
She added, her voice tremulous with astonishment and anger: 'It is a
caprice, an insolence, that no Sovereign and no minister could pardon.
I am most truly your husband's friend, but I can conceive no possible
excuse for such a change at the very last moment in a matter of such
vast importance.'
'Let us wait, dear mother,' said Wanda softly. 'It is not you who would
condemn Réné unheard?'
'But such a breach of etiquette! What explanation can ever annul it?'
'Perhaps none. I know it is a very grave offence that he has committed,
and yet I cannot help being happy,' said his wife with a smile, as she
lifted up the little Ottilie, and murmured over the child's fair curls,
'Ah, my dear little dove! We are not going to Russia after all. You
little birds will not leave your nest!'
'Bela is not going to the snow palace?' said he, whose ears were very
quick, and to whom his attendants had told marvellous narratives of an
utterly imaginary Russia.
'No; are not you glad, my dear?'
He thought very gravely for a moment.
'Bela is not sure. Marc says Bela would have slaves in Russia, and
might beat them.'
'Bela would be beaten himself if he did, and by my own hand, said his
mother very gravely. 'Oh, child! where did you get your cruelty?'
'He is not cruel,' said the Princess. 'He is only masterful.'
'Alas! it is the same thing.'
She sent the children indoors, and remained after the sun-glow had all
faded, and Mdme. Ottilie had gone away to her own rooms, and paced
to and fro the length of the terrace, troubled by an anxiety which
she would have owned to no one. What could have happened to make
him so offend alike the State and the Court? She tormented herself
with wondering again and again whether she had used any incautious
expression in her letters which could have betrayed to him the poignant
regret the coming exile gave her. No! she was sure she had not done
so. She had only written twice, preferring telegrams as quicker, and,
to a man, less troublesome than letters. She knew courts and cabinets
too well not to know that the step her husband had taken was one which
would wholly ruin the favour he enjoyed with the former, and wholly
take away all chance of his being ever called again to serve the
latter. Personally she was indifferent to that kind of ambition; but
her attachment to the Imperial house was too strong, and her loyalty
to it too hereditary, for her not to be alarmed at the idea of losing
its good-will. Disquieted and afraid of all kinds of formless unknown
ills, she went with a heavy heart into the Rittersaal to a dinner for
which she could find no appetite. The Princess also, so talkative and
vivacious at other times, was silent and pre-occupied. The evening
passed tediously. He did not come.
It was past midnight, and she had given up all hope of his arrival,
when she heard the returning trot of the horses, who had been sent over
to Matrey in the evening on the chance of his being there. She was in
her own chamber, having dismissed her women, and was trying in vain to
keep her thoughts to nightly prayer. At the sound of the horses' feet
without, she threw on a _négligé_ of white satin and lace, and went,
out on to the staircase to meet him. As he came up the broad stairs,
with Donau and Neva gladly leaping on him, he looked up and saw her
against the background of oak and tapestry and old armour, with the
light of a great Persian lamp in metal that swung above shed full upon
her. She had never looked more lovely to him than as she stood so, her
eyes eagerly searching the dim shadow for him, and the loose white
folds embroidered in silk with pale roses flowing downward from her
throat to her feet. He drew her within her chamber, and took her in his
arms with a passionate gesture.
'Let us forget everything,' he murmured, 'except that we have been
parted nearly a month!'