One day in this winter time she sat alone in her octagon-room whilst he
was out driving in the teeth of a strong wind blowing from the north
and frequent bursts of snowstorm. Rapid exercise, eager movements, were
necessary to him at once as tonic and as anodyne, and the northern
blood that was in him made the bitter cold, the keen and angry air, the
conflict with the frantic horses tearing at their curbs welcome and
wholesome to him. Paul Zabaroff had many a day driven so over the hard
snows of Russian plains.
She sat at home as the twilight drew on, her feet buried in the furs
before her chair, the fragrance shed about her from a basket of forced
narcissus and bowls full of orange flowers and of violets, the light
of the burning wood shining on the variegated and mellow hues of the
tiles of the hearth. The last poems of Coppée were on her lap, but
her thoughts had wandered away from those to Sabran, to her children,
to a thousand happy trifles connected with one or the other. She was
dreaming idly in that vague reverie which suits the last hour of the
reclining day in the grey still winter of a mountain-land. She was
almost sorry when Hubert entered and brought her the mail-bag, which
had just come through the gloomy defiles and the frosted woods which
stretched between them and Matrey.
'It grows late,' she said to him. 'I fear it will be a stormy night.
Have you heard the Marquis return?
He told her that Sabran had not yet driven in, and ventured to add
his hope that his master would not be out long; then he asked if she
desired the lamps lit, and on being told she did not, withdrew, leaving
the leather bag on a table close to one of the Saxe bowls of violets.
There was plenty of light from the fire, and even from the windows, to
read her letters by; she went first to one of the casements and looked
at the night, which was growing very wild and dark. Though day still
lingered, she could hear the wind go screaming down the lake, and
the rush of the swollen water swirling against the terrace buttresses
below. All beyond, woods, hills, mountains, were invisible under the
grey mist.
'I hope he will not be late,' she thought, but she was too keen a
mountaineer to be apprehensive. Sabran now knew every road and path
through all the Tauern as well as she did. She returned to her seat and
unlocked the leather bag; there were several newspapers, two letters
for the Princess, three or four for Sabran, and one only for herself.
She laid his aside for him, sent those of the Princess to her room,
and opened her own. The writing of it she did not recognise; it was
anonymous, and was very brief.
'If you wish to know why the Marquis de Sabran did not go to Russia,
ask Egon Vàsàrhely.'
That was all: so asps are little.
She sat quite still, and felt as if a bolt had fallen on her from the
leaden skies without. Vàsàrhely knew, the writer of the letter knew,
and she----_she----_ did not know! That was her first distinct thought.
If Sabran had entered the room at that instant she would have held to
him this letter, and would have said, 'I ask you, not him.' He was
absent, and she sat motionless, keeping the unsigned note in her hand,
and staring down on it. Then she turned and looked at the post-mark.
It was 'Vienna,' A city of a million souls! What clue to the writer
was there? She read it again and again, as even the wisest will read
such poisonous things, as though by repeated study that mystery would
be compelled to stand out clearly revealed. It did not say enough to
have been the mere invention of the sender; it was not worded as an
insinuation, but as a fact. For that reason it took a hold upon her
mind which would at once have rejected a fouler or a darker suggestion.
Although free from any baseness of suspicion there was yet that in the
name of her cousin, in juxtaposition with her husband's, which could
not do otherwise than startle and carry with it a corroboration of the
statement made. A wave of the deep anger which had moved her on her
husband's first refusal swept over her again. Her hand clenched, her
eyes hashed, where she sat alone in the gathering shadows.
There came a sound at the door of the room and a small golden head came
from behind the tapestry.
'May we come in?' said Bela; it was the children's hour.
She rose, and put him backward.
'Not now, my darling; I am occupied. Go away for a little while.'
The women who were with them took the children back to their
apartments. She sat down with the note still in her hand. What could
it mean? No good thing was ever said thus. She pondered long, and was
unable to imagine any sense or meaning it could have, though all the
while memories thronged upon, her of words, and looks, and many trifles
which had told her of the enmity that was existent between her cousin
and Sabran. That she saw; but there her knowledge ceased, her vision
failed. She could go no further, conjecture nothing more.
'Ask Egon!' Did they think she would ask him or any living being that
which Sabran had refused to confide in her? Whoever wrote this knew her
little, she thought. Perhaps there were women who would have done so.
She was not one of them.
With a sudden impulse of scorn she cast the sheet of paper into the
fire before her. Then she went to her writing-table and enclosed the
envelope in another, which she addressed to her lawyers in Salzburg.
She wrote with it: 'This is the cover to an anonymous letter which I
have received. Try your uttermost to discover the sender.'
Then she sat down again and thought long, and wearily, and vainly. She
could make nothing of it. She could see no more than a wayfarer whom a
blank wall faces as he goes. The violets and orange blossoms were close
at her elbow; she never in after time smelt their perfume without a
sick memory of the stunned, stupefied bewilderment of that hour.
The door unclosed again, a voice again spoke behind as a hand drew back
the folds of the tapestry.
'What, are you in darkness here? I am very cold. Have you no tea for
me?' said Sabran, as he entered, his eyes brilliant; his cheeks warm,
from the long gallop against the wind. He had changed his clothes, and
wore a loose suit of velvet; the servants, entering behind him, lit the
candelabra, and brought in the lamps; warmth, and gladness, and light
seemed to come with him; she looked up and thought, 'Ah! what does any
thing matter? He is home in safety!'
The impulse to ask of him what she had been bidden to ask of Egon
Vàsàrhely had passed with the intense surprise of the first moment. She
could not ask of him what she had promised never to seek to know; she
could not reopen a long-closed wound. But neither could she forget the
letter lying burnt there amongst the flames of the wood. He noticed
that her usual perfect calm was broken as she welcomed him, gave him
his letters, and bade the servants bring tea; but he thought it mere
anxiety, and his belated drive; and being tired with a pleasant fatigue
which made rest sweet, he stretched his limbs out on a low couch beside
the hearth, and gave himself up to that delicious dreamy sense of
_bien-être_ which a beautiful woman, a beautiful room, tempered warmth
and light, and welcome repose, bring to any man after some hours effort
and exposure in wild weather and intense cold and increasing darkness.
'I almost began to think I should not see you to-night,' he said
happily, as he took from her hand the little cup of Frankenthal china
which sparkled like a jewel in the light. 'I had fairly lost my way,
and Josef knew it no better than I; the snow fell with incredible
rapidity, and it seemed to grow night in an instant. I let the horses
take their road, and they brought us home; but if there be any poor
pedlars or carriers on the hills to-night I fear they will go to their
last sleep.'
She shuddered and looked at him with dim, fond eyes, 'He is here; he is
mine,' she thought; 'what else matters?'
Sabran stretched out his fingers and took some of the violets from the
Saxe bowl and fastened them in his coat as he went on speaking of the
weather, of the perils of the roads whose tracks were obliterated, and
of the prowess and intelligence of his horses, who had found the way
home when he and his groom, a man born and bred in the Tauern, had both
been utterly at a loss. The octagon-room had never looked lovelier and
gayer to him, and his wife had never looked more beautiful than both
did now as he came to them out of the darkness and the snowstorm and
the anxiety of the last hour.
'Do not run those risks,' she murmured. 'You know all that your life is
to me.'
The letter which lay burnt in the fire, and the dusky night of ice
and wind without, had made him dearer to her than ever. And yet the
startled, shocked sense of some mystery, of some evil, was heavy upon
her, and did not leave her that evening nor for many a day after.
'You are not well?' he said to her anxiously later, as they left the
dinner-table. She answered evasively.
'You know I am not always quite well now. It is nothing. It will pass.'
'I was wrong to alarm you by being out so late in such weather,' he
said with self-reproach. 'I will go out earlier in future.'
'Do not wear those violets,' she said, with a trivial caprice wholly
unlike her, as she took them from his coat. 'They are Bonapartist
emblems--_fleurs de malheur_.'
He smiled, but he was surprised, for he had never seen in her any one
of those fanciful whims and vagaries that are common to women.
'Give me any others instead,' he said; 'I wear but your symbol, O my
lady!'
She took some myrtle and lilies of the valley from one of the large
porcelain jars in the Rittersaal.
'These are our flowers,' she said as she gave them to him. 'They mean
love and peace.'
He turned from her slightly as he fastened them where the others had
been.
All the evening she was pre-occupied and nervous. She could not forget
the intimation she had received. It was intolerable to her to have
anything of which she could not speak to her husband. Though they had
their own affairs apart one from the other, there had been nothing
of moment in hers that she had ever concealed from him. But here it
was impossible for her to speak to him, since she had pledged herself
never to seek to know the reason of an action which, however plausibly
she explained it to herself, remained practically inexplicable and
unintelligible. It was terrible to her, too, to feel that the lines
of a coward who dared not sign them had sunk so deeply into her mind
that she did not question their veracity. They had at once carried
conviction to her that Egon Vàsàrhely did know what they said he did.
She could not have told why this was, but it was so. It was what hurt
her most----others knew; she did not.
She felt that if she could have spoken to Sabran of it, the matter
would have become wholly indifferent to her; but the obligation of
reticence, the sense of separation which it involved, oppressed her
greatly. She was also haunted by the memory of the enmity which existed
between these men, whose names were so strangely coupled in the
anonymous counsel given her.
She stayed long in her oratory that night, seeking vainly for calmness
and patience under this temptation; seeking beyond all things for
strength to put the poison of it wholly from her mind. She dreaded lest
it should render her irritable and suspicious. She reproached herself
for having been guilty of even so much insinuation of rebuke to him
as her words with the flower had carried in them. She had ideas of
the duties of a woman to her husband widely different to those which
prevail in the world. She allowed herself neither irritation nor irony
against him. 'When the thoughts rebel, the acts soon revolt,' she was
wont to say to herself, and even in her thoughts she would never blame
him.
Prayer, even if it have no other issue or effect, rarely fails to
tranquillise and fortify the heart which is lifted up ever so vaguely
in search of a superhuman aid. She left her oratory strengthened and
calmed, resolved in no way to allow such partial success to their
unknown foe as would be given if the treacherous warning brought any
suspicion or bitterness to her mind. She passed through the open
archway in the wall which divided his rooms from hers, and looked at
him where he lay already asleep upon his bed, early fatigued by the
long cold drive from which he had returned at nightfall. He was never
more handsome than sleeping calmly thus, with the mellow light of a
distant lamp reaching the fairness of his face. She looked at him with
all her heart in her eyes; then stooped and kissed him without awaking
him.
'Ah! my love,' she thought, 'what should ever come between us? Hardly
even death, I think, for if I lost you I should not live long without
you.'