Life went on in its old pathways at Hohenszalras. Nothing more, was
said by him, or to him, as to his rejection of the Russian mission. She
was niggard in nothing, and when she offered her faith or pledged her
silence, gave both entirely and ungrudgingly. Sabran to her showed an
increase of devotion, an absolute adoration which would in themselves
have sufficed to console any woman; and if the most observant member
of their household, Greswold, perceived in him a preoccupation, a
languor, a gloom, which boded ill for their future peace, the old man
was too loyal in his attachment not to endeavour to shake off his own
suspicions and discredit his own penetration.
The Princess had been favoured by a note from Olga Brancka, in which
that lady wrote: 'Have you discovered the nature of his refusal of
Russia? Myself, I believe that I was to blame. I hinted to him that
he would be tempted to his old sins in St. Petersburg, and that Wanda
would be very miserable there. It seems that this was enough for the
tender heart of this devoted lover, and too much for his wisdom and
his judgment; he rejected the mission after accepting it. I believe
the Court is furious. I am not _de service_ now, so that I have no
opportunity of endeavouring to restore him to favour; but I imagine the
Emperor will not quarrel for ever with the Hohenszalrasburg.
The letter restored him at least to the favour of Mdme. Ottilie.
Exaggerated as such a scruple appeared it did not seem to her
impossible in a man whose devotion to his wife she daily witnessed,
shown in a hundred traits. She blamed him still severely in her own
thoughts for what she held an inexcusable disrespect to the Crown, but
she kept her word scrupulously and never spoke to him on the subject.
'Where else in the wide world would any man have found such
forbearance?' he thought with gratitude, and he knew that nowhere
would such delicate sentiment have existed outside the pale of that
fine patrician dignity which is as incapable of the vulgarity of
inquisitiveness and interrogation as was the Spartan of lament.
The months went by. They did not leave home; he seemed to have lost
all wish for any absence, and even repulsed the idea of inviting the
usual house parties of the year. She supposed that he was averse to
meeting people who might recur to his rejection of the post he had
once accepted. The summer passed and the autumn came; he spent his
time in occasional sport, the keen and perilous sport of the Austrian
mountains, and more often and more faithfully beguiled himself with
those arts of which he was a brilliant master, though he would call
himself no more than a mere amateur. From the administration of the
estates he had altogether withdrawn himself.
'You are so much wiser than I,' he always said to her; and when she
would have referred to him, replied: 'You have your lawyers; they are
all honest men. Consult them rather than me.'
With the affairs of Idrac only he continued to concern himself a
little, and was persistent in setting aside all its revenues to
accumulate for his second son.
'I wish you cared more about all these things,' she said to him one
day, when she had in her hand the reports from the mines of Galicia.
He answered angrily, 'I have no right to them. They are not mine. If
you chose to give them all away to the Crown I should say nothing.'
'Not even for the children's sake?'
'No: you would be entirely justified if you liked to give the children
nothing.'
'I really do not understand you,' she said in great surprise.
'Everything is yours,' he said abruptly.
'And the children too, surely!' she said, with a smile: but the
strangeness of the remark disquieted her. 'It is over-sensitiveness,'
she thought; 'he can never altogether forget that he was poor. It is
for that reason public life would have been so good for him; dignities
which he enjoyed of his own, honours that he arrived at through his own
attainments.'
Chagrined to have lost, the opportunity of winning personal honours
in a field congenial to him, the sense that everything was hers could
hardly fail to gall him sometimes constantly, though she strove to
efface any remembrance or reminder that it was so.
In the midsummer of that year, whilst they were quite alone, they were
surprised by another letter from Mdme. Brancka, in which she proposed
to take Hohenszalras on her way from France to Tsarköe Selo, where she
was about to pay a visit which could not be declined by her.
When in the spring he had written with formality to her to announce the
birth of his son Victor, she had answered with a witty coquettish reply
such as might well have been provocative of further correspondence.
But he had not taken up the invitation. Mortified and irritated, she
had compared his writing with the piece of burnt paper, and been more
satisfied than ever that he had penned the name of Vassia Kazán. But
even were it so, what, she wondered, had it to do with Russia? He
and Egon Vàsàrhely were not friends so intimate that they had any
common interests one with the other. The mystery had interested her
intensely when her rapid intuition had connected the resignation of
Sabran's appointment with the messenger sent to him from Taróc. Her
impatience to be again in his presence grew intense. She imagined a
thousand stories, to cast each aside in derision as impossible. All her
suppositions were built upon no better basis than a fragment of charred
paper; but her shrewd intuition bore her into the region of truth,
though the actual truth of course never suggested itself to her even in
her most fantastic and dramatic visions. Finally she thus proposed to
visit Hohenszalras in the midsummer months.
'Last year you had such a crowd about you,' she wrote, 'that I
positively saw nothing of you, _liebe_ Wanda. You are alone now, and
I venture to propose myself for a fortnight. You cannot exactly be
said to be in the way to anywhere, but I shall make you so. When one
is going to Russia, a matter of another five hundred miles or so is a
bagatelle.'
'We must let her come,' said Wanda, as she gave the letter to Sabran,
who, having read it, said with much sincerity----
'For heaven's sake, do not. A fortnight of Madame Olga! as well
have----a century of "Madame Angot!"'
'Can I prevent her?'
'You can make some excuse. I do not like Mdme. Brancka.'
'Why?'
He hesitated; he could not tell her what he had felt at the ball of
the Hofburg. 'She reminds me of a woman who drew me into a thousand
follies, and to cap her good deeds betrayed me to the Prussians. If you
must let her come I will go away. I will go and see your haras on the
Pusztas.'
'Are you serious?'
'Quite serious. Were I not ashamed of such a weakness, I should use a
feminine expression. I should say "_elle me donne des nerfs._"'
'I think she has a great admiration for you, and she does not conceal
it.'
'Merely because she is sensible that I do not like her. Such women as
she are discontented if only one person fail to admit their charm. She
is accustomed to admiration, and she is not scrupulous as to how she
obtains it.'
'My dear! pray remember that she is our guest, and doubly our relative.'
'I will try and remember it; but, believe me, all honour is wholly
wasted upon Mdme. Olga. You offer her a coin of which the person and
the superscription are alike unknown to her.'
'You are very severe,' said his wife.
She looked at him, and perceived that he was not jesting, that he
was on the contrary disturbed and annoyed, and she remembered the
persistence with which Olga Brancka had sought his companionship and
accompanied him on his sport in the summer of her visit there.
'If she had not married first my brother and then my cousin, she would
never have been an intimate friend of mine,' she continued. 'She is of
a world wholly opposed to all my tastes. For you to be absent, if she
came, would be too marked, I think; but we can both leave, if you like.
I am well enough for any movement now, and I can leave the child with
his nurse. Shall we make a tour in Hungary? The haras will interest
you. There are the mines, too, that one ought to visit.'
He received her assent with gratitude and delight. He felt that he
would have gone to the uttermost ends of the earth rather than run the
risk of spending long lonely summer days in the excitation of Mdme.
Brancka's presence. He detested her, he would always detest her; and
yet when he shut his eyes he saw her so clearly, with the malicious
light in her dusky glance, and the jewelled butterfly trembling about
her breasts.
'She shall never come under Wanda's roof if I can prevent it,' he
thought, remembering her as she had been that night.
A few days later the Countess Brancka, much to her rage, had a note
from the Hohenszalrasburg, which said that they were on the point of
leaving for Hungary and Galicia, but that if she would come there in
their absence, the Princess Ottilie, who remained, would be charmed to
receive her. Of course she excused herself, and did not go. A visit to
the solitudes of the Iselthal, where she would, see no one but a lady
of eighty years old and four little children, had few attractions for
the adventurous and vivacious wife of Stefan Brancka.
'It is only Wanda's jealousy,' she thought, and was furious; but she
looked at herself in the mirror, and was almost consoled as she thought
also, 'He avoids me. Therefore he is afraid of me!'
She went to her god, _le monde_, and worshipped at all its shrines and
in all its fashions; but in the midst of the turmoil and the triumphs,
the worries and the intoxications of her life, she did not lose her
hold on her purpose, nor forget that he had slighted her. His beautiful
face, serene and scornful, was always before her. He might have been at
her feet, and he chose to dwell beside his wife under those solitary
forests, amongst those solitary mountains of the High Tauern!
'With a woman he has lived with all these eight years!' she thought,
with furious impatience. 'With a woman who has grafted the Lady of La
Garaye on Libussa, who never gives him a moment's jealousy, who is
as flawless as an ivory statue or a marble throne, who suckles her
children and could spin their clothes if she wanted, who never cares
to go outside the hills of her own home----the Teuton _Hausfrau_ to
her finger-tips.' And she was all the more bitter and the more angered
because, always as she tried to think thus, the image of Wanda rose up
before her, as she had seen her so often at Vienna or Hohenszalras,
with the great pearls on her hair and on her breast.
/$
A planet at whose passing, lo!
All lesser stars recede, and night
Grows clear as day thus lighted up
By all her loveliness, which burns
With pure white flame of chastity;
And fires of fair thought....
$/
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.