by Ouida
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.’