by Ouida
Vàsàrhely was silent.
His cousin left him and went amongst her guests. A vague sense of uneasiness went with her at her consciousness of his hostility to Sabran. She wished she had not asked him to remain.
‘You have never offended Egon?’ she asked Sabran anxiously that night. ‘You have always been forbearing and patient with him?’
‘I have obeyed you in that as all things, my angel,’, he answered her lightly. ‘What would you? He is in love with you still, and I have married you! It is even a crime in his eyes that my children resemble me! One can never argue with a passion that is unhappy. It is a kind of frenzy.’
She heard with some impatience.
‘He has no right to cherish such a resentment. He keeps it alive by brooding on it. I had hoped that when he saw you here, saw how happy you render me, saw your children too, he would grow calmer, wiser, more reconciled to the inevitable.’
‘You did not know men, my love,’ said Sabran, with a smile.
To him the unhappiness and the ill-will of Egon Vàsàrhely were matters of supreme indifference; in a manner they gratified him, they even supplied that stimulant of rivalry which a man’s passion needs to keep at its height in the calm of safe possession. That Egon Vàsàrhely saw his perfect happiness lent it pungency and a keener sense of victory. When he kissed his wife’s hand in the sight of her cousin, the sense of the pain it dealt to the spectator gave the trivial action to him all the sweetness and the ardour of the first caresses of his accepted passion.
Of that she knew nothing. It would have seemed to her ignoble, as so much that makes up men’s desire always does seem to a woman of her temperament, even whilst it dominates and solicits her, and forces her to share something of its own intoxication.
‘Egon is very unreasonable,’ said Mdme. Ottilie. ‘He believes that if you had not met Réné you would have in time loved himself. It is foolish. Love is a destiny. Had you married him you would not have loved him. He would soon have perceived that and been miserable, much more miserable than he is now, for he would have been unable to release you. I think he should not have come here at all if he could not have met M. de Sabran with at least equanimity.’
‘I think so, too,’ said Wanda, and an impatience against her cousin began to grow into anger; without being conscious of it, she had placed Sabran so high in her own esteem that she could forgive none who did not adore her own idol. It was a weakness in her that was lovely and touching in a character that had had before hardly enough of the usual foibles of humanity. Every error of love is lovable.
Vàsàrhely could not dismiss from his mind the impression which haunted him.
‘I conclude you knew the Marquis de Sabran well in France?’ he said one day to Baron Kaulnitz, who was still there.
Kaulnitz demurred.
‘No, I cannot say that I did. I knew him by repute; that was not very pure. However, the Faubourg always received and sustained him; the Comte de Chambord did the same; they were the most interested. One cannot presume to think they could be deceived.’
‘Deceived!’ echoed Prince Egon. ‘What a singular word to use. Do you mean to imply the possibility of — of any falsity on his part — any intrigue to appear what he is not?’
‘No,’ said Kaulnitz, with hesitation. ‘Honestly, I cannot say so much. An impression was given me at the moment of his signing his marriage contract that he concealed something; but it was a mere suspicion. As I told you, the whole Legitimist world, the most difficult to enter, the most incredulous of assumption, received him with open arms. All his papers were of unimpeachable regularity. There was never a doubt hinted by anyone, and yet I will confess to you, my dear Egon, since we are speaking in confidence, that I have had always my own doubts as to his marquisate of Sabran.’
‘Grosser Gott!’ exclaimed Vàsàrhely, as he started from his seat. ‘Why did you not stop the marriage?’
‘One does not stop a marriage by a mere baseless suspicion,’ replied Kaulnitz. ‘I have not one shadow of reason for my probably quite unwarranted conjecture. It merely came into my mind also at the signing of the contracts. I had already done all I could to oppose the marriage, but Wanda was inflexible — you are witness of the charm he still possesses for her — and even the Princess was scarcely less infatuated. Besides, it must be granted that few men are more attractive in every way; and as he is one of us, whatever else he be, his honour is now our honour, as you said yourself the other day.’
‘One could always kill him,’ muttered Vàsàrhely, ‘and set her free so, if one were sure.’
‘Sure of what?’ said Kaulnitz, rather alarmed at the effect of his own words. ‘You Magyar gentlemen always think that every knot can be cut with a sword. If he were a mere adventurer (which is hardly possible) it would not mend matters for you to run him through the heart; there are his children.’
‘Would the marriage be legal if his name were assumed?’
‘Oh, no! She could have it annulled, of course, both by Church and Law. All those pretty children would have no rights and no name. But we are talking very wildly and in a theatrical fashion. He is as certainly Marquis de Sabran as I am Karl von Kaulnitz.’
Vàsàrhely said nothing; his mind was in tumult, his heart oppressed by a sense of secrecy and of a hope that was guilty and mean.
He did not speak to his companion of Vassia Kazán, but his conjecture seemed to hover before his sight like a black cloud which grew bigger every hour.
He remained at Hohenszalras throughout the autumnal festivities. He felt as if he could not go away with that doubt still unsolved, that suspicion either confirmed or uprooted. His cousin grew as uneasy at his presence there as she had before been uneasy at his absence. Her instinct told her that he was the foe of the one dearest to her on earth. She felt that the gallant and generous temper of him had changed and grown morose; he was taciturn, moody, solitary.
He spent almost all his time out of doors, and devoted himself to the hardy sport of the mountains and forests with a sort of rage. Guests came and went at the castle; some were imperial, some royal people; there was always a brilliant circle of notable persons there, and Sabran played his part as their host, with admirable tact, talent, and good humour. His wit, his amiability, his many accomplishments, and his social charm were in striking contrast to the sombre indifference of Vàsàrhely, whom men had no power to amuse and women no power to interest. Prince Egon was like a magnificent picture by Rembrandt, as he sat in his superb uniform in a corner of a ball-room with the collars of his orders blazing with jewels, and his hands crossed on the diamond-studded hilt of his sword; but he was so mute, so gloomy, so austere, that the vainest, coquette there ceased to hope to please him, and his most cordial friends found his curt contemptuous replies destroy their desire for his companionship.
Wanda, who was frankly and fondly attached to him, began to long for his departure. The gaze of his black eyes, fixed in their fire and gloom on the little gay figures of her children, filled her with a vague apprehension.
‘If he would only find some one and be happy,’ she thought, with anger at this undesired and criminal love which clung to her so persistently.
‘Am I made of wax?’ he said to her with scorn, when she ventured to hint at her wishes.
‘How I wish I had not asked him to remain here!’ she said to herself many times. It was not possible for her to dismiss her cousin, who had been from his infancy accustomed to look on the Hohenszalrasburg as his second home. But as circle after circle of guests came, went, and were replaced by others, and Egon Vàsàrhely still retained the rooms in the west tower that had been his from boyhood, his continual presence grew irksome and irritating to her.
‘He forgets that it is now my husband’s house!’ she thought.
There was only one living creature in all the place to whom Vàsàrhely unbent from his sullen and haughty reserve, and that one was the child Bela.
Bela was as beautiful as the morning, with his shower of golden
hair, and his eyes like sapphires, and his skin like a lily. With curious self-torture Vàsàrhely would attract the child to him by tales of daring and of sport, and would watch with intent eyes every line of the small face, trying therein to read the secret of the man by whom this child had been begotten. Bela, all unconscious, was proud of this interest displayed in him by this mighty soldier, of whose deeds in war Ulrich and Hubert and Otto told such Homeric tales.
‘Bela will fight with you when he is big,’ he would say, trying to inclose the jewelled hilt of Vàsàrhely’s sword in his tiny fingers, or trotting after him through the silence of the tapestried corridors. When she saw them thus together she felt that she could understand the superstitious fear of oriental women when their children are looked at fixedly.
‘You are very good to my boy,’ she said once to Vàsàrhely, when he had let the child chatter by his side for hours.
Vàsàrhely turned away abruptly.
‘There are times when I could kill your son, because he is his,’ he muttered, ‘and there are times when I could worship him, because he is yours.’
‘Do not talk so, Egon,’she said, gravely. ‘If you will feel so, it is best — I must say it — it is best that you should see neither my child nor me.’
He took no notice of her words.
‘The children would always be yours,’ he muttered. ‘You would never leave him, never disgrace him for their sake; even if one knew — it would be of no use.’
‘Dear Egon,’ she said in real distress, ‘what strange things are you saying? Are you mad? Whose disgrace do you mean?’
‘Let us suppose an extreme case,’ he said, with a hard laugh. ‘Suppose their father were base, or vile, or faithless, would you hate the children? Surely you would.’
‘I have not imagination enough to suppose any such thing,’she said very coldly. ‘And you do not know what a mother’s love is, my cousin.’
He walked away, leaving her abruptly.
‘How strange he grows!’ she thought. ‘Surely his mind must be touched; jealousy is a sort of madness.’
She bade the children’s attendants keep Count Bela more in the nurseries; she told them that the child teased her guests, and must not be allowed to run so often at his will and whim over the house.’ She never seriously feared that Egon would harm the child: his noble and chivalrous nature could not have changed so cruelly as that; but it hurt her to see his eyes fixed on the son of Sabran with such persistent interrogation and so strange an intensity of observation. It made her think of old Italian tales of the evil eye.
She did not know that Vàsàrhely had come thither with a sincere and devout intention to conquer his jealous hatred of her husband, and to habituate himself to the sight of her in the new relations of her life. She did not know that he would probably have honestly tried to do his duty, and honestly striven to feel at least esteem for one so near to her, if the suspicion which had become almost certainty in his own mind had not made him believe that he saw in Sabran a traitor, a bastard, and a criminal whose offences were the deepest of all possible offences, and whose degradation was the lowest of all possible degradation, in the sight of the haughty magnate of Hungary, steeped to the lips in all the traditions and the convictions of an unsullied nobility. If what he believed were, indeed, the truth, he would hold Sabran lower than any beggar crouching at the gate of his palace in Buda, than any gipsy wandering in the woods of his mountain fortress of Taróc. If what he believed were the truth, no leper would seem to him so loathsome as this brilliant and courtly gentleman to whom his cousin had given her hand, her honour, and her life.
‘Doubt, like a raging tooth,’ gnawed at his heart, and a hope, which he knew was dishonourable to his chivalry, sprang up in him, vague, timid, and ashamed. If, indeed, it were as he believed, would not such crime, proven on the sinner, part him for ever from the pure, proud life of Wanda von Szalras? And then, as he thought thus, he groaned in spirit, remembering the children — the children with their father’s face and their father’s taint in them, for ever living witnesses of their mother’s surrender to a lying hound.
‘Your cousin cannot be said to contribute to the gaiety of your house parties, my love,’ Sabran observed with a smile one day, when they received the announcement of an intended visit from one of the archdukes. Egon Vàsàrhely was still there, and even his cousin, much as she longed for his departure, could not openly urge it upon him; relationship and hospitality alike forbade.
‘He is sadly changed,’ she answered. ‘He was always silent, but he is now morose. Perhaps he lives too much at Taróc, where all is very wild and solitary.’
‘He lives too much in your memory,’ said Sabran, with no compassion. ‘Could he determine to forgive my marriage with you, there would be a chance for him to recover his peace of mind. Only, my Wanda, it is not possible for any man to be consoled for the loss of you.’
‘But that is nothing new,’ she answered, with impatience. ‘If he felt so strongly against you, why did he come here? It was not like his high, chivalrous honour.’
‘Perhaps he came with the frank will to be reconciled to his fate,’ said Sabran, not knowing how closely he struck the truth, ‘and at the sight of you, of all that he lost and that I gained, he cannot keep his resolution.’
‘Then he should go away,’ she said, with that indifference to all others save the one beloved which all love begets.
‘I think he should. But who can tell him so?’
‘I did myself the other day. I shall tell him so more plainly, if needful. Who cannot honour you shall be no friend of mine, no guest of ours.’
‘Oh, my love!’ said Sabran, whose conscience was touched. ‘Do not have feud with your relatives for my sake. They are worthier than I.’
The Archduke, with his wife, arrived there on the following day, and Hohenszalras was gorgeous in the September sun, with all the pomp with which the lords of it had always welcomed their Imperial friends. Vàsàrhely looked on as a spectator at a play when he watched its present master receive the Imperial Prince with that supreme ease, grace, and dignity which were so admirably blent in him.
‘Can he be but a marvellous comedian?’ wondered the man, to whom a bastard was less even than a peasant.
There was nothing of vanity, of effort, of assumption visible in the perfect manner of his host. He seemed to the backbone, in all the difficult subtleties of society, as in the simple, frank intercourse of man and man, that which even Kaulnitz had conceded that he was, gentilhomme de race. Could he have been born a serf — bred from the hour’s caprice of a voluptuary for a serving-woman?
Vàsàrhely sat mute, sunk so deeply in his own thoughts that all the festivities round him went by like a pageantry on a stage, in which he had no part.
‘He looks like the statue of the Commendatore,’ said Olga Brancka, who had returned for the archducal visit, as she glanced at the sombre, stately figure of her brother-in-law, Sabran, to whom she spoke, laughed with a little uneasiness. Would the hand of Egon Vàsàrhely ever seize him and drag him downward like the hand of the statue in Don Giovanni?
‘What a pity that Wanda did not marry him, and that I did not marry you!’ said Mdme. Brancka, saucily, but with a certain significance of meaning.
‘You do me infinite honour!’ he answered. ‘But, at the risk of seeming most ungallant, I must confess the truth. I am grateful that the gods arranged matters as they are. You are enchanting, Madame Olga, as a guest, but as a wife — alas! who can drink kümmel every day?’
She smiled enchantingly, showing her pretty teeth, but she was bitterly angered. She had wished for a compliment at the least. ‘What can these men see in Wanda?’ she thought savagely. ‘She is handsome, it is true; but she has no coquetry, no animation, no passion. She is dressed by Worth, and has a marvellous quantity of old jewels; but for that no one would say anything of her except that she was much too tall and had a German face!’ And she persuaded herself that it was so; if the Venus de Medici coul
d be animated into life, women would only remark that her waist was large.
Mdme. Olga was still very lovely, and took care to be never seen except at her loveliest. She always treated Sabran with a great familiarity, which his wife was annoyed by, though she did not display her annoyance. Mdme Brancka always called him mon cousin or beau cousin in the language she usually used, and affected much more previous knowledge of him than their acquaintance warranted, since it had been merely such slight intimacy as results from moving in the same society. She was small and slight, but of great spirit; she shot, fished, rode, and played billiards with equal skill; she affected an adoration of the most dangerous sports, and even made a point of sharing the bear and the boar hunt. Wanda, who, though a person of much greater real courage, abhorred all the cruelties and ferocities that perforce accompany sport, saw her with some irritation go out with Sabran on these expeditions.
‘Women are utterly out of place in such sport as that, Olga,’ she urged to her; ‘and indeed are very apt to bring the men into peril, for of course no man can take care of himself whilst he has the safety of a woman to attend to; she must of necessity distract and trouble him.’
But the Countess Stefan only laughed, and slipped with affectation her jewelled hunting-knife into its place in her girdle.
Throughout the Archduke’s visit, and after the Prince’s departure, Vàsàrhely continued to stay on, whilst a succession of other guests came and went, and the summer deepened into autumn. He felt that he could not leave his cousin’s house with that doubt unsolved; yet he knew that he might stay on for ever with no more certainty to reward him and confirm his suspicions than he possessed now. His presence annoyed his host, but Sabran was too polished a gentleman to betray his irritation; sometimes Vàsàrhely shunned his presence and his conversation for days together, at other times he sought them and rode with him, shot with him, and played cards with him, in the vain hope of gathering from some chance admission or allusion some clue to Sabran’s early days. But a perfectly happy man is not given at any time to retrospection, and Sabran less than most men loved his past. He would gladly have forgotten everything that he had ever done or said before his marriage at the Hofburg.