Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

The next four days were anxious and terrible. Sabran did not recover as the physician expected that he would, seeing the nature of his wounds and the naturally elastic and sanguine temperament he possessed. He slept little, had considerable fever, woke from the little rest he had, startled, alarmed, bathed in cold sweats; at other times he lay still in an apathy almost comatose, from which all the caresses and entreaties of his wife failed to rouse him. They began to fear that the discharge from the arteries had in some subtle and dangerous manner affected the action of the heart, the composition of the blood, and produced aneurism or pyæmia. ‘The hero of Idrac to be prostrated by a mere flesh wound!’ thought Herr Greswold in sore perplexity. He sent for a great man of science from Vienna, who, when he came, declared the treatment admirable, the wounds healthy, the heart in a normal state, but added it was evident the nervous system had received a severe shock, the effects of which still remained.

  ‘But it is that which I cannot understand,’ said the old man in despair. ‘If you only knew the Marquis de Sabran as I know him; the most courageous, the most gay, the most resolute of men! A man to laugh at death in its face! A man absolutely without fear!’

  The other assented.

  ‘Every one knows what he did in the floods at Idrac,’ he answered; ‘but he has a sensitive temperament for all that. If you did not tell me it is impossible, I should say that he had had some mental shock, some great grief. The prostration seems to me more of the mind than the body. But you have assured me it is impossible?’

  ‘Impossible! There does not live on earth a man so happy, so fortunate, so blessed in all the world as he.’

  ‘Men have a past that troubles them sometimes,’ said the Vienna physician. ‘Nay, I mean nothing, but I believe that M. de Sabran was a man of pleasure. The cup of pleasure sometimes has dregs that one must drink long afterwards. I do not mean anything; I merely suggest. The prostration has to my view its most probable origin in mental trouble; but it would do him more harm than good to excite him by any effort to certify this. To the Countess von Szalras I have merely said, that his state is the result of the large loss of blood, and, indeed, after all it may be so.’

  On the fifth day, Sabran, still lying in that almost comatose silence which had been scarcely broken since his accident, said in a scarce audible voice to his wife:

  ‘Is your cousin here?’

  She stooped towards him and answered:

  ‘Yes; he is here, love. All the others went immediately, but Egon remained. I suppose he thought it looked kinder to do so. I have scarcely seen him, of course.’

  The pallor of his face grew greyer; he turned his head away restlessly.

  ‘Why does he not go?’ he muttered in his throat. ‘Does he wait for my death?’

  ‘Oh, Réné! hush, hush!’ she said, with horror and amaze. ‘My love, how can you say such things? You are in no danger; the doctor assures me so. In a week or two you will be well, you will be yourself.’

  ‘Send your cousin away.’

  She hesitated; troubled by his unreasoning, restless jealousy, which seemed to be the only consciousness of life remaining with him. ‘I will obey you, love; you are lord here,’ she said softly; ‘but will it not look strange? No guest can well be told to go.’

  ‘A guest! — he is an enemy!’

  She sighed, knowing how hopelessly reason can struggle against the delusions of a sick bed. ‘I will tell him to go to-morrow,’ she said, to soothe him. ‘To-night it is too late.’

  ‘Write to him — do not leave me.’

  There was a childlike appeal in his voice, that from a man so strong had a piteous pathos. Her eyes swam with tears as she heard.

  ‘Oh, my dearest, I will not leave you!’ she said passionately, ‘not for one moment whilst I live; and oh, my beloved! what could death ever change in me? Have you so little faith?’

  ‘You do not know,’ he said, so low that his breath scarcely stirred the air.

  She thought that he was tormented by a doubt that she would not be faithful to him if he died. She stooped and kissed him.

  ‘My own, I would sooner be faithless to you in your life than after death. Surely you know me well enough to know that at the least?’

  He was silent. A great sigh struggled from his breast and escaped his pale lips like a parting breath.

  ‘Kiss me again,’ he murmured; ‘kiss me again, whilst —— That gives me life,’ he said, as he drew her head down upon his bosom, where his heart throbbed labouredly. A little while later he fell asleep. He slept some hours. When he awoke he was consumed by a nameless fear.

  ‘Is your cousin gone?’ he asked.

  She told him that it was one o’clock in the same night; she had not written yet.

  ‘Let him stay,’ he said feverishly. ‘He shall not think I fear him. Do you hear me? Let him stay.’

  The words seemed to her the causeless caprice of a jealousy magnified and distorted by the weakness of fever. She strove to answer him calmly. ‘He shall go or stay as you please,’ she assured him. ‘What does it matter, dear, what Egon does? You always speak of Egon. You have never spoken of the children once.’

  She wanted to distract his thoughts. She was pained to think how deep, though unspoken, his antagonism to her cousin must have been, that now in his feebleness it — was the one paramount absorbing thought.

  A great sadness came upon his face as she spoke; his lips trembled a little.

  ‘Ah! the children,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, bring them to me to-morrow. Bela is too like me. Poor Bela, it will be his curse.’

  ‘It is my joy of joys,’ she murmured, afraid to see how his mind seemed astray.

  A shudder that was almost a spasm passed over him. He did not reply. He turned his face away from her, and seemed to sleep.

  The day following he was somewhat calmer, somewhat stronger, though his fever was high.

  The species of paralysis that had seemed to; fall on all his faculties had in a great measure left him. ‘You wish, me to recover,’ he said to her. ‘I will do so, though perhaps it were, better not?’

  ‘He says strange things,’ she said to Greswold. ‘I cannot think why he has such thoughts.’

  ‘It is not he, himself, that has them, it is his fever,’ answered the doctor. ‘Why, in fever, do people often hate what they most adore when they are in health?’

  She was reassured, but not contented.

  The children were brought to see him. Bela had with him an ivory air-gun, with which he was accustomed to blow down his metal soldiers; he looked at his father with awed, dilated eyes, and said that he would go out with the gun and kill the brothers of the bear that had done the harm.

  ‘The bear was quite right,’ said Sabran. ‘It was I who was wrong to take a life not my own.’

  ‘That is beyond Bela,’ said his wife. ‘But I will translate it to him into language he shall understand, though I fear very much, say what I will, he will be a hunter and a soldier one day.’

  Bela looked from one to the other, knitting, his fair brows as he sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Bela will be like Egon,’ he said, ‘with all gold and fur to dress up in, and a big jewelled sword, and ten hundred men and horses, and Bela will be a great killer of things!’

  Sabran smiled languidly, but she saw that he flinched at her cousin’s name.

  ‘I shall not love you, Bela, if you are a killer of things that are God’s dear creatures,’ she said, as she sent the child away.

  His blue eyes grew dark with anger.

  ‘God only cares about Bela,’ he said in innocent profanity, with a profound sense of his own vastness in the sight of heaven, ‘and Gela,’ he added, with the condescending tenderness wherewith he always associated his brother and himself.

  ‘Where could he get all that overwhelming pride?’ she said, as he was led away. ‘I have tried to rear him so simply. Do what I may he will grow arrogant and selfish.’

  ‘My dear,’ said Sabran, very bitterly, ‘what avails
that he was borne in your bosom? He is my son!’

  ‘Gela is your son, and he is so different,’ she answered, not seeking to combat the self-censure to which she was accustomed in him, and which she attributed to faults or follies of a past life, magnified by a conscience too sensitive.

  ‘He is all yours then,’ he said, with a wan smile. ‘You have prevailed over evil.’

  In a few days later his recovery had progressed so far that he had regained his usual tone and look; his wounds were healing, and his strength was returning. He seemed to the keen eyes of Greswold to have made a supreme effort to conquer the moral depression into which he had sunk, and to have thrust away his malady almost by force of will. As he grew better he never spoke of Egon Vàsàrhely.

  On the fifteenth day from his accident he was restored enough to health for apprehension to cease. He passed some hours seated at an open window in his own room. He never asked if Vàsàrhely were still there or not.

  Wanda, who never left him, wondered at that silence, but she forbore to bring forward a name which had had such power to agitate him. She was troubled at the nervousness which still remained to him. The opening of a door, the sound of a step, the entrance of a servant made him start and turn pale. When she spoke of it with anxiety to Herr Joachim, he said vague sentences as to the nervousness which was consequent on great loss of blood, and brought forward instances of soldiers who had lost their nerve from the same cause. It did not satisfy her. She was the descendant of a long line of warriors; she could not easily believe that her husband’s intrepid and careless courage could have been shattered by a flesh wound.

  ‘Did you really mean,’ he said abruptly to her that afternoon, as he sat for the first time beside the open panes of the oriel; ‘did you really mean that were I to die you would never forget me for any other?’

  She rose quickly as if she had been stung, and her face flushed.

  ‘Do I merit that doubt from you? she said. ‘I think not.’

  She spoke rather in sadness than in anger. He had hurt her, he could not anger her. He felt the rebuke.

  ‘Even if I were dead, should I have all your life?’ he murmured, in wonder at that priceless gift.

  ‘You and your children,’ she said gravely. ‘Ah! what can death do against great love? Make its bands stronger perhaps, its power purer. Nothing else.’

  ‘I thank you,’ he said very low, with great humility, with intense emotion. For a moment he thought —— should he tell her, should he trust this deep tenderness which could brave death; and might brave even shame unblenching? He looked at her from under his drooped eyelids, and then — he dared not. He knew the pride which was in her better than she did —— her pride, which was inherited by her firstborn, and had been the sign manual of all her imperious race.

  He looked at her where she stood with the light falling on her through the amber hues of painted glass; worn, wan, and tired by so many days and nights of anxious vigil, she yet looked a woman whom a nation might salute with the pro rege nostro! that Maria Theresa heard. All that a great race possesses and rejoices in of valour, of tradition, of dignity, of high honour, and of blameless truth were expressed in her; every movement, attitude, and gesture spoke of the aristocracy of blood. All that potent and subtle sense of patrician descent which had most allured and intoxicated him in other days now awed and daunted him. He dared not tell her of his treason. He dared not. He was as a false conspirator before a great queen he has betrayed.

  ‘Are you faint, my love?’ she asked him, alarmed to see the change upon his face and the exhaustion with which he sunk, backward against the cushions of his chair.

  ‘Mere weakness; it will pass,’ he said, smiling as best he might, to reassure her. He felt like a man who slides down a crevasse, and has time and consciousness enough to see the treacherous ice go by him, the black abyss yawning below him, the cold, dark death awaiting him beyond, whilst on the heights the sun is shining.

  That night he entreated her to leave him and rest. He assured her he felt well; he feigned a need of sleep. For fifteen nights she had not herself lain down. To please him she obeyed, and the deep slumber of tired nature soon fell upon her. When he thought she slept, he rose noiselessly and threw on a long velvet coat, sable-lined, that was by his bedside, and looked at his watch. It was midnight.

  He crossed the threshold of the open door into his wife’s chamber and stood beside her bed for a moment, gazing at her as she slept. She seemed like the marble statue of some sleeping saint; she lay in the attitude of S. Cecilia on her bier at Home. The faint lamplight made her fair skin white as snow. Bound her arm was a bracelet of his hair like the one which he wore of hers. He stood and gazed on her, then slowly turned away. Great tears fell down his cheeks as he left her chamber. He opened the door of his own room, the outer one which led into the corridor, and walked down the long tapestry-hung gallery leading to the guest-chambers. It was the first time that he had walked without assistance; his limbs felt strange and broken, but he held on, leaning now and then to rest against the arras. The whole house was still.

  He took his way straight to the apartments set aside for guests. All was dark. The little lamp he carried shed a circle of light about his steps but none beyond him. When he reached the chamber which he knew was Egon Vàsàrhely’s he did not pause. He struck on its panels with a firm hand.

  The voice of Vàsàrhely asked from within, ‘Who is there? Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘It is I! Open,’ answered Sabran.

  In a moment more the door unclosed. Vàsàrhely stood within it; he was not undressed. There were a dozen wax candles burning in silver sconces on the table within. The tapestried figures on the walls grew pale and colossal in their light. He did not speak, but waited.

  Sabran entered and closed the door behind him. His face was bloodless, but he carried himself erect despite the sense of faintness which assailed him.

  ‘You know who I am?’ he said simply, without preface or supplication.

  Vàsàrhely gave a gesture of assent.

  ‘How did you know it?’

  ‘I remembered,’ answered the other.

  There was a moment’s silence. If Vàsàrhely could have withered to the earth by a gaze of scorn the man before him, Sabran would have fallen dead. As it was his eyes dropped beneath the look, but the courage and the dignity of his attitude did not alter. He had played his part of a great noble for so long that it had ceased to be assumption and had become his nature.

  ‘You will tell her?’ he said, and his voice did not tremble, though his very soul seemed to swoon within him.

  ‘I shall not tell her!’

  Vàsàrhely spoke with effort; his words were hoarse and stern.

  ‘You will not?’

  An immense joy, unlooked for, undreamed of, sprang up in him, checked as it rose by incredulity.

  ‘But you loved her!’ he said, on an impulse which he regretted even as the exclamation escaped him. Vàsàrhely threw his head back with a gesture of fine anger.

  ‘If I loved’ her what is that to you?’ he said, with a restrained violence vibrating in his words. ‘It is, perhaps, because I once loved her that your foul secret is safe with me now. I shall not tell her. I waited to say this to you. I could not write it lest it should meet her eyes. You came to ask me this? Be satisfied and go.’

  ‘I came to ask you this because, had you said otherwise, I would have shot myself ere she could have heard.’

  Vàsàrhely said nothing; a great scorn was still set like the grimness of death upon his face. He looked far away at the dim figures on the tapestries; he shrunk from the sight of his boyhood’s enemy as from some loathly unclean thing he must not kill.

  ‘Suicide!’ he thought, ‘the Slav’s courage, the serf’s refuge!

  Before the sight of Sabran the room went round, the lights grew dull, the figures on the walls became, fantastic and unreal. His heart beat with painful effort, yet his ears, his throat, his brain seemed full of bloo
d. The nerves of his whole body seemed to shrink and thrill and quiver, but the force of habit kept him composed and erect before this man who was his foe, yet did for him what few friends would have done.

  ‘I do not thank you,’ he said at last. ‘I understand; you spare me for her sake, not mine.’

  ‘But for her, I would treat you so.’

  As he spoke he broke in two a slender agate ruler which lay on the writing-table at his elbow.

  ‘Go,’ he added, ‘you have had my word; though we live fifty years you are safe from me, because —— because —— God forgive you! you are hers.’

  He made a gesture towards the door. Sabran shivered under the insult which his conscience could not resent, his hand dared not avenge.

  Hearing this there fell away from him the arrogance that had been his mask, the courage that had been his shield. He saw himself for the first time as this man saw him, as all the world would see him if once it knew his secret. For the first time his past offences rose up like ghosts naked from their graves. The calmness, the indifference, the cynicism, the pride which had been so long in his manner and in his nature deserted him. He felt base-born before a noble, a liar before a gentleman, a coward before a man of honour.

  Where he stood, leaning on a high caned chair to support himself against the sickly weakness which still came on him from his scarce healed wounds, he felt for the first time to cower and shrink before this man who was his judge, and might become his accuser did he choose. Something in the last words of Egon Vàsàrhely suddenly brought home to him the enormity of his own sin, the immensity of the other’s forbearance. He suddenly realised all the offence to honour, all the outrage to pride, all the ineffaceable indignity which he had brought upon a great race: all that he had done, never to be undone by any expiation of his own, in making Wanda von Szalras the mother of his sons. Submissive, he turned without a word of gesture or of pleading, and felt his way out of the chamber through the dusky mists of the faintness stealing on him.

  CHAPTER XX.

  He reached his own room unseen, feeling his way with his hands against the tapestry of the wall, and had presence of mind enough to fling his clothes off him and stagger to his bed, where he sank down insensible.