by Ouida
What was in that letter?
She attended to none of her own, so absorbed was she in the impression which gained upon her that the packet which had brought so much surprise and even emotion upon his face came from the hand of Wanda. ‘If even she should be no saint at all?’ she thought, with a malicious amusement. She did not see Egon Vàsàrhely for many hours, but she did not lose her curiosity nor cease to cast about for a method of gratifying it. At the close of the day when she came back from hunting she went into the library, which was then empty. She did not seriously expect to see anything that would reward her enterprise, but she knew he read his letters there and wrote the few he was obliged to write: like most soldiers he disliked using pen and ink. It was dusk, and there were a few lights burning in the old silver sconces fixed upon the horns of forest animals against the walls. With a quick, calm touch, she moved all the litter of papers lying on the huge table where he was wont to do such business as he was compelled to transact. She found nothing that gratified her inquisitiveness. She was about to leave the room in baffled impatience —— impatience of she knew not what —— when her eyes fell upon a pile of charred paper lying on the stove.
It was one of those monumental polychrome stoves of fifteenth-century work in which the country-houses of Central Europe are so rich; a grand pile of fretted pottery, towering half way to the ceiling, with the crown and arms of the Vàsàrhely princes on its summit. There was no fire in it, for the weather was not cold, and Vàsàrhely, who alone used the room, was an ascetic in such matters; but upon its jutting step, which was guarded by lions of gilded bronze, there had been some paper burned: the ashes lay there in a little heap. Almost all of it was ash, but a few torn pieces were only blackened and coloured. With the eager curiosity of a woman who is longing to find another woman at fault, she kneeled down by the stove and patiently examined these pieces. Only one was so little burned that it had a word or two legible upon it; two of those words were Vassia Kazán. Nothing else was traceable; she recognised the handwriting of Sabran. She attached no importance to it, yet she slipped the little scrap, burnt and black as it was, within one of her gauntlets; then, as quickly as she had come there, she retreated and in another half hour, smiling and radiant, covered with jewels, and with no trace of fatigue or of weather, she descended the great banqueting-hall, clad as though the heart of the Greater Karpathians was the centre of the Boulevard S. Germain.
Who was Vassia Kazán?
The question floated above all her thoughts all that evening. Who was he, she, or it, and what could Sabran have to say of him, or her, or it to Egon Vàsàrhely? A less wise woman might have asked straightway what the unknown name might mean, but straight ways are not those which commend themselves to temperaments like hers. The pleasure and the purpose of her life was intrigue. In great things she deemed it necessity; in trifles it was an amusement; without it life was flavourless.
The next day her brother-in-law abandoned Taróc, to join his hussars and prepare for the autumn manœuvres in the plains, and left her and Stefan in possession of the great place, half palace, half fortress, which had withstood more than one siege of Ottoman armies, where it stood across a deep gorge with the water foaming black below. But she kept the charred, torn, triangular scrap of paper; and she treasured in her memory the two words Vassia Kazán; and she said again and again and again to herself: ‘Why should he write to Egon? Why should Egon burn what he writes?’ Deep down in her mind there was always at work a bitter jealousy of Wanda von Szalras; jealousy of her regular and perfect beauty, of her vast possessions, of her influence at the Court, of her serene and unspotted repute, and now of her ascendency over the lives of Sabran and of Vàsàrhely.
‘Why should they both love that woman so much?’ she thought very often. ‘She is always alike. She has no temptations. She goes over life as if it were frozen snow. She did one senseless thing, but then she was rich enough to do it with impunity. She is so habitually fortunate that she is utterly uninteresting; and yet they are both her slaves!’
She went home and wrote to a cousin of her own who had been a member of the famous Third Section at Petersburg. She said in her letter: ‘Is there anyone known in Russia as Vassia Kazán? I want you to learn for me to what or to whom this name belongs. It is certainly Russian, and appears to me to have been taken by some one who has been named more hebrœo from the city of Kazán. You, who know everything past, present, and to come, will be able to know this.’
In a few days she received an answer from Petersburg. Her cousin wrote: ‘I cannot give you the information you desire. It must be a thing of the past. But I will keep it in mind, and sooner or later you shall have the knowledge you wish. You will do us the justice to admit that we are not easily baffled.’
She was not satisfied, but knew how to be patient.
CHAPTER XXII.
Strangely enough the consciousness that one person lived who knew his secret unnerved him. He had said truly that so much were all his instincts and temper those of an aristocrat that he had long ceased to remember that he was not the true Marquis de Sabran. The admiration men frankly gave him, and the ascendency he exercised over women, had alike concurred in fostering his self-delusion. Since his recognition by the foe of his boyhood a vivid sense of his own shamefulness, however, had come upon him; a morbid consciousness that he was not what he seemed, and what all the world believed him, had returned to him. Egon would never speak, but he himself could never forget. He said to himself in his solitude, ‘I am Vassia Kazán! and what he had done appeared to him intolerable, infamous, beyond all expiation.
It was like an impalpable but impassable wall built up between himself and her. Nothing was changed except that one man knew his secret, but this one fact seemed to change the face of the world. For the first time all the deference, all the homage with which the people of the Tauern treated him seemed to him a derision. Naturally of proud temper, and of an intellect which gave him ascendency over others, he had from the first moment he had assumed the marquisate of Sabran received all the acknowledgments of his rank with an honest unconsciousness of imposture. After all he had in his veins blood as patrician as that of the Sabrans; but now that Egon Vàsàrhely knew the truth he was perpetually conscious of not being what he seemed. The mere sense that about the world there was another living being who knew what he knew, shook down all the self-possession and philosophy which had so long made him assure himself that the assumption of a name was an immaterial circumstance, which, harming no one, could concern no one. Egon Vàsàrhely seemed to have seized his sophisms in a rude grasp, and shaken them down as blossoms fall in wind. He thought with bitter self-contempt how true the cynic was who said that no sin exists so long as it is not found out; that discovery is the sole form which remorse takes.
At times his remorse made him almost afraid of Wanda, almost shrink from her, almost tremble at her regard; at other times it intensified his passion and infused into his embraces a kind of ferocity of triumph. He would show an almost brutal ardour in his caresses, and would think with an almost cruel exultation, ‘I was born a serf, and I am her lover, her lord! Strangely enough, she began to lose something of her high influence upon him, of her spiritual superiority in his sight. She was so entirely, so perpetually his, that she became in a manner tainted with his own degradation. She could no longer check him with a word, calm him with a gesture of restraint. She was conscious of a change in him which she could not explain to herself. His sweetness of temper was broken by occasional irritability that she had never seen before. He was at times melancholy and absorbed; he at times displayed a jealousy which appeared unworthy of herself and him; at other moments he adored her, submitted to her with too great a humility. They were still happy, but their happiness was more uncertain, more disturbed by passing shadows. She told herself that it was always so in marriage, that in the old trite phrase nothing mortal was ever perfect long. But this philosophy failed to reconcile her. She found herself continually pondering on t
he alteration that she perceived in him, without being able to explain it to herself in any satisfactory manner.
One day he announced to her without preface that he had decided to renounce the name of Sabran; that he preferred to any other the title which she had given him in the Countship of Idrac. She was astonished, but on reflection only saw, in his choice, devotion and deference to herself. Perhaps, too, she reflected with a pang, he desired some foreign mission such as she had once proposed to him; perhaps the life at Hohenszalras was monotonous and too quiet for a man so long used to the movement and excitation of Paris. She suggested the invitation of a circle of guests more often, but he rejected the idea with some impatience. He, who had previously amused himself so well with the part of host to a brilliant society, now professed that he saw nothing but trouble and ennui in a house full of people, who changed every week, and of royal personages who exacted ceremonious observances that were tedious and burdensome. So they remained alone, for even the Princess Ottilie had gone away to Lilienslust. For her own part she asked nothing better. Her people, her lands, her occupations, her responsibilities, were always interest enough. She loved the stately, serene tread of Time in these mountain solitudes. Life always seemed to her a purer, graver, more august thing when no echo of the world without jarred on the solemnity of the woods and hills. She wanted her children to grow up to love Hohenszalras, as she had always done, far above all pomps and pleasures of courts and cities.
The winter went by, and he spent most of the days out of doors in violent exercise, sledging, skating, wolf hunting. In the evenings he made music for her in the white room: beautiful, dreamy music, that carried her soul from earth. He played for hours and hours far into the night; he seemed more willing to do anything than to converse. When he talked to her she was sensible of an effort of constraint; it was no longer the careless, happy, spontaneous conversation of a man certain of receiving sympathy in all his opinions, indulgence in all his errors, comprehension in even his vaguest or most eccentric ideas: a certain charm was gone out of their intercourse. She thought sometimes humbly enough, was it because a man always wearies of a woman? Yet she could scarcely think that, for his reverential deference to her alternated with a passion that had lost nothing of its voluptuous intensity.
So the winter passed away. Madame Ottilie was in the South for her health, with her relatives of Lilienhöhe; they invited no one, and so no one could approach them. The children grew and throve. Bela and his brother had a little sledge of their own, drawn by two Spanish donkeys, white as the snows that wrapped the Iselthal in their serenity and silence. In their little sable coats and their sable-lined hoods the two little boys looked like rosebuds wrapped in brown moss. They were a pretty spectacle upon the ice, with their stately Heiduck, wrapped in his scarlet and black cloak, walking by the gilded shell-shaped sledge.
‘Bela loves the ice best. Bela wishes the summer never was!’ said the little heir of the Counts of Szalras one day, as he leaped out from under the bearskin of his snow-carriage. His father heard him, and smiled a little bitterly.
‘You have the snow in your blood,’ he thought. ‘I, too, know how I loved the winter with all its privations, how I skimmed like a swallow down the frozen Volga, how I breasted the wind of the North Sea, sad with the dying cries of the swans! But I had an empty stomach and naked limbs under my rough goatskin, and you ride there in your sables and velvets, a proud little prince, and yet you are my son!’
Was he almost angered against his own child for the great heirship to which he was born, as kings are often of their dauphins? Bela looked up at him a little timidly, always being in a certain awe of his father.
‘May Bela go with you some day with the big black horses, one day when you go very far?’
‘Ask your mother,’ said Sabran.
‘She will like it,’ said the child. ‘Yesterday she said you never do think of Bela. She did not say it to Bela, but he heard.’
‘I will think of him,’ said Sabran, with some emotion: he had a certain antagonism to the child, of which he was vaguely ashamed; he was sorry that she should have noticed it. He disliked him because Bela so visibly resembled himself that he was a perpetual reproach; a living sign of how the blood of a Russian lord and of a Persian peasant had been infused into the blood of the Austrian nobles.
The next day he took the child with him on a drive of many leagues, through the frozen highways winding through the frosted forests under the huge snow-covered range of the Glöckner mountains. Bela was in raptures; the grand black Russian horses, whose speed was as the wind, were much more to his taste than the sedate and solemn Spanish asses. When they returned, and Sabran lifted him out of the sledge in the twilight, the child kissed his hand.
‘Bela loves you,’ he said timidly.
‘Why do you?’ said his father, surprised and touched. ‘Because you are your mother’s child?’
Bela did not understand. He said, after a moment of reflection:
‘Bela is afraid, when you are angry; very afraid. But Bela does love you.’
Sabran laid his hand on the child’s shoulder. ‘I shall never be angry if Bela obey his mother, and never pain her. Remember that.’
‘He will remember,’ said Bela. ‘And may he go with the big black horses very soon again?’
‘Your mother’s horses are just as big, and just as black. Is it not the same thing to go with her?’
‘No. Because she takes Bela often; you never.’
‘You are ungrateful,’ said Sabran, in the tone which always alarmed and awed the bold, bright spirit of his child. ‘Your mother’s love beside mine is like the great mountain beside the speck of dust. Can you understand? You will when you are a man. Obey her and adore her. So you will best please me.’
Bela looked at him with troubled suffused eyes; he went within doors a little sadly, led away by Hubert, and when he reached his nursery and had his furs taken from off him he was still serious, and for once he did not tell his thoughts to Gela, for they were too many for him to be able to master them in words. His father was a beautiful, august, terrible, magnificent figure in his eyes; with the confused fancies of a child’s scarce-opened mind he blended together in his admiration Sabran and the great marble form of S. Johann of Prague which stretched its arm towards the lake from the doors of the great entrance, and, as Bela always understood, controlled the waters and the storms at will. Bela feared no one else in all the world, but he feared his father, and for that reason loved him as he loved nothing else in his somewhat selfish and imperious little life.
‘It is so good of you to have given Bela that pleasure,’ his wife said to him when he entered the white room. ‘I know you cannot care to hear a child chatter as I do. It can only be tiresome to you.’
‘I will drive him every day if it please you,’ said Sabran.
‘No, no; that would be too much to exact from you. Besides, he would soon despise his donkeys, and desert poor Gela. I take him but seldom myself for that reason. He has an idea that he is immeasurably older than Gela. It is true a year at their ages is more difference than are ten years at ours.’
‘The child said something to me, as if he had heard you say I do not care for him?’
‘You do not, very much. Surely you are inclined to be harsh to him?’
‘If I be so, it is only because I see so much of myself in him.’
He looked at her, assailed once more by the longing which at times came over him to tell her the truth of himself, to risk everything rather than deceive her longer, to throw himself upon her mercy, and cut short this life which had so much of duplicity, so much of concealment, that every year added to it was a stone added to the mountain of his sins. But when he looked at her he dared not. The very grace and serenity of her daunted him; all the signs of nobility in her, from the repose of her manner to the very beauty of her hands, with their great rings gleaming on the long and slender fingers, seemed to awe him into silence. She was so proud a woman, so great a lady
, so patrician in all her prejudices, her habits, her hereditary qualities, he dared not tell her that he had betrayed her thus. An infidelity, a folly, even any other crime he thought he could have summoned courage to confess to her; but to say to her, the daughter of a line of princes: ‘I, who have made you the mother of my children, I was born a bastard and a serf!’ How could he dare say that? Anything else she might forgive, he thought, since love is great, but never that. Nay, a cold sickness stole over him as he thought again that she came of great lords who had meted justice out over whole provinces for a thousand years; and he had wronged her so deeply that the human tongue scarcely held any word of infamy enough to name his crime. The law would set her free, if she chose, from a man who had so betrayed her, and his children would be bastards like himself.
He had stretched himself on a great couch, covered with white bear-skins. He was in shadow; she was in the light that came from the fire on the wide hearth, and from the oriel window near, a red warm dusky light, that fell on the jewels on her hands, the furs on her skirts, the very pearls about her throat.