by Ouida
As he ascended the grand staircase, with the escutcheon of the Szalras repeated on the gilded bronze of its balustrade, a chill and a depression stole upon him. He loved her with intensity and ardour and truth, yet he had been disloyal to her; he had forgotten her, he had been unworthy of her. What worth were all the women in the world beside her? What did they seem to him now, those Delilahs who had beguiled him? He loathed the memory of them; he wondered at himself. He went through the great house slowly towards his own rooms, pausing now and then, as though he had never seen them before, to glance at some portrait, some stand of arms, some banner commemorative of battle, some quiver, bow, and pussikan taken from the Turk.
On his table he found a telegram sent from Lienz:
‘I am so glad you are amused and happy. We are all well here.
(Signed) ‘WANDA.’
No torrents of rebuke, no scenes of rage, no passion of reproaches could have carried reproach to him like those simple words of trustful affection.
‘An angel of God should have descended to be worthy her!’ he thought.
The next evening there was a ball at the Hof. It was later in the season than such things were usually, but the visit to the court of the sovereign of a neighbouring nation had detained their majesties and the nobility in Vienna. The ball was accompanied by all that pomp and magnificence which characterise such festivities, and Sabran, present at it, was the object of universal congratulation and much observation, as the ambassador-designate to Russia.
Court dress became him, and his great height and elegance of manner made him noticeable even in that brilliant crowd of notables. All the greatest ladies distinguished him with their smiles, but he gave them no more than courtesy. He saw only before the ‘eye of memory’ his wife as he had seen her at the last court ball, with the famous pearls about her throat, and her train of silver tissue sown with pearls and looped up with white lilac.
‘It is the flower I like best,’ she had said to him. ‘It brought me your first love-message in Paris, do you remember? It said little; it was very discreet, but it said enough!’
‘You are always thinking of Wanda!’ said the Countess Brancka to him now, with a tinge of impatience in her tone.
He coloured a little, and said with that hauteur with which he always repressed any passing jest at his love for his wife:
‘When both one’s duty and joy point the same way it is easy to follow them in thought.’
‘I hope you follow them in action too,’ said Mdme. Brancka.
‘If I do not, I am at least only responsible to Wanda.’
‘Who would be a lenient judge you mean? said the Countess, with a certain smile that displeased him. ‘Do not be too sure; she is a von Szalras. They are not agreeable persons when they are angered.’
‘I have not been so unhappy as to see her so,’ said Sabran coldly, with a vague sense of uneasiness. As much as it is possible for a man to dislike a woman who is very lovely, and young enough to be still charming in the eyes of the world, he disliked Olga Brancka. He had known her for many years in Paris, not intimately, but by force of being in the same society, and, like many men who do not lead very decent lives themselves, he frankly detested cocodettes.
‘If we want these manners we have our lionnes,’ he was wont to say, at a time when Cochonette was seen every day behind his horses by the Cascade, and it had been the height of the Countess Olga’s ambition at that time to be called like Cochonette. A certain resemblance there was between the great lady and the wicked one; they had the same small delicate sarcastic features, the same red gold curls, the same perfect colourless complexion; but where Cochonette had eyes of the slightest blue, the wife of Count Stefan had the luminous piercing black eyes of the Muscovite physiognomy. Still the likeness was there, and it made the sight of Mdme. Brancka distasteful to him, since his memories of the other were far from welcome. It was for Cochonette that he had broken the bank at Monte Carlo, and into her lap that he had thrown all the gold rouleaux at a time when in his soul he had already adored Wanda von Szalras, and had despised himself for returning to the slough of his old pleasures. It was Cochonette who had sold his secrets to the Prussians, and brought them down upon him in the farmhouse amongst the orchards of the Orléannais, whilst she passed safely through, the German lines and across the frontier, laden with her jewels and her valeurs of all kinds, saying in her teeth as she went: ‘He will never see that Austrian woman again!’ That had been the end of all he had known of Cochonette, and a presentiment of perfidy, of danger, of animosity always came over him whenever he saw the joli petit minois which in profile was so like Cochonette’s, looking up from under the loose auburn curls that Mdme. Olga had copied from her.
Olga Brancka now looked at him with some malice and with more admiration; she was very pretty that night, blazing with diamonds; and with her beautifully shaped person as bare as Court etiquette would permit. In her red gold curls she had some butterflies in jewels flashing all the colours of the rainbow and glowing like sunbeams. There was such a butterfly, big as the great Emperor moth, between her breasts, making their whiteness look like snow.
Instinctively Sabran glanced away from her. He felt an étourdissement that irritated him. The movement did not escape her. She took his arm.
‘We will move about a little while,’ she said. ‘Let us talk of Wanda, mon beau cousin; since you can think of no one else. And so you are really going to Russia?’
‘I believe so.’
‘It will be a great sacrifice to her; any other woman would be in paradise in St. Petersburg, but she will be wretched.’
‘I hope not; if I thought so I would not go.’
‘You cannot but go now; you have made your choice. You will be happy enough. You will play again enormously, and Wanda has so much money that if you lose millions it will not ruin her.’
‘I shall certainly not play with my wife’s money. I have never played since my marriage.’
‘For all that you will play in St. Petersburg. It is in the air. A saint could not help doing it, and you are not a saint by nature, though you have become one since marriage. But you know conversions by marriage do not last. They are like compulsory confessions. They mean nothing.’
‘You are very malicious to-night, madame,’ said Sabran, absently; he was in no mood for banter, and was disinclined to take up her challenge.
‘Call me at least cousinette,’ said Mdme. Olga; ‘we are cousins, you know, thanks to Wanda. Oh! she will be very unhappy in St. Petersburg; she will not amuse herself, she never does. She is incapable of a flirtation; she never touches a card. When she dances it is only because she must, and then it is only a quadrille or a contre-dance. She always reminds me of Marie Thérèse’s “In our position nothing is a trifle.” You remember the Empress’s letters to Versailles?’
Sabran was very much angered, but he was afraid to express his anger lest it should seem to make him absurd.
‘Madame,’ he said, with ill-repressed irritation, ‘I know you speak only in jest, but I must take the liberty to tell you —— however bourgeois it appear —— that I do not allow a jest even from you upon my wife. Anything she does is perfect in my sight, and if she be imbued with the old traditions of gentle blood, too many ladies desert them in these days for me not to be grateful to her for her loyalty.’
She listened, with her bright black eyes fixed on him; then she leaned a little more closely on his arm.
‘Do you know that you said that very well? Most men are ridiculous when they are in love with their wives, but it becomes you, Wanda is perfect, we all know that; you are not alone in thinking so. Ask Egon!’
The face of Sabran changed as he heard that name. As she saw the change she thought: ‘Can it be possible that he is jealous?’
Aloud she said with a little laugh: ‘I almost wonder Egon did not run you through the heart before you married. Now, of course, he is reconciled to the inevitable; or, if not reconciled, he has to submit to it as we all ha
ve to do. He grows very farouche; he lives between his troopers and his castle of Taróc, like a barbaric lord of the Middle Ages. Were you ever at Taróc? It is worth seeing —— a huge fortress, old as the days of Ottokar, in the very heart of the Karpathians. He leads a wild, fierce life enough there. If he keep the memory of Wanda with him it is as some men keep an idolatry for what is dead.’
Sabran listened with a sombre irritation. ‘Suppose we leave my wife’s name in peace,’ he said coldly. ‘The grosser cotillon is about to begin; may I aspire to the honour?’
As he led her out, and the light fell on her red gold curls, on her dazzling butterflies, her armour of diamonds, her snow-white skin, a thousand memories of Cochonette came over him, though the scene around him was the ball-room of the Hofburg, and the woman whose great bouquet of rêve d’or roses touched his hand was a great lady who had been the wife of Gela von Szalras, and the daughter of the Prince Serriatine. He distrusted her, he despised her, he disliked her so strongly that he was almost ashamed of his own antagonism; and yet her contact, her grace of movement, the mere scent of the bouquet of roses had a sort of painful and unwilling intoxication for the moment for him.
He was glad when the long and gorgeous figures of the cotillon had tired out even her steel-like nerves, and he was free to leave the palace and go home to sleep. He looked at a miniature of his wife as he undressed; the face of it, with its tenderness and its nobility, seemed to him, after the face of this other woman, like the pure high air of the Iselthal after the heated and unhealthy atmosphere of a gambling-room.
The next day there was a review of troops in the Prater. His presence was especially desired; he rode his favourite horse Siegfried, which had been brought up from the Tauern for the occasion. The weather was brilliant, the spectacle was grand; his spirits rose, his natural gaiety of temper returned. He was addressed repeatedly by the sovereigns present. Other men spoke of him, some with admiration, some with envy, as one who would become a power at the court and in the empire.
As he rode homeward, when the manœuvres were over, making his way slowly through the merry crowds of the good-humoured populace, through the streets thronged with glittering troops and hung with banners, and odorous with flowers, he thought to himself with a light heart: ‘After all, I may do her some honour before I die.’
When he reached home and his horse was led away, a servant approached him with a sealed letter lying on a gold salver. A courier, who said that he had travelled with it without stopping from Taróc, had brought it from the Most High the Prince Vàsàrhely.
Sabran’s heart stood still as he took the letter and passed up the staircase to his own apartments. Once there he ordered his servants away, locked the doors, and, then only, broke the seal.
There were two lines written on the sheet inside. They said:
‘I forbid you to serve my Sovereign. If you persist, I must relate to him, under secrecy, what I know.’
They were fully signed — — ‘Egon Vàsàrhely.’ They had been sent by a courier, to insure delivery and avoid the publicity of the telegraph. They had been written as soon as the tidings of his appointment to the Russian mission had become known at the mountain fortress of Taróc.
CHAPTER XXIV.
As the carriage of the Countess Olga rolled home through the Graben after the military spectacle, she stopped it suddenly, and signed to an old man in the crowd who was waiting to cross the road until a regiment of cuirassiers had rolled by. He was eyeing them critically, as only an old soldier does look at troops.
‘Is it you, Georg?’ said Madame Olga. ‘What brings you here?’
‘I came from Taróc with a letter from the Prince, my master,’ answered the man, an old hussar who had carried Vàsàrhely in his arms off the field of Königsgrätz, after dragging him from under a heap of dead men and horses.
‘A letter! To whom?’ asked Olga, who always was curious and persistent in investigation of all her brother-in-law’s movements and actions.
Vàsàrhely had not laid any injunction as to secrecy, only as to speed, upon his faithful servant; so that Georg replied, unwitting of harm, ‘To the Markgraf von Sabran, my Countess.’
‘A letter that could not go by post — how strange! And from Egon to Wanda’s husband!’ she thought, with her inquisitive eagerness awakened. Aloud she bade the old trooper call at her palace for a packet for Taróc, to make excuse for having stopped and questioned him, and drove onward lost in thought.
‘Perhaps it is a challenge late in the day!’ she thought, with a laugh; but she was astonished and perplexed that any communication should take place between these men; she perplexed her mind in vain in the effort to imagine what tie could connect them, what mystery mutually affecting them could lie beneath the secret of Vassia Kazán.
When, on the morrow, she heard at Court that the Emperor was deeply incensed at the caprice and disrespect of the Count von Idrac, as he was called at Court, who, at the eleventh hour, had declined a mission already accepted by him, and of which the offer had been in itself an unprecedented mark of honour and confidence, her swift sagacity instantly associated the action, apparently so excuseless and inexcusable, with the letter sent up from Taróc. It was still as great a mystery to her as it had been before what the contents of the letter could have been, but she had no doubt that in some way or another it had brought about the resignation of the appointment. It awakened a still more intense curiosity in her, but she was too wise to whisper her suspicion to anyone. To her friends at the Court she said, with laughter: ‘A night or two ago I chanced to tell Sabran that his wife would be wretched at St. Petersburg. That is sure to have been enough for him. He is such a devoted husband.’
No one of course believed her, but they received the impression that she knew the real cause of his resignation, though she could not be induced to say it.
What did it matter to her? Nothing, indeed. But the sense of a secret withheld from her was to Mdme. Olga like the slot of the fox to a young hound. She might have a thousand secrets of her own if it pleased her, but she could not endure anyone else to guard one. Besides, in a vague, feverish, angry way, she was almost in love with the man who was so faithful to his wife that he had looked away from her as from some unclean thing when she had wished to dazzle him. She had no perception that the secret could concern him himself very nearly, but she thought it was probably one which he and Egon Vàsàrhely, for reasons of their own, chose to share and keep hidden. And if it were a secret that prevented Sabran from going to the Court of Russia? Then, surely, it was one worth knowing? And if she gained a knowledge of it, and his wife had none? —— what a superiority would be hers, what a weapon always to hand!
She did not intend any especial cruelty or compass any especial end: she was actuated by a vague desire to interrupt a current of happiness that flowed on smoothly without her, to interfere where she had no earthly title or reason to do so, merely because she was disregarded by persons content with each other. It is not always definite motives which have the most influence; the subtlest poisons are those which enter the system we know not how, and penetrate it ere we are aware. The only thing which had ever held her back from any extremes of evil had been the mere habit of good-breeding and an absolute egotism which had saved her from all strong passions. Now something that was like passion had touched her under the sting of Sabran’s indifference, and with it she became tenacious, malignant, and unsparing: adroit she had always been. Instinct is seldom at fault when we are conscious of an enemy, and Sabran’s had not erred when it had warned him against the wife of Stefan Brancka as the serpent who would bring woe and disaster to his paradise.
In some three months’ time she received a more explicit answer from her cousin in St. Petersburg. Giving the precise dates, he told her that Vassia Kazán was the name given to the son of Count Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff by a wayside amour with one of his own serfs at a village near the border line of Astrachan. He narrated the early history of the youth, and said that he h
ad been amongst the passengers on board a Havre ship, which had foundered with all hands. So far the brief record of Vassia Kazán was clear and complete. But it told her nothing. She was unreasonably enraged, and looked at the little piece of burnt paper as though she would wrench the secret out of it.
‘There must be so much more to know,’ she thought. ‘What would a mere drowned boy be to either of those men —— a boy dead too all these years before?’
She wrote insolently to her cousin, that the Third Section, with its eyes of Argus and its limbs of Vishnoo, had always been but an overgrown imbecile, and set her woman’s wits to accomplish what the Third Section had failed to do for her. So much she thought of it that the name seemed forced into her very brain; she seemed to hear every one saying — — ‘Vassia Kazán.’ It was a word to conjure with, at least: she could at the least try the effect of its utterance any day upon either of those who had made it the key of their correspondence. Russia had written down Vassia Kazán as dead, and the mystery which enveloped the name would not open to her. She knew her country too well not to know that this bold statement might cover some political secret, some story wholly unlike that which was given her. Vassia Kazán might have lived and have incurred the suspicions of the police, and be dwelling far away in the death in life of Siberian mines, or deep sunk in some fortress, like a stone at the bottom of a well. The reply not only did not beget her belief in it, but gave her range for the widest and wildest conjectures of imagination. ‘It is some fault, some folly, some crime, who can tell? And Vassia Kazán is the victim or the associate, or the confidant of it. But what is it? And how does Egon know of it?’
She passed the summer in pleasures of all kinds, but the subject did not lose its power over her, nor did she forget the face of Sabran as he had turned it away from her in the ball-room of the Hofburg.