by Ouida
But the consciousness of that superior will compelling him, left in him a chill tremor of constant fear, of perpetual self-abasement. What was natural to him was the reckless daring which many Russians, such as Skobeleff, have shown in a thousand ways of peril. He was here forced only to crouch and to submit; it was more galling, more cruel to him than utter exposure would have been. The sense of coercion was always upon him like a dragging chain. It produced on him a despondency, which not even the presence of his wife or the elasticity of his own nature could dispel.
He had to play a part to her, and to do this was unfamiliar and hateful to him. In all the years before he had concealed a fact from her, but he had never been otherwise false. Though to his knowledge there had been always between them the shadow of a secret untold, there had never been any sense upon him of obligation to measure his words, to feign sentiments he had not, to hide behind a carefully constructed screen of untruth. Now, though he had indeed not lied with his lips, he had to sustain a concealment which was a thousand times more trying to him than that concealment of his birth and station to which he had been so long accustomed that he hardly realised it as any error. The very nobility with which she had accepted his silence, and given it, unasked, a worthy construction, smote him with a deeper sense of shame than even that which galled him when he remembered the yoke laid on him by the will of Egon Vàsàrhely.
He roused himself to meet her with composure.
She rested her hand caressingly on his.
‘We will never speak of Russia any more. I should be sorry were the Kaiser to think you capricious or disloyal, but you have too much ability to have incurred this risk. Let it all be as though there had never arisen any question of public life for you. I have explained to Aunt Ottilie; she will not weary you with interrogation; she understands that you have acted as your honour bade you. That is enough for those who love you as do she and I.’
Every word she spoke entered his very soul with the cruellest irony, the sharpest reproach. But of these he let her see nothing. Yet he was none the less abjectly ashamed, less passionately self-condemned, because he had to consume his pain in silence, and had the self-control to answer, still with a smile, as he touched a chord or two of music:
‘When the Israelites were free they hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt. They deserved eternal exile, eternal bondage. So do I, for having ever been ingrate enough to dream of leaving Hohenszalras for the world of men!’
Then he turned wholly towards the Erard keyboard, and with splendour and might there rolled forth under his touch the military march of Rákóczi: he was glad of the majesty and passion of the music which supplanted and silenced speech.
‘That is very grand,’ she said, when the last notes had died away. ‘One seems to hear the Eljén! of the whole nation in it. But play me something more tender, more pathetic —— some lieder half sorrow and half gladness, you know so many of all countries.’
He paused a moment; then his hands wandered lightly across the notes, and called up the mournful folk-songs that he had heard so long, so long, before; songs of the Russian peasants, of the maidens borne off by the Tartar in war, of the blue-eyed children carried away to be slaves, of the homeless villagers beholding their straw-roofed huts licked up by the hungry hurrying flame lit by the Kossack or the Kurd; songs of a people without joy, that he had heard in his childish days, when the great rafts had drifted slowly down the Volga water, and across the plains the lines of chained prisoners had crept as slowly through the dust; or songs that he had sung to himself, not knowing why, where the winter was white on all the land, and the bay of the famished wolves afar off had blent with the shrill sad cry of the wild swans dying of cold and of hunger and of thirst on the frozen rivers, and the reeds were grown hard as spears of iron, and the waves were changed to stone.
The intense melancholy penetrated her very heart. She listened with the tears in her eyes, and her whole being stirred and thrilled by a pain not her own. A kind of consciousness came to her, borne on that melancholy melody, of some unspoken sorrow which lived in this heart which beat so near her own, and whose every throb she had thought she knew. A sudden terror seized her lest all this while she who believed his whole life hers was in truth a stranger to his deepest grief, his dearest memories.
When the last sigh of those plaintive songs without words had died away, she signed to him to approach her.
‘Tell me,’ she said very gently, ‘tell me the truth. Réné, did you ever care for any woman, dead or lost, more than, or as much as, you care for me? I do not ask you if you loved others. I know all men have many caprices, but was any one of them so dear to you that you regret her still? Tell me the truth; I will be strong to bear it.’
He, relieved beyond expression that she but asked him that on which his conscience was clear and his answer could be wholly sincere, sat down at her feet and leaned his head against her knee.
‘Never, so hear me God!’ he said simply. ‘I have loved no woman as I love you.’
‘And there is not one that you regret?’
‘There is not one.’
‘Then what is it that you do regret? Something more weighs on you than the mere loss of diplomatic life, which; after all, to you is no more than the loss of a toy to Bela.’
‘If I do regret,’ he said, with a smile, ‘it is foolish and thankless. The happiness you give me here is worth all the fret and fever of the world’s ambitions. You are so great and good to be so little angered with me for my reticence. All my life, such as it is, shall be dedicated to my gratitude.’
Once more an impulse to tell her all passed over him —— a sense that he might trust her absolutely for all tenderness and all pity came upon him; but with the weakness which so constantly holds back human souls from their own deliverance, his courage once again failed him. He once more looking at her thought: ‘Nay! I dare not. She would never understand, she would never pardon, she would never listen. At the first word she would abhor me.’
He did not dare; he bent his face down on her knees as any child might have done.
‘What I ever must regret is not to be worthy of you!’ he murmured; and the subterfuge was also a truth.
She looked down at him wistfully with doubt and confusion mingled. She sighed, for she understood that buried in his heart there was some pain he would not share, perchance some half involuntary unfaithfulness he did not dare confess. She thrust this latter thought away quickly; it hurt her as the touch of a hot iron hurts tender flesh; she would not harbour it. It might well be, she knew.
She was silent some little time, then she said calmly:
‘I think you worthy. Is not that enough? Never say to me what you do not wish to say. But —— but —— if there be anything you believe that I should blame, be sure of this, love: I am no fair weather friend. Try me in deep water, in dark storm!’
And still he did not speak.
His evil angel held him back and said to him, ‘Nay! she would never forgive.’
CHAPTER XXVI.
One day in this winter time she sat alone in her octagon-room whilst he was out driving in the teeth of a strong wind blowing from the north and frequent bursts of snowstorm. Rapid exercise, eager movements, were necessary to him at once as tonic and as anodyne, and the northern blood that was in him made the bitter cold, the keen and angry air, the conflict with the frantic horses tearing at their curbs welcome and wholesome to him. Paul Zabaroff had many a day driven so over the hard snows of Russian plains.
She sat at home as the twilight drew on, her feet buried in the furs before her chair, the fragrance shed about her from a basket of forced narcissus and bowls full of orange flowers and of violets, the light of the burning wood shining on the variegated and mellow hues of the tiles of the hearth. The last poems of Coppée were on her lap, but her thoughts had wandered away from those to Sabran, to her children, to a thousand happy trifles connected with one or the other. She was dreaming idly in that vague reverie which suits
the last hour of the reclining day in the grey still winter of a mountain-land. She was almost sorry when Hubert entered and brought her the mail-bag, which had just come through the gloomy defiles and the frosted woods which stretched between them and Matrey.
‘It grows late,’ she said to him. ‘I fear it will be a stormy night. Have you heard the Marquis return?
He told her that Sabran had not yet driven in, and ventured to add his hope that his master would not be out long; then he asked if she desired the lamps lit, and on being told she did not, withdrew, leaving the leather bag on a table close to one of the Saxe bowls of violets. There was plenty of light from the fire, and even from the windows, to read her letters by; she went first to one of the casements and looked at the night, which was growing very wild and dark. Though day still lingered, she could hear the wind go screaming down the lake, and the rush of the swollen water swirling against the terrace buttresses below. All beyond, woods, hills, mountains, were invisible under the grey mist.
‘I hope he will not be late,’ she thought, but she was too keen a mountaineer to be apprehensive. Sabran now knew every road and path through all the Tauern as well as she did. She returned to her seat and unlocked the leather bag; there were several newspapers, two letters for the Princess, three or four for Sabran, and one only for herself. She laid his aside for him, sent those of the Princess to her room, and opened her own. The writing of it she did not recognise; it was anonymous, and was very brief.
‘If you wish to know why the Marquis de Sabran did not go to Russia, ask Egon Vàsàrhely.’
That was all: so asps are little.
She sat quite still, and felt as if a bolt had fallen on her from the leaden skies without. Vàsàrhely knew, the writer of the letter knew, and she —— she —— did not know! That was her first distinct thought.
If Sabran had entered the room at that instant she would have held to him this letter, and would have said, ‘I ask you, not him.’ He was absent, and she sat motionless, keeping the unsigned note in her hand, and staring down on it. Then she turned and looked at the post-mark. It was ‘Vienna,’ A city of a million souls! What clue to the writer was there? She read it again and again, as even the wisest will read such poisonous things, as though by repeated study that mystery would be compelled to stand out clearly revealed. It did not say enough to have been the mere invention of the sender; it was not worded as an insinuation, but as a fact. For that reason it took a hold upon her mind which would at once have rejected a fouler or a darker suggestion. Although free from any baseness of suspicion there was yet that in the name of her cousin, in juxtaposition with her husband’s, which could not do otherwise than startle and carry with it a corroboration of the statement made. A wave of the deep anger which had moved her on her husband’s first refusal swept over her again. Her hand clenched, her eyes hashed, where she sat alone in the gathering shadows.
There came a sound at the door of the room and a small golden head came from behind the tapestry.
‘May we come in?’ said Bela; it was the children’s hour.
She rose, and put him backward.
‘Not now, my darling; I am occupied. Go away for a little while.’
The women who were with them took the children back to their apartments. She sat down with the note still in her hand. What could it mean? No good thing was ever said thus. She pondered long, and was unable to imagine any sense or meaning it could have, though all the while memories thronged upon, her of words, and looks, and many trifles which had told her of the enmity that was existent between her cousin and Sabran. That she saw; but there her knowledge ceased, her vision failed. She could go no further, conjecture nothing more.
‘Ask Egon!’ Did they think she would ask him or any living being that which Sabran had refused to confide in her? Whoever wrote this knew her little, she thought. Perhaps there were women who would have done so. She was not one of them.
With a sudden impulse of scorn she cast the sheet of paper into the fire before her. Then she went to her writing-table and enclosed the envelope in another, which she addressed to her lawyers in Salzburg. She wrote with it: ‘This is the cover to an anonymous letter which I have received. Try your uttermost to discover the sender.’
Then she sat down again and thought long, and wearily, and vainly. She could make nothing of it. She could see no more than a wayfarer whom a blank wall faces as he goes. The violets and orange blossoms were close at her elbow; she never in after time smelt their perfume without a sick memory of the stunned, stupefied bewilderment of that hour.
The door unclosed again, a voice again spoke behind as a hand drew back the folds of the tapestry.
‘What, are you in darkness here? I am very cold. Have you no tea for me?’ said Sabran, as he entered, his eyes brilliant; his cheeks warm, from the long gallop against the wind. He had changed his clothes, and wore a loose suit of velvet; the servants, entering behind him, lit the candelabra, and brought in the lamps; warmth, and gladness, and light seemed to come with him; she looked up and thought, ‘Ah! what does any thing matter? He is home in safety!’
The impulse to ask of him what she had been bidden to ask of Egon Vàsàrhely had passed with the intense surprise of the first moment. She could not ask of him what she had promised never to seek to know; she could not reopen a long-closed wound. But neither could she forget the letter lying burnt there amongst the flames of the wood. He noticed that her usual perfect calm was broken as she welcomed him, gave him his letters, and bade the servants bring tea; but he thought it mere anxiety, and his belated drive; and being tired with a pleasant fatigue which made rest sweet, he stretched his limbs out on a low couch beside the hearth, and gave himself up to that delicious dreamy sense of bien-être which a beautiful woman, a beautiful room, tempered warmth and light, and welcome repose, bring to any man after some hours effort and exposure in wild weather and intense cold and increasing darkness.
‘I almost began to think I should not see you to-night,’ he said happily, as he took from her hand the little cup of Frankenthal china which sparkled like a jewel in the light. ‘I had fairly lost my way, and Josef knew it no better than I; the snow fell with incredible rapidity, and it seemed to grow night in an instant. I let the horses take their road, and they brought us home; but if there be any poor pedlars or carriers on the hills to-night I fear they will go to their last sleep.’
She shuddered and looked at him with dim, fond eyes, ‘He is here; he is mine,’ she thought; ‘what else matters?’
Sabran stretched out his fingers and took some of the violets from the Saxe bowl and fastened them in his coat as he went on speaking of the weather, of the perils of the roads whose tracks were obliterated, and of the prowess and intelligence of his horses, who had found the way home when he and his groom, a man born and bred in the Tauern, had both been utterly at a loss. The octagon-room had never looked lovelier and gayer to him, and his wife had never looked more beautiful than both did now as he came to them out of the darkness and the snowstorm and the anxiety of the last hour.
‘Do not run those risks,’ she murmured. ‘You know all that your life is to me.’
The letter which lay burnt in the fire, and the dusky night of ice and wind without, had made him dearer to her than ever. And yet the startled, shocked sense of some mystery, of some evil, was heavy upon her, and did not leave her that evening nor for many a day after.
‘You are not well?’ he said to her anxiously later, as they left the dinner-table. She answered evasively.
‘You know I am not always quite well now. It is nothing. It will pass.’
‘I was wrong to alarm you by being out so late in such weather,’ he said with self-reproach. ‘I will go out earlier in future.’
‘Do not wear those violets,’ she said, with a trivial caprice wholly unlike her, as she took them from his coat. ‘They are Bonapartist emblems — fleurs de malheur.’
He smiled, but he was surprised, for he had never seen in her any one of t
hose fanciful whims and vagaries that are common to women.
‘Give me any others instead,’ he said; ‘I wear but your symbol, O my lady!’
She took some myrtle and lilies of the valley from one of the large porcelain jars in the Rittersaal.
‘These are our flowers,’ she said as she gave them to him. ‘They mean love and peace.’
He turned from her slightly as he fastened them where the others had been.
All the evening she was pre-occupied and nervous. She could not forget the intimation she had received. It was intolerable to her to have anything of which she could not speak to her husband. Though they had their own affairs apart one from the other, there had been nothing of moment in hers that she had ever concealed from him. But here it was impossible for her to speak to him, since she had pledged herself never to seek to know the reason of an action which, however plausibly she explained it to herself, remained practically inexplicable and unintelligible. It was terrible to her, too, to feel that the lines of a coward who dared not sign them had sunk so deeply into her mind that she did not question their veracity. They had at once carried conviction to her that Egon Vàsàrhely did know what they said he did. She could not have told why this was, but it was so. It was what hurt her most —— others knew; she did not.
She felt that if she could have spoken to Sabran of it, the matter would have become wholly indifferent to her; but the obligation of reticence, the sense of separation which it involved, oppressed her greatly. She was also haunted by the memory of the enmity which existed between these men, whose names were so strangely coupled in the anonymous counsel given her.