Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She stayed long in her oratory that night, seeking vainly for calmness and patience under this temptation; seeking beyond all things for strength to put the poison of it wholly from her mind. She dreaded lest it should render her irritable and suspicious. She reproached herself for having been guilty of even so much insinuation of rebuke to him as her words with the flower had carried in them. She had ideas of the duties of a woman to her husband widely different to those which prevail in the world. She allowed herself neither irritation nor irony against him. ‘When the thoughts rebel, the acts soon revolt,’ she was wont to say to herself, and even in her thoughts she would never blame him.

  Prayer, even if it have no other issue or effect, rarely fails to tranquillise and fortify the heart which is lifted up ever so vaguely in search of a superhuman aid. She left her oratory strengthened and calmed, resolved in no way to allow such partial success to their unknown foe as would be given if the treacherous warning brought any suspicion or bitterness to her mind. She passed through the open archway in the wall which divided his rooms from hers, and looked at him where he lay already asleep upon his bed, early fatigued by the long cold drive from which he had returned at nightfall. He was never more handsome than sleeping calmly thus, with the mellow light of a distant lamp reaching the fairness of his face. She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes; then stooped and kissed him without awaking him.

  ‘Ah! my love,’ she thought, ‘what should ever come between us? Hardly even death, I think, for if I lost you I should not live long without you.’

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  The Salzburg lawyers employed all the resources of the Viennese police to discover the sender of the envelope, but vainly; nothing was learned by all the efforts made. But the letter constantly haunted her thoughts. It produced in her an uneasiness and an apprehensiveness wholly foreign to her temper. The impossibility also of saying anything about it increased the weight of it on her memory. Yet she never once thought of asking Vàsàrhely. She wrote to him now and then, as she had always done, to give him tidings of her health or of her movements, but she never once alluded in the most distant terms to the anonymous information she had received. If he had been there beside her she would not have spoken of it. Of the two, she would sooner have reopened the subject to her husband. But she never did so. She had promised him to be silent, and to her creed a promise was inviolate, never to be retracted, be the pressure or the desire to do so what it would.

  It was these grand lines on which her character and her habits were cast that awed him, and made him afraid to tell her his true history. Had he revered her less he would probably have deceived her less. Had she been of a less noble temperament she would also probably have been much less easy to deceive.

  Her health was at this time languid, and more uncertain than usual, and the two lines of the letter were often present to her thoughts, tormenting her with idle conjecture, painful doubt, none the less painful because it could take no definite shape. Sometimes when she was not well enough to accompany him out of doors or drive her own sleigh through the keen clear winter air, she sat doing nothing, and thinking only of this thing, in the same room, with the same smell of violets about her, musing on what it might by any possibility mean. Any secret was safe with Egon, but then since the anonymous writer was in possession of it the secret was not only his. She wondered sometimes in terror whether it could be anything that might in after years affect her children’s future, and then as rapidly discarded the bare thought as so much dishonour to their father. ‘It is only because I am now nervous and impressionable,’ she said to herself,’that this folly takes such a hold upon me. When I am well again I shall not think of it. Who is it says of anonymous letters that they are like “les immondices des rues: il faut boucher le nez, tourner la tête et passer outre?”’

  But ‘les immondices’ spoiled the odours of the new year violets to her.

  In the early spring of the year she gave birth to another son. She suffered more than she had ever done before, and recovered less quickly. The child was like all the others, fair, vigorous, and full of health. She wished to give him her husband’s name, but Sabran so strenuously opposed the idea that she yielded, and named him after her brother Victor, who had fallen at Magenta.

  There were the usual rejoicings throughout the estates, rejoicings that were the outcome of genuine affection and fealty to the race of Szalras, whose hold on the people of the Tauern had resisted all the revolutionary movements of the earlier part of the century, and had fast root in the hearts of the staunch and conservative mountaineers. But for the first time as she heard the hearty ‘Hoch!’ of the assembled peasantry echoing beneath her windows, and the salvos fired from the old culverins on the keep, a certain fear mingled with her maternal pride, and she thought: ‘Will the people love them as well twenty years hence, fifty years hence, when I shall be no more? Will my memory be any shield to them? Will the traditions of our race outlast the devouring changes of the world?’

  Meantime the Princess, happy and smiling, showed the little new-born noble to the stalwart chamois hunters, the comely farmers and fishermen, the clear-eyed stout-limbed shepherds and labourers gathered bareheaded round the Schloss.

  Bela stood by contemplating the crowd he knew so well; he did not see why they should cheer any other child beside himself. He stood with his little velvet cap in his hand, because he was always told to do so, but he felt very inclined to put it on; if his father had not been present there he would have done so.

  ‘If I have ever so many brothers,’ he said at last thoughtfully to Greswold, who was by his side, ‘it will not make any difference, will it? I shall always be the one?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the physician.

  ‘They will none of them be like me? They will none of them be as great as I am? Not if I have twenty?’

  ‘You will be always the eldest son, of course,’ said the old man, repressing a smile. ‘Yes; you will be their head, their chief, their leading spirit; but for that reason you will have much more expected of you than will be expected of them; you will have to learn much more, and try to be always good. Do you follow me, Count Bela?’

  Bela’s little rosy mouth shut itself up contemptuously. ‘I shall be always the eldest, and I shall do whatever I like. I do not see why they want any others than me.’

  ‘You will not do always what you like, Count Bela.’

  ‘Who shall prevent me?’

  ‘The law, which you will have to obey like everyone else.’

  ‘I shall make the laws when I am a little older,’ said Bela. ‘And they will be for my brothers and all the people, but not for me. I shall do what I like.’

  ‘That will be very ungenerous,’ said Greswold, quietly. ‘Your mother, the Countess, is very different. She is stern to herself, and indulgent to all others. That is why she is beloved. If you will think of yourself so much when you are grown up, you will be hated.’

  Bela flushed a little guiltily and angrily.

  ‘That will not matter,’ he said sturdily. ‘I shall please myself always.’

  ‘And be unkind to your brothers?’

  ‘Not if they do what I tell them; I will be very kind if they are good. Gela always does what I tell him,’ he added after a little pause; ‘I do not want any but Gela.’

  ‘It is natural you should be fondest of Gela, as he is nearest your age, but you must love all the brothers you may have, or you will distress your mother very greatly.’

  ‘Why does she want any but me?’ said Bela, clinging to his sense of personal wrong. And he was not to be turned from that.

  ‘She wants others beside you,’ said the physician, adroitly, ‘because to be happy she needs children who are tender-hearted, unselfish, and obedient. You are none of those things, my Count Bela, so Heavens ends her consolation.’

  Bela opened his blue eyes very wide, and he coloured with mortification.

  ‘She always loves me best!’ he said haughtily. ‘She alw
ays will!’

  ‘That will depend on yourself, my little lord,’ said Greswold, with a significance which was not lost on the quick intelligence of the child; and he never forgot this day when his brother Victor was shown to the people.

  ‘There will be no lack of heirs to Hohenszalras,’ said the Princess meanwhile to his father.

  He thought as he heard:

  ‘And if ever she know she can break her marriage like a rotten thread! Those boys can all be made as nameless as I was! Would she do it? Perhaps not, for the children’s sake. God knows —— she might change even to them; she might hate them as she loves them now, because they are mine.’

  Even as he sat beside her couch with her hand in his these thoughts pursued and haunted him. Remorse and fear consumed him. When she looked at the blue eyes of her new-born son, and said to him with a happy smile: ‘He will be just as much like you as the others are,’ he could only think with a burning sense of shame, ‘Like me! like a traitor! like a liar! like a thief!’ —— and the faces of these children seemed to him like those of avenging angels.

  He thought with irrepressible agony of the fact that her country’s laws would divorce her from him if she chose, did ever the truth come to her ear. He had always known this indeed, as he had known all the other risks he ran in doing what he did. Put it had been far away, indistinct, unasserted; whenever the memory of it had passed over him he had thrust it away. Now when another knew his secret, he could not do so. He had a strange sensation of having fallen from some great height; of having all his life slide away like melting ice out of his hands. He never once doubted for an instant the good faith of Egon Vàsàrhely. He knew that his lips would no more unclose to tell his secret than the glaciers yonder would find human voice. But the consciousness that one man lived, moved, breathed, rose with each day, and went amongst other men, bearing with him that fatal knowledge, made it now impossible for himself ever to forget it. A dull remorse, a sharp apprehension, were for ever his companions, and never left him for long even in his sweetest hours. He did justice to the magnificent generosity of the one who spared him. Egon Vàsàrhely knew, as he knew, that she, hearing the truth, could annul the marriage if she chose. His children would have no rights, no name, if their mother chose to separate herself from him. The law would make her once more as free as though she had never wedded him. He knew that, and the other man who loved her knew it too. He could measure the force of Vàsàrhely’s temptation as that simple and heroic soldier could not stoop to measure his.

  He was deeply unhappy, but he concealed it from her. Even when his heart beat against hers it seemed to him always that there was an invisible wall between himself and her. He longed to tell the whole truth to her, but he was afraid; if the whole pain and shame had been his own that the confession would have caused, he would have dared it; but he had not the heart to inflict on her such suffering, not the courage to destroy their happiness with his own hand. Egon Vàsàrhely alone knew, and he for her sake would never speak. As for the reproach of his own conscience, as for the remorse that the words of his children might at any moment call up in him, these lie must bear. He was a man of cool judgment and of ready resource, and though he had never foreseen the sharp repentance which his better nature now felt, he knew that he would be able to live it down as he had crushed out so many other scruples. He vowed to himself that as far as in him lay he would atone for his act. The moral influence of his wife had not been without effect on him. Not altogether, but partially, he had grown to believe in what she believed in, of the duty of human life to other lives; he had not her sympathy for others, but he had admired it, and in his own way followed it, though without her faith.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  Life went on in its old pathways at Hohenszalras. Nothing more, was said by him, or to him, as to his rejection of the Russian mission. She was niggard in nothing, and when she offered her faith or pledged her silence, gave both entirely and ungrudgingly. Sabran to her showed an increase of devotion, an absolute adoration which would in themselves have sufficed to console any woman; and if the most observant member of their household, Greswold, perceived in him a preoccupation, a languor, a gloom, which boded ill for their future peace, the old man was too loyal in his attachment not to endeavour to shake off his own suspicions and discredit his own penetration.

  The Princess had been favoured by a note from Olga Brancka, in which that lady wrote: ‘Have you discovered the nature of his refusal of Russia? Myself, I believe that I was to blame. I hinted to him that he would be tempted to his old sins in St. Petersburg, and that Wanda would be very miserable there. It seems that this was enough for the tender heart of this devoted lover, and too much for his wisdom and his judgment; he rejected the mission after accepting it. I believe the Court is furious. I am not de service now, so that I have no opportunity of endeavouring to restore him to favour; but I imagine the Emperor will not quarrel for ever with the Hohenszalrasburg.

  The letter restored him at least to the favour of Mdme. Ottilie. Exaggerated as such a scruple appeared it did not seem to her impossible in a man whose devotion to his wife she daily witnessed, shown in a hundred traits. She blamed him still severely in her own thoughts for what she held an inexcusable disrespect to the Crown, but she kept her word scrupulously and never spoke to him on the subject.

  ‘Where else in the wide world would any man have found such forbearance?’ he thought with gratitude, and he knew that nowhere would such delicate sentiment have existed outside the pale of that fine patrician dignity which is as incapable of the vulgarity of inquisitiveness and interrogation as was the Spartan of lament.

  The months went by. They did not leave home; he seemed to have lost all wish for any absence, and even repulsed the idea of inviting the usual house parties of the year. She supposed that he was averse to meeting people who might recur to his rejection of the post he had once accepted. The summer passed and the autumn came; he spent his time in occasional sport, the keen and perilous sport of the Austrian mountains, and more often and more faithfully beguiled himself with those arts of which he was a brilliant master, though he would call himself no more than a mere amateur. From the administration of the estates he had altogether withdrawn himself.

  ‘You are so much wiser than I,’ he always said to her; and when she would have referred to him, replied: ‘You have your lawyers; they are all honest men. Consult them rather than me.’

  With the affairs of Idrac only he continued to concern himself a little, and was persistent in setting aside all its revenues to accumulate for his second son.

  ‘I wish you cared more about all these things,’ she said to him one day, when she had in her hand the reports from the mines of Galicia. He answered angrily, ‘I have no right to them. They are not mine. If you chose to give them all away to the Crown I should say nothing.’

  ‘Not even for the children’s sake?’

  ‘No: you would be entirely justified if you liked to give the children nothing.’

  ‘I really do not understand you,’ she said in great surprise.

  ‘Everything is yours,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘And the children too, surely!’ she said, with a smile: but the strangeness of the remark disquieted her. ‘It is over-sensitiveness,’ she thought; ‘he can never altogether forget that he was poor. It is for that reason public life would have been so good for him; dignities which he enjoyed of his own, honours that he arrived at through his own attainments.’

  Chagrined to have lost, the opportunity of winning personal honours in a field congenial to him, the sense that everything was hers could hardly fail to gall him sometimes constantly, though she strove to efface any remembrance or reminder that it was so.

  In the midsummer of that year, whilst they were quite alone, they were surprised by another letter from Mdme. Brancka, in which she proposed to take Hohenszalras on her way from France to Tsarköe Selo, where she was about to pay a visit which could not be declined by her.

  Whe
n in the spring he had written with formality to her to announce the birth of his son Victor, she had answered with a witty coquettish reply such as might well have been provocative of further correspondence. But he had not taken up the invitation. Mortified and irritated, she had compared his writing with the piece of burnt paper, and been more satisfied than ever that he had penned the name of Vassia Kazán. But even were it so, what, she wondered, had it to do with Russia? He and Egon Vàsàrhely were not friends so intimate that they had any common interests one with the other. The mystery had interested her intensely when her rapid intuition had connected the resignation of Sabran’s appointment with the messenger sent to him from Taróc. Her impatience to be again in his presence grew intense. She imagined a thousand stories, to cast each aside in derision as impossible. All her suppositions were built upon no better basis than a fragment of charred paper; but her shrewd intuition bore her into the region of truth, though the actual truth of course never suggested itself to her even in her most fantastic and dramatic visions. Finally she thus proposed to visit Hohenszalras in the midsummer months.

  ‘Last year you had such a crowd about you,’ she wrote, ‘that I positively saw nothing of you, liebe Wanda. You are alone now, and I venture to propose myself for a fortnight. You cannot exactly be said to be in the way to anywhere, but I shall make you so. When one is going to Russia, a matter of another five hundred miles or so is a bagatelle.’

  ‘We must let her come,’ said Wanda, as she gave the letter to Sabran, who, having read it, said with much sincerity ——

  ‘For heaven’s sake, do not. A fortnight of Madame Olga! as well have —— a century of “Madame Angot!”’

  ‘Can I prevent her?’

  ‘You can make some excuse. I do not like Mdme. Brancka.’