by Ouida
‘No, he does not care for Romaris. He dislikes its very name. He would never hear of one of the children bearing it. There must be something he does not say.’
She remembered sadly what the Duc de Noira had once said to her:
‘In morals as in metals, my dear, you cannot work gold without supporting it by alloy.’
Madame Brancka had patience and skill perfect enough to refrain altogether from those hints and tentatives by which a less clever woman would have attempted to approach and surprise the key to those hidden facts which she believed to be the theme of his correspondence with Vàsàrhely and the cause of his rejection of the Russian appointment. A less clever woman would have alarmed him, and betrayed herself by perpetual allusions to the matter. But she never did this: she treated him with an alternation of subtle compliment and ironical, malice, such as was most certain to allure and perplex any man, and he never by the most distant suspicion imagined that she knew anything which he desired unknown. She was a woman of strong nerve, and her equanimity in his and his wife’s presence was wholly undisturbed by her consciousness that she had dispatched the anonymous suggestion as a seed of discord to Hohenszalras. She knew indeed that it was not what people of her rank and breeding did do, that it was not honest warfare, that it was what even the very easy morality of her own world would have condemned with disgust; but she bore the sin of it very lightly. If she had been driven to excuse it, she would have characterised it as mere mischief. If her sister-in-law had shown her the letter, she would have glanced over it with a tranquil face and an air of utter unconcern. If she could not have done this sort of thing she would have thought herself a very poor creature. ‘I believe you could be as wicked as the Scotch Lady Macbeth,’ Stefan Brancka had said once to her; and she had answered with much contempt: ‘At least I promise you I should not walk in my sleep if I were so. Your Lady Macbeth was a grotesque barbarian.’
A great deal of the sin of this world, which is not at all like Lady Macbeth’s, comes from the want of excitement felt by persons, only too numerous, who have exhausted excitement in its usual shapes. She had done so; she required what was detestable to arouse her, because she had lived at such high pressure that any healthy diversion was vapid and stupid to her. The destruction, if she could achieve it, of her sister-in-law’s happiness, offered her in prospect such an excitement; and the whim she had taken for passion grew out of waywardness till it nearly became passion in truth. She never precisely weighed or considered its possible consequences, but she endeavoured to arouse a response in him with all the unscrupulous skill of a mistress in coquetry. When moved by Madame Ottilie’s warning he strove honestly to avoid her, and often excused himself from obedience to her summons, the opposition only stimulated her endeavours, and made a smarting mortification and anger against him supply a double motor-power for his subjection. If she could have believed that she succeeded in making his wife anxious, she might have been content; but Wanda always received her with the same serenity and courtesy, which, if it covered disdain, covered it unimpeachably with admirable grace.
‘If one broke her heart, she would only make one a grand courtesy with a bland smile,’ thought Olga Brancka, irritably and impatiently. ‘There are people who die standing. Wanda would do that.’
That ill weeds grow apace is a true old saw, never truer than of vindictive and envious passions. Sheer and causeless jealousy of her sister-in-law had been alive in her many years, and now, by being fed and unresisted, so grew that it became almost a restless hatred. It was far more her enmity to his wife than any other sentiment which inspired her with a fantastic and unhealthy desire to attract and detach Sabran from his allegiance. Joined to it now there was a sense of some mystery in him that baffled her, and which was to such a woman the most pungent of all stimulants. In all her câlineries and all her railleries she never lost sight of this one purpose, of surprising from him the secret which she believed existed. But he was always on his guard with her; even when most influenced by her atmosphere and her magnetism he did not once lose his self-control and his habitual coolness. At moments when she was most nearly triumphing, the remembrance of his wife came over him like a breath of sweet pure air that passes through a hot-house, and restored him to self-possession and to loyalty. She began to fear that all the ability with which she had procured her exemption from Court duties, and had induced her husband to remain in Vienna, was all vain, and she grew bolder and more reckless in her use of stratagems and solicitations to keep Sabran beside her in these early spring days given over to racing and sporting, and at all the evening entertainments at which the great world met, and whither she carried with so much effect her gleaming sapphires and her black pearls.
‘Black pearls argue a perverted taste,’ said the Princess Ottilie once to her, and she unabashed answered:
‘It is perverted tastes that make any noise in the world or possess any flavour. White pearls are much more beautiful, no doubt, but then they are everywhere, from the Crown jewel-cases to the peasant’s necks; but my black pearls! you cannot find their match — and how white one’s throat looks with them. I only want a green rose.’
‘Chemicals can supply any deformity,’ said the Princess, drily. ‘Doing so is called science, I believe.’
‘Do you call me a deformity?’ she asked, with some annoyance.
‘You are an elaborate production of the laboratory,’ said the Princess, calmly. ‘I am sure you will admit yourself that nature has had very little to do with you.’
‘My pearls are black by a freak of nature,’ said Madame Olga. ‘Perhaps I am the same.’
The Princess made a little gesture signifying that politeness forbade her from assent, but she thought: ‘Yes; you were never a white pearl, but you have steeped yourself in acids and solutions of all degrees of poison till you are darker than you need have been, and you think your darkness light, and some men think so too.’
Sabran had grown to look for that necklace of black pearls with eagerness in the society to which they both belonged. Few evenings found him where Madame Brancka was not. She had known his Paris of the Second Empire; she had known Compiègne and Pierrefonds as he had known them; she knew all the friendships and the bywords of his old life, and all the dessous des cartes of that which was now around them. She amused him. She comprehended all he said, half uttered. She remembered all he recalled. At Hohenszalras he had not found any charm in this, but here he did find one. She suited Paris; she knew it profoundly, she liked all its pastimes, she understood all its sports and all its slang. She hunted at Chantilly, betted at La Marche, plunged at baccara, shot and fenced well and gaily, had the theatres and all their jargon at her fingers’ ends; all this made her no mean aspirant to the post of mistress of his thoughts. All which had seemed tiresome, artificial, even ridiculous, amidst the grand forests and healthful air of the Iselthal became in Paris agreeable and even bewitching. Once he said almost angrily to his wife:
‘You, who ride so superbly, should surely show yourself at the Duc’s hunts. What is the use of long gallops in the Bois before anyone else is out of bed?’
‘I never rode for show yet,’ said Wanda, in surprise. ‘And you know I never would join in any sort of chase.’
‘Surely such humanitarianism is exaggeration,’ he said impatiently. ‘Olga Brancka rides every day they meet at Chantilly, and she is by no means of your form in the saddle.’
‘I have never yet imitated Olga,’ said his wife, a little coldly; but she did not object when day after day her finest horses were lent to Madame Brancka. She never by a word or a hint reminded him that he was not absolute master of all which belonged to her. Only when her sister-in-law wanted to take Bela and his pony to Chantilly, she made her will strongly felt in refusal.
The child, whose fancy had been fired by what he had heard of the ducal hunting, of the great hounds and the stately gatherings, like pictures of the Valois time, was passionately angered at being forbidden to go, and made his mother’s he
art ache with his flashing eyes and his flaming cheeks. ‘Cannot she leave even the children alone?’ she thought, with more bitterness than she had ever felt against anyone.
A few nights later they were both at the Grand Opéra, in the box which was allotted to the name of the Countess von Szalras. She was herself not very well; she was pale, she sat a little away from the light. Her gown was of white velvet; she had no ornament except a cluster of gardenias and stephanotis, and her habitual necklace of pearls. Olga Brancka, in a costume of many shaded reds, marvellously embroidered in gold cords, was as gorgeous as a tropical bird, and sat with her arms upon the front of the box, playing with a fan of red feathers, or looking through her glass round the house. He talked most with her, but he looked most at his wife. There was no woman, in a full and brilliant house, who could compare with her. A thrill of the pride of possession passed through him. The malicious eyes of the other, glancing towards him over her shoulder, read his thoughts. She smiled provokingly.
‘Le mari amoureux!’ she murmured. ‘Really I did not believe in the existence of that type. But it is quite admirable that it should exist. Its example is very much wanted in Paris.’
He felt himself colour like a youth, but it was with irritation; he was at a loss for an answer. To have defended his admiration of his wife at the sword’s point would have been easy; to defend it from a woman’s ridicule was more difficult. Wanda did not hear; she was listening to the song of Dinorah, and was dreamily regretting the solitude of Hohenszalras, and thinking of what pleasure it would be to return. All the news that Greswold and her stewards sent her thence was precious to her; no details seemed to her insignificant or without interest; and her own letters in return were full of minute attention to the welfare of everyone and of everything she had left there. She was roused from her home reverie by the voice of her sister-in-law, raised more highly and saying impatiently:
‘Why should you object, Réné, when I say that I wish it?’
‘What do you wish?’ said Wanda, who always felt a singular annoyance whenever she heard him thus familiarly addressed. ‘Whatever you may wish, I am sure M. de Sabran can require no second bidding to procure it for you, if it be within the limits of the possible.’
‘I wish to see a Breton Pardon,’ said Olga Brancka, with a gesture of her fan towards the stage. ‘There is one next week in his own country; I want him to invite me — us — to Romaris.’
Wanda, who knew that he always shrank from the mention of Romaris, interposed to save him from persecution.
‘There is nothing at Romaris to invite us to,’ she said for him. ‘Neither you nor I can live in a cabin or a fishing-boat; especially can we not in March weather.’
‘You can live in a hut on your Alps,’ returned the other, ‘and I do not dislike tent life in the Karpathians. If he sent his major-domo down, he would soon make the sands and rocks blossom like the rose, and villages would arise as fast as they did before the great Katherine. Why not? It would be charming. Has he no feeling for the cradle of his ancestors? We must put him through a course of Lamartine.’
‘An unfortunate allusion; he lived to lose Milly,’ said Sabran, finding himself forced to say something. ‘In midsummer, Mesdames, you might perhaps rough it, tant bien que mal; but now! — there is nothing to be seen except fog and surf at sea, and mud and pools inland. Even a Pardon would not reconcile you; not even the Breton jackets with scriptural stories embroidered on them, nor the bagpipes.’
‘Positively, you will not take us?’
‘I must disobey even your wishes in the Ides of March.’
‘But whether in March or July — why do you never go yourself?’
‘There is nothing to go there for,’ he answered, almost losing his patience; ‘a people to whom I am only a name, a strip of shore on which I only own a few wind-tormented oak-trees!’
‘Only imagine the duties that Wanda would evolve in your place out of those people and those oaks!’
‘I have not Wanda’s virtues,’ he said, half sadly, half jestingly.
‘We have none of us, or the Millennium would have arrived. I cannot understand your dislike to your melancholy sea-shore. Most of your countrymen are for ever home-sick away from their landes and their dolmen. You seem to feel no throb for the mater patria, even when listening to Dinorah, which sets every other Breton’s heart beating.’
‘My heart is Austrian,’ said Sabran, with a bow towards his wife.
‘That is very pretty, and what you are also obliged to say,’ interrupted Madame Brancka. ‘But why hate Romaris? For my part, I believe you see ghosts there.’
His wife said, with a quick reproach in her words: ‘The ghosts of men who knew how to live and to die nobly? He would not be afraid to meet them.’
The simplicity of the words and the trustfulness of them sank into his soul. A pang of terrible consciousness went through him like poisoned steel. As his wife’s eyes sought his the lights swam round with him, the music was only a confused murmur on his ear; he heard as if from afar off the voice of Olga Brancka saying: ‘My dear Wanda, you are always so exalted!’
At that moment some one knocked at the door: he was glad to rise and open it to admit Count Kaulnitz and two other gentlemen.
Hardly anything else which his wife could have said would have hurt him quite so much.
As he sat there in the brilliant illumination and the hot-house warmth, with her delicate profile clear as a cameo against the light, a sensation of physical cold passed through him. He saw himself as he was, an actor, a traitor, a perjured and dishonoured man. What right had he there more than any galley-slave at the hulks? — he, Vassia Kazán?
Well tutored by the ways of the world, he laughed, and spoke, and criticised the rendering of the opera with his usual readiness of grace; but Olga Brancka had marked the fleeting expression of his face, and said to herself: ‘Whatever the secret be, the key of it lies in the sands of Romaris.’
As she took his arm, when they left the box, she murmured to him: ‘I shall go to Romaris, and you will take me.’
‘I think not,’ he said curtly, without his usual suavity. ‘I am the servant of all your sex, it is true, but like all servants I am only willing to be commanded by my mistress.’
‘O most faithful of lovers, I understand!’ she said, with a contemptuous laugh. ‘And she never commands you, she only obeys. You are very fortunate, even though you do have ghosts at your ruined tower by the sea.’
‘Yes, I am fortunate, indeed,’ he answered gravely, and his eyes glanced towards his wife, who was standing a stair or two below conversing with her cousin Kaulnitz.
‘Even though you had to abandon Russia,’ murmured Olga Brancka, dreamily. She could feel that a certain thrill passed through him. He was startled and alarmed. Was it possible that Egon Vàsàrhely had betrayed him?
‘Paris is much more agreeable than St. Petersburg,’ he answered carelessly. ‘I am no loser. Wanda would have been unhappy, and, what would have been worse, she would never have said so.’
‘No, she would never have said so. She is like the Sioux, the Stoics, and the people who died in lace ruffles in ‘89. I beg your pardon, those are your people, I forgot; the people whose ghosts forbid you to entertain us at Romaris.’
‘I would brave an army of ghosts to please Madame Brancka,’ said Sabran, with his usual gallantry.
‘Call me Cousinette, at the least,’ she murmured, as they descended the last stair.
‘Bon soir, madame!’ he said, as he closed the door of her carriage.
‘Are you coming with me?’ said Wanda, as she went to hers.
He hesitated. ‘I think I will go for an hour to the clubs,’ he answered. He kissed her hand. As he drew the fur rug over her skirts, she thought his face was very pale as she saw it by the lamplight. She wished to ask him if he were quite well, but she restrained herself, knowing how intolerable such importunities are to men. Instead, she smiled at him, as she said, ‘Amusez-vous bien,’ and left hi
m to divert himself as he chose.
‘How little women understand men, and how poorly they love them when they do not leave them alone!’ she thought, as her carriage rolled homeward. She never troubled him, never interrogated him, never even tried to conjecture what he did when away from her. Sometimes, when he returned at sunrise, she had already risen, and had said a prayer with her children, written her letters, or visited her horses, but she always met him with a smile and without a question.
It hurt her with an ever-deepening wound to perceive the attraction which Olga Brancka possessed for him. She did not for a moment believe that it was love, but she saw that it was an influence which had audacity enough to compete with her own, a sort, of fascination which, commencing with dislike, increased to an unhealthy and morbid potency. She could not bring herself to speak of it to him. She was not one of those women who reproach and implore. It would have seemed to her as if both he and she would have lost all dignity in each other’s sight if once they had stooped to what society calls jestingly ‘a scene.’ He guessed aright that if she had really believed herself displaced in his heart she would have left him without a word. She was too conscious of his entire worship of her to be moved to anything like that jealous passion which would have seemed to her the last depths of humiliation; but she was pained, fretted, stirred to a scornful wonder by the power this frivolous woman possessed of usurping his time and giving colour to his thoughts.
It hurt her to think he feared her too much to tell her of any trouble, any folly, any memory. She reproached herself with having perhaps alienated his confidence by the gravity of her temper, the seriousness of her opinions. It would be hard to think that frivolous shallow women could inspire men with more confidence than a deeper nature could do, but perhaps it might be so. He had sometimes said to her, half jestingly: ‘You should dwell among the angels; the human world is unfit for you!’ Was it that which alarmed him?