by Ouida
With that subtle sense of what is in the air around which so often makes us aware of what is never spoken in our hearing, she was sensible that the great world in which they lived began to speak of the intimacy between her husband and the wife of her cousin Stefan. She became sensible that the world was in general disposed to resent for her, to pity her, and to censure them, whilst it coupled their names together. The very suspicion brought her an intolerable shame. When she was quite alone, thinking of it, her face burned with angry blushes. No one hinted it to her, no one breathed it to her, no one even expressed it by a glance in her presence; yet she was as well aware of what they were saying as though she had been in a hundred salons when they talked of her.
She knew the character of Olga Brancka, also, too well not to know that her own mortification would be the sweetest triumph for one of whose latent envy she had long been conscious. Ever since she had become the sole owner of the vast fortunes of the Szalras she had felt for ever upon her the evil eye of a foiled covetousness. The other had been very young, and had waited long and patiently, but her hour had now come.
She said nothing to her husband, and she preserved to her cousin’s wife the same perfect courtesy of manner; but in her own soul she began to suffer keenly, more from a sense of littleness in him than any mere personal feeling. To blame him, to entreat him, to seek to detach him — all these things were impossible to her.
‘If all our years of union do not hold him, what will?’ she thought; and the great natural hauteur of her temper could never have let her bend to the solicitation of a constancy denied to her.
One night, when they had no engagements but a ball, to which they could go at midnight, he did not come in to dinner. Always before, when he had not returned to dine, he had sent her a message to beg her not to wait. This evening there was no message. She and the Princess dined alone.
‘He was never discourteous before,’ said the Princess, who disliked such omissions.
‘It is his own house,’ said Wanda. ‘He has a right to come or not to come as he likes, without ceremony.’
‘There can never be too much ceremony,’ said the Princess. ‘It preserves amiability, self-respect, and good manners. It is the silver sheath which saves them from friction. It is the distinguishing mark between the gentleman and the boor. When politeness is only for the street or the salon, it is but a poor thing. He has always been so scrupulous in these matters.’
As Wanda later crossed the head of the grand staircase, to go and dress for the ball, she heard her maître d’hôtel in the hall below speak to the groom of the chambers.
‘Are the Marquis’s horses in, do you know?’ asked the former; and the latter answered:
‘Yes, hours ago; they are to go for him at the Union at eleven, but they left him at the Hôtel Brancka.’
Then the two officials laughed a little under their breath. Their words and their laughter came upwards distinctly to her ear. Her first impulse was a natural and passionate one of bitter burning pain and wonder. A sensation wholly new to her, of hatred and of impotence combined, seemed to choke her.
‘Is this what they call jealousy?’ she thought, and the mere thought checked her emotion and changed it to humiliation.
‘I — I — contend with her!’ she said in her soul. With a blindness before her eyes she retraced her steps, and went to the sleeping-rooms of her children. They were all asleep as they had been for hours. She sat down beside the bed of the little Ottilie; and gazed on the soft flushed loveliness of the child, bright as a rose in the dew.
She kissed the child’s cheek without waking her, and sat still there some time in the faint twilight and the perfect silence, only stirred by the light breathing of the sleepers; the repose, the innocence, the silence soothed and tranquillised her.
‘What matter a breath of folly?’ she thought. ‘He is their father; he is my love; we have all our lives to spend together.’
Then she rose and went to her chamber, and had herself clothed in a court dress of white taffetas and white velvet, embroidered with silver lilies.
‘Make me look well,’ she said to her women. ‘Put on all my diamonds.’
When he entered, near midnight, repentant, self-conscious, almost confused, she stopped his excuses with a smile.
‘I heard the servants say you dined with my cousin’s wife. Why not, if it please you? But I wonder she allows you to dine without un bout de toilette. Will you not make haste to dress? We shall be late.’
The words were perfectly simple and kind, but as she spoke them, so royal did she look, standing there in the blaze of her jewels, with her lily-laden train, that he felt abashed, ashamed, angered against himself, yet more angered against his temptress.
The old lines of Marlowe came to his mind and his lips:
‘O! thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’
‘I am not young enough to merit that quotation,’ she said, with a smile; ‘ten years ago perhaps — —’
Her heart contracted as she spoke; she was conscious that she had wished to look well in his eyes that night. The sense that she was stooping to measure weapons with such an opponent as Olga Brancka smote her with a sense of humiliation, which did not leave her throughout the after hours in which she carried her jewels through the gorgeous crowd of the ball at the Austrian Embassy.
‘If I lower myself to such a contest as that,’ she thought, ‘I shall lose all self-respect and all his reverence. I shall seem scarcely to him higher than an importunate mistress.’
Now and again there came to her a passionate anger against himself, a hardening of her heart to him, since he could thus be guilty of this inexcusable and insensate folly. But she would not harbour these; she would not judge him; she would not blame him. Her marriage vows were not mere dead letters to her. She conceived that obedience and silence were her clearest duties. Only one thing was outside her duty and beyond her force — she could not stoop to rivalry with Olga Brancka.
All at once she took a resolution of which few women would have been capable. She resolved to leave them.
Three days after the ball she said very quietly to him:
‘If you do not object, I will go home and take the children. It is time they were at Hohenszalras. Bela, above all, is not improved by what he sees and hears here; his studies are broken and his fancy is excited. In a very little while he would learn quite to despise his country pleasures, and forget all his own people. I will take them home.’
He looked at her quickly in surprise.
‘I do not think I can leave Paris immediately,’ he said, with hesitation. ‘I have many engagements. Of course you can send the children.’
‘I said I should go, not you. I long to see my own woods in their first leaf,’ she answered, with a smile. ‘It will be better for you to remain. No one ought to be allowed to suppose that you are bound to my side. That is neither for your dignity nor mine.’
‘Has anyone suggested — —’ he began, and paused in embarrassment, for he remembered the incessant taunts and innuendoes of Olga Brancka.
‘I do not listen to suggestions of that sort,’ she replied tranquilly. ‘You wish to remain here, and I wish to return home. We are both at liberty to do what we like. My love, she added, with a grave tenderness in her voice, ‘have I so poor an opinion of you that I dare not leave you alone? I think I should hardly care for a fealty which was only to be retained by my constant presence. That is not my ideal.’
He coloured; he was uncertain what to reply: before her he felt unworthy and disloyal. A vast sense of her immeasurable nobility swept over him, and made him conscious of his own unworthiness.
‘Whatever you wish, I wish,’ he murmured, and was aware that this could not be what she would gladly have heard him say. ‘I will follow you soon. Your heart is always in your highlands. I know that you are too grand a creature to be happy in cities. I have the baser leaven in me that is not above them. The forest
s and the mountains do not say to me all that they do to you.’
‘Men want the movement of the world, no doubt,’ she said, without showing any trace of disappointment. ‘I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see. The woods interest me, and the world does not.’
No more passed between them on the subject, but she gave orders to her people to make arrangements for her departure and her children’s in two days’ time, and sent out her cards of farewell.
‘Do you think you are wise?’ the Princess ventured to say to her.
She answered:
‘I know what you mean, dear mother; yes, I think so. To struggle for influence with another, and that other Olga! I should indeed despise myself if I could stoop so low. If he miss me he can follow me. If he do not — then he has no need of me.’
‘I confess I do not understand you,’ said Madame Ottilie; ‘to surrender so meekly!’
‘I surrender nothing,’ she said, almost sternly. ‘I know what I have seen again and again in society. The woman jealous and anxious, losing ground in his esteem and her own every hour, and rendering alike herself and him actors in a ludicrous comedy for the mockery of the world around them — a world which never has any sympathy for such a struggle. Indeed, why should it have? for if the jealousy of a lover be poetic, the jealousy of a wife is only ridiculous. I am his wife; I am not his gaoler. I refuse to admit to others or to him or to myself that any other could be wholly to him what I am; and I should lose that place I hold, lose it in his eyes and my own, if I once admitted my dethronement possible.’
She spoke with more force and anger than was common with her, and her auditor admired while she still failed to comprehend her.
‘Is there a more pitiable spectacle,’ she continued, ‘than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband’s sight which no philtres and no prayers can renew when once it has fled for ever? Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird’s song — beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you, if his soul be truant from you? You all say that Olga Brancka has power over him. If she have, let her use it and exhaust it, it will not last long; but I will not sink to her level by contesting it with her. For what can you take me?’
In her glance the leonine wrath of the Szalras flashed for a moment; her face was pale, she paced the room with a hasty and uneven step. The Princess sought a timid refuge in silence There were certain heights in the nature and impulses of her niece of which she, a dweller on a lower plain, never caught sight. There were times when the haughty reserve and the admirable patience of this stronger character made a union which awed her, and altogether escaped her comprehension.
In two days’ time she left Paris, the Princess and the children accompanying her.
He felt his heart misgive him as he let her go. What was Olga Brancka, what was Paris, what was all the world compared to her? As he kissed her hands in farewell before her servants at the Gare de l’Est, the impulse came over him to throw himself into the carriage beside her, and return with her to the old, fair, still, peaceful life of Hohenszalras. But he resisted it; he heard in memory the mocking of Olga Brancka’s voice saying to him:
‘Ah, quel mari amoureux!’
He had his establishment, his engagements, his horses, his friends, his wagers; he would seem ridiculous to all Paris if he could not endure a few weeks’ separation from his wife. A great banquet at his house was arranged to take place in a few days’ time, at which only great Legitimist nobles would be present, and at which the toast of ‘Le Roi!’ would be drunk with solemn honours. What would they say of him if he failed to receive them because he had followed his wife into Austria? With a thousand sophisms he reconciled himself to remaining there without her, and would not face the consciousness within him that the real motive of his staying on through the coming weeks in Paris was that Olga Brancka was there. For herself, she parted, with him tenderly, kindly, without any trace of doubt in him or of purpose in her departure.
‘You will come when you wish,’ were her last words to him. ‘You know well dear, that Hohenszalras without you will seem like a sadly empty eagle’s nest.’
All his offences against her were heavy on him as he returned to the great house no longer graced by her presence. He would have given twenty years of his life to have been able to undo what he had done when he had taken a name not his own. He was sensible of great talents in him which might have brought him to renown had he been willing to face hardship and laborious effort. Even as he had been at his birth — even as Vassia Kazán — he might have achieved such eminence as would have made him her equal in honest honour. But he had won the world and her by a lie, and the act was irrevocable. Chance and circumstance may be controlled or altered, but the fate which men make for themselves always abides with them for good or ill: a spirit either of good or ill which once incarnated by their incantations never departs from them till death.
CHAPTER XXXI.
‘Are you actually left alone?’ said Madame Olga gaily to him that evening, when they met at an embassy. ‘I thought Wanda was an Una, who never let her lion loose?’
‘The remembrance of her would recall him if she did,’ he answered quickly and coldly. ‘She does not believe in chains because she does not need them.’
‘Most knightly of men!’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘It must be very fatiguing to have to play the part you so affect, even in absence. Our metaphors are involved, but your loyalty seems one and indivisible. I suppose you are left on parole?’
The departure of his wife had disconcerted and disappointed her; as he, to realise his position, had required to have the world about him as spectator of it, so she felt all her triumph over him powerless and pointless if Wanda von Szalras were not there to suffer by the sight of it. He had remained; that was much; but she felt that the absence of his wife had made him colder to herself, that the blank left made a void between them, that remembrance might be more potent with him than vicinity; and his consciousness that he was trusted might have more power than any interference or opposition would have had. She became sensible that she had less charm for him; that he was less easily moved by her mockery and attracted by her wit. His earlier animosity to her still flashed fire now and then, and with this sense of revived resistance in him her own feeling, which had been born of caprice, took giant growth as a passion. She grew cruel in it. If she could only know his secret she thought she would crush him with it, grind him under her foot, torture him. There was a touch of the tigress under her feverish and artificial life.
‘Il faut brusquer la chose,’ she said savagely to herself, when he had been alone in Paris about a fortnight, and each day had convinced her that he grew more wary of her, more unwilling to surrender himself to the fascination which she exercised upon his baser nature. When she attempted jests at his wife he stopped her sternly, and she felt that she lost ground with him. Yet she had still a power upon him; an unhealthy and fatal power. When he looked at her he thought often of two lines: —
‘O Venus! shöne Frau meine,
Ihr seyd eine Teufelinne.’
‘Wanda writes to you every day?’ she asked once.
‘She writes often,’ he answered.
‘And what does she say of me?’
‘Nothing!’
‘Nothing? What does she write about? Of the priest’s sermons and the horses’ coughs, of how much wood has been cut, and how many shoes the children wear, of how she sorrows for you, and says Latin prayers for you twice a day?’
His face darkened.
‘Madame my cousin,’ he said irritably, ‘will you understand that men do not like their religion spoken lightly of? My wife is my religion.’
Then Madame Olga laughed with silvery, hysterical laughter, and clapped her hands as if she were applauding a good comedy, and cr
ied shrilly: ‘Oh! la bonne blague!’
But she knew very well that it was not ‘blague.’ She knew very well, too, that though he was subjugated by a certain sorcery when in her presence, when absent, his good taste condemned, and his good sense escaped, her. She was one of those women who have a thousand means of usurping a man’s time, and are not scrupulous if some of those measures are bold ones. All her admirers tacitly left the field open to one for whom she made no scruple of her preference; and, under pretext of her relationship to him, she contrived many ways to bring him beside her. Every day he said to himself that he would go home on the morrow; but each day bore its diversions, its claims, its interests, and each day found him in Paris, sometimes driving her to the Cascade, to St. Germain, to Versailles, sometimes escorting her to the tribune of a race-course, or a première at a theatre, sometimes dining with her in her pretty room, the table strewn with rose-leaves, and the windows open upon flowering orange trees.
When he wrote home he wrote eloquent, witty, clever letters; but he did not speak in them of the woman with whom he spent so much of his time, and his wife as she read them wished that they had been less clever, and had said more. She began to fear lest she had done unwisely. She did not repent, for it seemed to her that she could have done nothing else with any self-esteem; but she dreaded lest she had over-estimated the power of her own memory upon him. Yet even so, she thought, it was better that he should degrade himself and her in her absence than her presence; and she still felt a certainty — baseless, perhaps — that he would yet pause in time before he actually gave her a rival in her cousin’s wife.
‘If it were any other,’ she thought, ‘he might fall; but with Olga, never! never!’
And she prayed for him half the night, till her prayer seemed to beat against the very gates of heaven. But in the day, to her children, to the Princess, to the household, she seemed always tranquil, cheerful, and at ease. She applied herself arduously to all those duties which her great estates had always brought with them, and in occupation and exertion strove to keep her anxiety at bay, and attain that self-control which enabled her to write in return to him letters which had no shade of reproach in them, no hint of distrust.