by Ouida
Their ways of life renewed themselves as if they had never been broken. She divined what had passed, but she never spoke of it. She was happy in his return, and never disturbed its happiness by inquiry or allusion. He entered with eagerness into plans and projects which had of recent years ceased to interest him, and he resumed his old occupations and pursuits with almost boyish ardour. His restlessness was appeased, and if a dull apprehension beat at his heart with warning now and then, it was scarcely heeded in his deep sense of the intense and forbearing love his wife bore to him. She never asked him how he had escaped from Olga Brancka. She was satisfied that if he had been faithless to herself, he would not have returned with such single-hearted contentment and such lover-like fervour.
‘You are the only woman in the world who can forbear from putting questions,’ said Madame Ottilie to her.
She answered smiling:
‘I remember Psyche’s lamp.’
‘That is very pretty,’ said the Princess, ‘and I do believe you would never have cared for the lamp. But, all the same, if the god had been as honest as he ought to have been, would he have minded the light?’
‘I do not think that enters into the story,’ said Wanda. ‘He did not resent the light either; he resented the inquisitiveness.’
‘You are the only woman who has none,’ said the Princess, taking up her netting, and at times she called her niece Pschye, little imagining the terrible suitability of the name, and the secret that was hidden in darkness from that noble confidence of the last of the Szalras.
The remembrance of that night of base temptation left a sense of uneasiness and of insecurity upon Sabran, but the influence his temptress had possessed with him was of that kind which fades instantly in absence. He honestly abhorred the memory of her, and never spoke her name.
His wife, to whom the utter degradation of her cousin’s wife would never have seemed possible in a woman nobly born and nurtured, never imagined the truth or anything similar to it.
Another woman would have tormented herself and him with innuendo or direct reference to what had passed in those weeks when she had not been beside him, and on which he was absolutely silent. But she put all baseness of curiosity from her; she was content to know that her own influence in absence had been strong enough to bring him back to his allegiance. She would not have wished to hear, had he offered to reveal them, all the various, conflicts of good and evil which had gone on in his mind, all the subtle changes by which her own power had been for a moment obscured, only to regain still stronger and purer ascendency. She was indulgent because she knew human nature well, and expected no miracles. That he had returned of his own accord, and was content so to return, was all she desired to know. If to attain that equanimity had cost her many a struggle, the fact was shut in her own soul and could concern no other. She esteemed it a poor love which could not bear to be sometimes shut out in silence.
‘For a man to be manly he must be free,’ she thought; ‘and how can he be free if there be someone to whom he must confess every trifle? He owes allegiance to no one but his own conscience.’
If in their intercourse she had found his honour less scrupulous, his code less fine than her own; if she had been ever pained by a certain levity and looseness of principle betrayed by him at times, she always strove not to attach too much importance to these. The creeds of a man of pleasure were necessarily different, she told herself, to those of a woman reared in austere tenets, and guarded by natural pride and purity of disposition. Whenever the fear crossed her that he might not be always faithful to her she put it away from her thoughts. ‘What I have to do,’ she thought, ’is to be true to him, not to question or to doubt him: a man’s faithfulness has always such a different reading to a woman’s.’
Sabran never quite understood the perfect indulgence to him which she combined with the greatest severity to herself. He thought that the same measure she gave she would exact. The’ serenity and grandeur of her character made it seem to him impossible that she would ever have compassion for weakness or for falsehood. He fancied, wrongly, that a woman less noble herself would be more indulgent than she would be to error. He did not realise that it is only a great nature which can wholly understand the full force of the words aimer c’est pardonner. And then again, he said to himself, she might have pardoned a fault, a crime even, of high passion, of bold mutiny against moral, law, but how could she ever pardon a meanness, a treason, a lie?
So he let the months slide away, and did not say to her whilst he still might have said it himself, ‘I am not what you think me.’
But he was impressed and profoundly affected by that mute magnanimity, which never vaunted itself or claimed any praise for itself by any hint or suggestion. He felt disgust at his own folly in ever having cared to be a single instant in the presence of the woman of whose libertinage and inconstancy his yellow roses had been the fitting symbol. When he had cast her from him, rejected and despised, the glamour she had thrown over him had fallen like scales from the eyes of one blind. Her memory made the beauty of his wife’s nature and thoughts seem to him more than ever things for reverence and worship. More than ever his soul shrank within him when he recollected the treachery and the deception with which, he had rewarded this noblest of friends.
Ah! why when she had stretched out her hand to him in that supreme gift of herself, in, that golden sunset hour after the autumn floods of Idrac, had he not had courage to kneel at her feet and tell her all? Perchance she might have still have loved him, might have still stooped to him!
He strove his utmost to conceal these anxious self-reproaches from her, lest she should imagine that his hours of gloom were caused by any lingering shadows of the fatal folly which had been forced on him, like a drug by Olga Brancka. The sorceress had failed, and he had flung down and shivered in atoms the glass out of which she had bidden him drink; she was to him as utterly forgotten, as though she were in her grave; but not so easily could he banish the memory of his own treachery to his wife. The very forbearance of her made him the more conscious of guilt, when he remembered that one man lived who knew that he was unworthy even to kiss the hem of her garment. He had been faithful to her in the present, and so could greet her with clean hands and honest lips; but in the past he had betrayed her foully; he had done her what in her sight, if ever she knew it would be the darkest dishonour the treachery of ä human life could hold.
The sense of crime, which had slept quiet and mute in his conscience so many years, was now awake and seldom to be stilled.
The time passed serenely; the autumn brought its hardy sports, the winter its vigorous pastimes. With the new year she gave him another son; she named him after Egon Vàsàrhely, without opposition from Sabran.
‘He is worthier to give them a name than I,’ he thought bitterly.
They did not care to move from the green Iselthal. Of Olga Brancka they heard but rarely. Now and then she sent a little witty flippant note to Hohenszalras, dated from Paris or Trouville, or Biarritz, or Vienna, or Monaco, or St. Petersburg, according to the season and her caprices. Of these little meaningless notes Wanda did not speak to her husband. She could not bring herself to talk to him of the woman who had so nearly wrecked their peace, and it seemed to her that the old saw was wise: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ It appeared to her, too, that theirs and Madame Brancka’s paths in life would henceforth very seldom, if ever, meet.
Sabran believed that her overtures towards him had sprung from one of those insane unhealthy passions which sometimes are created by their very sense of their own immorality; he fancied it had died of its own fire. He did not credit her with the tenacity and endurance she really possessed. He had little doubt that long ere now some dandy of the boulevards, some soldier of the palace, had supplanted him in that brazier of heated senses which she called by courtesy her heart. He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.
The summer was a soft and sunny one, and they enjoyed it in s
imple and healthful pleasures of the open air and of the affections. The children throve and never ailed a day. Sabran had lost all desire to return to the excitations and passions of the world; his wife was more than content in the joys of her home; and if above her a storm brooded, if in his heart there fretted ceaselessly the chafing sense of a gross treachery, of an incessant peril, she was as ignorant of what menaced her as the child to whom she had given birth. With present security also, the sense of dread often wore away from him.
The months sped on swiftly and serenely for the mistress of Hohenszalras, the only shadows cast on them coming from accidents to her poor people through flood or avalanche, and the occasional waywardness and turbulence of her eldest born. Bela had not been the better for his sojourn in a great city, where parasites are never lacking to the heir of wealth, and where his companions had been small coquettes and dandies pétris du monde at six years old. The bright vigorous hardihood of the child had escaped the contagion of affectation, but he had arrived at an inordinate sense of his own importance and dignity, despite the memory of the Dauphin which often came to him. He grew quite beyond the management of his governantes, and though he never disobeyed his mother, gave little heed to anyone else’s authority. Of Sabran he was alone afraid; but at the same time he preserved for him that silent intense admiration which a young child sometimes nourishes for a man by whom he is little noticed, but who is his ideal of all power, force, and achievement, and of whom he hears heroic tales.
He was now seven years old. It was time to think of a tutor for him, since he was beyond the control of the women entrusted with his education. When she spoke of it to his father, he answered at once:
‘Take Greswold. He has the best temper in the world to govern a child, and he is a great scholar.’
‘But he is a physician,’ she objected.
‘He has studied the mind no less than the body. He adores the boy, and will influence him as a stranger could not. Speak to him; he will be only too happy. As no one is ever ill here,’ he added with a smile, ‘his present position is a sinecure; he can very well combine another office with it.’
‘I wanted you to take Bela in your hands,’ he said later to the old doctor, ‘because I say to you what I should not care to say to a stranger. The boy has all my faults in him. As he exactly resembles me physically so he does morally. There is in him, too, I am afraid, a tendency to tyranny that I have never had. I am not cruel to anything, though I am indifferent to most things; he would be cruel if he were allowed; perhaps it is mere masterfulness which may be conquered by time. I imagine he has also my fatal facility. I call it fatal because it renders acquisition and proficiency so easy that it prevents laboriousness and depth of knowledge. You are much wiser than I am, and will know how to educate the child much better than I can tell you how to do. Only remember two things: first, that he is cursed by certain hereditary passions coming to him from me which must be checked and calmed, or he will grow up with a character dangerous to himself, and odious to others in the great position he will one day occupy. Secondly, that if any child of mine ever bring any kind of sorrow upon her, I shall be of all men the most wretched. You have always been my good friend. Be yet more so in preventing my suffering from the pain of seeing my own moral deformities face me and accuse me in the life of her eldest son.’
The old physician listened with emotion and with surprise. Of the moral defects Sabran spoke of, he had seen none. Since his marriage his tenderness to his wife, his kindliness to his dependants, his courage in field sports, and his courtesy as a host had been all that anyone had seen in him; whilst his abstinence from all interference with and all appropriation of his wife’s vast possessions had aroused a yet deeper esteem in all who surrounded him. As he heard, over the old man’s mind drifted the memories of all he had observed at the time of Sabran’s accident in the forest and subsequent prostration of nerve and will. But he thrust these vague suspicions away, for he was blameless in his loyalty to the house he served, and honoured as his master the husband of the Countess von Szalras.
‘I will do my uttermost to deserve so precious a trust,’ he said, with deep feeling. ‘I think that you exaggerate childish foibles, and attach too much importance to them. The little Count Bela is imperious and high-spirited, nothing more; and in this great household, where everyone salutes him as the heir, it is difficult to keep him wholly unspoiled by adulation and consciousness of his own future power. But a great pride has been always the mark of the race of Szalras, although my lady has so chastened hers that you may well believe the line she springs from has been always faultless as — if one may say so of any mortal — one may say she herself is. It is not from you alone that the child inherits his arrogance, if arrogant he be. As for his facility, it is like a fairy’s wand, a caduceus of the gods; it may be used for good unspeakable. At least believe this, my dear lord, what any human teacher can do I will do, thankful to pay my debt so easily. I have always,’ he added less gravely, ‘had my own theories as to the education of young princes, and like all theorists believe everyone else who has had any doctrine on that subject to be wrong. I shall be charmed to have so happy an occasion in which to put my theories to the test. I think nature and learning together, the woods and the study, should be the preparation for the world.’
‘I have entire confidence in your judgment,’ said Sabran. ‘Above all, try and keep the boy from pride. Train him, as Madame de Genlis trained the d’Orléans boys, for any reverse of fortune. He is born with that temper which would make any humiliation, any loss of position, unbearable to him; and who can say — —’
He paused abruptly: what he thought was, who could say that in future years Egon Vàsàrhely might not tell his son of that secret shame which hung over Hohenszalras, a cloud unseen, but big with tempest? Greswold looked at him in a surprise which he could not conceal, and Sabran left his presence hastily, under excuse of visiting some stallions arrived that morning from Tunis; he was afraid of the interrogations which the old man might be led in all innocence to make. Greswold looked after him with some anxiety; he had become sincerely attached to his lord, whose life he had saved in Pregratten; but the unevenness of his spirits, the unhappiness which evidently came over him at times in the midst of his serene and fortunate life, the strangeness of a few words which from time to time he let fall, had not escaped the quick perception of the wise physician, and gave him at intervals a vague, uncertain feeling of apprehension.
‘Pride!’ he thought now. ‘If the little Count were not proud he would be no Szalras; and if his father have not also that superb sin he must be a greater philosopher than I have ever thought him, and no fit mate for our lady. What should overtake the child? If war or revolution ruin him when he grows up that will be no humiliation; he will be none the less Bela von Szalras, and if he be like my lady he will be quite content with being that. Nevertheless, one must try and teach him humility — that is, one must try and make the stork creep and the oak bend!’
Sabran, as he examined his Eastern horses and conversed about them with Ulrich, was haunted by the thoughts which his own words had called up in him. It was possible, it was always possible, that if she ever knew, she might divorce him, and the children would become bastards. The Law would certainly give her her divorce, and the Church also. The most severe of judges, the most austere of pontiffs, would not hold her bound to a man who had so grossly deceived her.
By his own act he had rendered it possible for her, if she knew, to sever herself entirely from him, and make his sons nameless. Of course he had always known this. But in the first ardours of his passion, the first ecstasies of his triumph, he had scarcely thought of it. He had been certain that Vassia Kazán was dead to the whole world. Then, as the years had rolled on, the security of his position, the calmness of his happiness, had lulled all this remembrance in him. But now tranquillity had departed from him, and there were hours when an intense dread possessed him.
True, he did justice to the veracity
and honour of his foe. He believed that Vàsàrhely would never speak whilst he himself was living; but then again he himself might die at any moment, a gun accident, a false step on a glacier, a thrust from a boar or a bear, ten thousand hazards might kill him in full health, and were he dead his antagonist might be tempted to break his word. Vàsàrhely had always loved her; would it not be a temptation beyond the power of humanity to resist, when by a word he could show to her that she had been betrayed and outraged by a traitor?
And then the children?
Though were he himself dead, she would in all likelihood never do aught that would let the world know his sin, yet she would surely change to his offspring, most probably would hate them when she saw in their lives only the evidence of her own dishonour, and knew that in their veins was the blood of a man born a serf.
‘Born a serf! I!’ he thought, incredulous of his own memories, of his own knowledge, as he left the haras and mounted a young half-broken English horse, and rode out into the silent, fragrant forest ways. Almost to himself it seemed a dream that he had ever been a little peasant on the Volga plains. Almost to himself it seemed an impossible fable that he had been the natural son of Paul Zabaroff and a poor maiden who had deemed herself honoured when she had been bidden to bear drink to the barine in his bedchamber. He had once said that he was that best of all actors, one who believes in the part he plays; and at all times, and above all since his marriage, he had been identified in his own persuasions, and his own instincts and habits, with that character of a great noble, which, when he paused to remember, he knew was but assumed. Patrician in all his temper and tone, it seemed to him, when he did so remember, incredible that he could be actually only a son of hazard, without name, right, or station in the world. Was he even the husband of Wanda von Szalras? Law and Church would both deny it were his fraud once known.