Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  She heard him patiently and smiled a little. ‘Disgrace me?’ she echoed gently. ‘Count Brancka will kill you.’

  Sabran signified by a gesture that the possibility was profoundly indifferent to him. He turned to leave her.

  ‘Understand me plainly,’ he said, as he moved away. ‘I leave it at your option to invent any summons, any excuse, as your reason for your departure; but if you do not announce your departure for this afternoon, I shall do what I have said. I have the honour to wish you good-morning.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Madame Brancka, still very softly. ‘Are you judicious to make an enemy of me?’

  ‘I much prefer you as an enemy,’ said Sabran, curtly; and he added, with contemptuous irony, ‘your friendship is far more perilous than your animosity; your compliments are like the Borgia’s banquets.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Olga Brancka, once again, ‘you are ungrateful like all men, and you are not very wise either. You forget that I am the sister-in-law of Egon Vàsàrhely.’

  Sabran could never hear that name mentioned without a certain inward tremor, a self-consciousness which he could not entirely conceal. But he was infuriated, and he answered with reckless scorn:

  ‘Prince Vàsàrhely is a man of honour. He would disown you if he knew that you offer yourself with the shamelessness of a déclassée, and that you outrage a noble and unsuspecting woman, by forcing yourself into her home when you have failed in tempting her husband to offer her the last dishonour.’

  Her face paled under the unveiled and unsparing insults, but she did not lose her equanimity.

  ‘We are very like a scene of Sardou’s,’ she said, with her unchangeable smile. ‘You would have made your fortune on the boards of the Français. Why did you not go there instead of calling yourself Marquis de Sabran? It would have been wiser.’

  He felt as if a knife had been plunged through his loins; all the colour left his face. Had Vàsàrhely told her? No! it was impossible. They were mere chance words of a woman eager to insult, not knowing what she said. He affected not to hear, and with a bow to her he moved once more to leave the chamber. But her voice again arrested him.

  ‘Tell me one thing before you go,’ she said, very gently. ‘Does Wanda know that you are Vassia Kazán?’

  She spoke with perfect moderation and simplicity, not altering her posture as she lay back in her tapestried chair, but she watched him with trepidation. She was not altogether sure of facts she had half-guessed, half-gathered. She had pieced details together with infinite skill, but she could not be absolutely certain of her conclusions. She watched him with eager avidity beneath her smiling calmness. If he showed no consciousness her cast was wrong; she would miss her vengeance; she would remain in his power. But at a glance she saw her shaft had pierced straight home. He had strong control and even strong power of dissimulation in need; but that name thrown at him stunned him as a stone might have done. His face grew livid, he stood motionless, he had no falsehood ready, he was taken off his guard: all he realised was that his ruin was in the grasp of his mortal foe. His hold on her was lost. His authority, his strength, his dignity, all fell before those two hateful words, ‘Vassia Kazán!’

  ‘He has told her!’ he thought, and the blood surged in his brain and made him dazed and giddy. He had not told her. By private investigation, by keen wit, by careful and cruel comparison of various information, she had arrived at the conclusion that Vassia Kazán and he who had come from Mexico as the grandson of the Marquis Xavier de Sabran were one and the same. Certain she could not be, but she was near enough to certainty to dare to cast her stone at a venture. If it missed — she was a woman. He could not kill or harm a woman, or call her to account.

  Even now, if he had preserved his composure and turned on her with a calm challenge, she would have been powerless.

  But he had lost the habit of falsehood; self-consciousness made him weak; he believed that Egon Vàsàrhely had betrayed him. His lips were mute, his tongue seemed to cleave to his mouth. A less keen-sighted woman would have read confession on his face. She was satisfied.

  ‘You have not answered my question,’ she said quietly. ‘Does Wanda know it? Does such a saintly woman “compound a felony”? I believe a false name is a sort of felony, is it not?’

  He breathed heavily; his eyes had a terrible look in them; he put his hand on his heart. For a moment the longing assailed him to spring upon her and throttle her as a man may a dangerous beast. He could not speak, a leaden weight seemed to shut his lips.

  He never doubted that she knew his whole history from Vàsàrhely.

  ‘It was an ingenious device,’ she pursued, in her honeyed, even tones, ‘but it was scarcely wise. Things are always found out some time or another — at least, men’s secrets are. A woman can keep hers. My dear friend, you are really a criminal. It is very strange that Wanda of all people should have made such a misalliance, and had such an imposture passed off on her! I belong to her family; I ought to abhor you; and yet I can imagine your temptation if I cannot forgive it. Still it was a foolish thing to do, not worthy a man of your wit; and in France, I believe, the punishment for such an assumption is some years’ imprisonment; and here, you know (perhaps you do not know?), your marriage would be null and void if she chose.’

  He made a movement towards her, and for the moment, though she was a woman of great courage, her spirit quailed before the look she met.

  ‘Hold your peace!’ he said savagely. ‘Speak truth, if you can. What has Vàsàrhely told you?’

  Vàsàrhely had told her nothing, but she looked him full in the face with perfect serenity, and answered— ‘All!’

  He never doubted her, he could not doubt her; what she said was met by too full confirmation from his memory and his conscience.

  ‘He gave me his word,’ he muttered.

  She smiled. ‘His word to you, when he is in love with your wife? The miracle is that he has not told her. She would divorce you, and after a decent interval I dare say she would marry him, if only pour balayer la chose. For a man so devoted to her as you are, you have certainly contrived to outrage and injure her in the most complete manner. Mon beau Marquis! to think how fooled we all were all the time by you. How haughty you were, how fastidious, how patrician!’

  He leaned against the high column of the enamelled stove and covered his eyes with his hands. He was unnerved, unstrung, half-paralysed. The blow had fallen on him without preparation or defence being possible to him. His thoughts were all in confusion; one thing alone he knew — he, and all he loved, were in the power of a merciless woman, who would no more spare them than the sloughi astride the antelope will let go its quivering flesh.

  She looked at him, and a contemptuous wonder came upon her that a man could be so easily beaten, so easily betrayed into tacit confession. She ignored the power of conscience, for she did not know it herself.

  She thought, with scorn: ‘Why did he not deny, deny boldly, as I should have done in his place? He would have twisted my weapon out of my hand at once. I know so little, and I could prove nothing! But he is unnerved at once, just because it is true! Men are all imbeciles. If he had only denied and questioned me he must have found that Egon had told me nothing.’

  And she watched him with derision.

  In truth, she knew so little; she had scarce more to guide her than coincidence and conjecture. She longed to know everything from himself, but strong as was her curiosity, her prudence and her cruelty were stronger still, and she admirably assumed a knowledge that she had not, guided in all her dagger-strokes by the suffering she caused.

  Yet her passion for him which, unslaked, was as ardent as ever, became not the less, but the greater, because she had him in her power. She was one of those women to whom love is only delightful if it possess the means to torture. Besides, it was not himself whom she hated, it was his wife. To make him faithless to his wife would be a more exquisite triumph than to betray him to her.

  ‘He would be wax — in my hands
,’ she thought. A vision of the future passed before her, with her dominion absolute over him, her knowledge of his shame holding him down with a chain never to be broken. She would compel him to wound, to deceive, to torment his wife; she would dictate his every word, his every act; she would make him ridiculous to the world, so servile should be his obedience to her, so great should be his terror of her anger. He should be her lover, weak as water in all semblance, because the puppet of her pleasure. This would be a vengeance worthy of herself when she should see him kneel at her feet for permission for every slightest act, and she should scourge him as with whips, knowing he dare not rise; when she should say softly in his ear a thousand times a year: ‘You are Vassia Kazán!’

  She was silent a few moments, lost in the witchery of the vision she conjured up; then she looked up at him and said very caressingly, in her sweetest voice:

  ‘Why are you so dejected? Your secret may be safe with me. You know — you know — I was willing ever to be your friend; I am not less willing now. I told you that you were unwise to make an enemy of me. Wanda’s regard would not outlive such a trial, but perhaps mine may, if you be discerning enough, grateful enough to trust to it. I know your crime, for a crime it is, and a foul one: we must not attempt to palliate it. When we last met you offended, you outraged me. Only a few moments since you insulted me as though I were the lowest creature on the Paris asphalte. Yet all this I — I — should be tempted to forgive if you love me as I believe that you do. I love you, not as that cold, calm, unerring woman yonder may, but as those only can who know and care for no heaven but earth. Réné — Vassia — who, knowing your sin, your shame, your birth, your treachery, would say to you what I say? Not Wanda!’

  He seemed not to hear, he did not hear. He leaned his forehead upon his arms; he was sunk in the apathy of an intense woe; only the name of his wife reached him, and he shivered a little as with cold.

  At his silence, his indifference, her eyes grew alight with flame; but she controlled herself; she rose and clasped her hands upon his arm.

  ‘Listen,’ she murmured, ‘I love you, I love you! I care nothing what you were born, what sins you have sinned; I love you! Love me, and she shall never know. I will silence Egon. I will bury your secret as though it were one that would cost me my life were it known.’

  Only at the touch of her hands did he arouse himself to any consciousness of what she was saying, of how she tempted him. Then he shook off her clasp with a rude gesture; he looked down on her with the bitterest of scorn: not for a single instant did he dream of purchasing her silence so.

  ‘You are even viler than I thought,’ he said in his throat, with a dreary laugh of mockery. ‘How long would you spare me if I sinned against her with you? Go, do your worst, say your worst! But if you stay beneath my wife’s roof to-night, I will drive you out of the house before all her people, if it be my last act of authority in Hohenszalras!’

  ‘I love you!’ she murmured, and almost knelt to him; but he thrust her away from him, and stood erect, his arms folded on his chest.

  ‘How dare you speak of love to me? You force me to employ the language of the gutter. If Egon Vàsàrhely have put me in your power, use it, like the incarnate fiend you are. I ask no mercy of you, but if you dare to speak of love to me I will strangle you where you stand. Since you call me the wolf of the steppes you shall feel my grip.’

  She fell a few steps backward and stretched her hand behind her, and rung a little silver bell. Absorbed in his own bitterness of thought he did not hear the sound or see the movement. She had already, between Greswold’s visit to her and his master’s, written a little letter:

  ‘Loved Wanda, — Will you be so good as to come to me for a moment at once? — Yours,

  ‘OLGA.’

  She had said to one of her women, who was in the next apartment: ‘When I ring you will take that note at once to my cousin, the Countess, yourself, without coming to me.’ She had had no fear of leaving the woman in the adjoining room, who was a Russian, wholly ignorant of the French tongue, which she herself always used.

  She recoiled from him, frightened for the moment, but only for that; she had nerves of steel, and many men had cursed her and menaced her for the ruin of their lives, and she had lived on none the worse. ‘On crie — et puis c’est fini,’ she was wont to say, with her airy cynicism. Something in his look, in his voice, told her that here it would not finish thus.

  ‘He will shoot himself if he do not strangle me; and he will escape so,’ she thought, and a faint sort of fear touched her. She was alone before him; she had said enough to drive him out of all calmness and all reason. She had left him nothing to hope for; she had made him believe that she knew all his fatal past. If he had struck her down into the dumbness of death he would have been scarcely guilty.

  But it was only for a moment that such a dread as this passed over her.

  ‘Pshaw! we are people of the world,’ she thought. ‘Society is with us even in our solitude. Those violent crimes are not ours: we strike otherwise than with our hands.’

  And, reassured, she sank down into her chair again, a delicate figure in a cloud of muslin of the Deccan and old lace of Flanders, and clasped her fingers gracefully behind her head, and waited.

  He did not move; his eyes were fastened on her, glittering and cold as ice, and full of unspeakable hatred. He was deadly pale. She thought she had never seen his face more beautiful than in that intense mute wrath which was like the iron frost of his own land.

  ‘When he goes he will go and kill himself,’ she mused, and she listened with passionate eagerness for the passing of steps down the corridor.

  But he did not stir; he was absorbed in wondering how he could deal with this woman so that his wife should be spared. Was there any way save that vile way to which she had tempted him? He could see none. From a passion rejected and despised there can be no chance of mercy. He had ceased altogether to think of himself.

  To take his own life did not pass over his thoughts then. It would have spared Wanda nothing. His shame, told when he were dead, would hurt her almost more than when he were living. He had too much courage to evade so the consequences of his own acts. In the confusion of his mind only this one thing was present to it — the memory of his wife. All that he had dreaded of disgrace, of divorce, of banishment, of ruin, were nothing to him; what he thought of was the loss of her herself, her adoration, her honour, her sweet obedience, her perfect faith. Would ever he touch even her hand again if once she knew?

  His remorse and his grief for his wife overwhelmed and destroyed every personal remembrance. If to spare her he could have undergone any extremity of torture he would have welcomed it with rapture. But it is not thus that a false step can be retrieved; not thus that a false word can be effaced. It, and the fate it brings, must be faced to the bitter end.

  He had no illusions; he was certain that the woman who would have tempted him to be false to her would spare her nothing. He would not even stoop to solicit a respite for her from Olga Brancka. He knew the only price at which it could be obtained.

  He stood there, leaning his shoulders on the high cornice of the stove, his arms crossed upon his chest, repressing every expression or gesture that could have delighted his enemy by revelation of what he suffered. In himself he felt paralysed; he felt as though neither his brain nor his limbs would ever serve him again. He had the sensation of having fallen from a great height; the same numbness and exhaustion which he had felt when he had dropped down the frozen side of the Umbal glacier. Both he and she were silent; he from the stupefaction of horror, she from the eagerness with which she was listening for the coming of Wanda von Szalras.

  After a short interval of her thirsty and cruel anxiety, the page, who was in waiting outside, entered with a note for his master.

  Sabran strove to recover his composure as he stretched his hand out and took the letter off the salver. It contained only two lines from his wife:

  ‘Olga asks me to come to
her. Do you wish me to do so?’

  A convulsion passed over his face.

  ‘Oh! most faithful of all friends!’ he thought with a pang, touched to the quick by those simple words of a woman whose fidelity was to be repaid by shame.

  ‘Where is the Countess?’ he asked of the young servant, who answered that she was in the library.

  ‘Say that I will be with her there in a few moments.’

  The page withdrew.

  Olga Brancka was mute; there was a great anger in her veiled eyes. Her last stroke had missed, through the loyalty of the woman whom she hated.

  He took a step towards her.

  ‘You dared to send for her then?’

  She laughed aloud, and with insolence.

  ‘Dare? Is that a word to be used by a Russian moujik, as you are, to me, the daughter of Fedor Demetrivitch Serriatine? Certainly, I sent for your wife, my cousin. Who should know what I know, if not she? Egon might make you what promises he would; he is a man and a fool. I make none. If you prevent my seeing Wanda, I shall write to her; if you stop her letters, I shall telegraph to her; if you stop the telegrams, I will put your story in the Paris journals, where the Marquis de Sabran is as well known as the Arc de l’Étoile. You were born a serf, you shall feel the knout. It would have been well for you if you had smarted under it in your youth.’

  So absorbed was he in the memory of his wife, and in the thought of the misery about to fall upon her innocent life, that the insults to himself struck on him harmless, as hail on iron.

  ‘Spare your threats,’ he said coldly. ‘No one shall tell her but myself. You know her present condition; it will most likely kill her.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the Countess Brancka, with a little smile. ‘Her nerves are of iron. She will divorce you, that is all.’

  ‘She will be in her right,’ he said, with the same coldness. Then, without another word, he turned and left her chamber.