by Ouida
All she knew was that he never touched the revenues of Idrac.
She paused on the same spot where he had stood before her first, with his fair beauty, his courtier’s smile, his easy grace, the very prince of gentlemen; and her hands clenched the folds of her gown as she thought— ‘the first of actors! Nothing more.’
And she, Wanda von Szalras, had been the dupe of that inimitable mimicry and mockery!
The thought was like a rusted iron, eating deeper and deeper into her heart each day. When her consciousness, her memory, would have said otherwise, would have told her that in much he was loyal and sincere, though in one great thing he had been false, she would not trust herself to hearken to the suggestion. ‘Let me see clearly, though I die of what I see!’ she said in her soul. She would be blind no more. She hated herself that she had been ever blind.
She had been always his dupe, from the first sonorous phrases she had heard him utter in the French Chamber to the last sentence with which he had left her when he went from her to the presence of Olga Brancka. So she believed. Here she did him wrong; but how was she to tell that? To her it seemed but one long-sustained comedy, one brilliant and hateful imposture.
Sometimes his cry to her rang in her ears: ‘Believe at least that I did love you!’ and some subtle true instinct in her whispered to her that he had there been sincere, that in passion and devotion at least he had never been false. But she thrust the thought away; it seemed but another form of self-deception.
The dull slow evening passed as usual; it was late in summer and the night came early. She dined in company with Madame Ottilie and sat with her as usual afterwards. The room seemed full of his voice, of his laughter, of the music of which he had had such mastery.
She never opened her lips to say to the Princess Ottilie: ‘But for you he would have passed from my life a mere stranger, seen but once.’ But the tender conscience of the Princess made her feel the bitterest reproach every time that the eyes of her niece met her own, every time that she passed the blank space in the picture gallery where once had hung the portrait of Sabran, painted in court dress by Mackart. The portrait was locked away in a dark closet that opened out from the oratory of his wife. With its emblazoned arms and marquis’s coronet on the frame, it had seemed such a perpetual record of his sin that she had had it taken from the wall and shut in darkness, feeling that it could not hang in its falsehood amidst the portraits of her people. But often she opened the door of her oratory and let the light stream upon the portrait where it leaned against the closet wall. It seemed then as if he stood living before her, looking as he had looked so often at the banquets and balls of the Hofburg, when she had felt so much pride in his personal beauty, his grace of bearing, his supreme distinction.
‘Who could have dreamed that it was but a perfect comedy,’ she thought, ‘as much a comedy as Got’s or Bressant’s!’
Then her conscience smote her with a sense that she did him injustice when she thought so. In all things save his one crime he had been as true a gentleman as any of the great nobles of the empire. His intelligence, his bearing, his habits, his person, were all those of a patrician of the highest culture. The fraud of his name apart, there had been nothing in him that the most fastidious aristocrats would have disowned. He had inherited the qualities of a race of princes, though he had been descended unlawfully from them. His title had been a borrowed thing, unlawfully worn; but his supreme distinction of manner, his tact, his bodily grace, that large and temperate view of men and things which marks a gentleman, these had all been inborn and natural to him. He had been no mere actor when he had moved through a throne-room by her side. Her calmer reason told her this, but her instincts of candour and of pride made her deny that where there was one fraud there could be any truth.
She span on now at her ivory wheel because it was mere mechanical work, which left thought free. The Princess, in lieu of slumbering, looked at her ever and again. Suddenly she gathered her courage and spoke.
‘Wanda, you are a Christian woman,’ she said slowly and softly. ‘Is it Christian never to forgive?’
Her face did not change as she turned the spinning-wheel.
‘What is forgiveness?’ she said coldly. ‘Is it abstinence from vengeance? I have abstained.’
‘It is far more than that!’
‘Then I do not reach it.’
‘No; you do not. That is why I presumed to ask you, is it in consonance with your tenets, with your duties?’
‘I think so.’
‘Then change your creed,’ said the Princess.
A sombre wrath shone in her eyes as she looked up one moment.
‘I have the blood in me of men who were not always Christians, but who, even when Pagan, knew what honour was. There are some things which are so vile that one must be vile oneself before one can forgive them.’
The Princess sighed.
‘I am in ignorance of the nature of your wrongs; but this I know — they erred who gave you absolution at Eastertide, whilst you still bore bitterness in your soul.’
‘Would I lay bare my soul and his shame now to any priest?’ thought Wanda; but she repressed the answer. She said simply: ‘Dear mother, believe me, I have been more merciful than many would have been.’
‘You mean that you have not sought for a divorce? Nay, that is not mercy; that is decency, dignity, self-respect. When they of a great race go to the public with their wrongs they drag their escutcheon in the mud for the pleasure of the crowd. That you have not done; that is not mercy. You do but follow your instincts; you are a gentlewoman.’
A momentary impulse came over her, as she heard, to tell her companion his sin and her own shame; the woman’s weakness, desiring sympathy and comprehension, assailed her for an instant. But she resisted and repressed it. The Princess Ottilie was aged and feeble. She had had no slight share in bringing about this union, which was now so cruelly broken; she had been ever proud of her penetration and devoted to his defence. To learn the truth would be a shock so terrible to her that it must needs be veiled from her for ever. Besides, his wife felt as though the relation would blister her lips were she to make it even to her oldest friend.
Had she known all, the elder woman would have been even more bitter in her hatred, even more inflexible in her sense of outrage than she herself; but she could not purchase sympathy at such a price. She chose rather to be herself condemned.
Offended, the Princess rose slowly to go to her own apartments. The tears welled painfully in her eyes.
‘You were so happy, he was so devoted,’ she murmured. ‘Can all that have crumbled like a house of sand?’
Wanda von Szalras said bitterly:
‘What did I say once, the day of my betrothal? That I leaned on a reed. The reed has withered, that is all. You see, I can stand without it.’
She conducted her aunt to her bedchamber with the usual courteous observances; then returned and sat long alone in the silent chamber.
‘Forgive! what is the obligation of forgiveness?’ she thought. ‘It is the obligation to pardon offences, infidelity, unkindness, cruelty, but not dishonour. To forgive dishonour is to be dishonoured. So would my fathers have said.’
CHAPTER XL.
Bela that dawn was awakened by his mother standing beside his bed. She stooped and touched his curls with her lips.
‘I was harsh to you yesterday, my child,’ she said to him. ‘I come to tell you now that you were quite right to have the thought you had. You are his son; you must not forget him.’
Bela lifted up his beautiful flushed face and his eye brilliant from sleep.
‘I am glad I may remember,’ he said simply; then he added, with his cheeks burning: ‘When I am a man I will go and find him and bring him back.’
His mother turned away her face.
When his manhood should come and he should hear the story of his father’s sin, what would he say? Would not all his soul cry out aloud and curse the impostor who had begotten him?
The eyes of Bela followed the dark form of his mother as she passed from his room.
‘She is very unhappy,’ he thought wistfully. ‘If I could find him now, would it make her happy again, I wonder?’
And the chivalry that was in his blood stirred in his childish veins.
‘But you said that she sent him away?’ whispered Gela, when Bela got upon his brother’s bed and confided his thoughts to him.
‘I did think so; but I might mistake,’ said Bela. ‘Perhaps he went because he was obliged, and that it is which grieves her.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Gela, meditatively.
‘If I only knew where to go to find him I would go all over the world,’ said Bela, with passion. ‘I would ride Folko to the earth’s very, very, end to reach him.’
‘You could not get over the seas so,’ said Gela; ‘and he may be over the seas.’
‘And we have never even seen the sea!’ said Bela, to whom the suggested distance seemed more terrible than he had ever imagined. ‘What can we do, Gela, do you think? you are clever about everything.’
Gela was silent a moment.
‘Let us pray for him with all our might,’ he said solemnly; and the two little boys knelt down by the bedside in their little nightshirts and prayed together for their father.
When Bela rose his face was very troubled, but very resolute. He drew out of its sheath a small sword with a handle of gold, which Egon Vàsàrhely had sent him years before. ‘One must pray first,’ he thought, ‘but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.’
In the day he went out all alone and found Otto; the children were allowed to go over the home woods at their pleasure. The jägermeister was very dear to Bela, for he told such wondrous tales of sport and danger, and spoke with such reverent affection of his lost lord.
‘Where can he be, Otto?’ said the child now, in a low hushed voice, as they sat under the green oak boughs.
‘Ah, my little Count, if only I knew!’ said Otto. ‘I would walk a thousand miles to him, and take him the first blackcock that shall fall to my gun this autumn.’
‘You really say the truth? You do not know?’ said Bela, with stern questioning eyes.
‘Would I tell a lie, my little lord?’ said the old hunter, reproachfully. ‘Since your father drove away that cruel night none of us have set eyes on him, or ever heard a word. If Her Excellency do not know, how should we?’
‘I mean to find him,’ said the child, solemnly.
The old man sighed.
‘How should you do that? Our hills are between us and all the rest of the world. Perhaps he is gone because he was tired of being here.’
‘No,’ said Bela, who remembered his father’s farewell to him, of which he could never bring himself to speak to any living creature.
Otto was silent too: he could not tell the child what all the household believed — that his father had found too great a charm in the presence of the Countess Brancka.
The weeks and months stole on their course, which in the forest-heart of the old Archduchy seems so leisurely beside the feverish haste of the mad world. The ways of life went on unchanged; the children throve, and studied, and played, and grew apace; the health of the Princess became more delicate, and her strength more feeble; the seasons succeeded each other with monotony; no sound from the cities of men that lay beyond the ramparts of the glaciers broke the silence and the calm of Hohenszalras.
Wanda herself would not have known that one year was different to another had she not been forced to count time by the inches which it added to the stature of her offspring, and the recurrence of the days of their patron saints. They grew as fast as reeds in peaceful waters, and forced her to recognise that the years were dropping into the past. Time for her was shod with lead, and crept tamely, like a cripple upon broken ground. For the children’s sake she lived; but for them she knew not why she rose to these long, colourless, lonely hours. But her corporeal life ailed nothing, whilst her spiritual life was sick unto death. Almost she could have wished for the lassitude of weakness to dull her pain; her bodily strength seemed to intensify what she suffered.
In the frosted brilliant winter time she still drove her fiery horses over the snow that was like marble, plunging into the recesses of the woods, seeing above her the ramparts, and bastions, and pinnacles of the great ice-range of the Glöckner glaciers. The intense cold, the rushing air, the whiteness as of a virgin earth, the sense of profound solitude, did her good, cooled the sense of shame that seemed burnt into her life, soothed the anguish of a love fooled, betrayed, and widowed. She felt with horror that the longer she kneeled beside the altar, the longer she prayed before the great Christ in her chapel, the more passionately she rebelled against the fate that had overtaken her. But, alone in the rarefied air, with the vastness of the mountains about her, with the cold wind pouring like spring water down a thirsty throat in its merciful coldness, with the white peaks meeting the starry skies, and the waters hushed in their shroud of ice, she gathered some kind of peace, some power of endurance: consolation neither earth nor heaven could give to her.
Of him she never heard. She could only have heard through her lawyers, and they knew nothing. Neither in Paris nor in Vienna was he seen. By a letter she received from the priest of Romaris she had learned that he was not there. She had sent one of her men of business thither with money and plans, to build on the site of the old house of the Sabrans a Maison de Dieu for the aged and sick fishermen of the coast and their widows.’ It will be a chapelle expiatoire,’ she had thought bitterly, and she had endowed it richly, so that it should be independent of all those who should come after her. In all the occupations entailed by this and similar projects she was as attentive as of yore to all demands made on her.
When she perused a lawyer’s long preamble, or corrected an architect’s estimates and drawings, she was the same woman as she had been ere her betrayer had crossed the threshold of her home. Her character had been built on lines too strong, on a base too firm, for the earthquake of calamity, the whirlwind of passion, to undo it. But in her heart there was utter shipwreck. She had given herself and all that was hers with magnificent generosity; and she had received in return betrayal and a dishonour under which day and night all the patrician in her writhed and suffered.
When in the autumn of that year Cardinal Vàsàrhely, travelling in great state from Buda Pesth, arrived at Hohenszalras — a guest whom none could deny, a judge whom none could evade — he did not spare her open interrogation, searching censure, stern rebuke.
The Lilienhöhe she had excused herself from receiving; the Kaulnitz she had also refused; others as nearly related to her had encountered the same resistance to their overtures; but Cardinal Vàsàrhely came to take up his residence at the Holy Isle, with the weight of authority and the sanctity of the Church.
He visited his niece for the sole purpose of remonstrance. When he found himself met by a respectful but firm refusal to acquaint him with the reasons for her conduct, he did not, either, spare her the stately wrath of the incensed ecclesiastic. He was a man of noble presence, and of austere if arrogant life. He spoke with all the weight of his sixty years and of his eminence in the service of the Church. His eyes were bent on her in stern scrutiny as he stood drawn up to all his great height beside her in the library.
‘If your griefs against your husband,’ he urged, ‘are of sufficient gravity to justify you in desiring eternal separation from him, you should not lean merely upon your own strength. You should seek the support of your spiritual counsellors. Although the Holy Church has never sanctioned the concubinage which the laws of men have called by the name of divorce; yet, as you are aware, my daughter, in extreme cases the Holy Father has himself deigned to unloose an unworthy bond, to annul an unsuitable marriage. In your case, if the offences of your lord have been so grave, I make no doubt that by my intercession with His Sanctity it would be possible to dissolve an union which has become unholy.’
She met his gaze calmly and coldly.
‘Your Eminence is very good to interest yourself in my sorrows,’ she replied; ‘but for the intercession with our Holy Father which you offer, I will not trouble you. Whatever the offences of my husband be against me, they can concern me alone. I have summoned no one to hear them. I seek no one’s judgment. As regards the power of the Supreme Pontiff to bind and loose, I would bow to it in all matters spiritual, but I cannot admit that even he can release me from an earthly tie which I voluntarily assumed.’
A rebuking wrath flashed from the eagle eyes of the great Churchman.
‘I did not think that Wanda von Szalras would heretically deny the Pope his power over all souls!’ he said sternly. ‘Are you not aware that when the Holy Father deigns in his mercifulness to decree a marriage as null and void, it becomes so from that instant? It is as though it had never been; the union is effaced, the woman is decreed pure.’
‘And the children,’ she said bitterly; ‘can the Holy Father efface them?’
The Cardinal was affronted and appalled.
‘You would call in question the infallible omnipotence of the Head of the Church!’ he said with horror.
‘The days of miracles are past,’ she said coldly. ‘I shall not entreat for them to be wrought for me. I trust your Eminence will pardon me if I say that no human, nay, no heavenly, permission could legitimate adultery in my sight or in my person.’
‘You merit excommunication, my daughter,’ said the haughty prelate, his brow black with wrath. He saw no reason why this marriage, which had offended all her house, should not be annulled by the all-powerful verdict of the Vatican. Such cases were rare, but it would be possible to include hers amongst them. The children could be consigned to religious houses, brought up to religious lives, unknown to and unknowing of the world.