by Ouida
‘If the man whom you chose to wed,’ he continued sternly, ‘has offended or outraged you so greatly, let your relatives judge him and deal with him. You were warned against the gift of your hand to a stranger with an uncertain past behind him; he had not the eminence, the repute, the character that should have been demanded in your husband. But you were inflexible in your resolve then, as you are now in your silence.’
‘I know of no one living to whom I owe any account,’ she said with haughty decision; ‘no one to whom I was bound to lay bare my mind and heart then, or to whom I am so bound now.’
‘You are so bound every time you kneel in the confessional.’
‘To reveal my own sins, perchance, not his.’
‘Your soul should be as an open book before your priest.’
‘Your Eminence will pardon me. I bow willingly and reverently to the Church in all matters spiritual, but in the rule of my own conduct I admit no guide but my conscience. My sorrows are all my own. No priest or layman shall intrude upon them.’
She spoke with peremptory and unyielding decision; the old spirit of her race was aroused in her, which in times bygone had bearded popes and monarchs, and braved the thunders of excommunication. They had been pious sons of Rome, but yet ofttimes rebellious ones; when their honour called one way and the priests pointed the other, they had lifted their swords in the sunlight and gone whither honour bade.
The Churchman knew that power of secular revolt which had been always latent in the Szalras blood; he knew now that, armed with the weapons of the Church though he was, he might as well seek to bow the mountains down as bend her will. He took for granted that her wrongs were great enough to entitle her to freedom; he had thought that she might wed again with his nephew, who had loved her so long; their mighty fortunes would have fitly met; this hateful union with a foreigner, a sceptic, a debauchee, would have become a thing of the past, washed away into absolute non-existence; — so he had dreamed, and he found himself confronted with a woman’s illogical inconsistency and obstinacy.
He was deeply incensed. He assailed her for many days with all the subtle arguments of the ecclesiastical armoury, but he made no impression. She utterly refused to tell why she had exiled her husband from her house, and she as utterly refused to take any measures to attain her own freedom. When he left her he said a word of rebuke that long lingered in her memory. ‘You are rebellious and almost heretical, my daughter. You entrench yourself in your silence and your pride, which you appear to forget are heinous sins when opposed to your spiritual superiors. But this only I will remind you of: if you deny the Church the power to annul the union of which its sacrament sanctified the consummation, be at least consistent: do not absolve yourself from its duties.’
With that keen home thrust in parting he left her, giving his blessing to the kneeling household; and six white mules, always kept there in readiness for his visits, bore him away through the embrowning woods.
When he reached his palace in Buda he summoned Egon Vàsàrhely and related what had passed.
His nephew heard in silence.
‘Your Eminence erred in your judgment of Wanda,’ he said at length. ‘She would never make her wrongs, whatever they be, public, nor seek for dissolution of her marriage. She may repent it, but she will repent it in solitude.’
‘If the marriage be so sacred in her eyes,’ said the angry prelate, ‘let her continue to live with her husband. She has been a law to herself; she has parted from him; where is the wifely submission there? Where the sanctity of the immutable bond?’
‘Perhaps some day she will bid him return,’ said Vàsàrhely, whose features were very grave and pale.
‘She could forget this fatal folly like a bad dream,’ continued the Cardinal, unheeding. ‘She could begin a new life; she could wed with you.’
‘Your Eminence mistakes,’ said Vàsàrhely, abruptly. ‘Though that man were dead ten times over, Wanda would never wed with me — nor I with her.’
‘You are both wiser than the wisdom and holier than the holiness of the Church,’ said the incensed ecclesiastic, with boundless scorn. He was accustomed to bend human volition like a willow wand in his hand.
When she herself had left the terrace where she had parted from the prelate, having accompanied him there in that stately etiquette which, though she had been dying, habit would have compelled her to observe in every detail, she had turned with a sense of intolerable pain from the sunshine of the September day.
It was a pretty scene that stretched before her, the children standing bareheaded, the household hushed and kneeling still where the mighty dignitary of the Mother Church had given them his benediction; the gold embroideries and rich colours of the liveries glowing in the light; the white mules and the scarlet-clothed attendants of the Cardinal passing down the avenue of oaks, with the immediate background of the darksome yews, and, further, the flushed foliage of the forests and the shine of the snow peaks; but to her it was fraught with unendurable associations. The central figure was missing from it which for so many years had graced all pageants and conducted all ceremonies there. It was the sole time since the exile of her husband that there had been any arrival or departure at Hohenszalras.
She had been compelled to receive the Cardinal with all due state and observance, and the oppressiveness of his three days’ sojourn had worn and wearied her.
‘I would sooner receive five emperors than one Churchman,’ she said to the Princess. ‘We are far from the days of the Apostles!’
‘Christ must be honoured in His Vicars,’ said the Princess, coldly, and with disapprobation chill on all her features.
Wanda turned away as the white mules disappeared in a bend of the avenue, and went into the house alone, whilst the children and the household still lingered in the sunshine. She traversed the whole length of the building to reach her octagon-room, where she was certain to be alone. The interrogation and censure of her uncle had left on her a harassed sense of being somewhere at fault: not to him, nor to the Church he represented and invoked, but to her own Conscience.
As she passed through one of the galleries she saw her youngest child Egon, now nearly two years old, playing with his nurse, an old, grave North German woman. They were the only living beings of the house who had not been upon the terraces to receive the Cardinal’s last blessing; the one too young, the other too old to care. The child, with his fair face and his light curls, was like the child Christ of Carlo Dolce, yet there was the same resemblance in him to his father which pierced her soul whenever she looked in the faces of her other offspring.
She paused and stooped towards him now, where he played with a toy lamb in the breadth of sunlight that fell warm and broad through the open lattices of an oriel window, in the embrasure of which his attendant was sitting. The baby looked up under his long dark lashes, and made a little timid movement towards his nurse.
‘Is he afraid of me?’ said Wanda, with the same vague sense of remorse which she had felt before his eldest brother.
‘Oh no! he is not afraid, my lady,’ said the old woman with him, hurriedly. ‘But he sees you so rarely now, and when they are so young they are frightened at grave faces.’
The nurse stopped herself, fearing she had said too much; but her mistress listened without anger and with a sharp pang of self-reproach.
‘Come for him to my room when I ring,’ she said; and she stooped again and lifted the little boy in her arms.
‘Are you all afraid of me, my poor children,’ she murmured to him. ‘Surely I have never been cruel to you?’
He did not understand; he was still frightened, but he put his arm about her throat and hid his pretty face on her shoulder with a gesture that was half terror, half confidence. She took him to her own room and soothed and caressed and amused him, till he regained his natural fearlessness and sat happy on her knee, playing with some Indian ivory toys; then he grew tired, and leaned his head against her breast, and fell asleep as prettily as a Star of Beth
lehem shuts its white leaves up at sunset.
She watched him with an aching heart.
She could look on none of her children without a throb of intolerable shame. They were the symbols as they were the offspring of all her hours of love. Another woman might have forgotten all except that they were hers.
She could not.
From that day she had the younger children brought to her more often, drove them out at times, and soon regained their affection, although to them all a majesty and melancholy, as inseparable from her now as shadows from the night, made her presence inspire them with a certain awe; even Lili, the most willful of them all, in her pretty, gay, childish vanity and naughtiness, never ventured to disobey or to weary her.
‘When I am with her it is as if I were at Mass,’ Lili said to her brothers. ‘You know what one feels when the Host comes and the bell rings, and it is all so still, and only the Latin words — —’
‘It is the presence of God that we feel at Mass,’ said Gela, in a hushed voice. ‘And I think our mother has God with her very much. Only He makes her sad.’
‘But she never does cry,’ said her little daughter.
‘No,’ said Gela, ‘I think she is too sad for that. You know when it is very, very cold the skies cannot rain. I think that it is just so cold with her.’
And Gela’s own eyes filled, for he, the most thoughtful and the most quick in perception of them all, adored his mother. When he could he would sit in her presence for hours, mute and motionless, with a book on his knees, glancing at her with his meditative eyes now and then in rapt veneration.
‘When Bela grows up he will wander, I dare say, and perhaps be a great soldier,’ Gela thought at such times. ‘But for me, I shall stay always with our mother, and read every thing that is written, and do all I can for the people, and care for nothing but for her and them.’
She had not let loose in the presence of Cardinal Vàsàrhely the burning wrath which had consumed her. And yet the valedictory words of the prelate recurred to her with haunting persistency. He had said to her: ‘If you refuse to be released from your marriage, do not absolve yourself from its duties.’ Was it possible, she asked herself, that she still owed allegiance to one who, whilst he had embraced her, had dishonoured her?
‘As well,’ she thought bitterly, ‘as well say that the man and woman chained and drowned together in the Noyades of Nantes were united in a holy union!’
‘Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.’
As she remembered those words of the Marriage Sacrament, uttered as she had stood beside him in the midst of the incense, the colour, the pomp, the gorgeous grandeur of the Court Chapel in Vienna, she felt that they had bound on her eternal silence, perpetual constancy, even in a sense continual submission; they forbade her to disgrace him before the world; they made his shame hers, they required her to defend him so far as in her lay from the punishment with which the laws would have met his wrong-doing: but she could not bring herself to acknowledge that it demanded more. Truth could not be forced to dwell beside falsehood. Honour could not take the kiss of peace from dishonour.
The natural veneration she bore to the speaker added to the weight of the reproach implied in the Cardinal’s words. Even beyond her pride was her intense sense of the obligations of duty. She asked herself a thousand times a week if she had indeed failed in these. Honour was a yet higher thing than duty. Offended honour had its title to any choice. Her race had never gone to others with their wrongs; they had known how to avenge themselves by their own hand, in their own way. If she had chosen to stab him in the throat which had lied to her she would not, she thought, have gone outside her right. Yet she had been merciful to him; she had neither exposed nor chastised him; she had simply cut his life adrift from hers, which he had outraged.
No man’s repute is hurt by separation from his wife; he was in no worse circumstance than he had been ere he had met her; she did not withdraw her gifts. She had given a noble name to one nameless; she had granted a feudal title to a bastard; she had enriched a man who previously had owned nothing, save half a million of francs won at play and a strip of sea-shore that was stolen. She withdrew none of her gifts; she left the impostor to the full enjoyment of the world; she did not even move a step to secure the world’s sympathy with herself. All she had done as her just vengeance was to withdraw herself from the pollution of his touch, and to exile him from the home of her fathers. Who could have done less? His children would in the future possess all she had, though through him they destroyed the purity of her race for ever: centuries would not wash out in her sight the stain that was in their blood: but she did not disinherit them. She could not see that she had failed anywhere in her duty; she had been more generous in her judgment than many could have been. Wherever women spoke of her and of her separation from her husband, there would they surely, with many a bitter word, repay her all the affronts which she had put upon them by her indifference and by what they had esteemed her arrogance. She knew that in such a position as she had perforce created, unexplained, the man is easily and constantly absolved of blame, the woman is always and certainly condemned. Therefore she had never doubted that the future would lie lightly on his shoulders, passed in sensual idleness, in oblivion more or less easily attained. Could it be possible that though she had been so cruelly betrayed her own obligations remained the same? Had her marriage vows compelled her to endure even such offence as this without alteration in her own obedience? Was she inconsistent in sending her betrayer from her, whilst she still considered her bond to him binding? Since she refused to take advantage of the release that the Law and the Church would give her, was it unjustifiable to free herself from his hourly presence, his daily contact? No! she could not believe that it was so.
On her name-day, in the following spring, addressing his felicitations to her, Egon Vàsàrhely added words which had cost him much to write.
‘You know how dear, more dear than any earthly thing, you have been ever to me,’ he wrote, ‘therefore you will pardon me what I am about to say. If I had followed my own selfish desires I should have entreated you to disgrace him publicly, begged you to shake off publicly all bonds to a traitor; and I should have shot him dead, with or without the formula of a quarrel; he himself knew that well. But for your own sake I would say to you now, pardon him if you can. Though you are the possessor of a position and of a character rare amongst women, yet even you must suffer as a separated wife. The children as they grow older will suffer from it likewise. You could divorce your husband; the Law and the Church would set you free from an union contracted in ignorance with a man guilty of a fraud. You would be free, and he would endure his fit chastisement. But I understand why you refuse to do that. I comprehend your feeling. Publicity would to you intensify disgrace. Divorce could do nothing to heal your cruel wounds. Therefore I urge on you forgiveness. It has cost me many months’ bitter struggle to be able to write this to you. His offence is vile. His past is hateful. He himself merits nothing. But for your commands I would have set my heel on his throat as on a snake’s. But there may have been excuses even for him; and since you acknowledge him as your husband you will, in the end, be more at peace if you do not continue to insist on a separation which will be food for the world’s calumny. Besides, though you know it not, you have not exiled him from your heart, though you have sent him from your house. If you had not still loved him you would have said to me — Slay him. I believe that he loved you, though he had such foul guilt against you, and he must have some true qualities of character and mind since he satisfied yours for many long years. Of where he may be now I know not. Since I saw you I have not quitted my own country. But I would say to you — wherever he be, send for him. You will understand without words what it costs me to say to you — Since you will not accept the freedom of the Law, summon him to you and cleanse his soul in yours. I speak for you, not him. If I saw him lying dead like a dog in a ditch, for myself, I should thank
God. Sometimes I look with stupor at my sword. Can it lie idle there and you be unavenged?’
The letter touched her profoundly. She realised the grandeur of generosity, the force of compelling duty, which had enabled Vàsàrhely to write it, proudest of gentlemen as he was, most devoted of lovers as he had been.
She replied to him:
‘I have thought myself strong, but of late years I have found that there are things beyond my strength; what you counsel is one of them. Religion enjoins, indeed, forgiveness without limit; but there are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension. Nevertheless, I thank you for him and for myself.’
Any crime, any folly, any violence or faithlessness, which yet should have left his honour pure, she thought it would have been possible to condone; the life of a woman who loves must ever be one long pardon. But such shame as this of his ate into her very soul, as rust into the pure metal. It was such shame that when her heart went out to what she had once loved in the yearning of affection, she felt herself disgraced, feeling that the dominion of the senses, the weakness of remembered and desired joys made her oblivious of indignity, feeble as an enamoured fool.
Her friends, her priests, even her own conscience might say to her ‘Forgive,’ but she could not bend her will to do it. Forgiveness would mean reconciliation, union, life spent together as in their days of love. She could not bring herself to endure that perpetual contact, that incessant communion. To her sight he was stained with a moral leprosy. She could not consent to admit that one in spiritual health, and clean of guilt, must dwell with one spiritually diseased.
CHAPTER XLI.
Another year passed by, and of him she still heard nothing. As, once before, his silence had told her of his passion more eloquently than speech could have done, so now the same silence tended to soften her wrath, to soothe her horror. She had expected him to take one of two courses: either to assail her with written entreaties for pardon, and ceaseless efforts to palliate his crime in her sight, or to go out into the world of men to seek oblivion in pleasure, and perhaps absolution in ambition.