WANDA

BY

OUIDA

'Doch!—alles was dazu mich trieb;
Gott!—war so gut, ach, war so lieb!'
Goethe

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III.

LONDON

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICADILLY

1883

[WANDA.]

[CHAPTER XXIX.]

When they came home from their tour amidst the mines of Galicia and the plains of Hungary, and from their reception amongst the adoring townsfolk of restored Idrac, the autumn was far advanced, and the long rains and the wild winds of October had risen, making of every brook a torrent.

On their return she found intelligence from Paris that a friend of her father's, and her own godfather, the Duc de Noira, had died, bequeathing her his gallery of pictures, and his art collection of the eighteenth century, which were both famous. The Duc had been a Legitimist and a hermit. He had been unmarried, and had spent all the latter years of his life in amassing treasures of art, for which he had no heir of his own blood to care a jot. The bequest was a very precious one, and her presence in Paris was requested. Regretful for herself to leave Hohenszalras, she perceived that to Sabran the tidings were welcome. Moved by an unselfish impulse she said at once:

'Go alone; go instead of me; your presence will be the same as mine. Paris will amuse you more if you are by yourself, and you will be so happy amongst all those Lancrets and Fragonards, those Reiseiners and Gauthières. The collection is a marvel, but entirely of the Beau Siècle. You never saw it? No! I think the Duc never opened his doors to anyone save to half a dozen old tried friends, and he had a horror of turning his salons into showrooms. If you think well, we will leave it all as it is, buying the house if we can. All that eighteenth century bibeloterie would not suit this place, and I should like to keep it all as he kept it; that is the only true respect to show to a legacy.'

Sabran hesitated; he was tempted, yet he was half reluctant to yield to the temptation. He felt that he would willingly be by himself awhile, yet he loved his wife too passionately to quit her without pain. His own conscience made her presence at times oppress and trouble him, yet he had never lost the half-religious adoration with which she had first inspired him. He suggested a compromise—why should they not winter in Paris?

She was about to dissent, for of all seasons in the Tauern she loved the winter best; but when she looked at him she saw such eager anticipation on his face that she suppressed her own wishes unuttered.

'We will go, if you like,' she said, without any hesitation or reluctance visible. 'I dare say we can find some pretty house. Aunt Ottilie will be pleased; there is nothing here which cannot do without us for a time, we have such trusty stewards; only I think it would be more change for you if you went alone.'

'No!' he said; 'separation is a sort of death; do not let us tempt fate by it. Life is so short at its longest; it is ingratitude to lose an hour that we can spend together.'

'There was never such a lover since Petrarca,' she said, with a smile. 'Nay, you eclipse him: he was never tried by marriage.'

But though he jested at it, his great love for her seemed like a beautiful light about her life. What did his state-secret matter? What did it matter what cause had led him to avoid political life?—he loved her so well.

The following month they were in Paris, having found an hotel in the Boulevard St. Germain, standing in a great sunny garden; and when they were fairly installed there, the Princess and the children and the horses followed them, and their arrival made an event of great interest and importance in the city which of all others in the world it is hardest thus to impress.

The Countess von Szalras, a notability always, was celebrated just then as the inheritress of the coveted Noira collection, which it had been fondly hoped would have gone to the hammer: and Sabran, popular always, and not forgotten here, where most things and people are forgotten in a week, was courted, flattered, and welcomed by men and by women; and as he rode down the Allée des Acacias, or entered the Mirlitons, he felt himself at home. His beautiful wife, his beautiful children, his incomparable horses, his marvellous good fortune were the talk of all those who had already left their country-houses for the winter rentrée, and attained a publicity, beginning with the great Szalras pearls and ending with the babies' white donkeys, which was the greatest of all possible offences to her; she abhorred and contemned publicity with the sensitiveness of a delicate temper and the contempt of a scornful patrician.

To Sabran it was not so offensive; there was the Slav in him, which loved display, and was not ill-pleased by notoriety. All this admiration around them made him feel that his life after all had been a great success, that he had drawn prizes in the lottery of fate which all men envied him; it helped him to forget Egon Vàsàrhely. He had never so nearly felt affection for Bela as when lines of men and women stood still to watch the handsome child gallop on his pony down the avenues of the Bois.

'Life is after all like baccara or billiards,' he said to himself. 'It is of no use winning unless there be a galerie to look on and applaud.'

And then he felt ashamed of the poorness and triviality of the thought, which was not one he would have expressed to his wife. That very morning, when she had read a long flattery of herself in a journal of fashion, she had cast the sheet from her with disgust on every line of her face.

'We are safe from that, at least, in the Iselthal,' she had said. 'Cannot you make them understand that we are not public artists to need réclames, nor yet sovereigns to be compelled to submit to the microscope? Is this the meaning of civilisation—to make privacy impossible, to oblige every one to live under a lens?'

He had affected to agree with her, but in his heart he had not done so. He liked the fumes of the incense. So did his child.

'They will put this in the papers!' said Bela, when the snow came and he had his sledge out for the first time with four little Hungarian ponies.

'That is the poison of cities!' said Wanda, as she heard him. 'Who can have been so foolish as to tell him of the papers?'

'Your heir, my dear, will never want for reporters of any flattery,' said his father. 'It is as well he should run the gauntlet of them early.'

Bela listened, and said to his brother a little later: 'I like Paris. Paris prints everything we do, and the people read the print, and then they want to see us.'

'What good is that?' said Gela. 'I like home. They all of them know us; they don't want to see us. That is much better.'

'No, it isn't,' said Bela. 'One drives all day long at home, and there is nothing but the trees; here the trees are all people, and the people talk of us, and the people want to be us.'

'But they love us at home,' said Gela.

'That does not matter,' said Bela with hauteur.

Wanda called the children to her.

'Bela,' she said gently, 'do you know that once, not so very long ago, there was a little boy here in Paris very much like you, with golden hair and velvet coat like yours, and he was called the Dauphin, and when he went out with his servants, as you do, the people envied him, and talked of him, and put in print what he did each day? The people wanted to be him, as you say, but they did not love him—poor little child!—because they envied him so. And in a very little while—a very, very little while—because it was envy and not love, they put the Dauphin in prison, and they cut off his golden hair, and gave him nothing but bread and water and filthy straw, and locked him up all alone till he died. That is the use of being envied in Paris—or anywhere else. Gela is right. It is better when people love us.'

The next day, as Bela drove in his sledge down the white avenues through the staring crowds, his little fair face was very grave under its curls; he thought of the Dauphin.

When the weather opened, Wanda took him and his brother to Versailles and Trianon, and told them more of that saddest of all earthly histories of fallen greatness. Gela sobbed aloud; Bela was silent and grew pale.

'I hate Paris,' he said very slowly, as they went back to it in the red close of the wintry afternoon.

'Do not hate Paris. Do not hate anything or anyone,' said his mother softly; 'but love your own home and your own people, and be grateful for them.'

Bela lifted his little cap and made the sign of the Cross, as he did when he saw anything holy. 'I am the Dauphin at home,' he thought; and he felt the tears in his eyes, though he never would cry as Gela did.

So she gave them her simples as antidotes to the city's poison, and occupied herself with her children, with the poor around her, with the various details of her distant estates, and paid but little heed to that artificial world which, when she heeded it, offended and irritated her. To please Sabran she went to a few great houses and to the opera, and gave many entertainments herself, happy that he was happy in it, but not otherwise interested in the life around her, or moved by the homage of it.

'It is much more my jewels than it is myself that they stare at,' she assured him, when he told her of the admiration which she elicited wherever she appeared. 'Believe me, if you put my pearls or my diamonds on Madame Chose or Baroness Niemand, they would gather and gaze quite as much.'

He laughed.

'Last night I think you wore no ornaments except a few tea-roses, and I saw them follow you just the same. It is very odd that you never seem to understand that you are a beautiful woman.'

'I am glad to be so in your eyes, if I never shall be in my own. As for that popularity of society, it never commended itself to me. It has too strong a savour of the mob.'

'When you are so proud to the world why are you so humble to me?'

She was silent a moment, then said:

'I think when one loves any other very much, one becomes for him altogether unlike what one is to the world. As for being proud, I have never fairly made out whether my pride is humility or my humility pride, and none of my confessors have ever been able to tell me. I assure you I have searched my heart in vain.'

A shadow passed over his face; he thought that there even would be pride enough to send him out for ever from her side if she knew——

One day she suggested to him that he should visit Romaris.

'Now you are near for so long a time, surely you should go,' she urged. 'It is not well never to see your poor people. The priest is a good man, indeed; but he cannot altogether make up for your absence.'

He answered with some irritation that they were not his people. All the land had been parcelled out, and nothing remained to the name of Sabran except a strip of the sea-shore and one old half ruined tower: he could not see that he had any duties or obligations there. She did not insist, because she never pursued a theme which appeared unwelcome; but in herself she wondered at the dislike which was in him towards his Breton hamlet, wondered that he did not wish one of his sons to bear its title, wondered that he did not desire the children to see once, at least, the sea-nest of his forefathers. It was more effort to her than usual to restrain herself from pressing questions upon him. But she did forbear; and as a consolation to her conscience sent to the Curé of Romaris a sum of money for the poor, which was so large that it astounded and bewildered the holy man by the weight of responsibility it laid on him.

The indifference shocked her the more because of the profound conviction, in which she had been reared, of the duties of the noble to his poorer brethren, and the ties of mutual affection which bound together her and her people's interests.

'The weapon of our order against the Socialist is duty,' she had once said to him.

He, more sceptical, had told her that no weapon, not even that anointed one, can turn aside the devilish hate of envy. But she held to her creed, and strove to rear her children in its tenets. It always seemed to her that the Cross before which the fiend shrinks cowering in 'Faust' is but a symbol of the power of a noble life to force even hatred to its knees.

She did not care for this season in Paris, but she did not let him perceive any dissatisfaction in her. She made her own interests out of the arts and charity; she bought the Hôtel Noira, and left everything as the Duc had left it; she found pleasure in intercourse with her royal exiled friends, and left her husband his own entire liberty of action.

'Are you never jealous?' said her royal friend to her once. 'He is so much liked—so much made love to—I wonder you are not jealous!'

'I?' she echoed: and it seemed to her friend as if in that one pronoun she had said volumes. 'Jealous!'

She repeated the word as she drove home alone that day, and almost wondered what it meant. Who could be to him what she was? Who could dethrone her from that 'great white throne' to which his adoration had raised her? If his senses ever strayed, his soul would never swerve from its loyalty.

When she reached home that afternoon she found a card, on which was written with a pencil, in German:

'So sorry not to find you. I am in Paris to see my doctor. Zdenka has taken my service at Court. I will come to you to-morrow.'

The card was Madame Brancka's.

[CHAPTER XXX.]

Sabran, that same afternoon, as he had walked down the Rue de la Paix, had been signalled and stopped by a pretty woman wrapped to the eyes in blue fox furs, who was being driven in a low carriage by Hungarian horses, glorious in silver chains and trappings.

'My dear Réné,' had cried Madame Olga, 'do you not know me, that you compel me to flourish my parasol? Yes: I am come to Paris. My sister-in-law, Zdenka, will do my waiting. I wanted to consult my physician; I am very unwell, though you look so incredulous. So Wanda has all the Noira collection? What a fortunate woman she is. The eighteenth century is the least suited to her taste. She will heartily despise all those shepherdesses en panier and those smiling deities on lacquer. How could the Duc leave such frivolities to so serious a person? What is her doubled rose-leaf amidst all her good luck? She must have one. I suppose it is you? Well, you will find me at home in an hour. I am only a stone's throw from your hotel. Have you brought all the homespun virtues with you from Hohenszalras? I am afraid they will wither in the air of the boulevards. Au revoir!

And then she had laughed again and kissed her finger-tips to him, and driven away wrapped up in her shining furs, and he was conscious of a stinging sense of excitement, annoyance, pleasure, and confusion, as if he had drunk some irritant and heady wine.

He had gone on to his clubs with an uneasy sense of something perilous and distasteful having come into his life, yet also with a consciousness of a certain zest added to the reductions of this his favourite city. He did not go to the Hôtel Brancka in the next hour, and was sensible of having to exercise a certain control over himself to refrain from doing so.

'Did you know that Olga was in Paris?' she said, in some surprise, to him when they met in the evening.

'I believe she arrived this morning,' he answered, with a certain effort. 'I met her an hour or two ago. She came unexpectedly; she had not even told her servants to open her hotel.'

'Is Stefan with her?'

'I believe not.'

'But surely it is her term of waiting in Vienna?'

He gave a gesture of indifference.

'I believed it was. I think it was. She will be sure to write to you this evening, so she said. We cannot escape her, you see; she is our fate.'

'We can go back to Hohenszalras.'

'That would be too absurd. We cannot spend our lives running away from Madame Brancka. We have a hundred engagements here. Besides, your Noira affair is not one half settled as yet, and it is only now that Paris is really agreeable. We will go back in May, after Chantilly.'

'As you like,' she said, with a smile of ready acquiescence.

She was only there for his sake. She, would not spoil his contentment by showing that she made a sacrifice. She was never really happy away from her mountains, but she did not wish him to suspect that.

The Hôtel Brancka was a charming little temple of luxury, ordered after the last mode, and as pimpant as its mistress. It had cost enormous sums of money, and its walls had been painted by famous artists with fantastic and voluptuous subjects, which had not been paid for at the present.

In finance, indeed, she was much like a king of recent time, who never had any money to give, but always said to his mistresses, 'Order whatever you like; the Civil List will always pay my bills.' She had never any money, but she knew that her brother-in-law, like the king's ministers, would always pay her bills.

'One expects to hear the "Decamerone" read here,' said Wanda, with some disdain, as she glanced around her on her first visit.

'At Hohenszalras one would never dare to read anything but the "Imitationis Christi,"' said Madame Olga, with contempt of another sort.

The little hotel was but a few streets distance off their own grand and spacious residence, which had undergone scarcely any change since the days of Louis XV. They saw the Countess Brancka very often, could not choose but see her when she chose, and that was almost perpetually.

He had honestly, and even intensely, desired not to be subjected to her vicinity. But it was difficult to resist its seduction when she lived within a few yards of him, when she met him at every turn, when the changing scenes of society were like those of a kaleidoscope, always composed of the same pieces. The closeness of her relationship to his wife made an avoidance of her, which would have been easy with a mere acquaintance, wholly out of possibility. She pleaded her 'poverty' very prettily, as a plea to borrow their riding-horses, use their boxes at the Opéra and the Théâtre Français, and be constantly, under one pretext or another, seeking their advice. Wanda, who knew the enormous extravagance of both the Branckas, and the inroads which their debts made on even the magnificent fortunes of Egon Vàsàrhely, had not as much patience as usual in her before these plaintive pretences.

'Wanda me boude', said Madame Brancka, with touching reproachfulness, and sought a refuge and a confidant in the sympathy of Sabran, which was not given very cordially, yet could not be altogether refused. Not only were they in the same world, but she made a thousand claims on their friendship, on their relationship. Stefan Brancka was in Hungary. She wanted Sabran's advice about her horses, about her tradespeople, about her disputes with the artists who had decorated her house; she sent for him without ceremony, and, with insistence, made him ride with her, drive with her, dance with her, made him take her to see certain diversions which were not wholly fitted for a woman of her rank, and so rapidly and imperceptibly gained ascendency over him that before making any engagement he involuntarily paused to learn whether she had any claim on his time. It caused his wife the same vague impatience which she had felt when Olga Brancka had persisted in going out with him on hunting excursions at home. But she thrust away her observation of it as unworthy of her.

'If she tire him,' she thought, 'he will very soon put her aside.'

But he did not do so.

Once she said to him, with a little irony, 'You do not dislike Olga so very much now?' and to her surprise he coloured and answered quickly, 'I am not sure that I do not hate her.'

'She certainly does not hate you,' said Wanda, a little contemptuously.

'Who knows?' he said gloomily; 'who could ever be sure of anything with a woman like that?'

'Mutability has a charm for some persons,' said his wife, with an irritation for which she despised herself.

'Not for me,' said Sabran, quickly. 'My opinion of Madame Olga is precisely what it has always been.'

'Are you very sincere to her, then?' said Wanda, and as she spoke, regretted it. What was Olga Brancka that she should for a moment bring any shadow of dissension between them?

'Sincere!' he echoed, with a certain embarrassment. 'Who would she expect to be so? I told you once before that you pay her in a coin of which she could not decipher the superscription!'

Wanda smiled, but she was pained by his tone. 'You are not the first man, I suppose, who amuses himself with what he despises,' she answered. 'But I do not think it is a very noble sport, or a very healthy one. Forgive me, dear, if I seem to preach to you.'

'Preach on for ever, my beloved divine. You can never weary me,' said Sabran, and he stooped and kissed her.

She did not return his caress.

That day as she drove with the Princess in the Bois, Bela and Gela facing her, she saw him in the side alley riding with the Countess Brancka. A physical pain seemed to contract her heart for a moment.

'Olga is very accaparante,' said the Princess, perceiving them also. 'Not content with borrowing your Arabs, she must have your husband also as her cavalier.'

'If she amuse him I am her debtor,' said Wanda, very calmly.

'Amuse! Can a man who has lived with you be amused by her?'

'I am not amusing,' said his wife, with a smile which was not mirthful. 'Men are like Bela and Gela; they cannot always be serious.'

Then she told her coachman to leave the Bois and drive out into the country. She did not care to meet those riders at every turn in the avenues.

'My dear Réné,' said the Princess, when she happened to see him alone. 'Can you find no one in all Paris to divert yourself with except Stefan Brancka's wife? I thought you disliked her.'

Sabran hesitated.

'She is related to us,' he said a little feebly. 'One sees her of necessity a hundred times a week.'

'For our misfortune,' said the Princess, sententiously. 'But she is not altogether friendless in Paris. Can she find no one but you to ride with her?'

'Has Wanda been complaining to you?'

'My dear Marquis,' replied Madame Ottilie, with dignity. 'Your wife is not a person to complain; you must understand her singularly little after all, if you suppose that. But I think, if you would calculate the hours you have of late passed in Madame Brancka's society, you would be surprised to see how large a sum they make up of your time. It is not for me to presume to dictate to you; you are your own master, of course: only I do not think that Olga Brancka, whom I have known from her childhood, is worth a single half-hour's annoyance to Wanda.'

Sabran rose, and his lips parted to speak, but he hesitated what to say, and the Princess, who was not without tact, left him to receive herself some sisters of S. Vincent de Paul. His conscience was not wholly clear. He was conscious of a pungent, irresistible, even whilst undesired, attraction that this Russian woman possessed for him; it was something of the same potent yet detestable influence which Cochonette had exercised over him. Olga Brancka had the secret of amusing men and of exciting their baser natures; she had a trick of talk which sparkled like wine, and, without being actually wit, illumined and diverted her companions. She was a mistress of all the arts of provocation, and had a cruel power of making all scruples of conscience and all honesties and gravities of purpose seem absurd. She made no disguise of her admiration of Sabran, and conveyed the sense of it in a thousand delicate and subtle modes of flattery. He read her very accurately, and had neither esteem nor regard for her, and yet she had an attraction for him. Her boudoir, all wadded softly with golden satin like a jewel-box, with its perpetual odour of roses and its faint light coloured like the roses, was a little temple of all the graces, in which men were neither wise nor calm. She had a power of turning their very souls inside out like a glove, and after she had done so they were never worth quite as much again. The fascination which Sabran possessed for her was that he never gave up his soul to her as the others did; he was always beyond her reach; she was always conscious that she was shut out from his inmost thoughts.

The sort of passion she had conceived for him grew, because it was fanned by many things—by his constancy to his wife, by his personal beauty, by her vague enmity to Wanda, by the sense of guilt and of indecency which would attach in the world's sight to such a passion. Her palate in pleasure was at once hardened and fastidious; it required strong food, and her audacity in search of it was not easily daunted. She knew, too, that he had some secret which his wife did not share; she was resolved to penetrate it. She had tried all other means; there only now remained one——to surprise or to beguile it from himself. To this end, cautious and patient as a cat, she had resumed her intimacy with them as relations, and with all the delicate arts of which she was a proficient, strove to make her companionship agreeable and necessary to him. Before long he became sensible of a certain unwholesome charm in her society. He went with her to the opera, he took her to pass hours amidst the Noira collection, he rode with her often; now and then he dined with her alone, or almost alone, in a small oval room of pure Japanese, where great silvery birds and white lilies seemed to float on a golden field, and the dishes were silver lotus leaves, and the lamps burned in pale green translucent gourds hanging on silver stalks.

An artificial woman is nothing without her mise en scène; transplanted amidst natural landscape and out-of-door life she is apt to become either ridiculous or tiresome. Madame Brancka in Paris was in her own playhouse; she looked well, and was in her own manner irresistible. At Hohenszalras she had been as out of keeping with all her atmosphere as her enamel buttons, her jewelled alpenstock, her cravat of pointe d'Alençon, and her softly-tinted cheeks had been out of place in the drenching rain-storms and mountain-winds of the Archduchy of Austria.

He knew very well that the attraction she possessed for him was of no higher sort than that which the theatre had; he seemed to be always present at a perfect comedy played with exquisite grace amidst unusually perfect decorations. But there was a certain artificial bias in his own temperament which made him at home there. His whole life after all had been an actor's. His wife had said rightly: 'Men cannot be always serious.' It was just his idler, falser moods which Olga Brancka suited, and his very fear of her gave a thrill of greater power to his amusement. When the Princess, his devoted friend, reproved him, he was unpleasantly aroused from his unwise indulgence in a perilous pursuit. To pain his wife would be to commit a monstrous crime, a crime of blackest ingratitude. He knew that; he was ever alive to the enormity of his debt to her, he was for ever dissatisfied with himself for being unable to become more worthy of her.

'She jealous!' he thought. It seemed to him impossible, yet his vanity could not repress a throb of exultation; it almost seemed to him that in making her more human it would make her more near his level. Jealous! It was not a word which was in any keeping with her; jealousy was a wild, coarse, undisciplined, suspicious passion, far removed from the calmness and the strength of her nature.

At that moment she entered the room, coming from a drive in the forenoon. It was still cold. She had a cloak of black sables reaching to her feet; it still rested on her shoulders. Her head was uncovered; she had never looked taller, fairer, more stately; the black furs seemed like some northern robes of coronation. Beneath them gleamed the great gold clasps of a belt, and gold lions' heads fastening her olive velvet gown.

'Jealous!' he thought, 'this queen amongst women!' His heart sank. 'She would never say anything,' he thought; 'she would leave me.' Almost he expected her to divine his thoughts. He was relieved when she spoke to him of some mere trifle of the day. Like many men he could not be frank, because frankness would have seemed like insult to his wife. He could not explain to her the mingled aversion and attraction which Olga Brancka possessed for him, the curious stinging irritation which she produced on his nerves and his senses, so that he despised her, disliked her, and yet could not wholly resist the charm of her unwholesome magic. How could he say this to his wife? How could he hope to make her understand, or if she understood, persuade her not to resent as the bitterest of affronts this power which another woman, and that woman nearly connected with her, possessed? Besides, even if he went so far, if he leaned so much on the nobility of her nature as to venture to do this, he knew very well that she would in reason say to him, 'Let us go away from where this danger exists.' He did not desire to go away. He was glad of this old life of pleasure, which let him forget his secret sorrow. Amidst the excitations of Paris he could push away the remembrance that another man knew the shame of his life. The calm and the solitude of Hohenszalras, which had been delightful to him once, had grown irksome when he had begun to cling to them for fear lest any other should remember as Vàsàrhely had remembered. Here in Paris, where he had always been popular, admired, well known, he was as it were in his own kingdom, and the magnificence with which he could now live there brought him troops of friends. He hoped that his wife would not be unwilling to pass a season there in every year, and he stifled as it rose his consciousness that she would assent to whatever he wished, however painful or unwelcome to herself.

'It is really very unwholesome for you to be married to such a saint as Wanda,' his tormentor said to him one day. 'You do not know what a little opposition and contradiction would do for you.'

They were visiting the Hôtel Noira, studying the probable effects of a new method of lighting the gallery which he contemplated, and she continued abruptly:

'Wanda has been buying very largely in Paris, has she not? And she has bought this hotel of the Noira heirs, I believe? You mean to keep it altogether as it is; and of course you will come and live in it?'

'Whenever she pleases,' he answered, intent on a Lancret not well hung.

'Whenever you please,' said Madame Brancka. 'Why will you pretend that Wanda has any separate will of her own? It is marvellous to see so resolute a person as she was as obediently bent as a willow-wand. But all this French property will constitute quite a fortune apart. I suppose it will all be settled on your third son, as Gela is to have Idrac? Will not you give him your title? Count Victor de Sabran will sound very pretty, and you might rebuild Romaris.'

He turned from her with impatience.

'Are we so very old that you want to parcel out our succession amongst babies? No; I do not intend to give my name to any of Wanda's children. There is an Imperial permission for them all to bear hers.'

'You are not very loyal to your forefathers,' said Madame Brancka. 'Wanda might well spare them one of her boys. If not, what is the use of accumulating all this property in France?'

'All that she buys is done out of respect for the Duc de Noira,' said Sabran, curtly. 'If she bear me twenty sons they will all have her name. It was settled so on the marriage-deeds and ratified by the Kaiser.'

'Are prince-consorts always deposed from any throne they have of their own?' said Madame Olga, in the tone that he hated. 'If I were you I should rebuild Romaris. I wonder so devoted a wife has not done so years ago.'

'There is nothing at Romaris to rebuild.'

'Decidedly,' thought his companion, 'he hates Romaris, and has no love of his own race. Did he drown Vassia Kazán in the sea there?'

Unsparingly she renewed the subject to Wanda herself.

'You should settle the French properties on little Victor, and give him the Sabran title,' she urged to her. 'I told Réné the other day that I thought it very strange he should not care to have one of his sons named after him.'

Wanda answered coldly enough: 'In my will, if I die before him, everything goes to the Marquis de Sabran. He will make what division he pleases between his children, subject of course to Bela's rights of primogeniture.'

Madame Brancka was silent for a moment from surprise.

'It is odd that he should not care for Romaris,' she said, after a long pause. 'You have much more trust in him, Wanda, than it is wise to put in any man that lives.'

'Whom one trusts with oneself, one may well trust with everything else,' said her sister-in-law in a tone which closed discussion. But when she was left alone the thorn remained in her. She thought with perplexity:

'No, he does not care for Romaris. He dislikes its very name. He would never hear of one of the children bearing it. There must be something he does not say.'

She remembered sadly what the Duc de Noira had once said to her:

'In morals as in metals, my dear, you cannot work gold without supporting it by alloy.'

Madame Brancka had patience and skill perfect enough to refrain altogether from those hints and tentatives by which a less clever woman would have attempted to approach and surprise the key to those hidden facts which she believed to be the theme of his correspondence with Vàsàrhely and the cause of his rejection of the Russian appointment. A less clever woman would have alarmed him, and betrayed herself by perpetual allusions to the matter. But she never did this: she treated him with an alternation of subtle compliment and ironical, malice, such as was most certain to allure and perplex any man, and he never by the most distant suspicion imagined that she knew anything which he desired unknown. She was a woman of strong nerve, and her equanimity in his and his wife's presence was wholly undisturbed by her consciousness that she had dispatched the anonymous suggestion as a seed of discord to Hohenszalras. She knew indeed that it was not what people of her rank and breeding did do, that it was not honest warfare, that it was what even the very easy morality of her own world would have condemned with disgust; but she bore the sin of it very lightly. If she had been driven to excuse it, she would have characterised it as mere mischief. If her sister-in-law had shown her the letter, she would have glanced over it with a tranquil face and an air of utter unconcern. If she could not have done this sort of thing she would have thought herself a very poor creature. 'I believe you could be as wicked as the Scotch Lady Macbeth,' Stefan Brancka had said once to her; and she had answered with much contempt: 'At least I promise you I should not walk in my sleep if I were so. Your Lady Macbeth was a grotesque barbarian.'

A great deal of the sin of this world, which is not at all like Lady Macbeth's, comes from the want of excitement felt by persons, only too numerous, who have exhausted excitement in its usual shapes. She had done so; she required what was detestable to arouse her, because she had lived at such high pressure that any healthy diversion was vapid and stupid to her. The destruction, if she could achieve it, of her sister-in-law's happiness, offered her in prospect such an excitement; and the whim she had taken for passion grew out of waywardness till it nearly became passion in truth. She never precisely weighed or considered its possible consequences, but she endeavoured to arouse a response in him with all the unscrupulous skill of a mistress in coquetry. When moved by Madame Ottilie's warning he strove honestly to avoid her, and often excused himself from obedience to her summons, the opposition only stimulated her endeavours, and made a smarting mortification and anger against him supply a double motor-power for his subjection. If she could have believed that she succeeded in making his wife anxious, she might have been content; but Wanda always received her with the same serenity and courtesy, which, if it covered disdain, covered it unimpeachably with admirable grace.

'If one broke her heart, she would only make one a grand courtesy with a bland smile,' thought Olga Brancka, irritably and impatiently. 'There are people who die standing. Wanda would do that.'

That ill weeds grow apace is a true old saw, never truer than of vindictive and envious passions. Sheer and causeless jealousy of her sister-in-law had been alive in her many years, and now, by being fed and unresisted, so grew that it became almost a restless hatred. It was far more her enmity to his wife than any other sentiment which inspired her with a fantastic and unhealthy desire to attract and detach Sabran from his allegiance. Joined to it now there was a sense of some mystery in him that baffled her, and which was to such a woman the most pungent of all stimulants. In all her câlineries and all her railleries she never lost sight of this one purpose, of surprising from him the secret which she believed existed. But he was always on his guard with her; even when most influenced by her atmosphere and her magnetism he did not once lose his self-control and his habitual coolness. At moments when she was most nearly triumphing, the remembrance of his wife came over him like a breath of sweet pure air that passes through a hot-house, and restored him to self-possession and to loyalty. She began to fear that all the ability with which she had procured her exemption from Court duties, and had induced her husband to remain in Vienna, was all vain, and she grew bolder and more reckless in her use of stratagems and solicitations to keep Sabran beside her in these early spring days given over to racing and sporting, and at all the evening entertainments at which the great world met, and whither she carried with so much effect her gleaming sapphires and her black pearls.

'Black pearls argue a perverted taste,' said the Princess Ottilie once to her, and she unabashed answered:

'It is perverted tastes that make any noise in the world or possess any flavour. White pearls are much more beautiful, no doubt, but then they are everywhere, from the Crown jewel-cases to the peasant's necks; but my black pearls! you cannot find their match—and how white one's throat looks with them. I only want a green rose.'

'Chemicals can supply any deformity,' said the Princess, drily. 'Doing so is called science, I believe.'

'Do you call me a deformity?' she asked, with some annoyance.

'You are an elaborate production of the laboratory,' said the Princess, calmly. 'I am sure you will admit yourself that nature has had very little to do with you.'

'My pearls are black by a freak of nature,' said Madame Olga. 'Perhaps I am the same.'

The Princess made a little gesture signifying that politeness forbade her from assent, but she thought: 'Yes; you were never a white pearl, but you have steeped yourself in acids and solutions of all degrees of poison till you are darker than you need have been, and you think your darkness light, and some men think so too.'

Sabran had grown to look for that necklace of black pearls with eagerness in the society to which they both belonged. Few evenings found him where Madame Brancka was not. She had known his Paris of the Second Empire; she had known Compiègne and Pierrefonds as he had known them; she knew all the friendships and the bywords of his old life, and all the dessous des cartes of that which was now around them. She amused him. She comprehended all he said, half uttered. She remembered all he recalled. At Hohenszalras he had not found any charm in this, but here he did find one. She suited Paris; she knew it profoundly, she liked all its pastimes, she understood all its sports and all its slang. She hunted at Chantilly, betted at La Marche, plunged at baccara, shot and fenced well and gaily, had the theatres and all their jargon at her fingers' ends; all this made her no mean aspirant to the post of mistress of his thoughts. All which had seemed tiresome, artificial, even ridiculous, amidst the grand forests and healthful air of the Iselthal became in Paris agreeable and even bewitching. Once he said almost angrily to his wife:

'You, who ride so superbly, should surely show yourself at the Duc's hunts. What is the use of long gallops in the Bois before anyone else is out of bed?'

'I never rode for show yet,' said Wanda, in surprise. 'And you know I never would join in any sort of chase.'

'Surely such humanitarianism is exaggeration,' he said impatiently. 'Olga Brancka rides every day they meet at Chantilly, and she is by no means of your form in the saddle.'

'I have never yet imitated Olga,' said his wife, a little coldly; but she did not object when day after day her finest horses were lent to Madame Brancka. She never by a word or a hint reminded him that he was not absolute master of all which belonged to her. Only when her sister-in-law wanted to take Bela and his pony to Chantilly, she made her will strongly felt in refusal.

The child, whose fancy had been fired by what he had heard of the ducal hunting, of the great hounds and the stately gatherings, like pictures of the Valois time, was passionately angered at being forbidden to go, and made his mother's heart ache with his flashing eyes and his flaming cheeks. 'Cannot she leave even the children alone?' she thought, with more bitterness than she had ever felt against anyone.

A few nights later they were both at the Grand Opéra, in the box which was allotted to the name of the Countess von Szalras. She was herself not very well; she was pale, she sat a little away from the light. Her gown was of white velvet; she had no ornament except a cluster of gardenias and stephanotis, and her habitual necklace of pearls. Olga Brancka, in a costume of many shaded reds, marvellously embroidered in gold cords, was as gorgeous as a tropical bird, and sat with her arms upon the front of the box, playing with a fan of red feathers, or looking through her glass round the house. He talked most with her, but he looked most at his wife. There was no woman, in a full and brilliant house, who could compare with her. A thrill of the pride of possession passed through him. The malicious eyes of the other, glancing towards him over her shoulder, read his thoughts. She smiled provokingly.

'Le mari amoureux!' she murmured. 'Really I did not believe in the existence of that type. But it is quite admirable that it should exist. Its example is very much wanted in Paris.'

He felt himself colour like a youth, but it was with irritation; he was at a loss for an answer. To have defended his admiration of his wife at the sword's point would have been easy; to defend it from a woman's ridicule was more difficult. Wanda did not hear; she was listening to the song of Dinorah, and was dreamily regretting the solitude of Hohenszalras, and thinking of what pleasure it would be to return. All the news that Greswold and her stewards sent her thence was precious to her; no details seemed to her insignificant or without interest; and her own letters in return were full of minute attention to the welfare of everyone and of everything she had left there. She was roused from her home reverie by the voice of her sister-in-law, raised more highly and saying impatiently:

'Why should you object, Réné, when I say that I wish it?'

'What do you wish?' said Wanda, who always felt a singular annoyance whenever she heard him thus familiarly addressed. 'Whatever you may wish, I am sure M. de Sabran can require no second bidding to procure it for you, if it be within the limits of the possible.'

'I wish to see a Breton Pardon,' said Olga Brancka, with a gesture of her fan towards the stage. 'There is one next week in his own country; I want him to invite me—us—to Romaris.'

Wanda, who knew that he always shrank from the mention of Romaris, interposed to save him from persecution.

'There is nothing at Romaris to invite us to,' she said for him. 'Neither you nor I can live in a cabin or a fishing-boat; especially can we not in March weather.'

'You can live in a hut on your Alps,' returned the other, 'and I do not dislike tent life in the Karpathians. If he sent his major-domo down, he would soon make the sands and rocks blossom like the rose, and villages would arise as fast as they did before the great Katherine. Why not? It would be charming. Has he no feeling for the cradle of his ancestors? We must put him through a course of Lamartine.'

'An unfortunate allusion; he lived to lose Milly,' said Sabran, finding himself forced to say something. 'In midsummer, Mesdames, you might perhaps rough it, tant bien que mal; but now!—there is nothing to be seen except fog and surf at sea, and mud and pools inland. Even a Pardon would not reconcile you; not even the Breton jackets with scriptural stories embroidered on them, nor the bagpipes.'

'Positively, you will not take us?'

'I must disobey even your wishes in the Ides of March.'

'But whether in March or July—why do you never go yourself?'

'There is nothing to go there for,' he answered, almost losing his patience; 'a people to whom I am only a name, a strip of shore on which I only own a few wind-tormented oak-trees!'

'Only imagine the duties that Wanda would evolve in your place out of those people and those oaks!'

'I have not Wanda's virtues,' he said, half sadly, half jestingly.

'We have none of us, or the Millennium would have arrived. I cannot understand your dislike to your melancholy sea-shore. Most of your countrymen are for ever home-sick away from their landes and their dolmen. You seem to feel no throb for the mater patria, even when listening to Dinorah, which sets every other Breton's heart beating.'

'My heart is Austrian,' said Sabran, with a bow towards his wife.

'That is very pretty, and what you are also obliged to say,' interrupted Madame Brancka. 'But why hate Romaris? For my part, I believe you see ghosts there.'

His wife said, with a quick reproach in her words: 'The ghosts of men who knew how to live and to die nobly? He would not be afraid to meet them.'

The simplicity of the words and the trustfulness of them sank into his soul. A pang of terrible consciousness went through him like poisoned steel. As his wife's eyes sought his the lights swam round with him, the music was only a confused murmur on his ear; he heard as if from afar off the voice of Olga Brancka saying: 'My dear Wanda, you are always so exalted!'

At that moment some one knocked at the door: he was glad to rise and open it to admit Count Kaulnitz and two other gentlemen.

Hardly anything else which his wife could have said would have hurt him quite so much.

As he sat there in the brilliant illumination and the hot-house warmth, with her delicate profile clear as a cameo against the light, a sensation of physical cold passed through him. He saw himself as he was, an actor, a traitor, a perjured and dishonoured man. What right had he there more than any galley-slave at the hulks?—he, Vassia Kazán?

Well tutored by the ways of the world, he laughed, and spoke, and criticised the rendering of the opera with his usual readiness of grace; but Olga Brancka had marked the fleeting expression of his face, and said to herself: 'Whatever the secret be, the key of it lies in the sands of Romaris.'

As she took his arm, when they left the box, she murmured to him: 'I shall go to Romaris, and you will take me.'

'I think not,' he said curtly, without his usual suavity. 'I am the servant of all your sex, it is true, but like all servants I am only willing to be commanded by my mistress.'

'O most faithful of lovers, I understand!' she said, with a contemptuous laugh. 'And she never commands you, she only obeys. You are very fortunate, even though you do have ghosts at your ruined tower by the sea.'

'Yes, I am fortunate, indeed,' he answered gravely, and his eyes glanced towards his wife, who was standing a stair or two below conversing with her cousin Kaulnitz.

'Even though you had to abandon Russia,' murmured Olga Brancka, dreamily. She could feel that a certain thrill passed through him. He was startled and alarmed. Was it possible that Egon Vàsàrhely had betrayed him?

'Paris is much more agreeable than St. Petersburg,' he answered carelessly. 'I am no loser. Wanda would have been unhappy, and, what would have been worse, she would never have said so.'

'No, she would never have said so. She is like the Sioux, the Stoics, and the people who died in lace ruffles in '89. I beg your pardon, those are your people, I forgot; the people whose ghosts forbid you to entertain us at Romaris.'

'I would brave an army of ghosts to please Madame Brancka,' said Sabran, with his usual gallantry.

'Call me Cousinette, at the least,' she murmured, as they descended the last stair.

'Bon soir, madame!' he said, as he closed the door of her carriage.

'Are you coming with me?' said Wanda, as she went to hers.

He hesitated. 'I think I will go for an hour to the clubs,' he answered. He kissed her hand. As he drew the fur rug over her skirts, she thought his face was very pale as she saw it by the lamplight. She wished to ask him if he were quite well, but she restrained herself, knowing how intolerable such importunities are to men. Instead, she smiled at him, as she said, 'Amusez-vous bien,' and left him to divert himself as he chose.

'How little women understand men, and how poorly they love them when they do not leave them alone!' she thought, as her carriage rolled homeward. She never troubled him, never interrogated him, never even tried to conjecture what he did when away from her. Sometimes, when he returned at sunrise, she had already risen, and had said a prayer with her children, written her letters, or visited her horses, but she always met him with a smile and without a question.

It hurt her with an ever-deepening wound to perceive the attraction which Olga Brancka possessed for him. She did not for a moment believe that it was love, but she saw that it was an influence which had audacity enough to compete with her own, a sort, of fascination which, commencing with dislike, increased to an unhealthy and morbid potency. She could not bring herself to speak of it to him. She was not one of those women who reproach and implore. It would have seemed to her as if both he and she would have lost all dignity in each other's sight if once they had stooped to what society calls jestingly 'a scene.' He guessed aright that if she had really believed herself displaced in his heart she would have left him without a word. She was too conscious of his entire worship of her to be moved to anything like that jealous passion which would have seemed to her the last depths of humiliation; but she was pained, fretted, stirred to a scornful wonder by the power this frivolous woman possessed of usurping his time and giving colour to his thoughts.

It hurt her to think he feared her too much to tell her of any trouble, any folly, any memory. She reproached herself with having perhaps alienated his confidence by the gravity of her temper, the seriousness of her opinions. It would be hard to think that frivolous shallow women could inspire men with more confidence than a deeper nature could do, but perhaps it might be so. He had sometimes said to her, half jestingly: 'You should dwell among the angels; the human world is unfit for you!' Was it that which alarmed him?

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 forests 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 cried 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.

It was now June.

The Paris of the world of fashion was soon about to take wing, to disperse itself to country-houses, sea-shores, and foreign baths; to change its place, but to take with it wheresoever it should go all its agitation, its weariness, its fever, its delirium, and its intrigues. Olga Brancka saw the close of the season approach with regret yet expectation. She knew that Sabran must escape her or succumb to her; and she had a bitter, enraged sense that the power of his wife was stronger over him than her own. 'Il faut brusquer la chose,' she said again and again to herself. She grew reckless, imprudent, and was tempted to discard even that external decency which her station in the world had made her assume. She would have compromised herself for him with any publicity he might have chosen to exact. But she had never been able to beguile him into any sort of declaration. When he most felt the danger of her attraction, when he was nearest forgetting honour and decency, nearest submitting, the memory of his wife saved him. He recovered his coolness; he drew back from the abyss. Once or twice she was tempted to throw the name of Vassia Kazán between them and watch its effect; but she refrained—she knew so little!

'You will not take me to Romaris?' she said, for the hundredth time, one evening, as they rode towards St. Germain's.

He laughed.

'Cousinette! if you and I went off to Finisterre you will confess that we should make a pretty paragraph for the papers, and Count Stefan would have a very good right to run me through the lungs.'

'Stefan!' she echoed, with contempt. 'It would be the first time he ever——Besides, you have had duels; you are not afraid of them; and, yet again, besides I do not see what harm we should do if we looked at your chouans and chasse-marées for a few days. No one need even know it.'

She spoke quite innocently, but her black eyes watched him with the 'Teufelinne' cunning and passion. He caught the look. He put his hand in the breast-pocket of his coat, where a letter of his wife's was lying.

'It is out of the question,' he said, almost rudely. 'I have no wish to furnish Figaro with so good a jest. Romaris,' he added, with a smile, 'is of course at your service, like all I possess, if you are so bent upon seeing its desolation. But you must pardon my receiving you by deputy, in the person of the curé, who is seventy years old and is the son of a fisherman.'

She cut her mare across the ears with a fierce gesture and galloped away from him. Sabran as he galloped after her thought with a vague apprehension, 'Why does she dwell on Romaris? Does she suspect that I abhor the place? Can she have seen anything in my looks or in my words that has raised any doubts in her?' But he told himself that this was impossible. As she rode her heart swelled with rage and mortification. There were many men in the world who would have been happy to go at her call to Breton wilds, or any other solitude; and he refused her, bluntly, coldly, because away there in the heart of Austria a woman, who was the mother of his children, span, and read, and said her prayers, and led her stupid, blameless, stately life! He escaped her just because that woman lived! All that hot, cruel caprice which she called love fastened upon him, and swore that it would not be denied. She had a sense of a grand white figure which stood for ever betwixt him and her. She brought herself almost to believe that it was Wanda von Szalras who wronged her.

Two nights later she was present at the last night of a gay comic opera which had made all Paris laugh ever since the first fogs of winter; a dazzling little opera, with a stage crowded by Louis Treize costumes, and music that went as trippingly as a shepherdess's feet in a pastoral. Sabran went to her box after a dinner-party which he had given to a score of men. She looked well, in a gown of many shades of yellow, which few women could have braved, but which suited her night-like eyes and her pearly skin; she had deep yellow roses, natural ones, in her bosom and hair.

'I am flattered that you wear my yellow roses,' he murmured.

'If you had sent me white ones you would have outraged the spirit of Wanda.'

He made an impatient movement.

'When are you going home?' she said, suddenly.

'Soon!' he answered, with the same impatience.

'Soon means anything, from an hour to a year. Besides, you have said it for the last six weeks.'

'Do you go to Noisettiers?'

'Of course I go to Noisettiers; you can come there if you please. I am more hospitable than you.'

He was silent. Noisettiers was a little place on the Norman coast, which Stefan Brancka had given to her on his marriage; a pleasure-house, with Swiss roofs, Cairene windows, Italian balconies and a Persian court, which was bowered amongst lime-trees and filbert trees, near Villeville, and had been the scene of much riotous midsummer gaiety when she had filled it with Parisians and Russians.

'You are always too good to me,' murmured Sabran, in the meaningless compliment of usage, as other men entered her box. But she knew by the coldness of his eyes, by the slightness of his smile, that he would no more go to Noisettiers than to Romaris.

'If Wanda had only remained here,' she thought angrily, opening and shutting her tortoiseshell fan, 'he would have done whatever I had chosen. Men are mere children; thwart them and they pine.

'I suppose,' she said aloud to him, 'you will have your own house-parties at Hohenszalras, as stiff as a minuet, crammed with grand dukes and grand duchesses, all decorum and dignity, all ennui and etiquette? By-the-by, are you restored again to the Emperor's good graces?'

'It is not likely that I shall be so,' replied Sabran, who always dreaded the subject. 'If ever I be so fortunate I shall owe it to the influence Wanda possesses.'

'Why did you offend him?' she said, bending her inquisitive glance upon him.

'All sovereigns are offended when not obeyed. We have discussed this so often. Need we discuss it again in a theatre?'

'You are very impenetrable,' she said. 'Your rule of conduct must follow the lines of M. de. Nothomb's 'il ne faut jamais se brouiller, ni se familiariser, avec qui que ce soit: c'est le secret de durer.'

'M. de Nothomb only meant his rule to apply to his own sex,' replied Sabran. 'With yours, unless a man be either familiarisé or brouillé, his life must be dull and his experience small.'

'Which will you be with me?' she said, with significance. 'The choice is open.'