Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 525
‘Do not be foolish, Olga,’ he said curtly, as he returned. ‘You are a clever woman, and always consult your own interests. I dare say you have done a thousand things as base as your attempt to ruin my cousin’s happiness, but I do not suppose you have often done anything so unwise. You will sign this at once, or you will regret it very greatly.’
‘Why should I sign it?’ she said insolently. ‘The man is what I say; he could not deny it. If I only guessed at the truth, I guessed aright. I wonder that you do not see your interests lie in exposing him. When the world knows he is an impostor Wanda will divorce him and put the children under other names in religious houses. Then you will be able to marry her. I told him she would marry you pour balayer la honte.’
For the moment she was alarmed at the fires that leapt from Vàsàrhely’s sombre eyes. It cost him much — as much as it had cost Sabran — not to strike her where she stood. He paused a second to control himself, then answered her coldly and calmly —
‘My cousin will never seek a divorce, nor shall I wed with a divorced woman. Your hate misleads you; there is no blinder thing than hate. You will sign this paper, or I shall telegraph for my brother.’
‘For Stefan!’
All her boundless indifference to her husband, and her contempt for him, were spoken in the accent she gave his name.
‘For Stefan. You are pleased to despise him because you can lead him into mad follies, and can make him believe you are an innocent woman. But Stefan is not altogether the ignoble dupe you think him. He is a dupe, wiser men than he have been so; but he would not bear your infidelity to him if he really knew it, nor would he bear other things if he knew of them. Two years ago you took two hundred thousand florins’ worth of diamonds, in my name, from my jeweller Landsee in the Graben. How should a tradesman suspect that a Countess Brancka was dishonest? At the end of the year he brought his bill for that and other things to me, whilst I was in Vienna. He had never, of course, doubted that you went on my authority. Equally, of course, I did not betray you, but paid the amount. When you do such things you should not give written orders. They remain against you. Now, if Stefan knew this, or if he knew that you had taken money from the richest of your lovers, the young Duc de Blois, as I knew it so long as seven years ago, you would no longer find him the malleable easily-cozened fool you deem him. You would learn that he has Vàsàrhely blood in him. I have only named two out of the many questionable facts I know against you. They have been safe with me. I would never urge Stefan to a public scandal. But, unless you sign this, and apologise for using my name to the husband of my cousin, as you used it to Landsee of the Graben, I shall tell my brother. He will not divorce you. That is not our way; we do not go to lawyers to redress our wrongs. But he will compel you to retire for your life into a religious house — as you would compel the harmless children of Wanda; or he would imprison you himself in one of our lonely places in the mountains, where you would cry in vain for your lovers, and your friends, and your menus plaisirs, and none would hear you. Do not mistake me. You have often called us barbaric; you will find we can be so. As I say, we do not carry our wrongs to lawyers. We can avenge ourselves.’
She had lost all colour as he spoke. A nervous spasm of laughter contracted her mouth, and remained on it like the ghastly rictus of death. She knew him well enough to know that he meant every syllable he said. The Vàsàrhely had had stern tragedies in their annals, and to women impure and unfaithful had been merciless as Othello.
She felt that she was vanquished; that she would have to obey him or suffer worse things. But though she was aware of her own impotence, she could not resist a retort that should sting him.
‘You are very chivalrous! I always knew you had an insane adoration of your cousin, but I never should have thought you would have put on sabre and spurs in her husband’s defence. Will he reward you by effacing himself? Will he end as he has begun, like the hero of a melodrama at the Gymnase, and shoot himself at Wanda’s feet? You would marry a widow, though you would not marry a divorced woman!’
‘Some time ago, when we spoke of him,’ he replied, still with stern self-control, ‘I told you that were his honour called in question I would defend it as I would my brother’s — not for his sake, for hers. I would, for her sake, defend it so were he the guiltiest soul on earth. He belongs to her. He is sacred to me. You mistake if you deem her such a woman as yourself. She has loved him. She will love no other whilst she lives. She has given herself to him. She will give herself to no other, though she outlive him from this hour. You make your calculations unwisely, for when you make them you suppose that every man and every woman have your own dishonesty, your own passions, your own baseness. You are short of sight, because you only see in the circle of your own conceptions.’
She understood that he knew the secret of the man he protected, but that he would never admit that he did so; would never reveal it or let any other reveal it. She understood that he had himself forborne from its exposure, and would never, whilst he lived, allow any other to hold it up to the derision of the world. She understood that, if need were, Vàsàrhely would defend, as he said, the honour of his cousin’s husband at the point of the sword against all foes or mockers.
‘For her sake!’ she cried, ‘always for her sake! What can you both see so marvellous in her? She has been a greater fool than any woman that has ever lived, though she can read Greek and write in Latin! What has she done with all her wisdom and her holiness? You know as well as though it were written there upon the wall that he is what I say. Why do you put your lance in rest for him? Why are you ready to shed blood on his behalf? He is an impostor who has taken in first the world and then the mistress of Hohenszalras. If you were the hero you have always seemed to me you would tear his heart out of his breast, shoot him like a wolf in these very woods! If her honour is yours, avenge her dishonour!’
She spoke with force and fire, and longing to behold the spirit of evil roused in her hearer’s soul and stung to action.
But she might as well have tried to move the mountains from their base as rouse either pain or rage in her brother-in-law. Vàsàrhely kept his attitude of stern, cold, contemptuous disgust. Not a muscle of his face changed. He said merely:
‘You have been told what I shall do if you do not sign this paper. The choice is yours. If you desire to hear any more episodes of your past I can tell you many.’
Then she changed her attitude and her eloquence. She dissolved in tears; she wept; she implored; she tried to kneel to him. But he was inflexible.
‘You are a good actress,’ he said simply. ‘But you forget; it is Stefan whom you can deceive, not me.’
When she had vainly used all her resources of alternate entreaty and invective, of cajolery and insolence, she sank into her chair, exhausted, hysterical, nerveless.
‘I am ill; call my woman,’ she said faintly.
He replied:
‘You are no more ill than I am.’
‘You are brutal, Egon,’ she said, raising herself, with flashing eyes and hissing tongue.
‘What have you been to her?’ said Vàsàrhely.
He waited with cold, inflexible patience. When another half-hour had gone by she signed the paper, and flung it with fury to him.
‘You know very well it is true!’ she cried, as she leaned across the table like a slender snake that darted. ‘Would she lie dying of it if it were only a lie?’
‘That I know not,’ said Vàsàrhely, coldly. ‘What I know is that your carriage will be ready in an hour, and that you will go hence. If ever you be tempted to speak of what has occurred here, you will remember that my silence to Stefan and your own people is only conditional on yours on another matter.’
Then he left her.
She was cowed, intimidated, vanquished. When the hour was over she went through the two lines of bowing servants, and left Hohenszalras ere the noon was past.
‘It is the first time in my life I ever failed,’ she thought, as the pinnacles and towers of the burg were lost to her sight. ‘What do these men see in that woman?’
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Vàsàrhely, when he left her, went straight to Sabran, who, seated on an oaken bench in the corridor of his wife’s apartments, knew not how the hours passed, and seemed aged ten years in a day. Vàsàrhely motioned him to pass into one of the empty chambers. There he gave him the lines which Olga Brancka had signed.
‘You are safe from her,’ he said. ‘She cannot tell your story to the world. She will not dare even to whisper it as a conjecture.’
Sabran did not speak. This great debt owed to his greatest foe hurt him even whilst it delivered him.
‘For the first time I have concealed the truth,’ pursued Vàsàrhely. ‘I affected to disbelieve her story. There was no other way to save it from publicity. That alone would not have sufficed, but I had means to coerce her.’
‘You have been very generous.’
Vàsàrhely shrank from his praise as though from some insolence. He did not look at Sabran; he spoke briefly between his closed teeth. All his soul was full of longing to strike this man; to meet him in open combat and to kill him; forcing him and his foul secret together down underneath the sole sure cover of the grave. But the sense that so near, within a few feet of them, she lay in peril of her life, made even vengeance seem for the moment profane and blasphemous.
‘There will be always time,’ he thought.
That hushed and darkened chamber hard by awed his hatred into silence. What would she wish? What would she command? Could he but know that, how clear would be his path!
He hesitated a moment, then turned away.
‘I shall wait here until the danger is past, or she is called to God,’ he said hoarsely.
Then he walked away down the corridor slowly, like a man wounded with a wound that bleeds within.
Sabran stood awhile where he had left him, his eyes bent on the ground, his heart sick with shame.
‘He was worthy of her!’ he thought with the most bitter pang of his life.
Three more days and nights passed; they were to him like a hideous nightmare; at times he thought with horror that he would lose his reason. The dreadful stillness, the dreadful silence, the knowledge that death was so near that bed which he dared not approach, the impossibility of learning what memories of him, what hatred of him, might not be haunting the stupor in which she lay, together made up a torture to which her bitterest reproach, her deadliest punishment would have seemed merciful.
All through that exhaustion, in which they believed her mind was without consciousness, the memory of all that he had told her was alive in it, in that poignant remembrance which the confusion of a dulled brain only makes but the more terrible, turning and changing what it suffers from into a thousand shapes. In her worst agony this consciousness never left her; she kept silence because in her uttermost weakness she was strong enough not to give her woe to the ears of the others, but in her heart there seemed a great knife plunged, a knife rusted with blood that was dishonoured.
When she knew that the child she bore was dead, she felt no sorrow, she thought only— ‘Begotten of a serf, of a coward!’
The intolerable outrage, the intolerable deception, were like flames of fire that seemed to eat up her life; her love for him, for the hour at least, had been stunned and ceased to speak. To the woman who came of the races of Szalras and Vàsàrhely, the dishonour covered every other memory.
‘All his life only one long lie!’ she thought.
Her race had been stainless through a thousand years of chivalry and heroism, and she — its sole descendant — had sullied it with the blood of a base-born impostor!
Whilst she lay sunk in what they deemed a perfect apathy, the disgrace done to her, to her name, to her ancestry, was ever present to her mind: a spectre which no one saw save herself. Every other emotion was for the time quenched in that. She felt as though the whole world had struck her on the cheek and she was powerless to resent or to revenge the blow. In hours of delirium she thought she saw all the men and women of her race who had reigned there before her standing about her bed, and saying: ‘You held our honour, and what did you do with it? You let it sink to the earth in the arms of a nameless coward.’
One night she said suddenly: ‘My cousin — is he here?’
When they told her that he had remained at Hohenszalras she seemed reassured. At sunrise she asked the same question. When they answered with the same affirmative, she said: ‘Bid him come to me.’
They fetched him instantly. As he passed Sabran in the corridor he paused.
‘Your wife has sent for me,’ he said; ‘have I your permission to see her?’
Sabran bent his head, but his heart beat thickly with the only jealousy he had ever felt. She asked for Egon Vàsàrhely in her stupor of misery, and he, her husband, had lost the right to enter her chamber, dared not approach her presence!
‘Wanda, I am here!’ said Vàsàrhely, softly, as he bent over her. She looked at him with eyes full of unspeakable agony.
‘Is it true?’ she murmured.
‘Yes!’ he said bitterly between his teeth.
‘And you knew it?’
‘Too late! But Wanda — my beloved Wanda — trust to me. The world shall never hear it.’
Her eyes had closed, a shiver ran through all her frame. ‘Olga?’ she muttered.
‘She is in my power. I will deal with her,’ he answered. ‘She will be silent as the grave.’
She gave a long shuddering sigh, and her head sank back upon her pillows.
Vàsàrhely fell on his knees beside her bed, and buried his face on her hands.
‘My violated saint!’ he murmured. ‘Fear not; I will avenge you.’
Low though the words were, they reached and moved her in her dim blind weakness. She stretched out her hand, and touched his bowed head.
‘No, no — not that. He is my children’s father. He must be sacred; give me your word, Egon, there shall be no bloodshed between him and you.’
‘I am your next friend,’ he said, with intense appeal in his voice. ‘You are insulted and dishonoured — your race is affronted and stained — who should avenge that if not I, your kinsman? There is no male of your house. It falls to me.’
All the manhood and knighthood in him were athirst for the life of the impostor who had dishonoured what he adored.
‘Promise me,’ she said again.
‘Your brothers are dead,’ he muttered. ‘I may well stand in their place. Their swords would have found him out ere he were an hour older.’
She raised herself with a supreme effort, and through the pallor and misery of her face there came a momentary flash of anger, a momentary flash of the old spirit of command.
‘My brothers are dead, and I forbid any other to meddle with my life. If anyone slew him it would be I — I — in my own right.’
Her voice had been for the instant stern and sustained, but physical faintness overcame her; her lips grew grey, and the darkness of great weakness came before her sight.
‘I forbid you! I forbid you!’ she said, as her breath failed her.
Vàsàrhely remained kneeling beside her bed. His shoulders trembled with restrained emotion. Even now she shut him out of her life. She denied him the right to be her champion and avenger.
She moved her hand towards him as a blind woman would have done.
‘Give me your word.’
‘You are my law,’ he answered. ‘I will do nothing that you forbid.’
She inclined her head with a feeble gesture of recognition of the words. He rose slowly, kissed the white fingers that lay near him, and, without speaking, left her presence.
‘Bloodshed, bloodshed!’ she thought, in the vague feverish confusion of half-conscious thought. ‘Though rivers of blood rolled between him and me what could they wash away of the shame that is with me for ever? What could death do? Death could blot out nothing.’
A sense of awful impotence lay upon her like a weight of iron. Do what she would she could never change the past! Her sons must grow to youth and manhood tainted and dishonoured in her sight. There were times when all the martial and arrogant spirit in her was like flame in her veins, and she thought: ‘Could I but rise and kill him — I, myself!’
It seemed to her that it would be but justice.
When Vàsàrhely, coming out from her chamber, passed the impostor who had done her this dishonour, it cost him the greatest self-sacrifice of his life not to order him out yonder in the chilly twilight of the leafless woods, to stand before him in that ordeal of combat which, in the code of honour of the Magyar Prince, was the sole tribunal to which a man of honour could appeal. But she had forbade him to avenge her. He felt that he had no share in her life sufficient to give him title to disobey her. His own love for her told him that this offender was still dear enough to her for his life to be sacred in her sight.
‘If I had not loved her,’ he thought, ‘I could have avenged her without suspicion; but what would it seem to her and to the world? — only that I slew him out of jealous rancour! In her soul she loves him still. Her hate will fade, her love will survive, traitor and hound though he be.’
He motioned Sabran towards one of the empty chambers in the gallery. When he had closed the door of it he spoke with a low, hoarse voice:
‘Sir, I have the right as her kinsman, I have the right her brothers would have had, to publicly insult you, to publicly chastise you. But she has commanded me to abstain; she will have no feud between us. I obey her; so must you. I have but one thing to say to you. Once you spoke of suicide. I forbid you to follow up your crimes by causing the unending misery that death by your own hand would bring to her. You have been coward enough. Have courage at least not to leave a woman alone under the disgrace you have brought upon her.’
‘Alone!’ echoed Sabran. ‘She will never admit me to her presence again. She will demand her divorce as soon as ever she has strength to remember and to speak.’
