Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 531
He had done neither.
Once she, having occasion to go to the room which had been set aside for the boys’ studies, saw the old professor absorbed in the perusal of a letter. Confused and startled he slipped it hurriedly beneath a Latin exercise of Bela’s, which lay with other papers on the table. The children were out riding.
His mistress looked at him, and her face grew a shade paler still.
‘You correspond with my husband?’ she said abruptly, pausing, as she always paused, before she said the latter words.
Greswold flushed consciously, stammered a few unintelligible words, and was silent.
‘You hear from him?’ she continued with correct inference. ‘You know where he is?’
‘I have promised that I will not say. I pray your Excellency to pardon me,’ murmured the old man, the colour mounting upward to his grey locks.
She was silent a moment; she knew not what emotion moved her, whether wrath, or wonder, or offence; or whether even relief from long suspense.
‘Do not be angered, my lady,’ pleaded Greswold, timidly. ‘It is the only way in which he can hear of you and of his children. Could your Excellency believe that all these months, these years, he lived on without any tidings?’
‘I think you have exceeded your duty,’ she said coldly. ‘I think that you should have asked my permission.’
The old man stood penitent, like a chidden child. He was afraid of her interrogations; but she made none.
‘You will give me your word,’ she pursued, ‘never to speak of this correspondence to Herr Bela or to any of the children.’
Greswold bowed his assent. ‘My lord has forbidden me also,’ he said eagerly.
Her brows contracted.
‘You have committed an imprudence,’ she said, in a tone which chilled the old man to the marrow. ‘Be heedful that no one knows of it.’
She said no more; took the volume she had needed, and quitted the room.
‘Who shall tell the heart of a woman?’ thought Greswold, left to himself. ‘She knows not whether the man she once adored be living or dead, and she does not put to me one single question, does not even seek to learn where he dwells or what he does! What could his sin be to sweep all love away as fire makes a desert of a smiling meadow? And be it what it would, of what use is human love if it have not enough of the divine love in it to rejoice over the sinner who repents?’
He knew not that the sin she might, she would, have forgiven, but that the shame ate into the fair marble of her honour like a corroding acid.
From that time he expected daily some fresh question, some allusion at least to the confession which she had surprised from him. But she never spoke to him again of it. If she placed a violent control upon herself, because she did not think it fitting to speak of her husband to one in her employ, or if her husband were absolutely dead to her memory and her affections, he could not tell. He only knew that by no word or sign did she appear to recall the brief conversation which had passed between them.
Although what he had done was innocent enough, the old physician, in his scrupulous sense of duty, began to have a sense of guilt. Had he any right to retain any hidden knowledge from the mistress whose roof sheltered him, and whose bread he ate?
But his loyalty to his pledged word, and to him whom the world of men still called Sabran, obliged him to be mute.
‘After all,’ he thought, ‘if she knew it might be better, but my first duty is to keep my word.’
She never tempted him to break it. She was not callous and hardened as he supposed. She felt a growing desire to learn where and how her husband had taken up the broken threads of his severed life. She had believed either that he would return to the unfettered existence that could be dreamed away under the cedar groves of Mexico, with the senses satisfied and the moral law set at naught, or that he would go amongst the men and women of the great world, popular, pitied, and easily consoled. She had seen that world exercise a potent fascination over him, and if it were called to pronounce against her or against him, she was well aware that he would bear away all its suffrages. He had always humoured and flattered it; she never.
He had passed from the sight of those who knew him as utterly as though he had descended to his grave. No sound or hint told her of his destiny. She still thought at times that he must have sought those flowery recesses of the West which had given his youth their shelter. It might well be that in his total ruin his instincts had urged him to return to the free barbaric life of his early manhood, where none would reproach him, none deride him, none know his secret or his sin. His correspondence with Greswold suggested a doubt to her. Perhaps remorse was with him and the weight of remembrance.
When, too harshly, she had assumed that all his love and life had been a lie, because one lie had been beneath it, she had told herself that he would find solace in those vices and pastimes which, in his earlier years, had been fatal to his ambition and to his perseverance. But since he cared to hear of his children’s welfare, it might well be that their life together was nearer to his heart than she had credited. She believed that, if he had been sunk in the kind of self-indulgence she had imagined, he would have shunned all tidings, all memories, of his lost home.
Then again, with the inconsistency of all great suffering, an intense indignation possessed her that he did dare to remember, did dare to recall, that her offspring were also his. Even alone the hot flush of an ever-increasing shame came to her face when she thought that she had been for nine long years his, in the most absolute possession that woman can grant to man. Exile, severance, silence, cold and dark as the winters of the land of his birth, could not alter that. Whenever he chose to think of her she must be his in remembrance still.
Once the Princess ventured to say again to her a word which came from her heart. They were standing on the terrace watching the blush of evening glow on the virginal snows of the mountains.
‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,’ she murmured. ‘Wanda, mine, do never you think of those words — you who let so many suns rise and set, and find your wrath unchanged?’
‘If it were only that!’ she answered bitterly. ‘It is so much else — so much else! Crimes deep as yonder water, high as yonder hills, I could have forgiven, but — a baseness — never! Nay, there are pardons that would only be as base as what they pardoned.’
So it seemed to her.
When again and again her heart was thrilled with its old tenderness, her mind was haunted by a million memories of dead delights, she strove against herself, and trod down her temptation with the merciless self-punishment of an ascetic. It humbled and stained her in her own sight to feel that love could live within her without honour.
‘Forgive me,’ said the Princess, ‘but it always seems to me that you — noble and generous and pure of mind as you are — yet have met ill the supreme trial, the supreme test of your life. You believed that you loved the man you wedded, but you loved your own pride more. If love be not endless forbearance, endless compassion, endless pity and sympathy, what is it but the mere fever and instincts of carnal passions? What raises it above the self-indulgence of the senses if not its sacrifice of will and its long-suffering? You have said so yourself in other days than these.’
‘And what,’ she thought passionately as she heard, ‘what would it be but the basest indulgence of the senses to let oneself love and be beloved by what one scorned? — to stoop and kiss the lips that lied for mere sake of their sweetness? — to gather in one’s arms the coward, the traitor, and persuade oneself that one forgave because one grew blind with amorous remembrance?’
‘Is it well,’ pursued her companion with soft solemnity, ‘to let anyone who is so near to you live his own life when that life may be one of sin? You send him from you, and how can you tell into what extremes of evil or of folly despair may not drive him? A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband’s soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other is not acquitted of obligation. Pardon me if I seem to censure. Look in your own heart and judge if I err.’
‘You do not know! You do not know! If I forgave him I should never forgive myself!’
She turned her head from the roseate and happy light that spoke to her of other days, and went with a swift uneven step into the house, now darkened by the passing of the day.
She flung his memory from her as so much unholiness. Had passion not yet lived in her, the coldness of unforgiving sorrow might not have seemed to her so sovereign a duty.
Some weeks after she had seen the letter in Greswold’s hands a small hamlet was burnt down during a high north wind. It belonged to her. Hearing of the calamity she went thither at once. It was some two and a half German miles from the castle. She drove, herself, four young Hungarian horses, whose fretting graces and tempestuous gallop gave her the only pleasure which she was now capable of enjoying. They were harnessed to a carriage light and strong, built on purpose to scour rapidly rough forest roads and steep hill-sides. When she had visited the melancholy scene, given what consolation she could, and distributed money to the homeless peasants, promising to rebuild the houses with her own timber and shingles — for the conflagration had been the fault of no one, but of the wild wind which had scattered the burning embers of a hearth-fire on a neighbouring wood-stack — her horses were rested, and she began her homeward drive as the pale afternoon grew grey and the twilight fell on the little grassy vale, now charred and smoking with the smouldering ruins of the châlets.
‘Our Countess never leaves us alone in any trouble,’ said the women gathered about the stone statue of S. Florian, their most trusted patron, who, despite their prayers, had refused to save them from the flames. The hamlet was not far from the Maurer glaciers, and was shut in by a complete wall of mountains; it was green, fresh, beautifully cool in summer. Now, in the late spring, it was still dreary, and patches of snow still lay on its sward; it was set high on the mountain side, and dense forests sloped down from it, seldom traversed, and dark early in the afternoon. Her groom lit the lamps of her carriage as she entered the deep woods, through which the road was little more than a timber-track. The long gallops and the steep inclines coming thither had calmed and pacified her young horses. They gave her no trouble to control them, as they trotted rapidly along the shadowy forest ways. In other parts of the country the sun had not then set, but here the gloom was grey, like that of a cloudy dawn. Yet it was not so dark but that she perceived ahead of her, as her horses turned a curve in the moss-grown path, a figure, whose height and outline made her heart stand still. As the animals went past him in their swinging trot the blaze of the lamps fell full upon him. He turned and retreated quickly into the undergrowth beneath the drooping boughs of the Siberian pines, but she saw him, he saw her. Mechanically he uncovered his head and bowed low; she drove onward with a sense of suffocation at her throat and a chill like ice in her veins. She had recognised him in that moment of time. He was changed, aged, and there were threads of grey in his hair. He wore a forester’s dress and had a gun on his shoulder.
Where they had met, in these woods that lay under the snow saddle of the Reggen Thörl, it was still twenty English miles away from the burg. It was late when she reached home, but her people were used to those long night drives, and even the Princess had become resigned to them. On the plea of fatigue she went to her own rooms and there remained. A faintness and sense of confusion stayed with her. She had not thought that merely meeting him thus would affect her. She had underrated, the power of the past.
When she had deemed him far away in other countries he was there in her own lands, not twenty miles from her. The knowledge of his vicinity moved her with a mingled sense of unendurable pain, partial anger, reviving love. It seemed horrible to have passed him by as any stranger would have passed, without a sign or word. Yet he was dead to her, whether oceans were between them or only a few leagues of hill and grass and forest.
She did not sleep, she did not even lie down that night. He seemed always before her; in the stillness of her chamber she heard his voice, and she started up thinking he touched her.
He had looked aged, ill, weary, unhappy; the sight of him bore conviction to her that he, like herself, found no compensation, no consolation. Perchance her monitress had been right; she had been cruel. Perchance, whatever sin his present or his future life might hold would lie, directly indeed at his own door, but indirectly at hers. She had always held that high and spiritual view of marriage which, rising above mere sensual indulgence, regarded the bond of souls as sacred, and made the life on earth mere passage and preparation for eternity. She had loved to believe that she ennobled, purified, exalted his life by union with hers. Was she now false to her own creed when she left him alone, unfriended, unpardoned, to drift to any solace in vice, or any distraction in evil, which might be his fate? The sensitiveness and apprehension of her conscience before the possibility of a neglected duty made of her meditations a very martyrdom. All her life long she had been resolute and serene in action, deciding quickly, and carrying resolve into action without hesitation; but here, in the supreme crisis of her fate, she was irresolute and wrung by continual doubt. Had it only been any other crime than this! — this which cankered all the honour of her race, and was rank with the abhorred putridity of fraud!
The spring passed into summer, and the children played amidst masses of roses and sweet ranks of lilies, stretching down the green grass alleys of the gardens. More than once she went to the same hamlet, where now châlets were arising, made of pine and elm, cut in the past winter in her own woods. But of him she saw no more. She could not bend her will to ask of him of any of her household, not even of Greswold. Whether he lingered amidst her mountains, or whether he had but come thither in a momentary impulse, she knew not.
The infinite yearning of affection, which is wholly outside the instincts of the passions, awoke in her once more. She began to doubt her own reading of obligation and of duty. Had her counsellors been right — had she met the supreme test of her character and had failed before it?
Was it true that a great love must be as exhaustless as the ocean in its mercy and as profound in its comprehension?
Had his sin to her released her from her duties towards him? Because he had been disloyal was she absolved from loyalty to him? Ought she sooner to have said to him,— ‘Nay, no crime, no untruth, no failure in yourself shall divide you from me; the darker be your soul the greater need hath it to lean on mine?’
In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honour, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite, To forgive wrongs darker than death or night, To defy power which seems omnipotent, To love, and live to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates, Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This, perchance, had been the higher diviner way which she had missed — this the obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.
Resolutely she had gone on upon her joyless path, not doubting that her course was right. It had seemed to her that there was no other way possible; that, stretching her hand to him across the gulf of shame that severed them, she would do nothing to raise him, but only fall herself, degraded to his likeness.
So it had always seemed to her.
Now alone the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to the traditions of honour, she had forgotten the obligations of mercy. Had it been any other thing, any other sin, she thought, rather than this, which struck at the very root of all the trusts, of all the faiths, which she had most venerated as the legacy of her fathers! ——
Sometimes it seemed to her as though, were that time of torture to be lived through again, she would not send him from her; she would say to him:
‘What we love once we love for ever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth?’
Sometimes it seemed to lier as though even now, after these years, she still ought to summon him and say this. But time passed on and passed away, and it remained unsaid.
She rode often through the same woods, now in full leaf, with sunny waters tumbling and sparkling through their flower-filled moss, but he crossed her path no more. He might have come thither, she thought, in some brief hope of possible reconciliation to her, and then his courage might have failed him, and he might have returned to whatsoever distant climate held him, whatsoever manner of life consoled him. That he might dwell amidst the hills, unseen of men, for her sake, never once seemed to her possible. Egon Vàsàrhely might have done that; but not he — he loved the world.
The summer weighed wearily upon her. The light, the fragrance, the gaiety of nature hurt her. In winter all the earth seemed of accord with herself; it was silent, stern, solitary. The keen winds, the glittering snow, the air that was like a bath of ice, the sense of absolute isolation and seclusion which the winter brought with it were precious to her. Not even the pretty figures of the children running through the bowers of blossom and of foliage could make the summer otherwise than oppressive and mournful to her.
Sometimes she thought of how it had been on other summer nights, when he had wandered with her through the white lines of the lilies by the starlight, or sent the melodies of Schumann and of Beethoven out upon the dewy, balmy air. Then she could bear no more to look upon the moonlit gardens.
