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?