Read Ebook: Wanda Vol. 3 (of 3) by Ouida

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Ebook has 1370 lines and 77213 words, and 28 pages

'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.

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.

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 H?tel 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.

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.

'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.

'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 R?n?,' 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.

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 V?s?rhely 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 H?tel 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.

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