An earnest rejoinder was on his lips; but some sudden remembrance flashing through his mind, he suddenly drew himself erect and, grasping the reins more firmly, said with a rush of the old bitterness--
"You will find it hard to justify such a desire in the eyes of your party, Countess Morynska."
She turned completely round to him now, and her eye met his.
"It may be so, for you have openly avowed yourself our enemy. It lay with you to make peace; instead of that you have declared war upon us."
"I did what necessity compelled me to do. You forget that my father was a German."
"And your mother is a Pole."
"Ah, you need not remind me of it in that reproachful tone," said Waldemar. "The unhappy division of interests has cost me too much for me ever to lose sight of it for an instant. It was the cause of my parents' separation. It poisoned my childhood, embittered my youth, and robbed me of my mother. She would perhaps have loved me as she loves her Leo if I had been a Baratowski. That I was my father's son has been my gravest offence in her eyes. If now we stand politically opposed to each other, that is only a consequence of past events."
"Which you logically, inexorably, carry out to its extreme limits," cried Wanda, flashing into anger. "Any other man would have sought for some means of reconciliation, some compromise, which must have been possible between mother and son."
"Perhaps between any other mother and son, but not between the Princess Baratowska and me. She gave me the choice of surrendering Wilicza and myself, bound hand and foot, into her hands to serve her interests, or to declare myself at war with her. I chose the latter alternative, and she takes good care that there shall be no truce, not even for a day. Were it not that the contest for dominion is still going on, she would long since have left me. She certainly does not stay on my account."
Wanda made no reply. She knew he was right, and the conviction was now forcing itself on her mind that this man, held on all sides to be cold and unfeeling, was in reality most keenly and bitterly sensitive to all that was painful in his position towards his mother. In the rare moments when he disclosed his secret feelings, this subject always came uppermost. The thought of his mother's indifference to himself and of her boundless love for her younger son had stung the boy's soul years ago; it rankled yet in the heart of the man.