XV
A TALE HALF TOLD
The heart soon accustoms itself to that existence which is called living upon a volcano. Prince Bukaty had indeed known no other life, and to such as had daily intercourse with him he was quite a peaceful and jovial gentleman. He had brought up his children in the same atmosphere of strife and peril, and it is to be presumed that the fit had survived, while the unfit princess, his wife, had turned her face to the wall quite soon, not daring to meet the years in which there could be no hope of alleviation.
The prince's friends were not in Warsaw; many were at the mines. Some lived in Paris; others were exiled to distant parts of Russia. His generation was slowly passing away, and its history is one of the grimmest stories untold. Yet he sat in that bare drawing-room of a poor man and read his Figaro quite placidly, like any bourgeois in the safety of the suburb, only glancing at the clock from time to time.
“He is late,” he said once, as he folded the paper, and that was all.
It was nearly eleven o'clock, and Martin had been expected to return to dinner at half-past six. Wanda was working, and she, too, glanced towards the clock at intervals. She was always uneasy about Martin, whose daring was rather of the reckless type, whose genius lay more in leadership than in strategy. As to her father, he had come through the sixties, and had survived the persecution and the dangers of Wielopolski's day—he could reasonably be expected to take care of himself. With regard to herself, she had no fear. Hers was the woman's lot of watching others in a danger which she could not share.
It was nearly half-past eleven when Martin came in. He was in riding-costume and was covered with dirt. His eyes, rimmed with dust, looked out of a face that was pale beneath the sunburn. He threw himself into a chair with an exclamation of fatigue.
“Had any dinner?” asked his father.
Wanda looked at her brother's face, and changed color herself. There was a suggestion of the wild rose in Wanda's face, with its delicate, fleeting shades of pink and white, while the slim strength of her limbs and carriage rather added to a characteristic which is essentially English or Polish. For American girls suggest a fuller flower on a firmer stem.
“Something has happened,” said Wanda, quietly.