The evening was chill, but beautifully calm and free of mist. Wanda von Szalras walked out on to the terrace, whilst her cousin and guest, missing the stimulus of her usual band of lovers and friends, curled herself up on a deep chair and fell sound asleep like a dormouse.
There was no sound on the night except the ripple of the lake water below and the splash of torrents falling down the cliffs around; a sense of irritation and of pleasure moved her both in the same moment. What was a French courtesan, a singer of lewd songs, an interpreter of base passions to her? Nothing except a creature to be loathed and pitied, as men in health feel a disgusted compassion for disease. Yet she felt a certain anger stir in her as she recalled all this frivolous, trivial, ill-flavoured chatter of her cousin's. And what was it to her if one of the many lovers of this woman had cast her spells from about him and left her for a manlier and a worthier arena? Yet she could not resist a sense of delicate distant homage to herself in the act, in the mute obedience to her counsels such as a knight might render, even Lancelot with stained honour and darkened soul.
The silence of it touched her.
He had said nothing: only by mere chance, in the idle circling of giddy rumour, she learned he had remembered her words and followed her suggestion. There was a subtle and flattering reverence in it which pleased the taste of a woman who was always proud but never vain. And to any noble temperament there is a singularly pure and honest joy in the consciousness of having been in any measure the means of raising higher instincts and loftier desires in any human soul that was not dead but dormant.
The shrill voice of Olga Brancka startled her as it broke in on her musings.
'I have been asleep!' she cried, as she rose out of her deep chair and came forth into the moonlight. 'Pray forgive me, Wanda. You will have all that drowsy water running and tumbling all over the place; it makes one think of the voices in the Sistine in Passion Week; there are the gloom, the hush, the sigh, the shriek, the eternal appeal, the eternal accusation. That water would drive me into hysteria; could you not drain it, divert it, send it underground—silence it somehow?'
'When you can keep the Neva flowing at New Year, perhaps I shall be able. But I would not if I could. I have had all that water about me from babyhood; when I am away from the sound of it I feel as if some hand had woolled up my ears.'
'That is what I feel when I am away from the noise of the streets. Oh, Wanda! to think that you can do utterly as you like and yet do not like to have the sea of light of the Champs-Élysées or the Graben before your eyes, rather than that gliding, dusky water!'
'The water is a mirror. I can see my own soul in it and Nature's; perhaps one hopes even sometimes to see God's.'
'That is not living, my dear, it is dreaming.'