[CHAPTER XXI.]
The Countess Brancka meanwhile had been staying at Taróc for the autumn shooting when her brother-in-law had returned there unexpectedly, and to her chagrin, since she had filled the old castle with friends of her own, such as Egon Vàsàrhely little favoured, and it amused her to play the châtelaine there and organise all manner of extravagant and eccentric pastimes. When he arrived she could no longer enjoy this unchecked independence of folly, and he did not hesitate to make it plain to her that the sooner Taróc should be cleared of its Parisian world the better would he be pleased. Indeed she knew well that it was only his sense of hospitality, as the first duty of a gentleman, which restrained him from enforcing a rough and sudden exodus upon her guests. He returned, moreover, unusually silent, reserved, and what she termed ill-tempered. It was clear to her that his sojourn at Hohenszalras had been painful to him; and whenever she spoke to him of it he replied to her in a tone which forbade her further interrogation. If she feared anyone in the world it was Egon, who had again and again paid her debts to spare his brother annoyance, and who received her and her caprices with a contemptuous unalterable disdain.
'Wanda has ruined him!' she always thought angrily. 'He always expects every other woman to have a soul above chiffons and to bury herself in the country with children and horses.'
Her quick instincts perceived that the hold upon his thoughts which his cousin always possessed had been only strengthened by his visit to her, and she attributed the gloom which had settled down on him to the pain which the happiness that reigned at Hohenszalras had given him. Little souls always try to cram great ones into their own narrowed measurements. As he did not absolutely dismiss her she continued to entertain her own people at Taróc, ignoring his tacit disapproval, and was still there when the letter of Sabran reached her brother-in-law. She had very quick eyes; she was present when the letters, which only came to Taróc once a week, being fetched over many leagues of wild forest, and hill, and torrent, and ravine, were brought to Vàsàrhely, and she noticed that his face changed as he took out a thick envelope, which she, standing by his shoulder, with her hand outstretched for her own correspondence from Paris and Petersburg, could see bore the post-mark of Matrey. He threw it amongst a mass of other letters, and soon after took all his papers away with him into the room which was called a library, being full of Hungarian black-letter and monkish literature, gathered in centuries gone by by great priests of the race of Vàsàrhely.
What was in that letter?
She attended to none of her own, so absorbed was she in the impression which gained upon her that the packet which had brought so much surprise and even emotion upon his face came from the hand of Wanda. 'If even she should be no saint at all?' she thought, with a malicious amusement. She did not see Egon Vàsàrhely for many hours, but she did not lose her curiosity nor cease to cast about for a method of gratifying it. At the close of the day when she came back from hunting she went into the library, which was then empty. She did not seriously expect to see anything that would reward her enterprise, but she knew he read his letters there and wrote the few he was obliged to write: like most soldiers he disliked using pen and ink. It was dusk, and there were a few lights burning in the old silver sconces fixed upon the horns of forest animals against the walls. With a quick, calm touch, she moved all the litter of papers lying on the huge table where he was wont to do such business as he was compelled to transact. She found nothing that gratified her inquisitiveness. She was about to leave the room in baffled impatience——impatience of she knew not what——when her eyes fell upon a pile of charred paper lying on the stove.
It was one of those monumental polychrome stoves of fifteenth-century work in which the country-houses of Central Europe are so rich; a grand pile of fretted pottery, towering half way to the ceiling, with the crown and arms of the Vàsàrhely princes on its summit. There was no fire in it, for the weather was not cold, and Vàsàrhely, who alone used the room, was an ascetic in such matters; but upon its jutting step, which was guarded by lions of gilded bronze, there had been some paper burned: the ashes lay there in a little heap. Almost all of it was ash, but a few torn pieces were only blackened and coloured. With the eager curiosity of a woman who is longing to find another woman at fault, she kneeled down by the stove and patiently examined these pieces. Only one was so little burned that it had a word or two legible upon it; two of those words were Vassia Kazán. Nothing else was traceable; she recognised the handwriting of Sabran. She attached no importance to it, yet she slipped the little scrap, burnt and black as it was, within one of her gauntlets; then, as quickly as she had come there, she retreated and in another half hour, smiling and radiant, covered with jewels, and with no trace of fatigue or of weather, she descended the great banqueting-hall, clad as though the heart of the Greater Karpathians was the centre of the Boulevard S. Germain.
Who was Vassia Kazán?
The question floated above all her thoughts all that evening. Who was he, she, or it, and what could Sabran have to say of him, or her, or it to Egon Vàsàrhely? A less wise woman might have asked straightway what the unknown name might mean, but straight ways are not those which commend themselves to temperaments like hers. The pleasure and the purpose of her life was intrigue. In great things she deemed it necessity; in trifles it was an amusement; without it life was flavourless.