The next day her brother-in-law abandoned Taróc, to join his hussars and prepare for the autumn manœuvres in the plains, and left her and Stefan in possession of the great place, half palace, half fortress, which had withstood more than one siege of Ottoman armies, where it stood across a deep gorge with the water foaming black below. But she kept the charred, torn, triangular scrap of paper; and she treasured in her memory the two words Vassia Kazán; and she said again and again and again to herself: 'Why should he write to Egon? Why should Egon burn what he writes?' Deep down in her mind there was always at work a bitter jealousy of Wanda von Szalras; jealousy of her regular and perfect beauty, of her vast possessions, of her influence at the Court, of her serene and unspotted repute, and now of her ascendency over the lives of Sabran and of Vàsàrhely.
'Why should they both love that woman so much?' she thought very often. 'She is always alike. She has no temptations. She goes over life as if it were frozen snow. She did one senseless thing, but then she was rich enough to do it with impunity. She is so habitually fortunate that she is utterly uninteresting; and yet they are both her slaves!'
She went home and wrote to a cousin of her own who had been a member of the famous Third Section at Petersburg. She said in her letter: 'Is there anyone known in Russia as Vassia Kazán? I want you to learn for me to what or to whom this name belongs. It is certainly Russian, and appears to me to have been taken by some one who has been named more hebrœo from the city of Kazán. You, who know everything past, present, and to come, will be able to know this.'
In a few days she received an answer from Petersburg. Her cousin wrote: 'I cannot give you the information you desire. It must be a thing of the past. But I will keep it in mind, and sooner or later you shall have the knowledge you wish. You will do us the justice to admit that we are not easily baffled.'
She was not satisfied, but knew how to be patient.
[CHAPTER XXII.]
Strangely enough the consciousness that one person lived who knew his secret unnerved him. He had said truly that so much were all his instincts and temper those of an aristocrat that he had long ceased to remember that he was not the true Marquis de Sabran. The admiration men frankly gave him, and the ascendency he exercised over women, had alike concurred in fostering his self-delusion. Since his recognition by the foe of his boyhood a vivid sense of his own shamefulness, however, had come upon him; a morbid consciousness that he was not what he seemed, and what all the world believed him, had returned to him. Egon would never speak, but he himself could never forget. He said to himself in his solitude, 'I am Vassia Kazán! and what he had done appeared to him intolerable, infamous, beyond all expiation.
It was like an impalpable but impassable wall built up between himself and her. Nothing was changed except that one man knew his secret, but this one fact seemed to change the face of the world. For the first time all the deference, all the homage with which the people of the Tauern treated him seemed to him a derision. Naturally of proud temper, and of an intellect which gave him ascendency over others, he had from the first moment he had assumed the marquisate of Sabran received all the acknowledgments of his rank with an honest unconsciousness of imposture. After all he had in his veins blood as patrician as that of the Sabrans; but now that Egon Vàsàrhely knew the truth he was perpetually conscious of not being what he seemed. The mere sense that about the world there was another living being who knew what he knew, shook down all the self-possession and philosophy which had so long made him assure himself that the assumption of a name was an immaterial circumstance, which, harming no one, could concern no one. Egon Vàsàrhely seemed to have seized his sophisms in a rude grasp, and shaken them down as blossoms fall in wind. He thought with bitter self-contempt how true the cynic was who said that no sin exists so long as it is not found out; that discovery is the sole form which remorse takes.
At times his remorse made him almost afraid of Wanda, almost shrink from her, almost tremble at her regard; at other times it intensified his passion and infused into his embraces a kind of ferocity of triumph. He would show an almost brutal ardour in his caresses, and would think with an almost cruel exultation, 'I was born a serf, and I am her lover, her lord! Strangely enough, she began to lose something of her high influence upon him, of her spiritual superiority in his sight. She was so entirely, so perpetually his, that she became in a manner tainted with his own degradation. She could no longer check him with a word, calm him with a gesture of restraint. She was conscious of a change in him which she could not explain to herself. His sweetness of temper was broken by occasional irritability that she had never seen before. He was at times melancholy and absorbed; he at times displayed a jealousy which appeared unworthy of herself and him; at other moments he adored her, submitted to her with too great a humility. They were still happy, but their happiness was more uncertain, more disturbed by passing shadows. She told herself that it was always so in marriage, that in the old trite phrase nothing mortal was ever perfect long. But this philosophy failed to reconcile her. She found herself continually pondering on the alteration that she perceived in him, without being able to explain it to herself in any satisfactory manner.