'Is it you, Georg?' said Madame Olga. 'What brings you here?'
'I came from Taróc with a letter from the Prince, my master,' answered the man, an old hussar who had carried Vàsàrhely in his arms off the field of Königsgrätz, after dragging him from under a heap of dead men and horses.
'A letter! To whom?' asked Olga, who always was curious and persistent in investigation of all her brother-in-law's movements and actions.
Vàsàrhely had not laid any injunction as to secrecy, only as to speed, upon his faithful servant; so that Georg replied, unwitting of harm, 'To the Markgraf von Sabran, my Countess.'
'A letter that could not go by post—how strange! And from Egon to Wanda's husband!' she thought, with her inquisitive eagerness awakened. Aloud she bade the old trooper call at her palace for a packet for Taróc, to make excuse for having stopped and questioned him, and drove onward lost in thought.
'Perhaps it is a challenge late in the day!' she thought, with a laugh; but she was astonished and perplexed that any communication should take place between these men; she perplexed her mind in vain in the effort to imagine what tie could connect them, what mystery mutually affecting them could lie beneath the secret of Vassia Kazán.
When, on the morrow, she heard at Court that the Emperor was deeply incensed at the caprice and disrespect of the Count von Idrac, as he was called at Court, who, at the eleventh hour, had declined a mission already accepted by him, and of which the offer had been in itself an unprecedented mark of honour and confidence, her swift sagacity instantly associated the action, apparently so excuseless and inexcusable, with the letter sent up from Taróc. It was still as great a mystery to her as it had been before what the contents of the letter could have been, but she had no doubt that in some way or another it had brought about the resignation of the appointment. It awakened a still more intense curiosity in her, but she was too wise to whisper her suspicion to anyone. To her friends at the Court she said, with laughter: 'A night or two ago I chanced to tell Sabran that his wife would be wretched at St. Petersburg. That is sure to have been enough for him. He is such a devoted husband.'
No one of course believed her, but they received the impression that she knew the real cause of his resignation, though she could not be induced to say it.
What did it matter to her? Nothing, indeed. But the sense of a secret withheld from her was to Mdme. Olga like the slot of the fox to a young hound. She might have a thousand secrets of her own if it pleased her, but she could not endure anyone else to guard one. Besides, in a vague, feverish, angry way, she was almost in love with the man who was so faithful to his wife that he had looked away from her as from some unclean thing when she had wished to dazzle him. She had no perception that the secret could concern him himself very nearly, but she thought it was probably one which he and Egon Vàsàrhely, for reasons of their own, chose to share and keep hidden. And if it were a secret that prevented Sabran from going to the Court of Russia? Then, surely, it was one worth knowing? And if she gained a knowledge of it, and his wife had none?——what a superiority would be hers, what a weapon always to hand!
She did not intend any especial cruelty or compass any especial end: she was actuated by a vague desire to interrupt a current of happiness that flowed on smoothly without her, to interfere where she had no earthly title or reason to do so, merely because she was disregarded by persons content with each other. It is not always definite motives which have the most influence; the subtlest poisons are those which enter the system we know not how, and penetrate it ere we are aware. The only thing which had ever held her back from any extremes of evil had been the mere habit of good-breeding and an absolute egotism which had saved her from all strong passions. Now something that was like passion had touched her under the sting of Sabran's indifference, and with it she became tenacious, malignant, and unsparing: adroit she had always been. Instinct is seldom at fault when we are conscious of an enemy, and Sabran's had not erred when it had warned him against the wife of Stefan Brancka as the serpent who would bring woe and disaster to his paradise.