In some three months' time she received a more explicit answer from her cousin in St. Petersburg. Giving the precise dates, he told her that Vassia Kazán was the name given to the son of Count Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff by a wayside amour with one of his own serfs at a village near the border line of Astrachan. He narrated the early history of the youth, and said that he had been amongst the passengers on board a Havre ship, which had foundered with all hands. So far the brief record of Vassia Kazán was clear and complete. But it told her nothing. She was unreasonably enraged, and looked at the little piece of burnt paper as though she would wrench the secret out of it.
'There must be so much more to know,' she thought. 'What would a mere drowned boy be to either of those men——a boy dead too all these years before?'
She wrote insolently to her cousin, that the Third Section, with its eyes of Argus and its limbs of Vishnoo, had always been but an overgrown imbecile, and set her woman's wits to accomplish what the Third Section had failed to do for her. So much she thought of it that the name seemed forced into her very brain; she seemed to hear every one saying——'Vassia Kazán.' It was a word to conjure with, at least: she could at the least try the effect of its utterance any day upon either of those who had made it the key of their correspondence. Russia had written down Vassia Kazán as dead, and the mystery which enveloped the name would not open to her. She knew her country too well not to know that this bold statement might cover some political secret, some story wholly unlike that which was given her. Vassia Kazán might have lived and have incurred the suspicions of the police, and be dwelling far away in the death in life of Siberian mines, or deep sunk in some fortress, like a stone at the bottom of a well. The reply not only did not beget her belief in it, but gave her range for the widest and wildest conjectures of imagination. 'It is some fault, some folly, some crime, who can tell? And Vassia Kazán is the victim or the associate, or the confidant of it. But what is it? And how does Egon know of it?'
She passed the summer in pleasures of all kinds, but the subject did not lose its power over her, nor did she forget the face of Sabran as he had turned it away from her in the ball-room of the Hofburg.
He himself had left the capital, after affirming to the minister that private reasons, which he could not enter into, had induced him to entreat the Imperial pardon for so sudden a change of resolve, and to solicit permission to decline the high honour that had been vouchsafed to him.
'What shall I say to Wanda?' he asked himself incessantly, as the express train swung through the grand green country towards Salzburg.
She was sitting on the lake terrace with the Princess, when a telegram from her cousin Kunst was brought to her. Bela and Gela were playing near with squadrons of painted cuirassiers, and the great dogs were lying on the marble pavement at her feet. It was a golden close to a sunless but fine day; the snow peaks were growing rosy as the sun shone for an instant behind the Venediger range, and the lake was calm and still and green, one little boat going noiselessly across it from the Holy Isle to the further side.
'What a pity to leave it all!' she thought as she took the telegram.
The Minister's message was curt and angered:
'Your husband has resigned; he makes himself and me ridiculous. Unable to guess his motive, I am troubled and embarrassed beyond expression.'