'I have said the utmost that I can say,' replied the Princess, with a chill light in her blue eyes. 'This little child is no more likely to ask questions than I am, after what you have stated. But you must not regard my silence as any condonation of what must always appear to me a step disrespectful to the Crown, contrary to all usages of etiquette, and injurious to his own future and that of his children. His scruples of conscience came too late.'
'I did not say they were exactly that. I believe he learned something which made him consider that his honour required him to withdraw.'
'That may be,' said the Princess, frigidly. 'As I observed, it came lamentably late. You will excuse me if I breakfast in my own rooms this morning.'
Wanda left her, gave the child to a nurse who waited without, and returned to the library. She had offended and pained Mdme. Ottilie, but she had saved her husband from annoyance. She knew that though the Princess was by no means as free from curiosity as she declared herself, she was too high-bred and too proud to solicit a confidence withheld from her.
Sabran was seated at the piano where she had left him, but his forehead rested on the woodwork of it, and his whole attitude was suggestive of sad and absorbed thought and abandonment to regrets that were unavailing.
'It has cost him so much,' she reflected as she looked at him. 'Perhaps it has been a self-sacrifice, a heroism even; and I, from mere wounded feeling, have been angered against him and almost cruel!'
With the exaggeration in self-censure of all generous natures, she was full of remorse at having added any pain to the disappointment which had been his portion; a disappointment none the less poignant, as she saw, because it had been voluntarily, as she imagined, accepted.
As he heard her approach he started and rose, and the expression of his face startled her for a moment; it was so full of pain, of melancholy, almost (could she have believed it) of despair. What could this matter be to affect him thus, since being of the State it could be at its worst only some painful and compromising secret of political life which could have no personal meaning for him? It was surely impossible that mere disappointment——a disappointment self-inflicted——could bring upon him such suffering? But she threw these thoughts away. In her great loyalty she had told herself that she must not even think of this thing, lest she should let it come between them once again and tempt her from her duty and obedience. Her trust in him was perfect.
The abandonment of a coveted distinction was in itself a bitter disappointment, but it seemed to him as nothing beside the sense of submission and obedience compelled from him to Vàsàrhely. He felt as though an iron hand, invisible, weighed on his life, and forced it into subjection. When he had almost grown secure that his enemy's knowledge was a buried harmless thing, it had risen and barred his way, speaking with an authority which it was not possible to disobey. With all his errors he was a man of high courage, who had always held his own with all men. How the old forgotten humiliation of his earliest years revived, and enforced from him the servile timidity of the Slav blood which he had abjured. He had never for an instant conceived it possible to disregard the mandate he received; that an apparently voluntary resignation was permitted to him was, his conscience acknowledged, more mercy than he could have expected. That Vàsàrhely would act thus had not occurred to him; but before the act he could not do otherwise than admit its justice and obey.
But the consciousness of that superior will compelling him, left in him a chill tremor of constant fear, of perpetual self-abasement. What was natural to him was the reckless daring which many Russians, such as Skobeleff, have shown in a thousand ways of peril. He was here forced only to crouch and to submit; it was more galling, more cruel to him than utter exposure would have been. The sense of coercion was always upon him like a dragging chain. It produced on him a despondency, which not even the presence of his wife or the elasticity of his own nature could dispel.