Wanda, Vol. 2 (of 3)

by Ouida

'If he had not satisfied her as to that, Wanda would not be his wife,' answered the Prince gravely. 'He has given her beautiful children, and it seems to me that he renders her perfectly happy. We should all be grateful to him.'

'The children are certainly very beautiful,' said Baron Kaulnitz, and said no more.

'The people all around are unfeignedly attached to him,' Vàsàrhely continued with generous effort. 'I hear nothing but his praise. Nor do I think it the conventional compliment which loyalty leads them to pay the husband of their Countess; it is very genuine attachment. The men of the old Archduchy are not easily won; it is only qualities of daring and manliness which appeal to their sympathies. That he has gained their affections is as great testimony to his character in one way as that he has gained Wanda's is in another. At Idrac also the people adore him, and Croats are usually slow to see merit in strangers.'

'In short, he is a paragon,' said the ambassador, with a little dubious smile. 'So much the better, since he is irrevocably connected with us.'

Sabran was at no time seen to greater advantage than when he was required to receive and entertain a large house-party. Always graceful, easily witty, endowed with that winning tact which is to society as cream is to the palate, the charm he possessed for women and the ascendency he could, at times, exercise over men—even men who were opposed to him—were never more admirably displayed than when he was the master of Hohenszalras, with crowned heads, and princes, and diplomatists, and beauties gathered beneath his roof. His mastery, moreover, of all field sports, and his skill at all games that demanded either intelligence or audacity, made him popular with a hardy and brilliant nobility; his daring in a boar hunt at noon was equalled by his science at whist in the evening. Strongly prejudiced against him at the onset, the great nobles who were his guests had long ceased to feel anything for him except respect and regard; whilst the women admired him none the less for that unwavering devotion to his wife which made even the conventionalities of ordinary flirtation wholly impossible to him. With all his easy gallantry and his elegant homage to them, they all knew that, at heart, he was as cold as the rocks to all women save one.

'It is really the knight's love for his lady,' said the Countess Brancka once; and Sabran, overhearing, said: 'Yes, and, I think that if there were more like my lady on earth, knighthood might revive on other scenes than Wagner's.'

Between him and the Countess Brancka there was a vague intangible enmity, veiled under the perfection of courtesy. They could ill have told why they disliked each other; but they did so. Beneath their polite or trivial or careless speech they often aimed at each other's feelings or foibles with accuracy and malice. She had stayed at Hohenszalras more or less time each year in the course of her flight between France and Vienna, and was there now. He admired his wife's equanimity and patience under the trial of Mdme. Olga's frivolities, but he did not himself forbear from as much sarcasm as was possible in a man of the world to one who was his guest, and by marriage his relative, and he was sensible of her enmity to himself, though she paid him many compliments, and sometimes too assiduously sought his companionship. 'Elle fait le ronron, mais gare à ses pattes!' he said once to his wife concerning her.

Sabran appraised her indeed with unflattering accuracy. He knew by heart all the wiles and wisdom of such a woman as she was. Her affectations did not blind him to her real danger, and her exterior frivolity did not conceal from him the keen and subtle self-interest and the strong passions which laboured beneath it.

She felt that she had an enemy in him, and partly in self-protection, partly in malice, she set herself to convert a foe into a friend, perhaps, without altogether confessing it to herself, into a lover as well.

The happiness that prevailed at Hohenszalrasburg annoyed her for no other reason than that it wearied her to witness it. She did not envy it, because she did not want happiness at all; she wanted perpetual change, distraction, temptation, passion, triumph—in a word, excitement, which becomes the drug most unobtainable to those who have early exhausted all the experiences and varieties of pleasure.