Mdme. Brancka had always an unacknowledged resentment against her sister-in-law, for being the owner of all the vast possessions of the Szalras. 'If Gela had lived!' she thought constantly. 'If I had only had a son by him before he died, this woman would have had her dower and nothing more.' That his sister should possess all, whilst she had by her later marriage lost her right even to a share in that vast wealth, was a perpetual bitterness to her.
Stefan Brancka was indeed rich, but he was an insensate gambler. She was extravagant to the last degree, with all the costly caprices of a cocodette who reigned in the two most brilliant capitals of the world. They were often troubled by their own folly, and again and again the generosity of his elder brother had rescued them from humiliating embarrassments. At such moments she had almost hated Wanda von Szalras for these large possessions, of which, according to her own views, her sister-in-law made no use whatever. Meantime, she wished Egon Vàsàrhely to die childless, and to that end had not been unwilling for the woman he loved to marry anyone else. She had reasoned that the Szalras estates would go to the Crown or the Church if Wanda did not marry; whilst all the power and possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely must, if he had no sons, pass in due course to his brother. She had the subtle acuteness of her race, and she had the double power of being able at once to wait very patiently and to spring with swift rage on what she needed. To her sister-in-law she always appeared a mere flutterer on the breath of fashion. The grave and candid nature of the one could not follow or perceive the intricacies of the other.
'She is a cruel woman and a perilous one,' Sabran said one day to his wife's surprise.
She answered him that Olga Brancka had always seemed to her a mere frivolous mondaine, like so many others of their world.
'No,' he persisted. 'You are wrong; she is not a butterfly. She has too much energy. She is a profoundly immoral woman also. Look at her eyes.'
'That is Stefan's affair,' she answered, 'not ours. He is indifferent.'
'Or unsuspicious? Did your brother care for her?'
'He was madly in love with her. She was only sixteen when he married her. He fell at Solferino half a year later. When she married my cousin it shocked and disgusted me. Perhaps I was foolish to take it thus, but it seemed such a sin against Gela. To die so, and not to be even remembered!'
'Did your cousin Egon approve this second marriage?'
'No,' he opposed it; he had our feeling about it. But Stefan, though very young, was beyond any control. He had the fortune as he had the title of his mother, the Countess Brancka, and Olga bewitched him as she had done my brother.'