Wanda, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by Ouida

The household resumed its calm order, the routine of the days was unbroken, the quiet yet stately life had been taken up in its course as though it had never been altered; and wherever young children are there will always be some shout of mirth, some sound of happy laughter somewhere; the children laugh as the birds sing, though those amidst them bury their dead.

But the house was as a house of mourning, and the sense of death was there as utterly as though he who was gone had been laid in his grave amidst the silver figures and the marble tombs in the Chapel of the Knights. No one ever heard a sigh from her lips, or ever saw the tears beneath her eyelids; but the sense of her bereavement, as one terrible, inconsolable, eternal, weighed like a pall on all those who were about her; the lowliest peasant on her estates understood that the sanctity of some untold woe had built up a wall of granite between her and all the living world.

She had always been grateful to fate for her old home set amidst the silence of the mountains, but she had never been so thankful for it as now. It shielded her from all the observation and interrogation of the world; no one came thither unbidden, unless she chose, no visitant would ever break that absolute solitude which was the sole approach to peace that she would ever know. Even her relatives could not pass the icy barrier of her cold denial. They wearied her for a while with written importunities and suggestions, hinted wonder, delicately expressed questions. But they made no way into her confidence; they soon left her to herself and to her children. They said angrily to themselves that she had been always whimsical and a solitary; they had been certain that soon or late that ill-advised union would be dissolved in some way, private or public. They were all people haughty, sensitive, abhorrent of scandal; they were content that the separation should be by mutual consent and noiseless.

She had had letters from Egon Vàsàrhely full of delicate tenderness; in the last he had asked with humility if he might visit Hohenszalras. She had written in return to him:

'You have my gratitude and my affection, but until we are quite old we will not meet. Leave me alone; you can do naught for me.'

He obeyed; he understood the loyalty to one disloyal which made her refuse to meet him, of whose loyalty she was so sure.

He sent a magnificent present to the child who was his namesake, and wrote to her no more save upon formal anniversaries.

The screen of her dark forests protected her from all the cruel comment and examination of the men and women of her world. She knew them well enough to know that when she ceased to appear amidst them, when she ceased to contribute to their entertainment, when she ceased to bid them to her houses, she would soon cease also to be remembered by them; even their wonder would live but for a day. If they blamed her in their ignorance, their blame would be as indifferent as their praise had been.

She had been told by her lawyers that her husband had refused to touch a coin of the revenues of Idrac, and had once visited them to sign a power of procuration, whereby they could receive those revenues and set them aside in accumulation for his son Gela. That was all she heard. Whither he had gone she was ignorant. She did not make any effort to learn. On the night following his departure a peasant had been sent with the sleigh and horses home to Hohenszalras. The solicitors of Salzburg had seen him a week or two later at their ancient offices under the Calvarienburg: that was all. She had bade him let it be forgotten that he had ever lived beside her. He had obeyed her.

The days, and weeks, and months went on, and his place knew him no more. The jägers, seated round their fires in their forest-huts, spoke longingly and wonderingly of his absence. The hunters, when they brought down a steinbock with unusual effort or skill, said that it had been a shot that would have been worthy of his praise. His old friend wept for him with the slow sad tears of age, and the child Bela prayed for his return every night that he knelt down before his crucifix. But his name never passed his wife's lips, and was never written by her hand. She had given her all with the superb generosity of a sovereign; she had in her wrongs the intense abiding unutterable disgust of a sovereign betrayed and outraged. When she let grief have its way, it was when no eyes beheld her, when the night was down and solitude sheltered her.