All she knew was that he never touched the revenues of Idrac.
She paused on the same spot where he had stood before her first, with his fair beauty, his courtier's smile, his easy grace, the very prince of gentlemen; and her hands clenched the folds of her gown as she thought—'the first of actors! Nothing more.'
And she, Wanda von Szalras, had been the dupe of that inimitable mimicry and mockery!
The thought was like a rusted iron, eating deeper and deeper into her heart each day. When her consciousness, her memory, would have said otherwise, would have told her that in much he was loyal and sincere, though in one great thing he had been false, she would not trust herself to hearken to the suggestion. 'Let me see clearly, though I die of what I see!' she said in her soul. She would be blind no more. She hated herself that she had been ever blind.
She had been always his dupe, from the first sonorous phrases she had heard him utter in the French Chamber to the last sentence with which he had left her when he went from her to the presence of Olga Brancka. So she believed. Here she did him wrong; but how was she to tell that? To her it seemed but one long-sustained comedy, one brilliant and hateful imposture.
Sometimes his cry to her rang in her ears: 'Believe at least that I did love you!' and some subtle true instinct in her whispered to her that he had there been sincere, that in passion and devotion at least he had never been false. But she thrust the thought away; it seemed but another form of self-deception.
The dull slow evening passed as usual; it was late in summer and the night came early. She dined in company with Madame Ottilie and sat with her as usual afterwards. The room seemed full of his voice, of his laughter, of the music of which he had had such mastery.
She never opened her lips to say to the Princess Ottilie: 'But for you he would have passed from my life a mere stranger, seen but once.' But the tender conscience of the Princess made her feel the bitterest reproach every time that the eyes of her niece met her own, every time that she passed the blank space in the picture gallery where once had hung the portrait of Sabran, painted in court dress by Mackart. The portrait was locked away in a dark closet that opened out from the oratory of his wife. With its emblazoned arms and marquis's coronet on the frame, it had seemed such a perpetual record of his sin that she had had it taken from the wall and shut in darkness, feeling that it could not hang in its falsehood amidst the portraits of her people. But often she opened the door of her oratory and let the light stream upon the portrait where it leaned against the closet wall. It seemed then as if he stood living before her, looking as he had looked so often at the banquets and balls of the Hofburg, when she had felt so much pride in his personal beauty, his grace of bearing, his supreme distinction.
'Who could have dreamed that it was but a perfect comedy,' she thought, 'as much a comedy as Got's or Bressant's!'
Then her conscience smote her with a sense that she did him injustice when she thought so. In all things save his one crime he had been as true a gentleman as any of the great nobles of the empire. His intelligence, his bearing, his habits, his person, were all those of a patrician of the highest culture. The fraud of his name apart, there had been nothing in him that the most fastidious aristocrats would have disowned. He had inherited the qualities of a race of princes, though he had been descended unlawfully from them. His title had been a borrowed thing, unlawfully worn; but his supreme distinction of manner, his tact, his bodily grace, that large and temperate view of men and things which marks a gentleman, these had all been inborn and natural to him. He had been no mere actor when he had moved through a throne-room by her side. Her calmer reason told her this, but her instincts of candour and of pride made her deny that where there was one fraud there could be any truth.