Wanda, Vol. 3 (of 3)

by Ouida

Another woman would have tormented herself and him with innuendo or direct reference to what had passed in those weeks when she had not been beside him, and on which he was absolutely silent. But she put all baseness of curiosity from her; she was content to know that her own influence in absence had been strong enough to bring him back to his allegiance. She would not have wished to hear, had he offered to reveal them, all the various, conflicts of good and evil which had gone on in his mind, all the subtle changes by which her own power had been for a moment obscured, only to regain still stronger and purer ascendency. She was indulgent because she knew human nature well, and expected no miracles. That he had returned of his own accord, and was content so to return, was all she desired to know. If to attain that equanimity had cost her many a struggle, the fact was shut in her own soul and could concern no other. She esteemed it a poor love which could not bear to be sometimes shut out in silence.

'For a man to be manly he must be free,' she thought; 'and how can he be free if there be someone to whom he must confess every trifle? He owes allegiance to no one but his own conscience.'

If in their intercourse she had found his honour less scrupulous, his code less fine than her own; if she had been ever pained by a certain levity and looseness of principle betrayed by him at times, she always strove not to attach too much importance to these. The creeds of a man of pleasure were necessarily different, she told herself, to those of a woman reared in austere tenets, and guarded by natural pride and purity of disposition. Whenever the fear crossed her that he might not be always faithful to her she put it away from her thoughts. 'What I have to do,' she thought, 'is to be true to him, not to question or to doubt him: a man's faithfulness has always such a different reading to a woman's.'

Sabran never quite understood the perfect indulgence to him which she combined with the greatest severity to herself. He thought that the same measure she gave she would exact. The' serenity and grandeur of her character made it seem to him impossible that she would ever have compassion for weakness or for falsehood. He fancied, wrongly, that a woman less noble herself would be more indulgent than she would be to error. He did not realise that it is only a great nature which can wholly understand the full force of the words aimer c'est pardonner. And then again, he said to himself, she might have pardoned a fault, a crime even, of high passion, of bold mutiny against moral, law, but how could she ever pardon a meanness, a treason, a lie?

So he let the months slide away, and did not say to her whilst he still might have said it himself, 'I am not what you think me.'

But he was impressed and profoundly affected by that mute magnanimity, which never vaunted itself or claimed any praise for itself by any hint or suggestion. He felt disgust at his own folly in ever having cared to be a single instant in the presence of the woman of whose libertinage and inconstancy his yellow roses had been the fitting symbol. When he had cast her from him, rejected and despised, the glamour she had thrown over him had fallen like scales from the eyes of one blind. Her memory made the beauty of his wife's nature and thoughts seem to him more than ever things for reverence and worship. More than ever his soul shrank within him when he recollected the treachery and the deception with which, he had rewarded this noblest of friends.

Ah! why when she had stretched out her hand to him in that supreme gift of herself, in, that golden sunset hour after the autumn floods of Idrac, had he not had courage to kneel at her feet and tell her all? Perchance she might have still have loved him, might have still stooped to him!

He strove his utmost to conceal these anxious self-reproaches from her, lest she should imagine that his hours of gloom were caused by any lingering shadows of the fatal folly which had been forced on him, like a drug by Olga Brancka. The sorceress had failed, and he had flung down and shivered in atoms the glass out of which she had bidden him drink; she was to him as utterly forgotten, as though she were in her grave; but not so easily could he banish the memory of his own treachery to his wife. The very forbearance of her made him the more conscious of guilt, when he remembered that one man lived who knew that he was unworthy even to kiss the hem of her garment. He had been faithful to her in the present, and so could greet her with clean hands and honest lips; but in the past he had betrayed her foully; he had done her what in her sight, if ever she knew it would be the darkest dishonour the treachery of ä human life could hold.

The sense of crime, which had slept quiet and mute in his conscience so many years, was now awake and seldom to be stilled.

The time passed serenely; the autumn brought its hardy sports, the winter its vigorous pastimes. With the new year she gave him another son; she named him after Egon Vàsàrhely, without opposition from Sabran.