'Born a serf! I!' he thought, incredulous of his own memories, of his own knowledge, as he left the haras and mounted a young half-broken English horse, and rode out into the silent, fragrant forest ways. Almost to himself it seemed a dream that he had ever been a little peasant on the Volga plains. Almost to himself it seemed an impossible fable that he had been the natural son of Paul Zabaroff and a poor maiden who had deemed herself honoured when she had been bidden to bear drink to the barine in his bedchamber. He had once said that he was that best of all actors, one who believes in the part he plays; and at all times, and above all since his marriage, he had been identified in his own persuasions, and his own instincts and habits, with that character of a great noble, which, when he paused to remember, he knew was but assumed. Patrician in all his temper and tone, it seemed to him, when he did so remember, incredible that he could be actually only a son of hazard, without name, right, or station in the world. Was he even the husband of Wanda von Szalras? Law and Church would both deny it were his fraud once known.
It was not very often that these gloomy terrors seized him—his temper was elastic and his mind sanguine; but when they did so they overcame him utterly; he felt like Orestes pursued by the Furies. What smote him most deeply and hardly of all was his consciousness of the wrong done to his wife.
He rode fast and recklessly in the soft, grey atmosphere of the still day, making his young horse leap brawling stream and fallen tree-trunk, and dash headlong through the dusky greenery of the forests.
When he returned Wanda was seated on the lawn under the great yews and cedars by the keep. She kissed her hand to him as he rode in the distance up the avenue.
A little while later he joined her in her garden retreat, calm and even gay. With her greeting his terror seemed to have faded away; his home was here, he possessed her entire devotion—what was there to fear? Never had the serenity of his life here appeared more precise to him; never had the respect and honour which surrounded him seemed more needful as the bulwarks of a contented career. What could the furnace of ambition, the fatigue of exhausted pleasure give, that could equal this profound sense of peace, this cultured leisure, and this untainted atmosphere. The moral loveliness of his wife seemed to him almost more than mortal in its absolute and unconscious rejection of all things mean or base. 'The world would find the spring by following her,' seemed to him to have been written for her—the spring of hope, of faith, of strength, of purity. Perhaps a better man might have less intensely perceived and worshipped that spiritual beauty.
'Shall we have any house-parties this year or not?' she asked him as he joined her. 'I fear you must feel lonely here after your crowded days in Paris last year?'
'No,' he said quickly. 'Let us be without people. We had enough of the world in Paris, too much of it. How can I be lonely whilst I have you? And the weather for once is superb, and promises to remain so.'
'I do not know how it seems to you,' she replied, 'but when I came from the glare and the asphalte of Paris, these deep shadows, these cool fresh greens, these cloud-bathed mountains seemed to me to have the very calm of eternity in them. They seemed to say to me in such reproach, "Why will you wander? What can you find nobler and gladder than we are?" I want the children to grow up with that love of country in them; it is such a refuge, such an abiding, innocent joy. What does the old English poet say: 'It is to go from the world as it is man's to the world as it is God's.'
'Well, then, I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne'er agree,'
he said, with a smile. 'Cowley was a very wise man; wiser than Socrates, when all is counted. But, then, Cowley forgot, and you, perhaps, forget that one must be born with that wiser, holier love in one; like any other poetic faculty or insight, it is scarcely to be taught, certainly not to be acquired. I hope your children may inherit it from you. There is no surer safeguard, no simpler happiness!'