The Playground of Satan Part 14

"The German soldiers don't know what really happens----" she began, then stopped, knowing the argument would not hold. Joseph was no ignorant peasant.

"I understand his confusion of mind in the beginning," pursued Ian. "We all had it. But afterwards----"

"He would have been shot," she cried. "It's all very well to talk like that when we're in Ruvno. But when your superior officer gives an order, and you disobey, what happens? We're not all heroes, ready to die for an idea in cold blood. Battle is different."

"But we must all try to be honest--with ourselves," he said, and with sincerity; for he found honesty hard that night.

Her bright eyes challenged him and she opened her lips to speak; but he silenced her with a gesture.

"He disapproved the Prussians. Yet he stopped with them."

"He has left them," she retorted.

"Yes. But before he can be honest with himself, or with the family, he must work out the promise he made when Roman helped him to escape."

"The Russians have not been any too good to us in the past," she objected.

"You know it is not a question of Russian, but of right. He can go to France. But I'll have n.o.body in my family who ends his fighting record in a Prussian uniform."

Vanda sprang up and faced him.

"You talk a lot about honesty to-night," she cried scornfully. "And now I'll begin. I would not say one word against this decision if I thought you were honest, too. I hated to think of Joseph with the Prussians as much as anybody. But that is not the honest reason why you won't let Father Constantine marry us to-morrow, here in Ruvno. _That_ is only a pretext."

"Vanda!" protested the Countess.

"A pretext," she repeated firmly. "Look at him! Look how nervous and insincere he has been all the evening! Do you know why, Aunt Natalie?

I will tell you. Because he is the dog in the manger."

"Vanda!" repeated her horrified aunt.

None of them had thought the girl capable of such words. For a moment she looked the incarnation of pa.s.sion.

"Let him deny it!" she retorted.

He looked up, his face flushed; but he was less nervous than a few minutes earlier.

She turned to her aunt.

"You see," she said. "He says nothing. He can't deny it."

"I don't wish to," he said quietly.

Minnie knew she ought to have tiptoed from the room. But the scene held her. It was not the novelty of seeing Vanda in a rage, nor the novelty of hearing Ian's avowal of love. It was because she felt her own sentence lay in their hot words.

"I don't understand," said the Countess, much troubled. "Surely you can deny your lack of honesty?"

"Yes, I can deny that."

There was a pause. Then he went on: "Just now I asked myself if I was being entirely honest"--he looked at Vanda--"with you. All day I have been asking myself, I was afraid I could not be. But after searching myself I think that, whatever my feelings about you--you personally----"

He stopped. There was no mistaking the nature of his feelings towards her. They were written on his face, shone from his eyes.

"I--I have been honest in this," he concluded.

"We are seldom honest with ourselves," she put in.

"I have tried to be. I believe I have succeeded. And Vanda, on my honor, I believe that, even if I--even had I never given you more than a cousinly thought since--since it was too late, I'd be against your marrying Joseph till he has redeemed his promise to fight on the right side."

She leaned towards him, forgetful even of her aunt now, full of thoughts for Joseph, of him alone.

"Do you know," she said in low, pa.s.sionate tones, "that there were years, yes, long years, when I loved you, would have died for you; would have followed you barefooted to Siberia rather than be parted from you?

And you took no more account of me than of this table. What was I? The little orphan cousin. A bit of furniture in your house. Nothing more."

"Vanda! How unjust!" cried his mother.

She took no notice; I don't think she heard.

"You talk about honesty," she went on. "Take it; bare, ugly truth that few people can tell one another with impunity. Whilst I was giving you every thought, you guessed my devotion, accepted it, put it on a mental shelf to leave or to take down and use, according to how life worked out for you...."

"Oh--what injustice!" said his mother again. This time she heard the reproach; all she said was:

"Let me speak, Auntie." Then, to him: "Yes, as things suited you ...

you looked on my devotion, my foolish, dumb devotion, as something to fall back upon, if, when the time came for you to marry, you found n.o.body you liked better. Oh--I knew you so well.... And through you, I know men. I have not watched your face all these years, day by day, meal by meal across this table, in vain. Here, in Ruvno, buried in the country, I have studied life, in your face, through your words, through the change which has come over you when you knew that both Joseph and Roman wanted me."

"But why bring----" began his mother. Vanda silenced her.

"Because we are out for honesty." Then to him: "Why do you come to me now, when I have learned to forget you, to look at you with indifference, killed the love I had for you after many silent struggles?

Why do you try to make Joseph so honest to himself when I want him more than anything else in the world? Why do you step in now?"

Her voice broke; she stopped. As for Ian, the scales had at length fallen from his eyes; he saw his past folly clearly enough; and it was too late. In her "now" lay much meaning.

"You're unjust. I'm not so mean as you think ... or so selfish," he said gently.

She wiped her eyes, damp with unshed tears, but said no more. It seemed that her pa.s.sion had worn itself out in those burning words she flung at him a moment before. Once again she was the quiet, un.o.btrusive Vanda, who did many things for other people's comfort and did not always get appreciation.

He took up an ill.u.s.trated paper, turned over its pages without seeing them, furtively glanced at his mother, who gave him a look of deep sympathy, then left the room.

He did not blame her for this outburst; bore her no bitterness. The indictment belonged to him and he admitted it. But in a way it soothed him to think that she had cared for him once. And it had taken him all this time, all the events of the past few weeks, to teach him what love meant, that pa.s.sion he had almost dreaded, never cultivated, because he liked a quiet even life, free from emotion. When her hot words fell on his ears they opened up visions to which he had been blind so long.

Yes; he cared no longer to deceive himself. He did love her; not as Roman loved women, but in his own way, shyly, hesitatingly, with affection of slow growth that had taken deep root. At last he was honest with himself, admitted the fullness of his folly. It maddened him to think that all the time, whilst he let things drift because he was too comfortable to plunge into the depths of emotion yet untasted; whilst he, in his blindness, let chances drift by, enjoying to the full that pleasant, uneventful life which had been swept away in war's hurricane forever, whilst he could have given her all the comforts and joys of his wealth; whilst he, ignorant of his own heart, not heartless as she said, but selfish, procrastinating, basked in the sunshine of peace and security--all that time her proud bruised heart had fought against the love he held of no account but longed for now with an intensity which left him sore, wondering, almost indignant at his new capacity for pa.s.sion.

Pacing his office, he remembered that he could not even give her the generous dowry he had planned a few weeks ago. For the moment he had forgotten his financial troubles. Hastily he opened the big safe which stood in the room, took out account books and deed boxes, made rough calculations. He could give her the paltry sum of twenty thousand roubles, unless the Prussians advanced more rapidly than he expected and seized the remainder of his invested wealth. It was a fifth of what he had planned for her when he took that rapid ride to Warsaw, with Roman at the wheel.

He put back his papers, locked the safe and sought the blue guest-room.

He found Joseph sitting by a round table on which a lamp burned. Martin had put away the Cossack uniform and given him one of Ian's dressing-gowns. His hand was bandaged; but except for that he bore no trace of having pa.s.sed through the experience of war since he last used that room. Yet Ian's feelings towards him had greatly changed. Before, he deemed him rather a prig, but a successful man, a distant relative who would never give him any trouble but in whom he felt no particular interest; not one he would have chosen for friend; but a man he tolerated as a cousin, with whom he had played, quarreled, learnt, and taken punishment in the long years of childhood.

But now, he hated him; hated him for Vanda's sake, for Roman's, for his coming to Ruvno in Prussian uniform, for his letting Roman risk life to save him from a death which, after all, was the consequence of his own conduct. But he determined to master his feelings and get over the meeting without an open quarrel.

Joseph welcomed him with unusual warmth, and this, too, he resented, as he resented his handsome nose and white, even teeth.