The Vultures Part 39

"And the princess says the same?" said Kosmaroff, rising also, and raising her hand to his lips to bid her good-night, after the Polish fas.h.i.+on.

"Yes," she answered, "I say the same."

XXVIII

IN THE PINE-WOODS

The prince was early astir the next morning. He was a hardy old man, and covered great distances on his powerful horse. Neither cold nor rain prevented him from undertaking journeys to some distant village which had once owned his ancestor as lord and master--in those days when a n.o.ble had to pay no more for killing a peasant than a farmer may claim for an injured sheep to-day.

The prince never discussed with Wanda those affairs in which, as a n.o.ble, he felt compelled to take an active interest. He had seen, perhaps, enough in the great revolution of his younger days to teach him that women--and even Polish women--should take no part in politics. He believed in a wise and studied ignorance of those things which it is better not to know. He made no reference to Kosmaroff at breakfast the next morning, and Wanda asked no questions. She had not slept until nearly morning, and had heard her father bolt the doors after the departure of the ex-Cossack. She had heard Kosmaroff's light and quick step on the frozen snow as he started on his seven-mile walk to Warsaw.

Cartoner's name, then, was not mentioned during the morning meal, which the prince ate with the deliberation of his years. The morning was bright and sunny, with a crisp air and sufficient frost to keep the snow from melting. The prince had recovered from his anger of the previous evening, and was gay. Wanda, too, seemed light-hearted enough. She was young and strong. In her veins there flowed the blood of a race that had always been "game," that had always faced the world with unflinching eyes, and had never craved its pity. Her father had lost everything, had lived a life of hards.h.i.+p, almost to privation for one of his rank; and witnessed the ruin or the downfall of all his friends; and yet he could laugh with the merry, while with the mourner it was his habit to purse up his lips beneath the grizzled mustache and mutter a few curt words, not of condolence, but of stimulation to endure.

He liked to see cheerful faces around him. They helped him, no doubt, to carry on to the end of his days that high-handed and dignified fight against ill-fortune which he had always waged.

"If you have a grievance," he always said to those who brought their tales of woe to his ears, "air it as much as you like, but speak up, and do not whine."

He had to listen to a great number of such tales, and to the majority of grievances could suggest no cure; for they were the grievances of Poland, and in these later times of Finland also, to which it appears there is no cure.

"I shall make a long round to-day," he said to Wanda, when he was in the saddle, with his short, old-fas.h.i.+oned stirrup, his great boots covering his knee and thigh from the wind, and his weather-beaten old face looking out from the fur collar of his riding-coat. "It may be the last time this winter. The spring must come soon."

And he went away at an easy canter.

Wanda, left alone for the whole day in the stillness of this forest farm, had her round to do also. She set out on foot soon after her father's departure, bound to a distant cottage in the depths of the pine-woods. The trees were quiet this morning; for it is only at the time of thaw, when the snow, gathering moisture from the atmosphere, gains in weight and breaks down the branches, that the woods crack as beneath the tread of some stealthy giant. But a frost seems to brace the trees which in the colder weather stand grim and silent, bearing their burden without complaint.

The sky was cloudless and the air quite still. There is no silence like that of a northern pine-wood in winter; for the creatures living in the twilight there have been given by G.o.d silent feet and a stealthy habit--the smaller ones going in fear of the larger, and the beasts of prey ever alert for their natural enemy--man. The birds kept for the most part to the outer fringes of the forest, nearer to the crops and the few, far cottages.

Wanda had grown from childhood amid the pines, and the gloomy forest-paths were so familiar as to have lost all power to impress her.

In the nursery she had heard tales of wolves and bears, but had never seen them. They might be near or far; they might be watching through the avenues of straight and motionless stems. In their childhood it had been the delight of Martin and herself to trace in the snow the footprints of the wolves--near the house, in the garden, right up to the nursery window. They had gradually acquired the indifference of the peasants who work in the fields, or the woodmen at their labors amid the trees, who are aware that the silent, stealthy eyes are watching them, and work on without fear. The prince had taught the children fearlessness, or, perhaps, it was in their blood, and needed no education. He had taught them to look upon the beasts of the forests not as enemies, but as quiet, watching friends.

Wanda went alone whithersoever she listed, without so much as turning her head to look over her shoulder. The pine-woods were hers; the peasants were her serfs in spirit, if not in deed. Here, at all events, the Bukatys were free to come and go. In cities they were watched, their footsteps dogged by human wolves.

There are few paths through the great forests of Poland, of Posen, and of Silesia, and what there are, are usually cut straight and at right angles to each other. There was a path just wide enough to give pa.s.sage to the narrow timber carts from the farm direct to the woodman's cottage, and so flat is the face of the earth that the distant trees are like the masts of s.h.i.+ps half-hidden by the curve of the world. It seems as if one could walk on and on forever, or drop from hunger and fatigue and lie unheeded for years in some forgotten corner. In the better-kept forests the paths are staked and numbered, or else it would be impossible to know the way amid such millions of trees--all alike, all of the same height. But the prince was too poor to vie with the wealthy land-owners of Silesia, and his forests were ill-kept.

In places the trees had fallen across the original path, and the few pa.s.sers-by had made a new path to one side or the other. Sometimes a tree had grown outward towards the light and air, almost bridging the open s.p.a.ce.

Wanda could not, therefore, see very far in front or behind, and was taken by surprise by the thud of a horse's feet on the beaten snow behind her. She turned, thinking it was her father, who for some reason had returned home, and, learning whither she had gone, had followed her. But it was not the prince. It was Cartoner. Before she had quite realized that it was he, he was on his feet leading his horse towards her.

She paused and looked at him, half startled; then, with a curt, inarticulate cry of joy she hurried towards him. Thus were given to them a few of those brief moments of complete happiness which are sometimes vouchsafed to human beings. Which must a.s.suredly be moments stolen from heaven; for angels are so chary with them, giving them to a few favored ones only once or twice in a whole lifetime, and, to the large majority of mankind, never at all.

"Why have you come?" asked Wanda.

"To see you," replied this man of few words.

And the sound of his voice, the sight of his strong face, swept away all her troubles and anxieties; as if, with his greater physical strength, he had taken a burden which she could hardly lift, and carried it easily. For he always seemed to know how to meet every emergency and face every trouble. A minute ago she had been reflecting with relief that he was not in Poland, and now it seemed as if her heart must break had he been anywhere else. She forgot for the moment all the dangers that surrounded them; the hopelessness of their love, the thousand reasons why they should not meet. She forgot that a whole nation stood between them. But it was only for a moment--a moment borrowed from eternity.

"Is that the only reason?" she asked, remembering with a sort of shock that this world of glittering snow and still pine-trees was not their real world at all.

"Yes," he answered.

"But you cannot stay in Poland! You must go away again at once! You do not know--" And she stopped short, for their respective positions were such that they always arrived at a point where only silence was left to them.

"Oh, yes," he answered with a short laugh. "I know. I am going away to-night--to St. Petersburg."

He did not explain that his immediate departure was not due to the fears that she had half expressed.

"I am so glad." She broke off, and looked at him with a little smile. "I am so glad you are going away."

She turned away from him with a sharp sigh. For she had now a new anxiety, which, however, like Aaron's rod, had swallowed all the rest.

"I would rather know that you were safe in England," she said, "even if I were never to see you again. But," and she looked up at him with a sort of pride in her eyes--that long-drawn pride of race which is strong to endure--"but you must never be hampered by a thought of me. I want you to be what you have always been. Ah! you need not shake your head.

All men say the same of you--they are afraid of you."

She looked at him slowly, up and down.

"And I am not," she added, with a sudden laugh. For her happiness was real enough. The best sort of happiness is rarely visible to the mult.i.tude. It lies hidden in odd corners and quiet places; and the eager world which, presumably, is seeking it, hurries past and never recognizes it, but continues to mistake for it prosperity and riches, noise and laughter, even fame and mere cheap notoriety.

They walked slowly back towards the farm, and again the G.o.ds were kind to them; for they forgot how short their time was, how quickly such moments fly. Much that they had to say to each other may not be expressed on paper, neither can any compositor set it up in type.

They were practical enough, however, and as they walked beneath the snow-clad pines they drew up a scheme of life which was astonis.h.i.+ngly unlike the dreams and aspirations of most lovers. For it was devoid of selfishness, and they looked for happiness--not in an immediate gratification of all their desires and an instant fulfilment of their hopes, but in a mutual faith that should survive all separation and bridge the longest span of years. Loyalty was to be their watchword.

Loyalty to self, to duty, and to each other.

Wanda did not, like the heroine of a novel, look for a pa.s.sion that should stride over every obstacle to its object, that should ignore duty, which is only another word for honor, and throw down the spectres, Foresight, Common-sense, Respect, which must arise in the pathway of that madness, a brief pa.s.sion. She was content, it seemed, that her lover should be wise, should be careful for the future, should take her life into his hands with a sort of quiet mastery as if he had a right to do so--a right, not to ruin and debase, such as is usually considered the privilege of that which is called a great pa.s.sion and admired as such--but a right to shape, guard, and keep.

Cartoner had not much to say about his own feelings, which, perhaps, made him rather different from most lovers. He went so far as to consider the feelings of others and to place them before his own, which, of course, is quite unusual. And yet the scheme of life which was his reading of Love, and which Wanda extracted from him that sunny March morning and pieced together bit by bit in her own decided and conclusive way, seemed to content her. She seemed to gather from it that he loved her precisely as she wished to be loved, and that, come what might, she had already enough to make her life happier than the lives of most women.

And, of course, they hoped. For they were young, and human, and the spring was in the air. But their hope was one of those things of which they could not speak; for it involved knowledge of which Wanda had become possessed at the hand of the prince and Martin and Kosmaroff. It touched those things which Cartoner had come to Poland to learn, but not from Wanda.

The smell of the wood-smoke from the chimneys of the farm told them that they were nearing the edge of the forest, and Wanda stopped short.

"You must not go any nearer," she said. "You are sure no one saw you when you came?"

"No one," answered Cartoner, whom fortune had favored as he came. For he had approached the farm through the wood, and he had seen Wanda's footsteps in the snow. He had often ridden over the same ground on the very horse which he was now riding, and knew every inch of the way to Warsaw. He could get there without being seen, might even quit the city again un.o.bserved.

For he knew--indeed, Wanda had told him--the dangers that surrounded him. He knew also that these dangers were infinitely greater for Martin and the prince.

"It is only what you foresaw," she said, "when--when we first understood."

"No, it is worse than I foresaw," he answered.

So they parted, with the knowledge that they must not meet again in Poland when their meeting must mean such imminent risk to others. They could not even write to each other while Wanda should be within the circle of the Russian postal service. There was but the one link between them--Paul Deulin; and to him neither would impart a confidence. Deulin had brought about this meeting to-day. Warned by telegram, he had met Cartoner at Warsaw Station, and had counselled him not to go out into the streets. Since he was only waiting a few hours in Warsaw for the St.

Petersburg train, he must either sit in the station or take a horse and go for a ride into the country. The Bukatys, by-the-way, were not in town, but at their country house.

"Go and see them," he added. "A man living on a volcano may surely play with firearms if he wants to. And you are all on the volcano together.

Pah! I know the smell of it. The very streets, my friend, reek of catastrophe."