



Produced by Wanda Lee, Laura Natal Rodriguez and Marc
D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org (Images
generouslly made available by the Internet Archive.)





WANDA

BY

OUIDA


_'Doch!--alles was dazu mich trieb_;
_Gott!--war so gut, ach, war so lieb!_'
Goethe


IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.


London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1873




TO

'A PERFECT WOMAN, NOBLY PLANN'D'

WALPURGA, LADY PAGET

NÉE

COUNTESS VON HOHENTHAL



This book is inscribed

IN ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION




WANDA.




PROEM.

    Doch--alles was dazu mich trieb,
    Gott! war so gut! ach, war so lieb!--GOETHE.


Towards the close of a summer's day in Russia a travelling carriage was
compelled to pause before a little village whilst a smith rudely mended
its broken wheel. The hamlet was composed of a few very poor dwellings
grouped around a large low horse-shoe shaped building, which was the
manorial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and dropping
to decay; its many windows were barred and shuttered; the grass grew in
its courts, and flowering weeds had time to seed and root themselves
on its whitewashed walls.

Around it the level ground was at this season covered with green
wheat, spreading for leagues on leagues, and billowing and undulating
under the wind that blew from the steppes, like the green sea which it
resembled. Farther on were woods of larch and clumps of willow; and in
the distance, across the great plain to the westward, rolled a vast
shining river, here golden with choking sand, here dun- with
turbid waves, here broken with islets and swamps of reeds, where the
singing swan and the pelican made their nests.

It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the Volga rolls
its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was bleak and mournful,
though for many leagues the green corn spread and caught the timid
sunshine and the shadow of the clouds. There were a few stunted
willows near the house, and a few gashed pines; a dried-up lake was
glittering with crystals of salt; the domes and minarets of a little
city rose above the sky line far away to the south-east; and farther
yet northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains; the wall of
stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All was desolate,
melancholy, isolated, even though the season was early summer; but the
vastness of the view, the majesty of the river, the suggestion of the
faint blue summits where the Urals rose against the sky, gave solemnity
and a melancholy charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous and
tedious.

Prince Paul Ivanovitch Zabaroff was in Russia because he was on the
point of marriage with a great heiress of the southern provinces, and
was travelling across from Orenburg to the Krimea, where his betrothed
bride awaited him in the summer palace of her fathers. Russia, with the
exception of Petersburg, was an unknown and detested place to him; his
errand was distasteful, his journey tedious, his temper irritated; and
when a wheel of his _telegue_ came off in this miserable village of
the Northern Volga district, he was in no mood to brook with patience
such an accident. He paced to and fro restlessly as he looked round on
the few and miserable cabins of a district that had been continually
harried and fired through many centuries by Kossack and Tartar.

'Whose house