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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 is that?' he said to his servant, pointing to the great
white building.

The servant humbly answered, 'Little father, it is thine.'

'Mine!' echoed Paul Zabaroff. He was astonished; then he laughed, as he
remembered that he had large properties around the city of Kazán.

The whole soil was his own as far as his eyes could reach, till the
great river formed its boundary. He did not even know his steward here;
the villagers did not know him. He had been here once only, a single
night, in the late autumn time, long, long before, He was a man in
whose life incidents followed each other too rapidly for remembrance
to have any abiding-place or regret any home in his mind. He had
immense estates, north, south, east, west; his agents forwarded him
the revenues of each, or as much of the revenues as they chose him to
enjoy, when they themselves were satisfied with their gains.

When he was not in Paris he was in Petersburg, and he was an
impassioned and very daring gamester. These great silent houses, in
the heart of fir woods, in the centre of grass plains, or on the banks
of lonely rivers, were all absolutely unknown to and indifferent to
him. He was too admired and popular at his Court ever to have had the
sentence passed upon him to retire to his estates; but had he been
forced to do so he would have been as utterly an exile in any one of
the houses of his fathers as if he had been consigned to Tobolsk itself.

He looked around him now, an absolute stranger in the place where
he was as absolutely lord. All these square leagues he learned were
his, all these miserable huts, all these poor lives; for it was in
a day before the liberation of the serfs had been accomplished by
that deliverer whom Russia rewarded with death. A vague remembrance
came over him as he gazed around: he had been here once before. The
villagers, learning that it was their master who had arrived thus
unexpectedly in their midst, came timidly around and made their humble
prostrations: the steward who administered the lands was absent that
day in the distant town. He was entreated to go within his own deserted
dwelling, but he refused: the wheel was nearly mended, and he reflected
that a house abandoned for so long was probably damp and in disorder,
cold and comfortless. He was impatient to be gone, and urged the smith
to his best and quickest by the promise of many roubles. The _moujiks_,
excited and frightened, hastened to him with the customary offerings
of bread and salt; he touched the gifts carelessly; spoke to them with
good-humoured, indifferent carelessness; and asked if they had any
grievances to complain of, without listening to the answer. They had
many, but they did not dare to say so, knowing that their lord would be
gone in five minutes, but that the heavy hand of his steward would lie
for ever upon them.

Soon the vehicle was repaired, and Paul Zabaroff ceased his restless
walk to and fro the sandy road, and prepared to depart from this weary
place of detention. But, from an _isba_ that stood apart, beneath one
of the banks of sand that broke the green level of the corn, the dark
spare figure of an old woman came, waving bony hands upon the air, and
crying with loud voice to the _barine_ to wait.

'It is only mad Maritza,' said the people; yet they thought Maritza
had some errand with their lord, for they fell back and permitted her
to approach him as she cried aloud: 'Let me come! Let me come! I would
give him back the jewel he left here ten years ago!'

She held a young boy by the hand, and dragged him with her as she spoke
and moved. She was a dark woman, once very handsome, with white hair
and an olive skin, and a certain rugged grandeur in her carriage; she
was strong and of strong purpose; she made her way to Paul Zabaroff as
he stood by the carriage, and she fell at his feet and touched the dust
with her forehead, and forced the child beside her to make the same
obeisance.

'All hail to my lord, and heaven be with him! The poor Maritza comes
to give him back what he left.'

Prince Zabaroff smiled in a kindly manner, being a man often careless,
but not cruel.

'Nay, good mother, keep it, whatever it be: you have earned the right.
Is it a jewel, you say?'

'It is a jewel.'

'Then keep it. I had forgotten even that I was ever here.'

'Ay! the great lord had forgot.'

She rose up with the dust on her white hair, and thrust forward a young
boy, and put her hands on the boy's shoulders and made him kneel.

'There is the jewel, Paul Ivanovitch. It is time the Gospodar kept it
now.'

Paul Zabaroff did not understand. He looked down at the little serf
kneeling in the dust.

'A handsome child. May the land have many such to serve the Tsar. Is he
your grandson, good mother?'

The boy was beautiful, with long curling fair hair and a rosy mouth,
and eyes like the blue heavens in a night of frost. His limbs were
naked, and his chest. He had a shirt of sheepskin.

Old Maritza kept her hands on the shoulders of the kneeling child.

'He is thy son, O lord!'

'My son!'

'Ay. The lord has forgotten. The lord tarried but one night, but he
bade my Sacha serve drink to him in his chamber, and on the morrow,
when he left, Sacha wept. The lord has forgotten!'

Paul Zabaroff stood silent, slowly remembering. In the boy's face
looking up at him, half-sullenly, half-timidly, he saw the features of
his own race mingled with something much more beautiful, oriental, and
superb.

Yes: he had forgotten; quite forgotten; but he remembered now.

The people stood around, remembering better than he, but thinking it no
wrong in him to have forgotten, because he was their ruler and lord,
and did that which seemed right to him; and when he had gone away, in
Sacha's bosom there had been a thick roll of gold.

'Where is--the mother?' he said at length.

Old Maritza made answer:

'My Sacha died four summers ago. Always Sacha hoped that the lord might
some day return.'

Prince Zabaroff's cheek reddened a little with pain.

'Fool! why did you not marry her?' he said with impatience. 'There
were plenty of men. I would have given more dowry.'

'Sacha would not wed. What the lord had honoured she thought holy.'

'Poor soul!' muttered Paul Zabaroff; and he looked again at the boy,
who bore his own face, and was as like him as an eaglet to an eagle.

'Do you understand what we say?'

The boy answered sullenly, 'I understand.' 'What is your name?'

'I am Vassia.'

'And what do you do?'

'I do nothing.'

'Are you happy?'

'What is that? I do not know.'

Prince Zabaroff was silent.

'Rise up, since you are my son,' he said at length.

The boy rose.

He was sullen, shy, tameless, timid, like a young animal from the pine
woods. The old woman took her hands off his shoulders.

'I have delivered the jewel to the lord that owns it. I have done
Sacha's will.'

Then she turned herself round and covered her face, and went towards
her home.

The child stood, half-fierce, half-fearful, like a dog which an old
master drives away, and which fears the new one.

'These jewels are as many as the sands of the sea, and as worthless,'
said Paul Zabaroff with a slight smile.

Nevertheless, he resolved, since Maritza spoke truth, that the boy
should be cared for and well taught, and have all that gold could get
for him, and be sent away out from Russia; for in Russia he was a serf.

The boy's hair hung over his eyes, which were hungrily watching the
dark lean figure of the woman as it went away through the tall corn to
the white wood hut that stood alone in the fields. He dimly understood
that his life was being changed for him, but how he knew not. He wanted
to go home with Maritza to his nest of moss, where his bear-cubs slept
with him by night and played with him at dawn.

'Farewell,' said Paul Zabaroff, and he touched his son's cheek with his
hand.

'You are magnificently handsome, my poor child; indeed, who knows
what you will be?--a jewel or only a toad's eye?' he said dreamily;
then he sprang up behind his horses, and was borne away through the
fast-falling shades of the evening, leaving behind him the boy Vassia
and a little rough mound of nameless grass, which he had never seen,
and which was Sacha's grave.

The four fiery horses that bore the _telegue_ dashed away with it in
the sunlight, scattering the sand in yellow clouds, and the village
on the Volga plains beheld its lord never more in life. The boy stood
still, and looked after it with a sombre anger on his beautiful fair
Circassian face.

'You will go and be a prince far away, Vassia,' said the men to him
with envy. The child could not have expressed the vague mute wrath and
shame that stirred together in him, but he turned from them without a
word, and ran fleet as a roe in the path which Maritza had taken. He
loved his great-grandmother with a strong affection that was almost
passion, though it was silent and almost unconscious of itself. She
never checked him, beat him, or cursed him as the other women often
did their children. She did her best by him, though they dwelt in a
miserable little _isba_, that often in winter time was covered up with
the snow like a bear's hole, and in summer, the fierce brief parching
summer of north-east Russia, was as hot as a scorched eye under a
sun-glass. Life was barren and wretched to her, but not to him. He was
loved and he was free: childhood wants nothing more; Maritza was a
Persian woman. Years and years before, when she had been in her youth,
she had come from the Caspian shore, where the land and the sea are
alike alive with the leaping naphtha of the Ghebir worship: she had
been born within the iron gates of Derbent, of Persian parentage, and
she had known war and capture and violence, and had had many troubles,
many privations, many miseries before she had found herself stranded in
her old age, with her grandchild, in this little desolate village on
the sand-bank by the Volga.

She was very poor; she had an evil reputation: nothing evil was ever
really traced to her, but she had Oriental faiths and traditions
and worshipped fire, or so said her enemies the black clergy of the
scattered villages and their ready believers. Never did Maritza light a
lamp at nightfall, but her neighbours saw in the act a devil worship.

She was silent, proud, fierce, calm, exceedingly poor; she was hated
accordingly. When her granddaughter Sacha bore a child that was
the offspring of Prince Paul Zabaroff, though she cursed him, the
neighbours envied her and begrudged her such an honour.

Maritza had brought up the young Vassia with little tenderness, yet
with a great yearning over the boy, with his pure Persian face and
his beautiful fair body, like a pearl. The uttermost she wished for
him was that he should grow up a raftsman or a fisherman on the Volga
water; all that she dreaded was that the Kossacks would take him and
put a lance in his hand and have him slain in war, as in the old stern
days of her youth her lovers had been taken by the battle-god, that
devoured them one by one, and her sons after them.

She never gave a thought to the boy's parentage as of possible use to
him, but she always said to herself, 'If Paul Zabaroff ever come back,
then shall he know his son,' and meanwhile the boy was happy, though
he had not known the meaning of the word. He would plunge in the tawny
Volga in the summer-time, and watch the slow crowd of rafts go down
it, and the iron pontoon pass by, closed like a bier, which took the
condemned prisoners to Siberia. Now and then a gang of such captives
would go by on foot and chained; miserable exceedingly, wounded,
exhausted, doomed to twelve months' foot-sore travel ere they reached
the endless darkness of the mines or the blindness of the perpetual
frost. He watched them; but that was all. He felt neither curiosity nor
pity as he lay on the tall rough grass, and they moved by him on the
dusty, flint-strewn, ill-made road towards that chain of blue hills
which marked their future home and their eternal grave. For sport the
boy had the bear, the wolf, the blue fox, the wild hare, in the long
wintertime; in the brief summer he helped chase the pelican and the
swan along the sand-banks of the Volga or upon its lime-choked waves.
He was keen of eye and swift of foot: the men of his native village
were always willing to have his company, child though he was. He was
fond of all beasts and birds, though fonder still of sport; once he
risked his own life to save a stork and her nest on a burning roof.
When asked why he did it, he who choked the cygnet and snared the cub,
he could not say: he was ashamed of his own tenderness.

He wanted no other life than this rude freedom, but one day, a month or
more after Paul Zabaroff had passed through the country, there came to
the door of Maritza's hut a stranger, who displayed to her eyes, which
could not read, a letter with the Prince's seal and signature. He said:
'I am sent to take away the boy who is called Vassia.'

The Persian woman bowed her head as before a headsman's glaive