Prince Zilah Part 24

"When he left yesterday, the Count expressly ordered me to take the package to Monseigneur that very evening. I beg Monseigneur's pardon; but I had an invitation to a wedding, and I did not carry out the Count's instructions until this morning. But, as Monseigneur was not at home, I took the train to Maisons-Lafitte. I hope that I did not arrive too late. The Count was very particular about it, and I should be very sorry if my negligence has done any harm."

Andras listened, gazing intently upon the face of the servant, who was a little discountenanced by this silent inquisition.

"So Count Menko wished the package to be delivered to me yesterday?"

"I beg Monseigneur not to tell the Count that he was not obeyed."

"Yesterday?" repeated Andras.

"Yes, yesterday, Monseigneur. The Count departed, thinking it would be done; and, indeed, he had a right to think so. I am very careful, Monseigneur, very careful; and if Monseigneur should some day have need of a--"

The Prince stopped the valet with a gesture. It was repugnant to Andras to have this man mixed up in a secret of his life; and such a secret!

But the domestic was evidently ignorant what a commission Menko had confided to him: in his eyes, the package, containing such letters, was like any other package. Andras was persuaded of this by the att.i.tude of the man, humiliated at having failed in his duty.

A word more exchanged with the valet, and Andras would have felt humiliated himself. But he had gained from the conversation the idea that Menko had not wished to insult him in his happiness, but to reveal all to him before the ceremony had yet been celebrated. It was as atrocious, but not so cowardly. Menko had wished to attack Marsa, rather than Andras; this was visible in the express commands given to his valet. And upon what a trifle had it depended, whether the name of Zilah should be borne by this woman! Upon what? Upon a servant's feast! Life is full of strange chances. The hands of that low-born valet had held for hours his happiness and his honor--his honor, Andras Zilah's--the honor of all his race!

The Prince returned to his hotel, which he had left that morning thinking that he would soon bring there the woman he then adored, but whom he now despised and hated. Oh! he would know where Menko had gone; him he could punish; as for Marsa, she was now dead to him.

But where, in the whirlpool of the New World, would this Michel Menko disappear? and how could he find him?

The days pa.s.sed; and Zilah had acquired almost the certainty that Menko had not embarked at Havre. Perhaps he had not quitted Europe. He might, some day or another, in spite of what the valet had said, reappear in Paris; and then--

Meanwhile, the Prince led the life of a man wounded to the heart; seeking solitude, and shutting himself in his hotel, in the Rue Balzac, like a wolf in his den; receiving no one but Varhely, and sometimes treating even old Yanski coldly; then, suddenly emerging from his retirement, and trying to take up his life again; appearing at the meetings of the Hungarian aid society, of which he was president; showing himself at the races, at the theatre, or even at Baroness Dinati's; longing to break the dull monotony of his now ruined life; and, with a sort of bravado, looking society and opinion full in the face, as if to surprise a smile or a sneer at his expense, and punish it.

He had, however, no right to complain of the sentiment which was felt for him, for every one respected and admired him. At first, it is true, society, and in particular that society of Parisian foreigners in which Prince Andras mingled, had tried to find out why he had broken so suddenly with the woman he had certainly married for love. Public curiosity, aroused and excited, had sought to divine the secret of the romance. "If it does not get into the newspapers," they said, "it will be fortunate." And society was even astonished that the journals had not already discovered the key to this Parisian mystery.

But society, after all as fickle as it is curious (one of its little vices chasing away the other), turned suddenly to another subject; forgot the rupture of Marsa and Andras, and saw in Zilah only a superior being, whose lofty soul forced respect from the frivolous set accustomed to laugh at everything.

A lofty soul, yes, but a soul in torment. Varhely alone, among them all, knew anything of the suffering which Andras endured. He was no longer the same man. His handsome face, with its kindly eyes and grave smile, was now constantly overshadowed. He spoke less, and thought more. On the subject of his sadness and his grief, Andras never uttered a word to any one, not even to his old friend; and Yanski, silent from the day when he had been an unconscious messenger of ill, had not once made any allusion to the past.

Although he knew nothing, Varhely had, nevertheless, guessed everything, and at once. The blow was too direct and too cruelly simple for the old Hungarian not to have immediately exclaimed, with rage:

"Those were love-letters, and I gave them to him! Idiot that I was! I held those letters in my hand; I might have destroyed them, or crammed them one by one down Menko's throat! But who could have suspected such an infamy? Menko! A man of honor! Ah, yes; what does honor amount to when there is a woman in question? Imbecile! And it is irreparable now, irreparable!"

Varhely also was anxious to know where Menko had gone. They did not know at the Austro-Hungarian emba.s.sy. It was a complete disappearance, perhaps a suicide. If the old Hungarian had met the young man, he would at least have gotten rid of part of his bile. But the angry thought that he, Varhely, had been a.s.sociated in a vile revenge which had touched Andras, was, for the old soldier, a constant cause for ill-humor with himself, and a thing which, in a measure, poisoned his life.

Varhely had long been a misanthrope himself; but he tried to struggle against his own temperament when he saw Andras wrapping himself up in bitterness and gloomy thoughts.

Little by little, Zilah allowed himself to sink into that state where not only everything becomes indifferent to us, but where we long for another suffering, further pain, that we may utter more bitter cries, more irritated complaints against fate. It seems then that everything is dark about us, and our endless night is traversed by morbid visions, and peopled with phantoms. The sick man--for the one who suffers such torture is sick--would willingly seek a new sorrow, like those wounded men who, seized with frenzy, open their wounds themselves, and irritate them with the point of a knife. Then, misanthropy and disgust of life a.s.sume a phase in which pain is not without a certain charm. There is a species of voluptuousness in this appet.i.te for suffering, and the sufferer becomes, as it were, enamored of his own agony.

With Zilah, this sad state was due to a sort of insurrection of his loyalty against the many infamies to be met with in this world, which he had believed to be only too full of virtues.

He now considered himself an idiot, a fool, for having all his life adored chimeras, and followed, as children do pa.s.sing music, the fanfares of poetic chivalry. Yes, faith, enthusiasm, love, were so many cheats, so many lies. All beings who, like himself, were wors.h.i.+ppers of the ideal, all dreamers of better things, all lovers of love, were inevitably doomed to deception, treason, and the stupid ironies of fate.

And, full of anger against himself, his pessimism of to-day sneering at his confidence of yesterday, he abandoned himself with delight to his bitterness, and he took keen joy in repeating to himself that the secret of happiness in this life was to believe in nothing except treachery, and to defend oneself against men as against wolves.

Very rarely, his real frank, true nature would come to the fore, and he would say:

"After all, are the cowardice of one man, and the lie of one woman, to be considered the crime of entire humanity?"

Why should he curse, he would think, other beings than Marsa and Menko?

He had no right to hate any one else; he had no enemy that he knew of, and he was honored in Paris, his new country.

No enemy? No, not one. And yet, one morning, with his letters, his valet brought him a journal addressed to "Prince Zilah," and, on unfolding it, Andras's attention was attracted to two paragraphs in the column headed "Echoes of Paris," which were marked with a red-lead pencil.

It was a number of 'L'Actualite', sent through the post by an unknown hand, and the red marks were evidently intended to point out to the Prince something of interest to himself.

Andras received few journals. A sudden desire seized him, as if he had a presentiment of what it contained, to cast this one into the fire without reading it. For a moment he held it in his fingers ready to throw it into the grate. Then a few words read by accident invincibly prevented him.

He read, at first with poignant sorrow, and then with a dull rage, the two paragraphs, one of which followed the other in the paper.

"A sad piece of news has come to our ears," ran the first paragraph, "a piece of news which has afflicted all the foreign colony of Paris, and especially the Hungarians. The lovely and charming Princess Z., whose beauty was recently crowned with a glorious coronet, has been taken, after a consultation of the princes of science (there are princes in all grades), to the establishment of Dr. Sims, at Vaugirard, the rival of the celebrated asylum of Dr. Luys, at Ivry. Together with the numerous friends of Prince A. Z., we hope that the sudden malady of the Princess Z. will be of short duration."

So Marsa was now the patient, almost the prisoner, of Dr. Sims! The orders of Dr. Fargeas had been executed. She was in an insane asylum, and Andras, despite himself, felt filled with pity as he thought of it.

But the red mark surrounded both this first "Echo of Paris," and the one which followed it; and Zilah, impelled now by eager curiosity, proceeded with his reading.

But he uttered a cry of rage when he saw, printed at full length, given over to common curiosity, to the eagerness of the public for scandal, and to the malignity of blockheads, a direct allusion to his marriage--worse than that, the very history of his marriage placed in an outrageous manner next to the paragraph in which his name was almost openly written. The editor of the society journal pa.s.sed directly from the information in regard to the illness of Princess Z. to an allegorical tale in which Andras saw the secret of his life and the wounds of his heart laid bare.

A LITTLE PARISIAN ROMANCE

Like most of the Parisian romances of to-day, the little romance in question is an exotic one. Paris belongs to foreigners. When the Parisians, whose names appear in the chronicles of fas.h.i.+on, are not Americans, Russians, Roumanians, Portuguese, English, Chinese, or Hungarians, they do not count; they are no longer Parisians. The Parisians of the day are Parisians of the Prater, of the Newski Perspective or of Fifth Avenue; they are no longer pureblooded Parisians. Within ten years from now the boulevards will be situated in Chicago, and one will go to pa.s.s his evenings at the Eden Theatre of Pekin. So, this is the latest Parisian romance: Once upon a time there was in Paris a great lord, a Moldavian, or a Wallachian, or a Moldo-Wallachian (in a word, a Parisian--a Parisian of the Danube, if you like), who fell in love with a young Greek, or Turk, or Armenian (also of Paris), as dark-browed as the night, as beautiful as the day. The great lord was of a certain age, that is, an uncertain age. The beautiful Athenian or Georgian, or Circa.s.sian, was young. The great lord was generally considered to be imprudent. But what is to be done when one loves? Marry or don't marry, says Rabelais or Moliere. Perhaps they both said it.

Well, at all events, the great lord married. It appears, if well- informed people are to be believed, that the great Wallachian lord and the beautiful Georgian did not pa.s.s two hours after their marriage beneath the same roof. The very day of their wedding, quietly, and without scandal, they separated, and the reason of this rupture has for a long time puzzled Parisian high-life. It was remarked, however, that the separation of the newly-married pair was coincident with the disappearance of a very fas.h.i.+onable attache who, some years ago, was often seen riding in the Bois, and who was then considered to be the most graceful waltzer of the Viennese, or Muscovite, or Castilian colony of Paris. We might, if we were indiscreet, construct a whole drama with these three people for our dramatis personae; but we wish to prove that reporters (different in this from women) sometimes know how to keep a secret. For those ladies who are, perhaps, still interested in the silky moustaches of the fugitive ex-diplomat, we can add, however, that he was seen at Brussels a short time ago. He pa.s.sed through there like a shooting star. Some one who saw him noticed that he was rather pale, and that he seemed to be still suffering from the wounds received not long ago. As for the beautiful Georgian, they say she is in despair at the departure of her husband, the great Wallachian lord, who, in spite of his ill-luck, is really a Prince Charming.

Andras Zilah turned rapidly to the signature of this article. The "Echoes of Paris" were signed Puck. Puck? Who was this Puck? How could an unknown, an anonymous writer, a retailer of scandals, be possessed of his secret? For Andras believed that his suffering was a secret; he had never had an idea that any one could expose it to the curiosity of the crowd, as this editor of L'Actualite had done. He felt an increased rage against the invisible Michel Menko, who had disappeared after his infamy; and it seemed to him that this Puck, this unknown journalist, was an accomplice or a friend of Michel Menko, and that, behind the pseudonym of the writer, he perceived the handsome face, twisted moustache and haughty smile of the young Count.

"After all," he said to himself, "we shall soon find out. Monsieur Puck must be less difficult to unearth than Michel Menko."

He rang for his valet, and was about to go out, when Yanski Varhely was announced.

The old Hungarian looked troubled, and his brows were contracted in a frown. He could not repress a movement of anger when he perceived, upon the Prince's table, the marked number of L'Actualite.

Varhely, when he had an afternoon to get rid of, usually went to the Palais-Royal. He had lived for twenty years not far from there, in a little apartment near Saint-Roch. Drinking in the fresh air, under the striped awning of the Cafe de la Rotunde, he read the journals, one after the other, or watched the sparrows fly about and peck up the grains in the sand. Children ran here and there, playing at ball; and, above the noise of the promenaders, arose the music of the bra.s.s band.

It was chiefly the political news he sought for in the French or foreign journals. He ran through them all with his nose in the sheets, which he held straight out by the wooden file, like a flag. With a rapid glance, he fell straight upon the Hungarian names which interested him--Deak sometimes, sometimes Andra.s.sy; and from a German paper he pa.s.sed to an English, Spanish, or Italian one, making, as he said, a tour of Europe, acquainted as he was with almost all European languages.

An hour before he appeared at the Prince's house, he was seated in the shade of the trees, scanning 'L'Actualite', when he suddenly uttered an oath of anger (an Hungarian 'teremtete!') as he came across the two paragraphs alluding to Prince Andras.

Varhely read the lines over twice, to convince himself that he was not mistaken, and that it was Prince Zilah who was designated with the skilfully veiled innuendo of an expert journalist. There was no chance for doubt; the indistinct nationality of the great lord spoken of thinly veiled the Magyar characteristics of Andras, and the paragraph which preceded the "Little Parisian Romance" was very skilfully arranged to let the public guess the name of the hero of the adventure, while giving to the anecdote related the piquancy of the anonymous, that velvet mask of scandal-mongers.

Then Varhely had only one idea.

"Andras must not know of this article. He scarcely ever reads the journals; but some one may have sent this paper to him."

And the old misanthrope hurried to the Prince's hotel, thinking this: that there always exist people ready to forward paragraphs of this kind.

When he perceived 'L'Actualite' upon the Prince's table, he saw that his surmise was only too correct, and he was furious with himself for arriving too late.

"Where are you going?" he asked Andras, who was putting on his gloves.