Chapter 16

The Bukatys' country-house, like all else that the past had left them, was insignificant. In olden days it had been a farm, one of the smallest, used once or twice during the winter as a shooting-lodge; for it stood in the midst of vast forests. It was not really ancient, for it had been built in the days of Sobieski, when that rough warrior and parvenu king built himself the house in the valley of the Vistula, where he saw all his greatness vanish, and ended his days in that grim solitude which is the inheritance of master-minds. The hand of the French architect is to be detected even in this farm; for Poland, more frankly and consciously than the rest of the world, drew all her inspiration and her art from France. Did not France once send her a king? Was not Sobieski's wife a Frenchwoman, who, moreover, ruled that great fighter with her little finger, stronger than any rod of iron? If ever a Frenchman was artificially made from other racial materials, he was the last king of Poland, Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski.

Built on raised ground, the farm-house was of stone. It had been a plain, square building; but in the days of Poniatowski some attempt had been made at ornamentation in the French style. A pavilion had been built in the garden amid the pine-trees. A sun-dial had been placed on the lawn, which was now no longer a lawn, but had lapsed again into a meadow. The cows had polished the sun-dial with their rough sides, while the passage of cold winters and wet springs had left the plaster ornamentation mossy and broken.

Here, amid a simple people, the Bukatys spent a portion of the year. They usually came in the winter, because it was in the winter they were needed. The feudal spirit, which was strong in the old prince and weaker in his children, has two sides to it; but its enemies have only remembered one. The prince took it as a matter of course that it was his duty to care for his peasants, and relieve as far as lay in his power the distress which came upon them annually with the regularity of the recurring seasons. With a long winter and a wet spring, with a heavy taxation, and a standing bill at the village shop kept by a Jew, and the village inn kept by another, these peasants never had any money. And so far as human foresight can perceive, there seems to be no reason why they ever should.

By some chain of reasoning, which assuredly had a flaw in it, the prince seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that he was put into the world to help his peasants, and those who were now no longer his serfs. And, though he spoke to them as if they were of a different creation and not his equals--as the French Revolution set about to prove, but only succeeded in proving the contrary--he cared for their bodies as he would have cared for a troop of sheep. He only saw that they were hungry, and he fed them. Wanda only saw that there were among them sick who could not pay for a doctor, and could not have gone to the expense of obeying his orders had they called one in. She only saw that there were mothers who had to work in the fields, while their children died of infantine and comparatively simple complaints at home, because their rightful nurse could not spare the time to nurse them. It was no wonder that the roof of the farm-house leaked, and that the cows were invited to feed upon the front lawn.

Clad in a sheepskin coat, with great jack-boots flapping above his knees, the prince spent all his days on horseback, riding from house to house, giving a little money and a good deal of sound and practical advice, listening to the old, old stories of undrained land and poor crops, of bad seed and broken tools; and cheering the tellers with his great laugh and some small witticism. For they are a gay people, these Poles, through it all. “Ils sont legers, actifs, insouciants,” said Napoleon, that keenest searcher of the human heart, who knew them a hundred years ago when their troubles were comparatively fresh. And it is an odd thing that adversity rarely breaks a man's spirit, but often strengthens it.

Wanda sometimes rode, but usually went on foot, and had more than enough work to fill the days now growing longer and lighter. She, like her father, was brisk and cheerful in her well-being--like him, she was intolerant of anything that savored of laziness or lack of spirit. They liked the simple life and the freedom from the restraint that hung round their daily existence in Warsaw. But the old man watched the weather, and longed to be about larger business, which alone could satisfy the restless spirit of activity handed down to him by the forefathers who had stirred all Europe, and spoken fearlessly to kings.

Wanda was not sorry when the thaw gave way to renewed frost. The snow lay thickly on the ground, and weighed down the branches of the pines. In the stillness which brooded over the land during day and night alike the only sound they ever heard was the sharp crack of a branch breaking beneath its burden. They had lived in this still world of snow and forest for some weeks, and had seen and heard nothing of men.

“This frost cannot last,” said the prince. “The spring must come soon, and then we shall have to go back to the world and its business.”

But the world and its business thereof did not wait until the brief frost was over. It came to them that same night. For Kosmaroff was essentially of the active world, and carried with him wherever he went the spirit of unrest.

He arrived on foot soon after nine o'clock. He was going on to Warsaw on foot the same night, he announced, before the greetings were over.

“And you have had nothing to eat,” said Wanda, glancing at his spare, weather-beaten face. He was the impersonation of hardness and activity; a man in excellent physical training, inured to cold and every hardship. He had simply opened the front door and walked in, throwing his rough sheepskin coat aside in the outer hall. The snow was on his boots nearly to the knee. The ice hung from his mustache and glistened on his eyebrows. He held his coarse blue handkerchief in his hand, and wiped his face from time to time as the ice melted.

“No,” he answered, “I have had nothing to eat. But the servants do not know I am here. I saw the lights in their windows at the other end of the house. I would rather go hungry than let them know that I am here.”

“You will not go hungry from this house,” said the prince, with his rather fierce laugh.

“I will get you what you want,” said Wanda, lighting a candle. “There are no servants, however, so you need not think of that. There are only the farmer and his wife--and my maid, who is English, and silent.”

So, before telling his news, Kosmaroff sat down and ate, while Wanda waited on him, and Prince Bukaty poured out wine for this rough man in the homespun clothing and heavy boots of the Vistula raftsman, who yet had the manner of a gentleman and that quiet air of self-possession in all societies which is not to be learned in schools nor yet acquired at any academy.

“When you have finished,” said Wanda, “you can talk of your affairs. I shall leave you to yourselves.”

“Oh, there is not much to say,” answered Kosmaroff. “I have done no good on my journey. Things make no progress.”

“You expect too much,” said the prince. He had helped himself to a glass of wine, and fingered the glass reflectively as he spoke. “You expect the world to move more quickly than it can. It is old and heavy, remember that. I have a fellow-feeling for it, with my two sticks. You would never make a diplomatist. I have heard of negotiations going forward for five years, and then falling through, after all.”

Kosmaroff smiled, his odd, one-sided smile, and cut himself a piece of bread. There was a faint suggestion of the river-side in his manner at table. This was a man into whose life the ceremony of sit-down meals had never entered largely. He ate because he was hungry--not, as many do, to pass the time.

“One thing I came to tell you I can tell you now,” he said. “In fact, it is better that the princess should hear it; for in a way it concerns her also. But, please, do not stand,” he added, turning to her. “I have all I want. It is kind of you to wait on me as if I were a king--or a beggar.”

His laugh had rather a cruel ring in it as he continued his meal.

“It is,” he said, after a pause, “about that Englishman, Cartoner.”

Wanda turned slowly, and resumed the chair she had quitted on Kosmaroff's sudden appearance at the door.

“Yes,” she said, in a steady voice.

“He knows more than it is safe to know--safe for us--or for himself. One evening I could have put him out of the way, and it is a pity, perhaps, that it was not done. In a cause like ours, which affects the lives and happiness of millions, we should not pause to think of the life of one. This does not come into my sphere, and I have no immediate concern in it----” He stopped, and looked at the prince.

“But I have also no power,” he added, “over those whose affair it is--you understand that. This comes under the hand of those who study the attitude of the European powers, our--well, I suppose I may say--our foreign office. It is their affair to know what powers are friendly to us--they were all friendly to us thirty years ago, in words--and who are our enemies. It is also their affair to find out how much the foreign powers know. It seems they must know something. It seems that Cartoner--knows everything. So it is reported in Cracow.”

The prince shrugged his shoulders, and gave a short laugh.

“In Cracow,” he said, “they are all words.”

“There are certain men, it appears,” continued Kosmaroff, “in the service of the governments--in one service it is called 'foreign affairs,' in another the 'secret service'--whose mission it is to find themselves where things are stirring, to be at the seat of war. They are, in jest, called the Vultures. It is a French jest, as you would conclude. And the Vultures have been congregating at Warsaw. Therefore, the powers know something. At Cracow, it is said--I ask your pardon for repeating it--that they know, and that Cartoner knows what he knows--through the Bukatys.”

The prince's lips moved beneath his mustache, but he did not speak. Wanda, who was seated near the fire, had turned in her chair, and was looking at Kosmaroff over her shoulder with steady eyes. She was not taken by surprise. It was Cartoner himself who had foreseen this, and had warned her. There was deep down in her heart, even at this moment, a thrill of pride in the thought that her lover was a cleverer man than any she had had to do with. And, oddly enough, the next words Kosmaroff spoke made her his friend for the rest of her life.

“I have nothing against him. I know nothing of him, except that he is a brave man. It happens that I know that,” he said. “He knows as well as I do that his life is unsafe in this country, and yet, before I left London I heard--for we have friends everywhere--that he had got his passport for Russia again. It is to be presumed that he is coming back, so you must be prepared. In case anything should happen to confirm these suspicions that come to us from Cracow, you know that I have no control over certain members of the party. If it was thought that you or Martin had betrayed anything--”

“I or Martin would be assassinated,” said the prince with his loud laugh. “I know that. I have long known that we are going back to the methods of the sixties--suspicion and assassination. It has always been the ruin of Poland--that method.”

“But you have no feelings with regard to this man?” asked Kosmaroff, sharply, looking from father to daughter, with a keen sidelong glance, as if the suspicion that had come from Cracow had not left him untouched.

“None whatever,” answered the prince. “He is a mere passing acquaintance. He must be allowed to pass. We will drop him--you can tell your friends--it will not be much of a sacrifice compared to some that have been made for Poland.”

Wanda glanced at her father. Did he mean anything?

“You know what they are,” broke in Kosmaroff's eager voice. “They see a mountain in every molehill. Martin was seen at Alexandrowo with Cartoner. Wanda was seen speaking to him at the Mokotow. He is known to have called on you at your hotel in London.”

“It is a question of dropping his acquaintance, my friend,” said the prince, “and I tell you, he shall be dropped.”

“It is more than that,” answered Kosmaroff, half sullenly.

“You mean,” said the prince, suddenly roused to anger, “that Martin and I are put upon our good behavior--that our lives are safe only so long as we are not seen speaking to Cartoner, or are not suspected of having any communication with him.”

And Kosmaroff was silent.

He had ceased eating, and had laid aside his knife and fork. It was clear that his whole mind and body were given to one thought and one hope. He looked indifferently at the simple dishes set before him, and had satisfied his hunger on that nearest to him, because it came first.

“I tell you this,” he said, after a silence, “because no one else dared to tell you. Because I know, perhaps better than any other, all that you have done--all that you are ready to do.”

“Yes--yes. Everything must be done for Poland,” said the prince, suddenly pacified by the recollection, perhaps, of what the speaker's life had been. Wanda had risen as if to go. The clock had just struck ten.

“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 fashion.

“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 noble 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 noble, 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 hardship, 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-fashioned 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 God 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 passage 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 ships 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 passers-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 space.

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 assuredly 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 multitude. 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 gods 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.