Wanda, Vol. 1 (of 3)

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-coloured 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.