The Bukatys had lost all in Poland except a house or two in Warsaw, but a few square miles of fertile land in Galicia brought in a sufficiency, while Wanda had some property in the neighborhood of Breslau bequeathed to her by her mother. The grim years of and had worn out this lady, who found the peace that passeth man’s understanding while Poland was yet in the horrors of a hopeless guerilla warfare.
“Russia owes me twenty years of happiness and twenty million rubles,” the old prince was in the habit of saying, and each year on the anniversary of his wife’s death he reckoned up afresh this debt. He mentioned it, moreover, to Russian and Pole alike, with that calm frankness which was somehow misunderstood, for the administration never placed him among the suspects. Poland has always been a plain-speaking country, and the Poles, expressing themselves in the roughest of European tongues, a plainspoken people. They spoke so plainly to Henry of Valois when he was their king that one fine night he ran away to mincing France and gentler men. When, under rough John Sobieski, they spoke with their enemy in the gate of Vienna, their meaning was quite clear to the Muslim understanding.
The Prince Bukaty had a touch of that rough manner which commands respect in this smooth age, and even Russian officials adopted a conciliatory attitude towards this man, who had known Poland without one of their kind within her boundaries.
“You cannot expect an old man such as I to follow all the changes of your petty laws, and to remember under which form of government he happens to be living at the moment!” he had boldly said to a great personage from St. Petersburg, and the observation was duly reported in the capital. It was, moreover, said in Warsaw that the law had actually stretched a point or two for the Prince Bukaty on more than one occasion. Like many outspoken people, he passed for a barker and not a biter.
It does not fall to the lot of many to live in a highly civilized town and submit to open robbery. Prince Bukaty lived in a small palace in the Kotzebue street, and when he took his morning stroll in the Krakow Faubourg he passed under the shadow of a palace flying the Russian flag, which palace was his, and had belonged to his ancestors from time immemorial. He had once made the journey to St. Petersburg to see in the great museum there the portraits of his fathers, the books that his predecessors had collected, the relics of Poland’s greatness, which were his, and the greatness thereof was his.
“Yes,” he answered to the loquacious curator, “I know. You tell me nothing that I do not know. These things are mine. I am the Prince Bukaty!”
And the curator of St. Petersburg went away, sorrowful, like the young man who had great possessions.
For Russia had taken these things from the Bukatys, not in punishment, but because she wanted them. She wanted offices for her bureaucrats on the Krakowski Przedmiéscie, in Warsaw, so she took Bukaty Palace. And to whom can one appeal when Caesar steals?
Poland had appealed to Europe, and Europe had expressed the deepest sympathy. And that was all!
The house in the Kotzebue had the air of an old French town-house, and was, in fact, built by a French architect in the days of Stanislaus Augustus, when Warsaw aped Paris. It stands back from the road behind high railings, and, at the farther end of a paved courtyard, to which entrance is gained by two high gates, now never opened in hospitality, and only unlocked at rare intervals for the passage of the quiet brougham in which the prince or Wanda went and came. The house is just round the corner of the Kotzebue, and therefore faces the Saski Gardens—a quiet spot in this most noisy town. The building is a low one, with a tiled roof and long windows, heavily framed, of which the smaller panes and thick woodwork suggest the early days of window-glass. Inside, the house is the house of a poor man. The carpets are worn thin; the furniture, of a sumptuous design, is carefully patched and mended. The atmosphere has that mournful scent of better days—now dead and past. It is the odor of monarchy, slowly fading from the face of a world that reeks of cheap democracy.
The air of the rooms—the subtle individuality which is impressed by humanity on wood and texture—suggested that older comfort which has been succeeded by the restless luxury of these times.
The prince was, it appeared, one of those men who diffuse tranquillity wherever they are. He had moved quietly through stirring events; had acted without haste in hurried moments. For the individuality of the house must have been his. Wanda had found it there when she came back from the school in Dresden, too young to have a marked individuality of her own. The difference she brought to the house was a certain brightness and a sort of experimental femininity, which reigned supreme until her English governess came back again to live as a companion with her pupil. Wanda moved the furniture, turned the house round on its staid basis, and made a hundred experiments in domestic economy before she gave way to her father’s habits of life. Then she made that happiest of human discoveries, which has the magic power of allaying at one stroke the eternal feminine discontent which has made the world uneasy since the day that Eve idled in that perfect garden—she found that she was wanted in the world!
The prince did not tell her so. Perhaps his need of her was too obvious to require words. He had
