Netty tried to stop him. She was very much distressed. She almost had tears in her eyes, but not quite. She put her gloved hands over her ears to stop them, but did not quite succeed in shutting out his voice. The gloves were backed with a dark, fine fur, which made her cheeks look delicate and soft as a peach.
“I will not hear you,” she said. “I will not. I will not.”
Then he seemed to recollect something, and he stopped short.
“No,” he said; “you are quite right. I have no business to ask you to hear me. I have nothing to offer you. I am poor. At any moment I may be an outlaw. But at any moment I may have more to offer you. Things may go well, and then I should be in a very different position.”
Netty looked away from him, and seemed to be trying to think. Or, perhaps, she was only putting together recollections which had all been thought out before. She could be a princess. She remembered that. She had only been in Europe six months, and here was a prince at her feet. But there were terrible drawbacks. Warsaw was one of them, and poverty, that greatest of all drawbacks, was the other.
“I can tell you nothing now,” he said. “But soon, before the summer, there may be great changes in Poland.”
Then his own natural instinct told him that position, or poverty, wealth or success, had nothing to do with the cause he was pleading. He did not even know whether Netty was rich or poor, and he certainly did not care.
“What did you mean,” he asked, “when you said ‘Be careful’? What did you mean—tell me?”
His gay, blue eyes were serious enough now. They were alight with an honest and good love. Never of a cold and calculating habit, he was reckless of observation. He did not care who saw. He would have taken her hands and forced her to face him had she not held them behind her back. She was singularly calm and self-possessed. People who appear nervous often rise to the occasion.
“I do not know what I meant,” she said; “I do not know. You must not ask me. It slipped out when I was not thinking. Oh! please be generous, and do not ask me.”
By some instinct she had leaped to the right mark. She had asked a Bukaty to be generous.
“Someday,” he said, “I will ask you.”
And he walked with her to the gate of the gardens in silence.
XXVII
A Sacrifice
Though the fine weather did not last, it was a promise of better things, like the letter that precedes a welcome friend. After it the air seemed warmer, though snow fell again, and the thermometer went below zero.
Wanda and her father did not return to Warsaw as they had intended.
So long as the frost holds, the country is endurable; nay, it is better than the towns on those great plains of eastern Europe; but when the thaw comes, and each small depression is a puddle, every low-lying field a pond, and whole plains become lakes, few remain in the villages who can set their feet upon the pavement. The early spring, so closely associated in most minds with the song of birds and the budding of green things, is in Poland and Russia a period of waiting for the water to drain off the flat land; a time to look to one’s thickest top-boots in these countries, where men and women are booted to the knee, and every third house displays the shoemaker’s sign upon its doorpost.
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 masterminds. 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 farmhouse 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 sundial 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 sundial 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
