The Doll - Bolesaw Prus [287]
After breakfast next morning, he ordered a horse and rode out on the pretext of surveying the district. Without thinking, he turned along the road by which Izabela’s carriage had driven away the day before, and where he believed traces of wheels were still visible. Then, almost mechanically, he rode towards the wood where they had so recently gone for mushrooms. At this spot she had laughed, here she had talked to him, here she surveyed the view …
Suspicion, anger, everything, died away within him. In their place, an unhappiness as fine as tears, yet burning like everlasting fire, began flowing into his heart. Entering the wood, he dismounted and led the horse. This was the path along which they had both walked, but it seemed somehow different. This part of the wood was supposed to resemble a church — today there was no trace of a likeness. All around was grey and quiet. Only the croaking of crows which were at this moment flying over the wood, and the bark of a squirrel as it climbed a tree could be heard.
Wokulski reached the clearing where he and Izabela had talked: he even found the tree-stump she had sat on. Everything was as it had been: only she was absent … Already the undergrowth was turning yellow, and sorrow drooped from the pine trees like spider-webs. So impalpable, yet it entangled him!
‘It’s madness,’ he thought, ‘to make oneself too dependent on another human being. I worked for her alone, I think of her, I live for her. The worst is that I rejected Geist for her sake … Well, but what more would I have got from Geist? I’d be as dependent as I am today, except that my master would be an old German instead of a beautiful woman. And I’d work the same, even harder, except that today I’m working for my own happiness, and there it would be for the happiness of others, who in any case would have a good time, and fall in love at my expense.
‘Besides, what right have I to complain? A year ago I hardly dared dream about Izabela, and today I know her, I’m even trying to win her affection … But do I know her? She’s a conventional aristocrat, yes … but she still hasn’t looked around the world. She has a poetic spirit, or perhaps merely presents one. She’s a flirt, but that will change if she falls in love with me … In a word, it isn’t bad, and within a year …’
At this moment his horse raised its head and neighed: neighing and the sound of hoofs echoed in the depths of the wood. Soon a woman on horseback appeared at the end of the drive, and Wokulski recognised Mrs Wąsowska. ‘Hop, hop!’ she cried, laughing. She jumped off her horse, and gave the reins to Wokulski. ‘Tie him up, sir,’ she said, ‘ah, how well I know you! An hour ago I asked the Duchess where you were. “He’s gone out looking for a site for the sugar-factory.” “Just so,” thought I, “he’s gone into the woods to dream.” I ordered a horse and here I find you, sitting on a tree-stump in a state of exaltation. Ha ha ha!’
‘Do I look so comical?’
‘No! You do not look at all comical to me, but — how shall I word it? — unexpected. I imagined you very differently. When they told me you were a tradesman who had also made a fortune, I thought: “A tradesman? So he’s come into the country either to woo a rich young woman, or to obtain money from the Duchess for some business.” In any case, I thought you a cold man, calculating, a man who estimates the values of the trees as he walks in a wood, and who doesn’t look at the sky because it doesn’t pay interest. But what do I find? A dreamer, a medieval troubadour who disappears into the wood to sigh and gaze