THE PLAYGROUND OF SATAN.

by Beatrice Baskerville.

I

Ian went into his mother's sitting-room, carrying an open telegram.

"Roman Skarbek has wired for horses to meet the express from Posen," he remarked. "He says it's important business."

As Countess Natalie looked up from her letter--she wrote hundreds a year--her hazel eyes twinkled with a mischievous thought.

"Roman and business, indeed! He's after Vanda."

Ian's brows contracted over his clear gray eyes; they were of the kind you find in outdoor men, used to gazing over long distances and watching for wild fowl to come out of the rushes at the dawn of day. Vanda was his cousin, and an orphan; she had lived at Ruvno since her babyhood.

"Give me a cigarette," said his mother, leaving her letter.

He obeyed, offered one to Minnie, who refused, and lit another for himself. The two smoked on in silence for awhile. Roman Skarbek was his cousin, too, though not Vanda's.

"I don't think so," he said.

"Why?" asked his mother.

"He's been to Monte Carlo. If he's had any luck he'll want some horses."

"He never had any luck. No. It's Vanda. _She's_ in love."

"Vanda in love?" He laughed. "Nonsense!"

"Why not?" put in Minnie, the English girl, from her seat in the window.

He did not answer. His mother went on:

"Something has happened to Vanda lately. I don't know what, yet. When she was stopping with Aunt Eugenie she must have seen Roman every day.

They rode together, too."

He walked over to the long window which opened into the rose garden. On the sward beneath it, thirty years ago, his father was shot in a famous duel with the rakish Prince Mniszek, neighbor and quondam friend.

"What will you say to him, if it is?" he asked.

The Countess considered. In her little world marriages were "arranged,"

thought out with the help of the Almanach de Gotha and a profound knowledge of the young couple's incomes, debts, acres and ancestors.

"Roman," she said, "is generous and chivalrous. I shouldn't mind helping him with his debts, if he'd only stop gambling."

"Does a man ever stop?"

"Not when it's got into his blood," said Minnie.

"It's in his right enough," rejoined Ian. He gambled, too, but with circ.u.mspection, unhampered by pa.s.sion.

"I wonder what he sees in Vanda," the Countess mused.

"She's a charming girl," remarked Minnie.

Ian went out, his setters following him. An hour later he sought the two women with another telegram, finding them in the rose garden. The Countess walked with a stick, though she was only sixty. Her hair was perfectly white and her face much lined. Perhaps her youth, so full of interests and emotions, had faded too soon. But she looked the great lady she was, queen of herself and fit to rule Ruvno, with its traditions, its wealth and dignity.

"Here's Joseph now," he announced. "Wants to be met at the afternoon train from Warsaw."

"Which Joseph?" asked Minnie. "You know a dozen."

"Roman's brother."

"What does he want?" asked the Countess.

"Vanda," he returned, a twinkle in his eye.

They walked down the garden together, Ian and Minnie sparring gently, as often happened. But his mother was thinking of Vanda again, for she said at last:

"If I were her, I'd choose Roman. Joe is cold."

"I'm sure they're coming to see us, that's all," said Ian. "They're coming from opposite directions. I'll send a motor for Roman. He's always in such a hurry. Joe can have horses."

And again he left them.

Until August, in the year of strife nineteen hundred and fourteen, you could find no pleasanter country house than Ruvno, Poland. It stood a little way back from the high road between Warsaw and Kutno, slightly on a hill, surrounded by pines and hardy hornbeams which guarded it, like sentinels, from the gaze of pa.s.sers by. It had stood thus for centuries, ever since another Ian, Lord of Ruvno, built him a great house with the spoils of war against the Turk, laying the foundation of a hard-fighting, hard-living race, good for anything on earth but trade, always ready for a row, out of sheer love for adventure and broken heads. And of adventures they had full share, both in love and war.

All the hordes of Europe pa.s.sed over their land during the centuries; for Poland is Europe's eastern battlefield, as Belgium is her western.

And the plows were forever turning up human bones, which lay where they fell; and human treasure, which lay where it was buried, either because the owners failed to find it when peace came again or because they happened to go where neither Turk nor Swede, Russian nor Prussian, could trouble them more.

And so the domestic history of Ruvno, half fortress, half palace, filled many parchment volumes. I am not going to bore you with it; but quite recently, as Ruvno counts time, Napoleon slept there when on his luckless march to Moscow. And he supped at the large oaken table which was carved out of Ruvno oak long before the discovery of America brought mahogany to Poland. And in his clumsy, violent way, he made love to the reigning Countess of Ruvno, toasting her in that Hungarian wine which looks like liquid sunshine and makes your feet like lead. Some of the same vintage still lingered in the cellars when one smaller than Napoleon crossed the Polish borders a hundred years later.

Napoleon, remembering the good cheer, paused here again to take breath on his homeward flight. But this time there was neither toasting nor courting. The Countess, in solitude, wept for her gallant husband, whose body lay at Beresina, his gay tongue frozen forever, his blue eyes staring up at the stars in the fixed gaze of death. So the great man sat at the dead one's board, silent and sullen, surrounded by the weary, ragged remnants of his staff. Those who were in Ruvno that night said that he paced his room, restless and sleepless, till daybreak. Then he went his way, no longer a conquerer, but a fugitive.

A century later, Ruvno belonged to another widow and her son Ian, ruddy of face and broad in the shoulder. They were both up to date. They spoke English and French, and followed the fashions of western Europe.

But their hearts and souls were with Poland, not only because they loved her, but because, too, race is stronger than love and hatred and death itself.

Ian spent most of his time on the Ruvno estate, and his mother's patrimony in Lithuania; but Ruvno was his heart's beloved. The Lithuanian estate was let on a long lease. He had a lively sense of his responsibilities, knowing that two watchful neighbors, Russia and Prussia, were ever working to denationalize the country and stamp out his race. His many acres were well cultivated, the peasants who worked on them well cared for. Though the Russian government forbade Polish schools, he and his mother saw to it that the children on their land learned to read and write their mother tongue. The Agricultural Society that had spread its branches all over Poland, despite opposition from Russian bureaucracy, had no more energetic member than he. Modern machinery and methods were rapidly replacing the old throughout the country, which was prosperous and enterprising. Ian did his share of this good work with intelligence and cheerfulness.

He thoroughly enjoyed his life; was a keen hunter; had no hankering after urban pleasures; knew no debt, confined his distractions to racing, in which he was moderate, and to a very occasional supper party after the opera, in Warsaw, Paris or Vienna.

To his mother he felt bound by a degree of affection and sympathy which rarely survive a son's early childhood. Other women bored him. His name had not been linked with one, of good repute or bad. Indeed, his circ.u.mspection with the opposite s.e.x had become a joke among his friends, who teased him about it and searched for some well-hidden pa.s.sion. But they did not find one, and contented themselves with dubbing him a woman-hater; which he was not. He knew he must marry some day; for what would become of Ruvno without an heir? But as the pleasant years slipped by, he told himself there was still time. And far down in his heart he had always relied upon Vanda.

Did he love her? The question rapped him as he left the rose garden for the paddock. He thought not. He liked to have her in the house, driving with his mother, keeping her company, helping her to entertain visitors during the shooting season, or going with her to Warsaw for shopping and the play. He knew she was fond of him; accepted her affection as he accepted so many other things which were daily facts in his existence.

In the rare moments when he thought about marriage at all he comforted himself with the reflection that she was there, ready for the asking when the inevitable day came. It never crossed his mind that she might refuse. It would be so comfortable, one day, to wed her. Life would be the same as before. His mother would go on living with them; Vanda would wear the family jewels; the rooms that had been his own nurseries would be reopened and refurnished. And in due time little people would play and sleep in them as he and Vanda had done.

He was shy of other girls; they bored him; he never knew what to talk about. And he would have had to woo anybody but Vanda; no girl with any self-respect would marry him without preliminaries in which compliments and attention played a large part. Vanda did not ask to be wooed. They had met daily for years. And she was so suitable; so comely and well-bred, so thoroughly sound in her ideas of life, marriage and society. She would not want to drag him off to Monte Carlo and Paris every year. She loved the country, and Ruvno; knew his life and would not expect him to change it. Another bride might have all kinds of ideas in her head, might not like the place, or his mother, from whom he refused to be parted, whatever happened. Therefore her remarks about the Skarbeks worried him; if she noticed a difference in Vanda, then a difference there must be. He had not noticed it; but then he was particularly interested in some alterations that he was making in the Home Farm and had not paid much attention to her and to Minnie Burton, the English girl who was staying with them. He and Minnie "got on" very well; she was a good horsewoman and a good comrade; rode about with him and Vanda, quite content to talk of whatever work happened to be going on at Ruvno, or not to talk at all. He had been to England a good deal, spent a couple of years at Oxford after leaving Theresarium and made friends with Minnie's two brothers, who were coming to Ruvno for shooting in a month's time. She was to return home with them.