He drew a quick deep breath as if he had been struck a blow, and stood gazing at her. He did not speak, his eyes darkened as with pain. For the moment she was afraid that she had wounded him. With exquisite softness of tone and touch she took his hand and said to him tenderly:
'Why will you be so proud? After all, what are these things? Since we love one another, what is mine is yours; a formula more or less is no offence. It is my fancy that you should have the title and the fief. The people know you there, and your heroic courage will be for ever amongst their best traditions. Dear! once I read that it needs a greater soul to take generously than to give. Be great so, now, for my sake!'
'Great!' he echoed the word hoarsely, and a smile of bitter irony passed for a moment over his features. But he controlled the passionate self-contempt that rose in him. He knew that whatever else he was, he was her lover, and her hero in her sight. If the magnitude and magnanimity of her gifts overwhelmed and oppressed him, he was recalled to self-control by the sense of her absolute faith in him. He pressed her hands against his heavily-beating heart.
'All the greatness is with you, my beloved,' he said with effort. 'Since you delight to honour me, I can but strive my utmost to deserve your honour. It is like your beautiful and lavish nature to be prodigal of gifts. But when you give yourself, what need is there for aught else?'
'But Idrac is my caprice. You must gratify it.'
'I will take the title gladly at your hands then. The revenues—No.'
'You must take it all, the town and the title, and all they bring,' she insisted. 'In truth, but for you there would possibly be no town at all. Nay, my dear, you must do me this little pleasure; it will become you so well that Countship of Idrac: it is as old a place as Vindobona itself.'
'Do you not understand?' she added, with a flush on her face. 'I want you to feel that it is wholly yours; that if I die, or if you leave me, it remains yours still. Oh, I do not doubt you; not for one moment. But liberty is always good. And Idrac will make you an Austrian noble in your own right. If you persist in refusing it I will assign it to the Crown; you will pain me and mortify me.'
'That is enough! Never wittingly in my life will I hurt you. But if you wish me to be lord of Idrac, invest me with the title, my Empress. I will take it and be proud of it; and as for the revenues—well, we will not quarrel for them. They shall go to make new dykes and new bastions for the town, or pile themselves one on another in waiting for your children.'
She smiled and her face grew warm as she turned aside and took up one of the great swords with jewelled hilts and damascened scabbards, which were ranged along the wall of the Rittersaal with other stands of arms.
She drew the sword, and as he fell on his knee before her smote him lightly on the shoulder with its blade.
'Rise, Graf von Idrac!' she said, stooping and touching his forehead with the bouquet that she wore at her breast. He loosened one of the roses and held it to his lips.
'I swear my fealty now and for ever,' he said with emotion, and his face was paler and his tone was graver than the playfulness of the moment seemed to call for in him.
'Would to Heaven I had had no other name than this one you give me,' he murmured as he rose. 'Oh, my love, my lady, my guardian angel! Forget that ever I lived before, forget all my life when I was unworthy you; let me live only from the day that will make me your vassal and your——'
'That will make you my lord!' she said softly; then she stooped, and for the first time kissed him.
What caused her the only pain that disturbed the tranquillity of these cloudless days was the refusal of her cousin Egon to be present at her marriage. He sent her, with some great jewels that had come from Persia, a few words of sad and wistful affection.
'My presence,' he added in conclusion, 'is no more needed for your happiness than are these poor diamonds and pearls needed in your crowded jewel-cases. You will spare me a trial, which it could be of no benefit to you for me to suffer. I pray that the Marquis de Sabran may all his life be worthy of the immense trust and honour which you have seen fit to give to him. For myself, I have been very little always in your life. Henceforth I shall be nothing. But if ever you call on me for any service—which it is most unlikely you ever will do—I entreat you to remember that there is no one living who will more gladly or more humbly do your bidding at all cost than I, your cousin Egon.'
The short letter brought tears to her eyes. She said nothing of it to Sabran. He had understood from Mdme. Ottilie that Prince Vàsàrhely had loved his cousin hopelessly for many years, and could not be expected to be present at her marriage.
In a week from that time their nuptials were celebrated in the Court Chapel of the Hofburg at Vienna, with all the pomp and splendour that a brilliant and ceremonious Court could lend to the espousal of one of the greatest ladies of the old Duchy of Austria.
Immediately after the ceremony they left the capital for Hohenszalras.
At the signing of the contract on the previous night, when he had taken up the pen he had grown very pale; he had hesitated a moment, and glanced around him on the magnificent crowd, headed by the Emperor and Empress, with a gleam of fear and of anxiety in his eyes, which Baron Kaulnitz, who was intently watching him, had alone perceived.
'There is something. What is it?' had mused the astute German.
It was too late to seek to know. Sabran had bent down over the parchment, and with a firm hand had signed his name and title.
It was midsummer once more in the Iselthal, five years and a half after the celebration at the Imperial palace of those nuptials which had been so splendid that their magnificence had been noticeable even at that magnificent Court. The time had seemed to her like one long, happy, cloudless day, and if to him there had come any fatigue, any satiety, any unrest, such as almost always come to the man in the fruition of his passion, he suffered her to see none of them.
It was one of those rare marriages in which no gall of a chain is felt, but a quick and perfect sympathy insures that harmony which passion alone is insufficient to sustain. He devoted himself with ardour to the care of the immense properties that belonged to his wife; he brought to their administration a judgment and a precision that none had looked for in a man of pleasure; he entered cordially into all her schemes for the well-being of her people dependent on her, and carried them out with skill and firmness. The revenues of Idrac he never touched; he left them to accumulate for his younger son, or expended them on the township itself, where he was adored.
If he were still the same man who had been the lover of Cochonette, the terror of Monte Carlo, the hero of night-long baccara and frontier duels, he had at least so banished the old Adam that it appeared wholly dead. Nor was the death of it feigned. He had flung away the slough of his old life with a firm hand, and the peace, the dignity of his present existence were very precious to him. He was glad to steep himself in them, as a tired and fevered wayfarer was glad to bathe his dusty and heated limbs in the cool, clear waters of the Szalrassee. And he loved his wife with a great love, in which reverence, and gratitude, and passion were all blent. Possession had not dulled, nor familiarity blunted it. She was still to him a sovereign, a saint, a half divine creature, who had stooped to become mortal for his sake, and his children's.
The roses were all aglow on the long lawns and under the grey walls and terraces; the sunbeams were dancing on the emerald surface of the Szalrassee.
'What a long spell of fair weather,' said Sabran, as they sat beneath the great yews beside the keep.
'It is like our life,' said his wife, who was doing nothing but watching the clouds circle round the domes and peaks, which, white as ivory, dazzling and clear, towered upward in the blue air like a mighty amphitheatre.
She had borne him three children in these happy years, the eldest of whom, Bela, played amidst the daisies at her feet, a beautiful fair boy with his father's features and his father's luminous blue eyes. The other two, Gela and the little Ottilie, who had seen but a few months of life, were asleep within doors in their carved ivory cots. They were all handsome, vigorous, and of perfect promise.
'Have I deserved to be so happy?' she would often think, she whom the world called so proud.
'Bela grows so like you!' she said now to his father, who stood near her wicker chair.
'Does he?' said Sabran, with a quick glance that had some pain in it, at the little face of his son. 'Then if the other one be more like you it will be he who will be dearest to me.'
As he spoke he bowed his head down and kissed her hand.
She smiled gravely and sweetly in his eyes.
'That will be our only difference, I think! It is time, perhaps, that we began to have one. Do you think there are two other people in all the world who have passed five years and more together without once disagreeing?'
'In all the world there is not another Countess Wanda!'
'Ah! that is your only defect; you will always avoid argument by escaping through the side-door of compliment. It is true, to be sure, that your flattery is a very high and subtle art.'
'It is like all high art then, based on what is eternally true.'
'You will always have the last word, and it is always so graceful a one that it is impossible to quarrel with it. But, Réné, I want you to speak without compliment to me for once. Tell me, are you indeed never—never—a little weary of being here?'
He hesitated a moment and a slight flush came on his face.
She observed both signs, slight as they were, and sighed; it was the first sigh she had ever breathed since her marriage.
'Of course you are, of course you must be,' she said quickly. 'It has been selfish and blameable of me never to think of it before. It is paradise to me, but no doubt to you, used as you have been to the stir of the world, there, must be some tedium, some dulness in this mountain isolation. I ought to have remembered that before.'
'You need do nothing of the kind, now,' he said. 'Who has been talking to you? Who has brought this little snake into our Eden?'
'No one; and it is not a snake at all, but a natural reflection. Hohenszalras and you are the world to me, but I cannot expect that Hohenszalras and I can be quite as much to yourself. It is always the difference between the woman and the man. You have great talents; you are ambitious.'
'Were I as ambitious as Alexander, surely I have gained wherewithal to be content!'
'That is only compliment again, or if truth it is only a side of the truth. Nay, love, I do not think for a moment you are tired of me; I am too self-satisfied for that! But I think it is possible that this solitude may have grown, or may grow, wearisome to you; that you desire, perhaps without knowing it, to be more amidst the strife, the movement, and the pleasures of men. Aunt Ottilie calls this "confinement to a fortress;" now that is a mere pleasantry, but if ever you should feel tempted to feel what she feels, have confidence enough in my good sense and in my affection to say so to me, and then——.'
'And then? We will suppose I have this ingratitude and bad taste, what then?'
'Why then, my own wishes should not stand for one instant in the way of yours, or rather I would make yours mine. And do not use the word ingratitude, my dearest; there can be no question of that betwixt you and me.'
'Yes,' said Sabran, as he stooped towards her and touched her hair with his lips. 'When you gave me yourself, you made me your debtor for all time; would have made me so had you been as poor as you are rich. When I speak of gratitude it is ofthatgift, I think, not of Hohenszalras.'
A warmth of pleasure flushed her cheek for a moment, and she smiled happily.
'You shall not beg the question so,' she said, with gentle insistence after a moment's pause. 'I have not forgotten your eloquence in the French Chamber.' You are that rare thing a born orator. You are not perhaps fitted to be a statesman, for I doubt if you would have the application or bear the tedium necessary, but you have every qualification for a diplomatist, a foreign minister.'
'I have not the first qualification, I have no country!'
She looked at him, in surprise—he spoke with bitterness and self-contempt; but in a moment he had added quickly:—
'France is nothing to me now, and though I am Austrian by all ties and affections, I am not an Austrian before the law.'
'That is hardly true,' she answered, satisfied with the explanation. 'Since France is little to you you could be naturalised here whenever you chose, even if Idrac have not made you a Croat noble, as I believe the lawyers would say it had; and the Emperor, who knows and admires you, would, I think, at once give you gladly any mission you preferred; you would make so graceful, so perfect, so envied an ambassador! Diplomacy has indeed little force now, yet tact still tells wherever it be found, and it is as rare as blue roses in the unweeded garden of the world. I do not speak for myself, dear; that you know. Hohenszalras is my beloved home, and it was enough for me before I knew you, and nowhere else could life ever seem to me so true, so high, so simple, and so near to God as here. But I do remember that men weary even of happiness when it is unwitnessed, and require the press and stir of emulation and excitation; and, if you feel that want, say so. Have confidence enough in me to believe that your welfare will be ever my highest law. Promise me this.'
He changed colour slightly at her generous and trustful words, but he answered without a moment's pause:
'Whenever I am so thankless to fate I will confess it. No; the world and I never valued one another much. I am far better here in the heart of your mountains. Here only have I known peace and rest.'
He spoke with a certain effort and emotion, and he stooped over his little son and raised him on her knees.
'These children shall grow up at Hohenszalras,' he continued, 'and you shall teach them your love of the open air, the mountain solitudes, the simple people, the forest creatures, the influences and the ways of nature. You care for all those things, and they make up true wisdom, true contentment. As for myself, if you always love me I shall ask no more of fate.'
'If! Can you be afraid?'
'Sometimes. One always fears to lose what one has never merited.'
'Ah, my love, do not be so humble! If you saw yourself as I see you, you would be very proud.'
She smiled as she spoke, and stretched her hand out to him over the golden head of her child.
He took it and held it against his heart, clasped in both his own. Bela, impatient, slipped off his mother's lap to pursue his capture of the daisies; the butterflies were forbidden joys, and he was obedient, though in his own little way he was proud and imperious. But there was a blue butterfly just in front of him, a Lycœna Adonis, like a little bit of the sky come down and dancing about; he could not resist, he darted at it. As he was about to seize it she caught his fingers.
'I have told you, Bela, you are never to touch anything that flies or moves. You are cruel.'
He tried to get away, and his face grew very warm and passionate.
'Bela will be cruel, if he like,' he said, knitting his pretty brows.
Though he was not more than four years old he knew very well that he was the Count Bela, to whom all the people gave homage, crowding to kiss his tiny hand after Mass on holy-days. He was a very beautiful child, and all the prettier for his air of pride and resolution; he had been early put on a little mountain pony, and could ride fearlessly down the forest glades with Otto. All the imperiousness of the great race which had dealt out life and death so many centuries at their caprice through the Hohe Tauern seemed to have been inherited by him, coupled with a waywardness and a vanity that were not traits of the house of Szalras. It was impossible, even though those immediately about him were wise and prudent, to wholly prevent the effects of the adulation with which the whole household was eager to wait on every whim of the little heir.
'Bela wishes it!' he would say, with an impatient frown, whenever his desire was combated or crossed: he had already the full conviction that to be Bela was to have full right to rule the world, including in it his brother Gela, who was of a serious, mild, and yielding disposition, and gave up to him in all things. As compensating qualities he was very affectionate and sensitive, and easily moved to self-reproach.
With a step Sabran reached him. 'You dare to disobey your mother?' he said, sternly. 'Ask her forgiveness at once. Do you hear?'
Bela, who had never heard his father speak in such a tone, was very frightened, and lost all his colour; but he was resolute, and had been four years old on Ascension Day. He remained silent and obstinate.
Sabran put his hand heavily on the child's shoulder.
'Do you hear me, sir? Ask her pardon this moment.'
Bela was now fairly stunned into obedience.
'Bela is sorry,' he murmured. 'Bela begs pardon.'
Then he burst into tears.
'You alarmed him rather too much. He is so very young,' she said to his father, when the child, forgiven and consoled, had trotted off to his nurse, who came for him.
'He shall obey you, and find his law in your voice, or I will alarm him more,' he said, with some harshness. 'If I thought he would ever give you a moment's sorrow I should hate him!'
It was not the first time that Sabran had seen his own more evil qualities look at him from the beautiful little face of his elder son, and at each of those times a sort of remorse came upon him. 'I was unworthy to begetherchildren,' he thought, with the self-reproach that seldom left him, even amidst the deep tranquility of his satisfied passions, and his perfect peace of life. Who could tell what trials, what pains, what shame even, might not fall on her in the years to come, with the errors that her offspring would have in them from his blood?
'It is foolish,' she murmured, 'he is but a baby; yet it hurts one to see the human sin, the human wrath, look out from the infant eyes. It hurts one to remember, to realise, that one's own angel, one's own little flower, has the human curse born with it. I express myself ill; do you know what I mean? No, you do not, dear; you are a man. He is your son, and because he will be handsome and brave you will be proud of him; but he is not a young angel, not a blossom from Eden to you.'
'You are my religion,' he answered, 'you shall be his. When he grows older he shall learn that to be born of such a mother as you is to enter the kingdom of heaven by inheritance. Shall he be unworthy that inheritance because he bears in him also the taint of my sorry passions, of my degraded humanity?'
'Dear! I too am only an erring creature. I am not perfect as you think me.'
'As I know you and as my children shall know you to be.'
'You love me too well,' she said again; 'but it is abeau défaut, and I would not have you lose it.'
'I shall never lose it whilst I have life,' he said, with truth and passion. 'I prize it more because most unworthy it.'
She looked at him surprised, and vaguely troubled at the self-reproach and the self-scorn of his passionate utterance. Seeing that surprise and trouble in her glance, he controlled the emotion that for the moment mastered him.
'Ah, love!' he said quickly and truly, 'if you could but guess how gross and base a man's life seems to him contrasted with the life of a pure and noble woman! Being born of you, those children, I think, should be as faultless and as soilless as those pearls that lie on your breast. But then they are mine also; so already on that boy's face one sees the sins of revolt, of self-will, of cruelty—being mine also, your living pearls are dulled and stained!'
A greater remorse than she dreamed of made his heart ache as he said these words; but she heard in them only the utterance of that extreme and unwavering devotion to her which he had shown in all his acts and thoughts from the first hours of their union.
The Princess Ottilie was scarcely less happy than they in the realisation of her dreams and prophecies. Those who had been most bitterly opposed to her alliance with him could find no fault in his actions and his affections.
'I always said that Wanda ought to marry, since she had plainly no vocation for the cloister,' she said a hundred times a year. 'And I was certain that M. de Sabran was the person above all others to attract and to content her. She has much more imagination than she would be willing to allow and he is capable at once of fascinating her fancy and of satisfying her intellect. No one can be dull where he is; he is one of those who makela pluie et le beau tempsby his absence or presence; and, besides that, no commonplace affection would have ever been enough for her. And he loves her like a poet, which he is at once whenever he leaves the world for Beethoven and Bach. I cannot imagine why you should have opposed the marriage, merely because he had not two millions in the Bank of France.'
'Not for that,' answered the Grand Duke; 'rather because he broke the bank of Monte Carlo, and other similar reasons. A great player of baccara is scarcely the person to endow with the wealth of the Szalras.'
'The wealth is tied up tightly enough at the least, and you will admit that he was yet more eager than you that it should be so.'
'Oh, yes! he behaved very well. I never denied it. But she has placed it in his power to make away with the whole of Idrac, if he should ever choose. That was very unwise, but we had no power to oppose.'
'You may be quite sure that Idrac will go intact to the second son, as it has always done; and I believe but for his own exertions Idrac would now be beneath the Danube waters. Perhaps you never heard all that story of the flood?'
'I only hope that if I have detractors you will defend me from them,' said Prince Lilienhöhe, giving up argument.
Fair weather is always especially fair in the eyes of those who have foretold at sunset that the morrow would be fine; and so the married life of Wanda von Szalras was especially delightful as an object of contemplation, as a theme of exultation, to the Princess, who alone had been clear-sighted enough to foresee the future. She really also loved Sabran like a son, and took pride and pleasure in the filial tenderness he showed her, and in his children, with the beautiful blue eyes that had gleams of light in them like sapphires. The children themselves adored her; and even the bold and wilful Bela was as quiet as a startled fawn beside this lovely little lady, with her snow-white hair and her delicate smile, whose cascades of lace always concealed such wonderful bon-bon boxes, and gilded cosaques, and illuminated stories of the saints.
Almost all their time was spent at Hohenszalras. A few winter months in Vienna was all they had ever passed away from it, except one visit to Idrac and the Hungarian estates. The children never left it for a day. He shared her affection for the place, and for the hardy and frank mountain people around them. He seemed to her to entirely forget Romaris, and beyond the transmission of moneys to its priest, he took no heed of it. She hesitated to recall it to him, since to do so might have seemed to remind him that it was she, not he, who was suzerain in the Hohe Tauern. Romaris was but a bleak rock, a strip of sea-swept sand; it was natural that it should have no great hold on his affections, only recalling as it did all that its lords had lost.
'I hate its name,' he said impetuously once; and seeing the surprise upon her face, he added: 'I was very lonely and wretched there; I tried to take interest in it because you bade me, but I failed; all I saw, all I thought of, was yourself, and I believed you as far and for ever removed from me as though you had dwelt in some other planet. No! perhaps I am superstitious: I do not wish you to go to Romaris. I believe it would bring us misfortune. The sea is full of treachery, the sands are full of graves.'
She smiled.
'Superstition is a sort of parody of faith; I am sure you are not superstitious. I do not care to go to Romaris; I like to cheat myself into the belief that you were born and bred in the Iselthal. Otto said to me the other day, "My lord must be a son of the soil, or how could he know our mountains so well as he does, and how could he anywhere have learned to shoot like that?"'
'I am very glad that Otto does me so much honour. When he first met me, he would have shot me like a fox, if you had given the word. Ah, my love! how often I think of you that day, in your white serge, with your girdle of gold, and your long gold-headed staff, and your little ivory horn. You were truly a châtelaine of the old mystical German days. You had someSchlüsselblumenin your hand. They were indeed the key flower to my soul, though, alas! treasures, I fear, you found none on your entrance there.'
'I shall not answer you, since to answer would be to flatter you, and Aunt Ottilie already, does that more than is good for you,' she said smiling, as she passed her fingers over the waves of his hair. 'By the way, whom shall we invite to meet the Lilienhöhe? Will you make out a list?'
'The Grand Duke does not share Frau Ottilie's goodness for me.'
'What would you? He has been made of buckram and parchment; besides which; nothing that is not German has, to his mind, any right to exist. By the way, Egon wrote to me this morning; he will be here at last.'
He looked up quickly in unspoken alarm: 'Your cousin Egon? Here?'
'Why are you so surprised? I was sure that sooner or later he would conquer that feeling of being unable to meet you. I begged him to come now; it is eight whole years since I have seen him. When once you have met you will be friends—for my sake.'
He was silent; a look of trouble and alarm was still upon his face.
'Why should you suppose it any easier to him now than then?' he said at length. 'Men who loveyoudo not change. There are women who compel constancy,sans le vouloir. The meeting can but be painful to Prince Vàsàrhely.'
'Dear Réné,' she answered in some surprise, 'my nearest male relative and I cannot go on for ever without seeing each other. Even these years have done Egon a great deal of harm. He has been absent from the Court for fear of meeting us. He has lived with his hussars, or voluntarily confined to his estates, until he grows morose and solitary. I am deeply attached to him. I do not wish to have the remorse upon me of having caused the ruin of his gallant and brilliant life. When he has been once here he will like you: men who are brave have always a certain sympathy. When he has seen you here he will realise that destiny is unchangeable, and grow reconciled to the knowledge that I am your wife.'
Sabran gave an impatient gesture of denial, and began to write the list of invitations for the autumn circle of guests who were to meet the Prince and Princess of Lilienhöhe.
Once every summer and every autumn Hohenszalras was filled with a brilliant house-party, for she sacrificed her own personal preferences to what she believed to be for the good of her husband. She knew that men cannot always live alone; that contact with the world is needful to their minds and bracing for it. She had a great dread lest the ghostennuishould show his pale face over her husband's shoulder, for she realised that from the life of the asphalte of the Champs-Élysées to the life amidst the pine forests of the Iselthal was an abrupt transition that might easily bring tedium in its train. And tedium is the most terrible and the most powerful foe love ever encounters.
Sabran completed the list, and when he had corrected it into due accordance with all Lilienhöhe's personal and political sympathies and antipathies, despatched the invitations, 'for eight days,' written on cards that bore the joint arms of the Counts of Idrac and the Counts of Szalras. He had adopted the armorial bearings of the countship of Idrac as his own, and seemed disposed to abandon altogether those of the Sabrans of Romaris.
When they were written he went out by himself and rode long and fast through the mists of a chilly afternoon, through dripping forest ways and over roads where little water-courses spread in shining shallows. The coming of Egon Vàsàrhely troubled him and alarmed him. He had always dreaded his first meeting with the Magyar noble; and as the years had dropped by one after another, and her cousin had failed to find courage to see her again, he had begun to believe that they and Vàsàrhely would remain always strangers. His wish had begotten his thought. He knew that she wrote at intervals to her cousin, and he to her; he knew that at the birth of each of their children some magnificent gift, with a formal letter of felicitation, had come from the Colonel of the White Hussars; but as time had gone on and Prince Egon had avoided all possibility of meeting them, he had grown to suppose that the wound given her rejected lover was too profound ever to close; nor did he wonder that it was so: it seemed to him that any man who loved her must do so for all eternity, if eternity there should be. To learn suddenly that within another month Vàsàrhely would be his guest, distressed and alarmed him in a manner she never dreamed. They had been so happy. On their cloud less heaven there seemed to him to rise a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but bearing with it disaster and a moonless night.
'Perhaps he will have forgotten,' he thought, as he strove to shake off his forebodings. 'We were so young then. He was not even as old as I!'
And he rode fast and furiously homewards as the day drew in, and the lighted windows of the great castle seemed to smile at him as lie saw it high up above the darkness of the woods and of the evening mists, his home, beloved, sacred, infinitely dear to him; dear as the soil of the mother country which the wrecked mariner reaches after facing death on the deep sea.
'God save her from suffering by me!' he said, in an unconscious prayer, as he drew rein before the terrace of Hohenszalras. Almost he believed in God through her.
When, after dressing, he went into, the Saxe room, the peace and beauty of the scene had never struck him so strongly as it did now, coming out of the shadows of the wet woods and the gloom of his own anxieties; anxieties the heavier and the more wearing because they could be shared by no one. The soft, full light of the wax candles fell on the Louis Seize embroideries and the white woodwork of the panelling and the china borders of the mirrors. The Princess Ottilie sat making silk-netting for the children's balls; his wife was reading, and Bela and Gela, who were there for their privileged half-hour before dinner, were fitting together on a white bearskin, playing with the coloured balls of the game of solitaire. The soft light from the chandeliers and sconces of the Saxe Royale china fell on the golden heads and the velvet frocks of the children, on the old laces and the tawny-coloured plush of their mothers skirts, on the great masses of flowers in the Saxe bowls, and on the sleeping forms of the big dogs Donau and Neva. It was an interior that would have charmed Chardin, that would have been worthy of Vandyck.
As he looked at it he thought with a sort of ecstasy, 'All that is mine;' and then his heartstrings tightened as he thought again, 'If she knew——?'
She looked up at his entrance with a welcome on her face that needed no words.
'Where have you been in the rain all this long afternoon?' You see we have a fire, even though it is midsummer. Bela, rise, and make your obeisance, and push that chair nearer the hearth.'
The two little boys stood up and kissed his hand, one after another, with the pretty formality; of greeting on which she always insisted; then they went back to their coloured glass balls, and he sank into a low chair beside his wife with a sigh half of fatigue, half of content.
'Yes, I have been riding all the time,' he said to her. 'I am not sure that Siegfried approved it. But it does one good sometimes, and after the blackness and the wetness of that forest how charming it is to come home!'
She looked at him with wistfulness.
'I wish you were not vexed that Egon is coming! I am sure you have been thinking of it as you rode.'
'Yes, I have; but I am ashamed of doing so. He is your cousin, that shall be enough for me. I will do my best to make him welcome. Only there is this difficulty; a welcome from me to him will seem in itself an insult.'
'An insult! when you are my husband? One would think you were myjägermeister.Dear mother mine, help me to scold him.'
'I am a stranger,' he said, under his breath.
She smiled a little, but she said with a certain hauteur:
'You are master of Hohenszalras, as your son will be when our places shall know us no more. Do not let the phantom of Egon come between us, I beseech you. His real presence never will do so, that is certain.'
'Nothing shall come between us,' said Sabran, as his hand took and closed upon hers. 'Forgive me if I have brought some gloomynixout of the dark woods with me; he will flee away in, the light of this beloved white-room. No evil spirits could dare stay by your hearth.'
'There arenixesin the forests,' said Bela in a whisper to his brother.
'Ja!' said Gela, not comprehending.
'We will kill them all when we are big,' said Bela.
'Ja! ja!' said Gela.
Bela knew very well what anixwas. Otto had told him all about kobolds and sprites, as his pony trotted down the drives.
'Or we will take them prisoners,' he added, remembering that his mother never allowed anything to be killed, not even butterflies.
'Ja!' said Gela again, rolling the pretty blue and pink and amber balls about in the white fur of the bearskin.
Gela's views of life were simplified by the disciple's law of imitation; they were restricted to doing whatever Bela did, when that was possible, when it was not possible he remained still adoring Bela, with his little serious face as calm as a god's.
She used to think that when they should grow up Bela would be a great soldier like Wallenstein or Condé, and Gela would stay at home and take care of his people here in the green, lone, happy Iselthal.
Time ran on and the later summer made the blooming hay grow brown on all the alpine meadows, and made the garden of Hohenszalras blossom with a million autumnal glories; it brought also the season of the first house-party. Egon Vàsàrhely was to arrive one day before the Lilienhöhe and the other guests.
'I want Egon so much to see Bela!' she said, with the thoughtless cruelty of a happy mother forgetful of the pain of a rejected lover.
'I fear Bela will find little favor in your cousin's eyes, since he is mine too,' said Sabran.
'Oh, Egon is content to be only our cousin by this——'
'You think so? You do not know yourself if you imagine that.'
'Egon is very loyal. He would not come here if he could not greet you honestly.'
Sabran's face flushed a little, and he turned away. He vaguely dreaded the advent of Egon Vàsàrhely, and there were so many innocent words uttered in the carelessness of intimate intercourse which stabbed him to the quick; she had so wounded him all unconscious of her act.
'Shall we have a game of billiards?' he asked her as they stood in the Rittersaal, whilst the rain fell fast without. She played billiards well, and could hold her own against him, though his game was one that had often been watched by a crowdedgaleriein Paris with eager speculation and heavy wager. An hour afterwards they were still playing when the clang of a great bell announced the approach of the carriage which had been sent to Windisch-Matrey.
'Come!' she said joyously, as she put back her cue in its rest; but Sabran drew back.
'Receive your cousin first alone,' he said. 'He must resent my presence here. I will not force it on him on the threshold of your house.'
'Of our house! Why will you use wrong pronouns? Believe me, dear, Egon is too generous to bear you the animosity you think.'
'Then he never loved you,' said Sabran, somewhat impatiently, as he sent one ball against another with a sharp collision. 'I will come if you wish it,' he added; 'but I think it is not in the best taste to so assert myself.'
'Egon is only my cousin and your guest. You are the master of Hohenszalras. Come! you were not so difficult when you received the Emperor.'
'I had done the Emperor no wrong,' said Sabran, controlling the impatience and the reluctance he still felt.
'You have done Egon none. I should not have been his wife had I never been yours.'
'Who knows?' murmured Sabran, as he followed her into the entrance hall. The stately figure of Egon Vàsàrhely enveloped in furs was just passing through the arched doorway.
She went towards him with a glad welcome and both hands outstretched.
Prince Egon bowed to the ground: then took both her hands in his and kissed her on the cheek.
Sabran, who grew very pale, advanced and greeted him with ceremonious grace.
'My wife has bade me welcome you, Prince, but it would be presumptuous in me, a stranger, to do that. All her kindred must be dear and sacred here.'
Egon Vàsàrhely, with an effort to which he had for years been vainly schooling himself, stretched out his hand to take her husband's; but as he did so, and his glance for the first time dwelt on Sabran, a look surprised and indefinitely perplexed came on his own features. Unconsciously he hesitated a moment; then, controlling himself, he replied with a few fitting words of courtesy and friendship. That there should be some embarrassment, some constraint, was almost inevitable, and did not surprise her: she saw both, but she also saw that both were hidden under the serenity of high breeding and worldly habit. The most difficult moment had passed: they went together into the Rittersaal, talked together a little on a few indifferent topics, and in a little space Prince Egon withdrew to his own apartments to change his travelling clothes. Sabran left him on the threshold of his chamber.
Vàsàrhely locked the doors, locking out even his servant, threw off his furs and sat down, leaning his head on his hands. The meeting had cost him even more than he had feared that it would do. For five years he had dreaded this moment, and its pain was as sharp and as fresh to him as though it had been unforeseen. To sleep under the same roof with the husband of Wanda von Szalras! He had overrated his power of self-control, underrated his power of suffering, when to please her he had consented after five years to visit Hohenszalras. What were five years?—half a century would not have changed him.
Under the plea of fatigue, he, who had sat in his saddle eighteen hours at a stretch, and was braced to every form of endurance in the forest chase and in the tented field, sent excuses to his host for remaining in his own rooms until the Ave Maria rung. When he at length went down to the blue-room where she was, he had recovered, outwardly at least, his tranquillity and his self-possession, though here, in this familiar, once beloved chamber, where every object had been dear to him from his boyhood, a keener trial than any he had passed through awaited him, as she led forward to meet him a little boy clad in white velvet, with a cloud of light golden hair above deep blue luminous eyes, and said to him:
'Egon, this is my Bela. You will love him a little, for my sake?'
Vàsàrhely felt a chill run through him like the cold of death as he stooped towards the child; but he smiled and touched the boy's forehead with his lips.
'May the spirit of our lost Bela be with him and dwell in his heart,' he murmured; 'better I cannot wish him.'
With an effort he turned to Sabran.
'Your little son is a noble child; you may with reason be proud of him. He is very like you in feature. I see no trace of the Szalras.'
'The other boy is more like Wanda,' replied Sabran, sensible of a certain tenacity of observation with which Vàsàrhely was gazing at him. 'As for my daughter, she is too young for anyone to say whom she will resemble. All I desire is that she should be like her mother, physically and spiritually.'
'Of course,' said the Prince, absently, still looking from Sabran to the child, as if in the endeavour to follow some remembrance that eluded-him. The little face of Bela was a miniature of his father's, they were as alike as it is possible for a child and a man to be so, and Egon Vàsàrhely perplexedly mused and wondered at vague memories which rose up to him as he gazed on each.
'And what do you like best to do, my little one?' he asked of Bela, who was regarding him with curious and hostile eyes.
'To ride,' answered Bela at once, in his pretty uncertain German.
'There you are a true Szalras at least. And your brother Gela, can he ride yet? Where is Gela, by the way?'
'He is asleep,' said Bela, with some contempt. 'He is a little thing. Yes; he rides, but it is in a chair-saddle. It is not real riding.'
'I see. Well, when you come and see me you shall have some real riding, on wild horses if you like;' and he told the child stories of the great Magyar steppes, and the herds of young horses, and the infinite delight of the unending gallop over the wide hushed plain; and all the while his heart ached bitterly, and the sight of the child—who was her child, yet had that stranger's face—was to him like a jagged steel being turned and twisted inside a bleeding wound. Bela, however, was captivated by the new visions that rose before him.
'Bela will come to Hungary,' he said with condescension, and then with an added thought, continued: 'I think Bela has great lands there. Otto said so.'
'Bela has nothing at all,' said Sabran, sternly. 'Bela talks great nonsense sometimes, and it would be better he should go to sleep with his brother.'
Bela looked up shyly under his golden cloud of hair. 'Folko is Bela's,' he said under his breath. Folko was his pony.
'No,' said Sabran; 'Folko belongs to your mother. She only allows you to have him so long as you are good to him.'
'Bela is always good to him,' he said decidedly.
'Bela is faultless in his own estimation,' said his mother, with a smile. 'He is too little to be wise enough to see himself as he is.'
This view made Bela's blue eyes open very wide and fill very sorrowfully. It was humiliating. He longed to get back to Gela, who always listened to him dutifully, and never said anything in answer except an entirely acquiescent 'Ja! ja!' which was indeed about the limitation of Gela's lingual powers. In a few moments, indeed, his governess came for him and took him away, a little dainty figure in his ivory velvet and his blue silk stockings, with his long golden curls hanging to his waist.
'It is so difficult to keep him from being spoilt,' she said, as the door closed on him. 'The people make a little prince, a little god, of him. He believes himself to be something wonderful. Gela, who is so gentle and quiet, is left quite in the shade.'
'I suppose Gela takes your title?' said Vàsàrhely to his host. 'It is usual with the Austrian families for the second son to have some distant appellation?'
'They are babies,' said Sabran, impatiently.
'It will be time enough to settle those matters when they are old enough to be court-pages or cadets. They are Bela and Gela at present. The only real republic is childhood.'
'I am afraid Bela is thetyrannusto which all republics succumb,' said Wanda, with a smile. He is extremely autocratic in his notions, and in his family. In all his "make believe" games he is crowned.'
'He is a beautiful child,' said her cousin, and she answered, still smiling:
'Oh, yes: he is so like Réné!'
Egon Vàsàrhely turned his face from her. The dinner was somewhat dull, and the evening seemed tedious, despite the efforts of Sabran to promote conversation, and theécartéwhich he and his guest played together. They, were all sensible that some chord was out of tune, and glad that on the morrow a large house-party would be there to spare them a continuation of this difficult intercourse.
'Your cousin will never forgive me,' said Sabran to her when they were alone. 'I think, beside his feeling that I stand for ever between you and him there is an impatience of me as a stranger and one unworthy you.'
'You do yourself and him injustice,' she answered. 'I shall be unhappy if you and he be not friends.'
'Then unhappy you will be, my beloved. We both adore you.'
'Do not say that. He would not be here if it were so.'
'Ah! look at him when he looks at Bela!'
She sighed; she had felt a strong emotion on the sight of her cousin, for Egon Vàsàrhely was much changed by these years of pain. His grand carriage and his martial beauty were unaltered, but all the fire and the light of earlier years were gone out of his face, and a certain gloom and austerity had come there. To all other women he would have been the more attractive for the melancholy which was in such apt contrast with the heroic adventures of his life, but to her the change in him was a mute reproach which filled her with remorse though she had done no wrong.
Meantime Prince Egon, throwing open his window, leaned out into the cold rainy night, as though a hand were at his throat and suffocating him. And amidst all the tumult of his pain and revolt, one dim thought was incessantly intruding itself; he was always thinking, as he recalled the face of Sabran and of Sabran's little son, 'Where have I seen those blue eyes, those level brows, those delicate curved lips?'
They were so familiar, yet so strange to him. When he would have given a name to them they receded into the shadows of some far away past of his own, so far away he could not follow them. He sat up half the night letting the wind beat and the rain fall on him. He could not sleep.
In the morrow thirty or forty people arrived, amongst them Baron Kaulnitzen congéfrom his embassy.
'What think you of Sabran?' he asked of Egon Vàsàrhely, who answered:
'He is a perfect gentleman. He is a charming companion. He plays admirably atécarté.
'Écarté! I spoke of his moral worth: what is your impression of that?'
'If he had not satisfied her as to that, Wanda would not be his wife,' answered the Prince gravely. 'He has given her beautiful children, and it seems to me that he renders her perfectly happy. We should all be grateful to him.'
'The children are certainly very beautiful,' said Baron Kaulnitz, and said no more.
'The people all around are unfeignedly attached to him,' Vàsàrhely continued with generous effort. 'I hear nothing but his praise. Nor do I think it the conventional compliment which loyalty leads them to pay the husband of their Countess; it is very genuine attachment. The men of the old Archduchy are not easily won; it is only qualities of daring and manliness which appeal to their sympathies. That he has gained their affections is as great testimony to his character in one way as that he has gained Wanda's is in another. At Idrac also the people adore him, and Croats are usually slow to see merit in strangers.'
'In short, he is a paragon,' said the ambassador, with a little dubious smile. 'So much the better, since he is irrevocably connected with us.'
Sabran was at no time seen to greater advantage than when he was required to receive and entertain a large house-party. Always graceful, easily witty, endowed with that winning tact which is to society as cream is to the palate, the charm he possessed for women and the ascendency he could, at times, exercise over men—even men who were opposed to him—were never more admirably displayed than when he was the master of Hohenszalras, with crowned heads, and princes, and diplomatists, and beauties gathered beneath his roof. His mastery, moreover, of all field sports, and his skill at all games that demanded either intelligence or audacity, made him popular with a hardy and brilliant nobility; his daring in a boar hunt at noon was equalled by his science at whist in the evening. Strongly prejudiced against him at the onset, the great nobles who were his guests had long ceased to feel anything for him except respect and regard; whilst the women admired him none the less for that unwavering devotion to his wife which made even the conventionalities of ordinary flirtation wholly impossible to him. With all his easy gallantry and his elegant homage to them, they all knew that, at heart, he was as cold as the rocks to all women save one.
'It is really the knight's love for his lady,' said the Countess Brancka once; and Sabran, overhearing, said: 'Yes, and, I think that if there were more like my lady on earth, knighthood might revive on other scenes than Wagner's.'
Between him and the Countess Brancka there was a vague intangible enmity, veiled under the perfection of courtesy. They could ill have told why they disliked each other; but they did so. Beneath their polite or trivial or careless speech they often aimed at each other's feelings or foibles with accuracy and malice. She had stayed at Hohenszalras more or less time each year in the course of her flight between France and Vienna, and was there now. He admired his wife's equanimity and patience under the trial of Mdme. Olga's frivolities, but he did not himself forbear from as much sarcasm as was possible in a man of the world to one who was his guest, and by marriage his relative, and he was sensible of her enmity to himself, though she paid him many compliments, and sometimes too assiduously sought his companionship. 'Elle fait le ronron, mais gare à ses pattes!' he said once to his wife concerning her.
Sabran appraised her indeed with unflattering accuracy. He knew by heart all the wiles and wisdom of such a woman as she was. Her affectations did not blind him to her real danger, and her exterior frivolity did not conceal from him the keen and subtle self-interest and the strong passions which laboured beneath it.
She felt that she had an enemy in him, and partly in self-protection, partly in malice, she set herself to convert a foe into a friend, perhaps, without altogether confessing it to herself, into a lover as well.
The happiness that prevailed at Hohenszalrasburg annoyed her for no other reason than that it wearied her to witness it. She did not envy it, because she did not want happiness at all; she wanted perpetual change, distraction, temptation, passion, triumph—in a word, excitement, which becomes the drug most unobtainable to those who have early exhausted all the experiences and varieties of pleasure.
Mdme. Brancka had always an unacknowledged resentment against her sister-in-law, for being the owner of all the vast possessions of the Szalras. 'If Gela had lived!' she thought constantly. 'If I had only had a son by him before he died, this woman would have had her dower and nothing more.' That his sister should possess all, whilst she had by her later marriage lost her right even to a share in that vast wealth, was a perpetual bitterness to her.
Stefan Brancka was indeed rich, but he was an insensate gambler. She was extravagant to the last degree, with all the costly caprices of acocodettewho reigned in the two most brilliant capitals of the world. They were often troubled by their own folly, and again and again the generosity of his elder brother had rescued them from humiliating embarrassments. At such moments she had almost hated Wanda von Szalras for these large possessions, of which, according to her own views, her sister-in-law made no use whatever. Meantime, she wished Egon Vàsàrhely to die childless, and to that end had not been unwilling for the woman he loved to marry anyone else. She had reasoned that the Szalras estates would go to the Crown or the Church if Wanda did not marry; whilst all the power and possessions of Egon Vàsàrhely must, if he had no sons, pass in due course to his brother. She had the subtle acuteness of her race, and she had the double power of being able at once to wait very patiently and to spring with swift rage on what she needed. To her sister-in-law she always appeared a mere flutterer on the breath of fashion. The grave and candid nature of the one could not follow or perceive the intricacies of the other.
'She is a cruel woman and a perilous one,' Sabran said one day to his wife's surprise.
She answered him that Olga Brancka had always seemed to her a mere frivolousmondaine, like so many others of their world.
'No,' he persisted. 'You are wrong; she is not a butterfly. She has too much energy. She is a profoundly immoral woman also. Look at her eyes.'
'That is Stefan's affair,' she answered, 'not ours. He is indifferent.'
'Or unsuspicious? Did your brother care for her?'
'He was madly in love with her. She was only sixteen when he married her. He fell at Solferino half a year later. When she married my cousin it shocked and disgusted me. Perhaps I was foolish to take it thus, but it seemed such a sin against Gela. To dieso, and not to be even remembered!'
'Did your cousin Egon approve this second marriage?'
'No,' he opposed it; he had our feeling about it. But Stefan, though very young, was beyond any control. He had the fortune as he had the title of his mother, the Countess Brancka, and Olga bewitched him as she had done my brother.'
'Sheisa witch, a wicked witch,' said Sabran.
The great autumn party was brilliant and agreeable. All things went well, and the days were never monotonous. The people were well assorted, and the social talent of their host made their outdoor sports and their indoor pastimes constantly varied, whilst Hungarian musicians and Viennese comedians played waltzes that would have made a statue dance, and represented the little comedies for which he himself had been famous at the Mirlitons.
He was not conscious of it, but he was passionately eager for Egon Vàsàrhely to be witness, not only of his entire happiness, but of his social powers. To Vàsàrhely he seemed to put forward the perfection of his life with almost insolence; with almost exaggeration to exhibit the joys and the gifts with which nature and chance had so liberally dowered him. The stately Magyar soldier, sitting silent and melancholy apart, watched him with a curious pang, that in a lesser nature would have been a consuming envy. Now and then, though Sabran and his wife spoke rarely to each other in the presence of others, a glance, a smile, a word passed between them that told of absolute unuttered tenderness, profound and inexhaustible as the deep seas; in the very sound of their laughter, in the mere accent of their voices, in a careless caress to one of their children, in a light touch of the hand to one another as they rode, or as they met in a room, there was the expression of a perfect joy, of a perfect faith between them, which pierced the heart of the watcher of it. Yet would he not have had it otherwise at her cost.
'Since she has chosen him as the companion of her life, it is well that he should be what she can take pride in, and what all men can praise,' he thought, and yet the happiness of this man seemed to him an audacity, an insolence. What human lover could merit her?
Between himself and Sabran there was the most perfect courtesy, but no intimacy. They both knew that if for fifty years they met continually they would never be friends. All her endeavours to produce sympathy between them failed. Sabran was conscious of a constant observation of him by her cousin, which seemed to him to have a hostile motive, and which irritated him extremely, though he did not allow his irritation any visible vent. Olga Brancka perceived, and with the objectless malice of women of her temperament, amused herself with fanning, the slumbering enmity, as children play at fire.
'You cannot expect Egon to love you,' she said once to her host. 'You know he was the betrothed of Wanda from her childhood—at least in his own hopes, and in the future sketched for them by their families.'
'I was quite aware of that before I married,' he answered her indifferently. 'But those family arrangements are tranquil disposals of destiny which, if they be disturbed, leave no great trace of trouble. The Prince is young still, and a famous soldier as well as a great noble. He has no lack of consolation if he need it, and I cannot believe that he does.'
Mdme. Olga laughed.
'You know as well as I do that Egon adores the very stirrup your wife's foot touches!'
'I know he is her much beloved cousin,' said Sabran, in a tone which admitted of no reply.
To Vàsàrhely his sister-in-law said confidentially:
'Dear Egon, why did you not stay on thepusztasor remain with your hussars? You makele beauSabran jealous.'
'Jealous!' asked Vàsàrhely, with a bitter smile. 'He has much cause, when she has neither eye nor ear, neither memory nor thought of any kind for any living thing except himself and those children who are all his very portraits! Why do you say these follies, Olga? You know that my cousin Wanda chose her lord out of all the world, and loves him as no one would have supposed she had it in her to love any mortal creature.'
He spoke imperiously, harshly, and she was silenced.
'What do you think of him?' she said with hesitation.
'Everyone asks me that question. I am not his keeper!'
'But you must form some opinion. He is virtual lord of Hohenszalras, and I believe she has made over to him all the appanages of Idrac, and his children will have everything.'
'Are they not her natural heirs? Who should inherit from her if not her sons?'
'Of course, of course they will inherit, only they inherit nothing from him. It was certainly a great stroke of fortune for a landless gentleman to make. Why does thegentilhomme pauvrealways so captivate women?'
'What do you mean to insinuate, Olga?' he asked her, with a stern glance of his great black eyes.'
'Oh, nothing; only his history was peculiar. I remember his arrival in France, his first appearance in society; it is many years ago now. All the Faubourg received him, but some said at the time that it was too romantic to be true—those Mexican forests, that long exile of the Sabran, the sudden appearance of this beautiful young marquis; you will grant it was romantic. I suppose it was the romance that made even Wanda's clear head turn a little. It is avin capiteuxfor many women. And then such a life in Paris after it—duels, baccara, bonnes fortunes, clever comedies, a touch like Liszt's, a sudden success in the Chamber—it was all so romantic; it was bound to bring him at last to his haven, the Prince Charmant of an enchanted castle! Only enchanted castles sometimes grow dull, and Princes Charmants are not always amusable by the same châtelaine!'
Egon Vàsàrhely, with his eyes sombre under their long black lashes, listened to the easy bantering phrases with the vague suspicion of an honest and slow-witted man that a woman is trying to drop poison into his ear which she wishes to pass aseau sucrée.He did not altogether follow her insinuation, but he understood something of her drift. They were alone in a corner of the ball-room, whilst the cotillon was at its height, conducted by Sabran, who had been famous for its leadership in Paris and Vienna. He stooped his head and looked her full in her eyes.
'Look here, Olga. I am not sure what you mean, but I believe you are tired of seeing my cousin's happiness, merely because it is something with which you cannot interfere. For myself I would protect her happiness as I would her honour if I thought either endangered. Whether you or I like the Marquis de Sabran is wholly beyond the question. She loves him, and she has made him one of us. His honour is now ours. For myself I would defend him in his absence as though he were my own brother. Not for his sake at all—for hers. I do not express myself very well, but you know what I mean. Here is Max returning to claim you.'
Silenced and a little alarmed the Countess Brancka rose and went off to her place in the cotillon.
Vàsàrhely, sitting where she had left him, watched the mazes of the cotillon, the rhythm of the tzigane musicians coming to his ear freighted with a thousand familiar memories of the czardas danced madly in the long Hungarian nights. Time had been when the throb of the tzigane strings had stirred all his pulses like magic, but now all his bold bright life seemed numb and frozen in him.
His eyes rested on his cousin, where she stood conversing with a crown prince, who was her chief guest, and passed from her to follow the movements of Sabran, who with supreme ease and elegance was leading a new intricate measure down the ball-room.
She was happy, that he could not doubt. Every action, every word, every glance said so with a meaning not to be doubted. He thought she had never looked so handsome as she did to-night since that far away day in her childhood when he had seen her with the red and white roses in her lap and the crown upon her curls. She had the look of her childhood in her eyes, that serene and glad light which had been dimmed by her brothers' death, but now shone there again tranquil, radiant, and pure as sunlight is. She wore white velvet and white brocade; her breast was hidden in white roses; she wore her famous pearls and the ribbons of the Starred Cross of Austria and of the Prussian Order of Merit; she held in her hand a large painted fan which had belonged to Maria Theresa. Every now and then, as she talked with her royal guest, her glance strayed down the room to where her husband was, and lingered there a moment with a little smile.
Vàsàrhely watched her for awhile, then rose abruptly, and made his way out of the ball-room and the state apartments down the corridors of the old house he knew so well towards his own chamber. He thought he would write to her and leave upon the morrow. What need was there for him to stay on in this perpetual pain? He had done enough for the world, which had seen him under the roof of Hohenszalras.
As he took his way through the long passages, tapestry-hung or oak-panelled, which led across the great building to his own set of rooms in the clock tower, he passed an open door out of which a light was streaming. As he glanced within he saw it was the children's sleeping apartment, of which the door was open because the night was warm, unusually warm for the heart of the Gross Glöckner mountains. An impulse he could not have explained made him pause and enter. The three little white beds of carved Indian work, with curtains of lace, looked very snowy and peaceful in the pale light from a hanging lamp. The children were all asleep; the one nearest the door was Bela.
Vàsàrhely stood and looked at him. His head was thrown back on his pillow and his arms were above his head. His golden hair, which was cut straight and low over his forehead, had been pushed back in his slumber; he looked more like his father than in his waking hours, for as he dreamed there was a look of coldness and of scorn upon his childish face, which made him so resemble Sabran that the man who looked on him drew his breath hard with pain.
The night-nurse rose from her seat, recognising Prince Egon, whom she had known from his childhood.
'The little Count is so like the Marquis,' she said, approaching; 'so is Herr Gela. Ah, my Prince, you remember the noble gentlemen whose names they bear? God send they may be like them in their lives and not their deaths!'
'An early death is good,' said Vàsàrhely, as he stood beside the child's bed. He thought how good it would have been if he had fallen at Sadowa or Königsgrätz, or earlier by the side of Gela and Victor, charging with his White Hussars.
The old nurse rambled on, full of praise and stories of the children's beauty, and strength, and activity, and intelligence. Vàsàrhely did not hear her; he stood lost in thought looking down on the sleeping figure of Bela, who, as if conscious of strange eyes upon him, moved uneasily in his slumber, and ruffled his golden hair with his hands, and thrust off his coverings from his beautiful round white limbs.
'Count Bela is not like our saint who died,' said the old nurse. 'He is always masterful, and loves his own way. My lady is strict with him, and wisely so, for he is a proud rebellious child. But he is very generous, and has noble ways. Count Gela is a little angel; he will be like the Heilige Graf.'
Vàsàrhely did not hear anything she said. His gaze was bent on the sleeping child, studying the lines of the delicate brows, of the curving lips, of the long black lashes. It was so familiar, so familiar! Suddenly as he gazed a light seemed to leap out of the darkness of long forgotten years, and the memory which had haunted him stood out clear before him.
'He is like Vassia Kazán!' he cried, half aloud. The face of the child had recalled what in the face of the man had for ever eluded his remembrance.
He thrust a gold coin in the nurse's hand, and hurried from the chamber. A sudden inconceivable, impossible suspicion had leaped up before him as he had gazed on the sleeping loveliness of Sabran's little son.
The old woman saw his sudden pallor, his uncertain gesture, and thought, 'Poor gallant gentleman! He wishes these pretty boys were his own. Well, it might have been better if he had been master here, though there is nothing to say against the one who is so. Still, a stranger is always a stranger, and foreign blood is bad.'
Then she drew the coverings over Bela's naked little limbs, and passed on to make sure that the little Ottilie, who had been born when the primroses where first out in the Iselthal woods, was sleeping soundly, and wanted nothing.
Vàsàrhely made his way to his own chamber, and there sat down heavily, mechanically, like a man waking out from a bad dream.
His memory went back to twenty years before, when he, a little lad, had accompanied his father on a summer visit to the house of a Russian, Prince Paul Zabaroff. It was a house, gay, magnificent, full of idle men and women of facile charm; it was not a house for youth; but both the Prince Vàsàrhely and the Prince Zabaroff were men of easy morals—viveurs, gamesters, and philosophers, who at fifteen years old themselves had been lovers and men of the world. At that house had been present a youth, some years older than he was, who was known as Vassia Kazán: a youth whose beauty and wit made him the delight of the women there, and whose skill at games and daring in sports won him the admiration of the men. It was understood without even being said openly that Vassia Kazán was a natural son of the Prince Zabaroff. The little Hungarian prince, child as he was, had wit enough and enough knowledge of life to understand that this brilliant companion, of his was base-born. His kind heart moved him to pity, but his intense pride curbed his pity with contempt. Vassia Kazán had resented the latter too bitterly to even be conscious of the first. The gentlemen assembled had diverted themselves by the unspoken feud that had soon risen between the boys, and the natural intelligence of the little Magyar noble had been no match for the subtle and cultured brain of the Parisian Lycéen.
One day one of the lovely ladies there, who plundered Zabaroff and caressed his son, amused herself with a war of words between the lads, and so heated, stung, spurred and tormented the Hungarian boy that, exasperated by the sallies and satires of his foe, and by the presence of this lovely goddess of discord, he so far forgot his chivalry that he turned on Vassia with a taunt. 'You would be a serf if you were in Russia!' he said, with his great black eyes flashing the scorn of the noble on the bastard. Without a word, Vassia, who had come in from riding and had his whip in his hand, sprang on him, held him in a grip of steel, and thrashed him. The fiery Magyar, writhing under the blows of one who to him was as a slave, as a hound, freed his right arm, snatched from a table near an oriental dagger lying there with other things of value, and plunged it into the shoulder of his foe. The cries of the lady, alarmed at her own work, brought the men in from the adjoining room; the boys were forced apart and carried to their chambers.
Prince Vàsàrhely left the house that evening with his son, still furious and unappeased. Vassia Kazán remained, made a hero of and nursed by the lovely woman who had thrown the apple of strife. His wound was healed in three weeks' time; soon after his father's house-party was scattered, and he himself returned to his college. Not a syllable passed between him and Zabaroff as to his quarrel with the little Hungarian magnate. To the woman who had wrought the mischief Zabaroff said: 'Almost I wish he were my lawful son. He is a true wolf of the steppes. Paris has only combed his hide and given him a silken coat; he is still a wolf, like all true Russians.'
Looking on the sleeping child of Sabran, all that half-forgotten scene had risen up before the eyes of Egon Vàsàrhely. He seemed to see the beautiful fair face of Vassia Kazán, with the anger on the knitted brows, and the ferocity on the delicate stern lips as he had raised his arm to strike. Twenty years had gone by; he himself, whenever he had remembered the scene, had long grown ashamed of the taunt he had cast, not of the blow he had given, for the sole reproof his father had ever made him was to say: 'A noble, only insults his equals. To insult an inferior is ungenerous, it is derogatory; whom you offend you raise for the hour to a level with yourself. Remember to choose your foes not less carefully than you choose your friends.'