It would have been hard enough to bear, difficult enough to explain away to others, if he had told her his reasons, however captious, unwise, or selfish they might be; but to have the door of his soul thus shut upon her, his thoughts thus closed to her, hurt her with intolerable pain, and filled her with a deep and burning indignation.
She passed all the early morning hours alone in her little temple of prayer, striving in vain against the bitterness of her heart; above her the great ivory Crucifixion, the work of Angermayer, beneath which so many generations of the women of the House of Szalras had knelt in their hours of tribulation or bereavement.
When she left the oratory she had conquered herself. Though she could not extinguish the human passions that smarted and throbbed within her, she knew her duty well enough to know that it must lie in submission and in silence.
She sought for him at once. She found him in the library: he was playing to himself a long dreamy concerto of Schubert's, to soothe the irritation of his own nerves and pass away a time of keen suspense. He rose as she came into the room, and awaited her approach with a timid anxiety in his eyes, which she was too absorbed by her own emotions to observe. He had assumed a boldness that he had not, and had used his power to dominate her rather in desperation than in any sense of actual mastery. In his heart it was he who feared her.
'You were quite right,' she said simply to him. 'Of course, you are master of your own actions, and owe no account of them to me. We will say no more about it. For myself, you know I am content enough to escape exile to any embassy.'
He kissed her hand with an unfeigned reverence and humility.
'You are as merciful as you are great,' he murmured. 'If I be silent it is my misfortune.' He paused abruptly.
A sudden thought came over her as he spoke.
'It is some State secret that he knows and cannot speak of, and that has made him unwilling to go. Why did I never think of that before?'
An explanation that had its root in honour, a reticence that sprang from conscience, were so welcome to her, and to her appeared so natural, that they now consoled her at once, and healed the wounds to her own pride.
'Of course, if it be so, he is right not to speak even to me,' she mused, and her only desire was now to save him from the insistence and the indignation of the Princess, and the examination which these were sure to entail upon him when he should meet her at the noon breakfast now at hand.
To that end she sought out her aunt in her own apartments, taking with her the tiny Ottilie, who always disarmed all irritation in her godmother by the mere presence of her little flower-like face.
'Dear mother,' she said softly, when the child had made her morning obeisance, 'I am come to ask of you a great favour and kindness to me. Réné returned last night. He has done what he thought right. I do not even ask his reasons. He has acted fromforce majeureby dictate of his own honour. Will you do as I mean to do? Will you spare him any interrogation? I shall be so grateful to you, and so will he.'
Mdme. Ottilie, opening her bonbonnière for her namesake, drew up her fragile figure with a severity unusual to her.
'Do I hear you aright? You do not even know the reasons of the insult M. de Sabran has passed upon the Crown and Cabinet, and you do not even mean to ask them?'
'I do mean that; and what I do not ask I feel sure you will admit no one else has any right to ask of him.'
'No one certainly except His Majesty.'
'I presume His Majesty has had all information due to him as our Imperial master. All I entreat of you, dearest mother, is to do as I have done; assume, as we are bound to assume, that Réné has acted wisely and rightly, and not weary him with questions to which it will be painful to him not to respond.'
'Questions! I never yet indulged in anything so vulgar as curiosity, that you should imagine I shall be capable of subjecting your husband to a cross-examination. If you be satisfied, I can have no right to be more exacting than yourself. The occurrence is to me lamentable, inexcusable, unintelligible; but if explanation be not offered me you may rest assured I shall not intrude my request for it.'
'Of that I am sure; but I am not contented only with that. I want you to feel no dissatisfaction, no doubt, no anger against him. You may be sure that he has acted from conviction, because he was most desirous to go to Russia, as you saw when you urged him to accept the mission.'
'I have said the utmost that I can say,' replied the Princess, with a chill light in her blue eyes. 'This little child is no more likely to ask questions than I am, after what you have stated. But you must not regard my silence as any condonation of what must always appear to me a step disrespectful to the Crown, contrary to all usages of etiquette, and injurious to his own future and that of his children. His scruples of conscience came too late.'
'I did not say they were exactly that. I believe he learned something which made him consider that his honour required him to withdraw.'
'That may be,' said the Princess, frigidly. 'As I observed, it came lamentably late. You will excuse me if I breakfast in my own rooms this morning.'
Wanda left her, gave the child to a nurse who waited without, and returned to the library. She had offended and pained Mdme. Ottilie, but she had saved her husband from annoyance. She knew that though the Princess was by no means as free from curiosity as she declared herself, she was too high-bred and too proud to solicit a confidence withheld from her.
Sabran was seated at the piano where she had left him, but his forehead rested on the woodwork of it, and his whole attitude was suggestive of sad and absorbed thought and abandonment to regrets that were unavailing.
'It has cost him so much,' she reflected as she looked at him. 'Perhaps it has been a self-sacrifice, a heroism even; and I, from mere wounded feeling, have been angered against him and almost cruel!'
With the exaggeration in self-censure of all generous natures, she was full of remorse at having added any pain to the disappointment which had been his portion; a disappointment none the less poignant, as she saw, because it had been voluntarily, as she imagined, accepted.
As he heard her approach he started and rose, and the expression of his face startled her for a moment; it was so full of pain, of melancholy, almost (could she have believed it) of despair. What could this matter be to affect him thus, since being of the State it could be at its worst only some painful and compromising secret of political life which could have no personal meaning for him? It was surely impossible that mere disappointment——a disappointment self-inflicted——could bring upon him such suffering? But she threw these thoughts away. In her great loyalty she had told herself that she must not even think of this thing, lest she should let it come between them once again and tempt her from her duty and obedience. Her trust in him was perfect.
The abandonment of a coveted distinction was in itself a bitter disappointment, but it seemed to him as nothing beside the sense of submission and obedience compelled from him to Vàsàrhely. He felt as though an iron hand, invisible, weighed on his life, and forced it into subjection. When he had almost grown secure that his enemy's knowledge was a buried harmless thing, it had risen and barred his way, speaking with an authority which it was not possible to disobey. With all his errors he was a man of high courage, who had always held his own with all men. How the old forgotten humiliation of his earliest years revived, and enforced from him the servile timidity of the Slav blood which he had abjured. He had never for an instant conceived it possible to disregard the mandate he received; that an apparently voluntary resignation was permitted to him was, his conscience acknowledged, more mercy than he could have expected. That Vàsàrhely would act thus had not occurred to him; but before the act he could not do otherwise than admit its justice and obey.
But the consciousness of that superior will compelling him, left in him a chill tremor of constant fear, of perpetual self-abasement. What was natural to him was the reckless daring which many Russians, such as Skobeleff, have shown in a thousand ways of peril. He was here forced only to crouch and to submit; it was more galling, more cruel to him than utter exposure would have been. The sense of coercion was always upon him like a dragging chain. It produced on him a despondency, which not even the presence of his wife or the elasticity of his own nature could dispel.
He had to play a part to her, and to do this was unfamiliar and hateful to him. In all the years before he had concealed a fact from her, but he had never been otherwise false. Though to his knowledge there had been always between them the shadow of a secret untold, there had never been any sense upon him of obligation to measure his words, to feign sentiments he had not, to hide behind a carefully constructed screen of untruth. Now, though he had indeed not lied with his lips, he had to sustain a concealment which was a thousand times more trying to him than that concealment of his birth and station to which he had been so long accustomed that he hardly realised it as any error. The very nobility with which she had accepted his silence, and given it, unasked, a worthy construction, smote him with a deeper sense of shame than even that which galled him when he remembered the yoke laid on him by the will of Egon Vàsàrhely.
He roused himself to meet her with composure.
She rested her hand caressingly on his.
'We will never speak of Russia any more. I should be sorry were the Kaiser to think you capricious or disloyal, but you have too much ability to have incurred this risk. Let it all be as though there had never arisen any question of public life for you. I have explained to Aunt Ottilie; she will not weary you with interrogation; she understands that you have acted as your honour bade you. That is enough for those who love you as do she and I.'
Every word she spoke entered his very soul with the cruellest irony, the sharpest reproach. But of these he let her see nothing. Yet he was none the less abjectly ashamed, less passionately self-condemned, because he had to consume his pain in silence, and had the self-control to answer, still with a smile, as he touched a chord or two of music:
'When the Israelites were free they hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt. They deserved eternal exile, eternal bondage. So do I, for having ever been ingrate enough to dream of leaving Hohenszalras for the world of men!'
Then he turned wholly towards the Erard keyboard, and with splendour and might there rolled forth under his touch the military march of Rákóczi: he was glad of the majesty and passion of the music which supplanted and silenced speech.
'That is very grand,' she said, when the last notes had died away. 'One seems to hear theEljén!of the whole nation in it. But play me something more tender, more pathetic——someliederhalf sorrow and half gladness, you know so many of all countries.'
He paused a moment; then his hands wandered lightly across the notes, and called up the mournful folk-songs that he had heard so long, so long, before; songs of the Russian peasants, of the maidens borne off by the Tartar in war, of the blue-eyed children carried away to be slaves, of the homeless villagers beholding their straw-roofed huts licked up by the hungry hurrying flame lit by the Kossack or the Kurd; songs of a people without joy, that he had heard in his childish days, when the great rafts had drifted slowly down the Volga water, and across the plains the lines of chained prisoners had crept as slowly through the dust; or songs that he had sung to himself, not knowing why, where the winter was white on all the land, and the bay of the famished wolves afar off had blent with the shrill sad cry of the wild swans dying of cold and of hunger and of thirst on the frozen rivers, and the reeds were grown hard as spears of iron, and the waves were changed to stone.
The intense melancholy penetrated her very heart. She listened with the tears in her eyes, and her whole being stirred and thrilled by a pain not her own. A kind of consciousness came to her, borne on that melancholy melody, of some unspoken sorrow which lived in this heart which beat so near her own, and whose every throb she had thought she knew. A sudden terror seized her lest all this while she who believed his whole life hers was in truth a stranger to his deepest grief, his dearest memories.
When the last sigh of those plaintive songs without words had died away, she signed to him to approach her.
'Tell me,' she said very gently, 'tell me the truth. Réné, did you ever care for any woman, dead or lost, more than, or as much as, you care for me? I do not ask you if you loved others. I know all men have many caprices, but was any one of them so dear to you that you regret her still? Tell me the truth; I will be strong to bear it.'
He, relieved beyond expression that she but asked him that on which his conscience was clear and his answer could be wholly sincere, sat down at her feet and leaned his head against her knee.
'Never, so hear me God!' he said simply. 'I have loved no woman as I love you.'
'And there is not one that you regret?'
'There is not one.'
'Then what is it that you do regret? Something more weighs on you than the mere loss of diplomatic life, which; after all, to you is no more than the loss of a toy to Bela.'
'If I do regret,' he said, with a smile, 'it is foolish and thankless. The happiness you give me here is worth all the fret and fever of the world's ambitions. You are so great and good to be so little angered with me for my reticence. All my life, such as it is, shall be dedicated to my gratitude.'
Once more an impulse to tell her all passed over him——a sense that he might trust her absolutely for all tenderness and all pity came upon him; but with the weakness which so constantly holds back human souls from their own deliverance, his courage once again failed him. He once more looking at her thought: 'Nay! I dare not. She would never understand, she would never pardon, she would never listen. At the first word she would abhor me.'
He did not dare; he bent his face down on her knees as any child might have done.
'What I ever must regret is not to be worthy of you!' he murmured; and the subterfuge was also a truth.
She looked down at him wistfully with doubt and confusion mingled. She sighed, for she understood that buried in his heart there was some pain he would not share, perchance some half involuntary unfaithfulness he did not dare confess. She thrust this latter thought away quickly; it hurt her as the touch of a hot iron hurts tender flesh; she would not harbour it. It might well be, she knew.
She was silent some little time, then she said calmly:
'I think you worthy. Is not that enough? Never say to me what you do not wish to say. But——but——if there be anything you believe that I should blame, be sure of this, love: I am no fair weather friend. Try me in deep water, in dark storm!'
And still he did not speak.
His evil angel held him back and said to him, 'Nay! she would never forgive.'
One day in this winter time she sat alone in her octagon-room whilst he was out driving in the teeth of a strong wind blowing from the north and frequent bursts of snowstorm. Rapid exercise, eager movements, were necessary to him at once as tonic and as anodyne, and the northern blood that was in him made the bitter cold, the keen and angry air, the conflict with the frantic horses tearing at their curbs welcome and wholesome to him. Paul Zabaroff had many a day driven so over the hard snows of Russian plains.
She sat at home as the twilight drew on, her feet buried in the furs before her chair, the fragrance shed about her from a basket of forced narcissus and bowls full of orange flowers and of violets, the light of the burning wood shining on the variegated and mellow hues of the tiles of the hearth. The last poems of Coppée were on her lap, but her thoughts had wandered away from those to Sabran, to her children, to a thousand happy trifles connected with one or the other. She was dreaming idly in that vague reverie which suits the last hour of the reclining day in the grey still winter of a mountain-land. She was almost sorry when Hubert entered and brought her the mail-bag, which had just come through the gloomy defiles and the frosted woods which stretched between them and Matrey.
'It grows late,' she said to him. 'I fear it will be a stormy night. Have you heard the Marquis return?
He told her that Sabran had not yet driven in, and ventured to add his hope that his master would not be out long; then he asked if she desired the lamps lit, and on being told she did not, withdrew, leaving the leather bag on a table close to one of the Saxe bowls of violets. There was plenty of light from the fire, and even from the windows, to read her letters by; she went first to one of the casements and looked at the night, which was growing very wild and dark. Though day still lingered, she could hear the wind go screaming down the lake, and the rush of the swollen water swirling against the terrace buttresses below. All beyond, woods, hills, mountains, were invisible under the grey mist.
'I hope he will not be late,' she thought, but she was too keen a mountaineer to be apprehensive. Sabran now knew every road and path through all the Tauern as well as she did. She returned to her seat and unlocked the leather bag; there were several newspapers, two letters for the Princess, three or four for Sabran, and one only for herself. She laid his aside for him, sent those of the Princess to her room, and opened her own. The writing of it she did not recognise; it was anonymous, and was very brief.
'If you wish to know why the Marquis de Sabran did not go to Russia, ask Egon Vàsàrhely.'
That was all: so asps are little.
She sat quite still, and felt as if a bolt had fallen on her from the leaden skies without. Vàsàrhely knew, the writer of the letter knew, and she——she——did not know! That was her first distinct thought.
If Sabran had entered the room at that instant she would have held to him this letter, and would have said, 'I ask you, not him.' He was absent, and she sat motionless, keeping the unsigned note in her hand, and staring down on it. Then she turned and looked at the post-mark. It was 'Vienna,' A city of a million souls! What clue to the writer was there? She read it again and again, as even the wisest will read such poisonous things, as though by repeated study that mystery would be compelled to stand out clearly revealed. It did not say enough to have been the mere invention of the sender; it was not worded as an insinuation, but as a fact. For that reason it took a hold upon her mind which would at once have rejected a fouler or a darker suggestion. Although free from any baseness of suspicion there was yet that in the name of her cousin, in juxtaposition with her husband's, which could not do otherwise than startle and carry with it a corroboration of the statement made. A wave of the deep anger which had moved her on her husband's first refusal swept over her again. Her hand clenched, her eyes hashed, where she sat alone in the gathering shadows.
There came a sound at the door of the room and a small golden head came from behind the tapestry.
'May we come in?' said Bela; it was the children's hour.
She rose, and put him backward.
'Not now, my darling; I am occupied. Go away for a little while.'
The women who were with them took the children back to their apartments. She sat down with the note still in her hand. What could it mean? No good thing was ever said thus. She pondered long, and was unable to imagine any sense or meaning it could have, though all the while memories thronged upon, her of words, and looks, and many trifles which had told her of the enmity that was existent between her cousin and Sabran. That she saw; but there her knowledge ceased, her vision failed. She could go no further, conjecture nothing more.
'Ask Egon!' Did they think she would ask him or any living being that which Sabran had refused to confide in her? Whoever wrote this knew her little, she thought. Perhaps there were women who would have done so. She was not one of them.
With a sudden impulse of scorn she cast the sheet of paper into the fire before her. Then she went to her writing-table and enclosed the envelope in another, which she addressed to her lawyers in Salzburg. She wrote with it: 'This is the cover to an anonymous letter which I have received. Try your uttermost to discover the sender.'
Then she sat down again and thought long, and wearily, and vainly. She could make nothing of it. She could see no more than a wayfarer whom a blank wall faces as he goes. The violets and orange blossoms were close at her elbow; she never in after time smelt their perfume without a sick memory of the stunned, stupefied bewilderment of that hour.
The door unclosed again, a voice again spoke behind as a hand drew back the folds of the tapestry.
'What, are you in darkness here? I am very cold. Have you no tea for me?' said Sabran, as he entered, his eyes brilliant; his cheeks warm, from the long gallop against the wind. He had changed his clothes, and wore a loose suit of velvet; the servants, entering behind him, lit the candelabra, and brought in the lamps; warmth, and gladness, and light seemed to come with him; she looked up and thought, 'Ah! what does any thing matter? He is home in safety!'
The impulse to ask of him what she had been bidden to ask of Egon Vàsàrhely had passed with the intense surprise of the first moment. She could not ask of him what she had promised never to seek to know; she could not reopen a long-closed wound. But neither could she forget the letter lying burnt there amongst the flames of the wood. He noticed that her usual perfect calm was broken as she welcomed him, gave him his letters, and bade the servants bring tea; but he thought it mere anxiety, and his belated drive; and being tired with a pleasant fatigue which made rest sweet, he stretched his limbs out on a low couch beside the hearth, and gave himself up to that delicious dreamy sense ofbien-êtrewhich a beautiful woman, a beautiful room, tempered warmth and light, and welcome repose, bring to any man after some hours effort and exposure in wild weather and intense cold and increasing darkness.
'I almost began to think I should not see you to-night,' he said happily, as he took from her hand the little cup of Frankenthal china which sparkled like a jewel in the light. 'I had fairly lost my way, and Josef knew it no better than I; the snow fell with incredible rapidity, and it seemed to grow night in an instant. I let the horses take their road, and they brought us home; but if there be any poor pedlars or carriers on the hills to-night I fear they will go to their last sleep.'
She shuddered and looked at him with dim, fond eyes, 'He is here; he is mine,' she thought; 'what else matters?'
Sabran stretched out his fingers and took some of the violets from the Saxe bowl and fastened them in his coat as he went on speaking of the weather, of the perils of the roads whose tracks were obliterated, and of the prowess and intelligence of his horses, who had found the way home when he and his groom, a man born and bred in the Tauern, had both been utterly at a loss. The octagon-room had never looked lovelier and gayer to him, and his wife had never looked more beautiful than both did now as he came to them out of the darkness and the snowstorm and the anxiety of the last hour.
'Do not run those risks,' she murmured. 'You know all that your life is to me.'
The letter which lay burnt in the fire, and the dusky night of ice and wind without, had made him dearer to her than ever. And yet the startled, shocked sense of some mystery, of some evil, was heavy upon her, and did not leave her that evening nor for many a day after.
'You are not well?' he said to her anxiously later, as they left the dinner-table. She answered evasively.
'You know I am not always quite well now. It is nothing. It will pass.'
'I was wrong to alarm you by being out so late in such weather,' he said with self-reproach. 'I will go out earlier in future.'
'Do not wear those violets,' she said, with a trivial caprice wholly unlike her, as she took them from his coat. 'They are Bonapartist emblems—fleurs de malheur.'
He smiled, but he was surprised, for he had never seen in her any one of those fanciful whims and vagaries that are common to women.
'Give me any others instead,' he said; 'I wear but your symbol, O my lady!'
She took some myrtle and lilies of the valley from one of the large porcelain jars in the Rittersaal.
'These are our flowers,' she said as she gave them to him. 'They mean love and peace.'
He turned from her slightly as he fastened them where the others had been.
All the evening she was pre-occupied and nervous. She could not forget the intimation she had received. It was intolerable to her to have anything of which she could not speak to her husband. Though they had their own affairs apart one from the other, there had been nothing of moment in hers that she had ever concealed from him. But here it was impossible for her to speak to him, since she had pledged herself never to seek to know the reason of an action which, however plausibly she explained it to herself, remained practically inexplicable and unintelligible. It was terrible to her, too, to feel that the lines of a coward who dared not sign them had sunk so deeply into her mind that she did not question their veracity. They had at once carried conviction to her that Egon Vàsàrhely did know what they said he did. She could not have told why this was, but it was so. It was what hurt her most——others knew; she did not.
She felt that if she could have spoken to Sabran of it, the matter would have become wholly indifferent to her; but the obligation of reticence, the sense of separation which it involved, oppressed her greatly. She was also haunted by the memory of the enmity which existed between these men, whose names were so strangely coupled in the anonymous counsel given her.
She stayed long in her oratory that night, seeking vainly for calmness and patience under this temptation; seeking beyond all things for strength to put the poison of it wholly from her mind. She dreaded lest it should render her irritable and suspicious. She reproached herself for having been guilty of even so much insinuation of rebuke to him as her words with the flower had carried in them. She had ideas of the duties of a woman to her husband widely different to those which prevail in the world. She allowed herself neither irritation nor irony against him. 'When the thoughts rebel, the acts soon revolt,' she was wont to say to herself, and even in her thoughts she would never blame him.
Prayer, even if it have no other issue or effect, rarely fails to tranquillise and fortify the heart which is lifted up ever so vaguely in search of a superhuman aid. She left her oratory strengthened and calmed, resolved in no way to allow such partial success to their unknown foe as would be given if the treacherous warning brought any suspicion or bitterness to her mind. She passed through the open archway in the wall which divided his rooms from hers, and looked at him where he lay already asleep upon his bed, early fatigued by the long cold drive from which he had returned at nightfall. He was never more handsome than sleeping calmly thus, with the mellow light of a distant lamp reaching the fairness of his face. She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes; then stooped and kissed him without awaking him.
'Ah! my love,' she thought, 'what should ever come between us? Hardly even death, I think, for if I lost you I should not live long without you.'
The Salzburg lawyers employed all the resources of the Viennese police to discover the sender of the envelope, but vainly; nothing was learned by all the efforts made. But the letter constantly haunted her thoughts. It produced in her an uneasiness and an apprehensiveness wholly foreign to her temper. The impossibility also of saying anything about it increased the weight of it on her memory. Yet she never once thought of asking Vàsàrhely. She wrote to him now and then, as she had always done, to give him tidings of her health or of her movements, but she never once alluded in the most distant terms to the anonymous information she had received. If he had been there beside her she would not have spoken of it. Of the two, she would sooner have reopened the subject to her husband. But she never did so. She had promised him to be silent, and to her creed a promise was inviolate, never to be retracted, be the pressure or the desire to do so what it would.
It was these grand lines on which her character and her habits were cast that awed him, and made him afraid to tell her his true history. Had he revered her less he would probably have deceived her less. Had she been of a less noble temperament she would also probably have been much less easy to deceive.
Her health was at this time languid, and more uncertain than usual, and the two lines of the letter were often present to her thoughts, tormenting her with idle conjecture, painful doubt, none the less painful because it could take no definite shape. Sometimes when she was not well enough to accompany him out of doors or drive her own sleigh through the keen clear winter air, she sat doing nothing, and thinking only of this thing, in the same room, with the same smell of violets about her, musing on what it might by any possibility mean. Any secret was safe with Egon, but then since the anonymous writer was in possession of it the secret was not only his. She wondered sometimes in terror whether it could be anything that might in after years affect her children's future, and then as rapidly discarded the bare thought as so much dishonour to their father. 'It is only because I am now nervous and impressionable,' she said to herself,'that this folly takes such a hold upon me. When I am well again I shall not think of it. Who is it says of anonymous letters that they are like "les immondices des rues: il faut boucher le nez, tourner la tête et passer outre?"'
But 'les immondices' spoiled the odours of the new year violets to her.
In the early spring of the year she gave birth to another son. She suffered more than she had ever done before, and recovered less quickly. The child was like all the others, fair, vigorous, and full of health. She wished to give him her husband's name, but Sabran so strenuously opposed the idea that she yielded, and named him after her brother Victor, who had fallen at Magenta.
There were the usual rejoicings throughout the estates, rejoicings that were the outcome of genuine affection and fealty to the race of Szalras, whose hold on the people of the Tauern had resisted all the revolutionary movements of the earlier part of the century, and had fast root in the hearts of the staunch and conservative mountaineers. But for the first time as she heard the hearty 'Hoch!' of the assembled peasantry echoing beneath her windows, and the salvos fired from the old culverins on the keep, a certain fear mingled with her maternal pride, and she thought: 'Will the people love them as well twenty years hence, fifty years hence, when I shall be no more? Will my memory be any shield to them? Will the traditions of our race outlast the devouring changes of the world?'
Meantime the Princess, happy and smiling, showed the little new-born noble to the stalwart chamois hunters, the comely farmers and fishermen, the clear-eyed stout-limbed shepherds and labourers gathered bareheaded round the Schloss.
Bela stood by contemplating the crowd he knew so well; he did not see why they should cheer any other child beside himself. He stood with his little velvet cap in his hand, because he was always told to do so, but he felt very inclined to put it on; if his father had not been present there he would have done so.
'If I have ever so many brothers,' he said at last thoughtfully to Greswold, who was by his side, 'it will not make any difference, will it? I shall always betheone?'
'What do you mean?' asked the physician.
'They will none of them be like me? They will none of them be as great as I am? Not if I have twenty?'
'You will be always the eldest son, of course,' said the old man, repressing a smile. 'Yes; you will be their head, their chief, their leading spirit; but for that reason you will have much more expected of you than will be expected of them; you will have to learn much more, and try to be always good. Do you follow me, Count Bela?'
Bela's little rosy mouth shut itself up contemptuously. 'I shall be always the eldest, and I shall do whatever I like. I do not see why they want any others than me.'
'You will not do always what you like, Count Bela.'
'Who shall prevent me?'
'The law, which you will have to obey like everyone else.'
'I shall make the laws when I am a little older,' said Bela. 'And they will be for my brothers and all the people, but not for me. I shall do what I like.'
'That will be very ungenerous,' said Greswold, quietly. 'Your mother, the Countess, is very different. She is stern to herself, and indulgent to all others. That is why she is beloved. If you will think of yourself so much when you are grown up, you will be hated.'
Bela flushed a little guiltily and angrily.
'That will not matter,' he said sturdily. 'I shall please myself always.'
'And be unkind to your brothers?'
'Not if they do what I tell them; I will be very kind if they are good. Gela always does what I tell him,' he added after a little pause; 'I do not want any but Gela.'
'It is natural you should be fondest of Gela, as he is nearest your age, but you must love all the brothers you may have, or you will distress your mother very greatly.'
'Why does she want any but me?' said Bela, clinging to his sense of personal wrong. And he was not to be turned from that.
'She wants others beside you,' said the physician, adroitly, 'because to be happy she needs children who are tender-hearted, unselfish, and obedient. You are none of those things, my Count Bela, so Heavens ends her consolation.'
Bela opened his blue eyes very wide, and he coloured with mortification.
'She always loves me best!' he said haughtily. 'She always will!'
'That will depend on yourself, my little lord,' said Greswold, with a significance which was not lost on the quick intelligence of the child; and he never forgot this day when his brother Victor was shown to the people.
'There will be no lack of heirs to Hohenszalras,' said the Princess meanwhile to his father.
He thought as he heard:
'And if ever she know she can break her marriage like a rotten thread! Those boys can all be made as nameless as I was! Would she do it? Perhaps not, for the children's sake. God knows——she might change even to them; she might hate them as she loves them now, because they are mine.'
Even as he sat beside her couch with her hand in his these thoughts pursued and haunted him. Remorse and fear consumed him. When she looked at the blue eyes of her new-born son, and said to him with a happy smile: 'He will be just as much like you as the others are,' he could only think with a burning sense of shame, 'Like me! like a traitor! like a liar! like a thief!'——and the faces of these children seemed to him like those of avenging angels.
He thought with irrepressible agony of the fact that her country's laws would divorce her from him if she chose, did ever the truth come to her ear. He had always known this indeed, as he had known all the other risks he ran in doing what he did. Put it had been far away, indistinct, unasserted; whenever the memory of it had passed over him he had thrust it away. Now when another knew his secret, he could not do so. He had a strange sensation of having fallen from some great height; of having all his life slide away like melting ice out of his hands. He never once doubted for an instant the good faith of Egon Vàsàrhely. He knew that his lips would no more unclose to tell his secret than the glaciers yonder would find human voice. But the consciousness that one man lived, moved, breathed, rose with each day, and went amongst other men, bearing with him that fatal knowledge, made it now impossible for himself ever to forget it. A dull remorse, a sharp apprehension, were for ever his companions, and never left him for long even in his sweetest hours. He did justice to the magnificent generosity of the one who spared him. Egon Vàsàrhely knew, as he knew, that she, hearing the truth, could annul the marriage if she chose. His children would have no rights, no name, if their mother chose to separate herself from him. The law would make her once more as free as though she had never wedded him. He knew that, and the other man who loved her knew it too. He could measure the force of Vàsàrhely's temptation as that simple and heroic soldier could not stoop to measure his.
He was deeply unhappy, but he concealed it from her. Even when his heart beat against hers it seemed to him always that there was an invisible wall between himself and her. He longed to tell the whole truth to her, but he was afraid; if the whole pain and shame had been his own that the confession would have caused, he would have dared it; but he had not the heart to inflict on her such suffering, not the courage to destroy their happiness with his own hand. Egon Vàsàrhely alone knew, and he for her sake would never speak. As for the reproach of his own conscience, as for the remorse that the words of his children might at any moment call up in him, these lie must bear. He was a man of cool judgment and of ready resource, and though he had never foreseen the sharp repentance which his better nature now felt, he knew that he would be able to live it down as he had crushed out so many other scruples. He vowed to himself that as far as in him lay he would atone for his act. The moral influence of his wife had not been without effect on him. Not altogether, but partially, he had grown to believe in what she believed in, of the duty of human life to other lives; he had not her sympathy for others, but he had admired it, and in his own way followed it, though without her faith.
Life went on in its old pathways at Hohenszalras. Nothing more, was said by him, or to him, as to his rejection of the Russian mission. She was niggard in nothing, and when she offered her faith or pledged her silence, gave both entirely and ungrudgingly. Sabran to her showed an increase of devotion, an absolute adoration which would in themselves have sufficed to console any woman; and if the most observant member of their household, Greswold, perceived in him a preoccupation, a languor, a gloom, which boded ill for their future peace, the old man was too loyal in his attachment not to endeavour to shake off his own suspicions and discredit his own penetration.
The Princess had been favoured by a note from Olga Brancka, in which that lady wrote: 'Have you discovered the nature of his refusal of Russia? Myself, I believe that I was to blame. I hinted to him that he would be tempted to his old sins in St. Petersburg, and that Wanda would be very miserable there. It seems that this was enough for the tender heart of this devoted lover, and too much for his wisdom and his judgment; he rejected the mission after accepting it. I believe the Court is furious. I am notde servicenow, so that I have no opportunity of endeavouring to restore him to favour; but I imagine the Emperor will not quarrel for ever with the Hohenszalrasburg.
The letter restored him at least to the favour of Mdme. Ottilie. Exaggerated as such a scruple appeared it did not seem to her impossible in a man whose devotion to his wife she daily witnessed, shown in a hundred traits. She blamed him still severely in her own thoughts for what she held an inexcusable disrespect to the Crown, but she kept her word scrupulously and never spoke to him on the subject.
'Where else in the wide world would any man have found such forbearance?' he thought with gratitude, and he knew that nowhere would such delicate sentiment have existed outside the pale of that fine patrician dignity which is as incapable of the vulgarity of inquisitiveness and interrogation as was the Spartan of lament.
The months went by. They did not leave home; he seemed to have lost all wish for any absence, and even repulsed the idea of inviting the usual house parties of the year. She supposed that he was averse to meeting people who might recur to his rejection of the post he had once accepted. The summer passed and the autumn came; he spent his time in occasional sport, the keen and perilous sport of the Austrian mountains, and more often and more faithfully beguiled himself with those arts of which he was a brilliant master, though he would call himself no more than a mere amateur. From the administration of the estates he had altogether withdrawn himself.
'You are so much wiser than I,' he always said to her; and when she would have referred to him, replied: 'You have your lawyers; they are all honest men. Consult them rather than me.'
With the affairs of Idrac only he continued to concern himself a little, and was persistent in setting aside all its revenues to accumulate for his second son.
'I wish you cared more about all these things,' she said to him one day, when she had in her hand the reports from the mines of Galicia. He answered angrily, 'I have no right to them. They are not mine. If you chose to give them all away to the Crown I should say nothing.'
'Not even for the children's sake?'
'No: you would be entirely justified if you liked to give the children nothing.'
'I really do not understand you,' she said in great surprise.
'Everything is yours,' he said abruptly.
'And the children too, surely!' she said, with a smile: but the strangeness of the remark disquieted her. 'It is over-sensitiveness,' she thought; 'he can never altogether forget that he was poor. It is for that reason public life would have been so good for him; dignities which he enjoyed of his own, honours that he arrived at through his own attainments.'
Chagrined to have lost, the opportunity of winning personal honours in a field congenial to him, the sense that everything was hers could hardly fail to gall him sometimes constantly, though she strove to efface any remembrance or reminder that it was so.
In the midsummer of that year, whilst they were quite alone, they were surprised by another letter from Mdme. Brancka, in which she proposed to take Hohenszalras on her way from France to Tsarköe Selo, where she was about to pay a visit which could not be declined by her.
When in the spring he had written with formality to her to announce the birth of his son Victor, she had answered with a witty coquettish reply such as might well have been provocative of further correspondence. But he had not taken up the invitation. Mortified and irritated, she had compared his writing with the piece of burnt paper, and been more satisfied than ever that he had penned the name of Vassia Kazán. But even were it so, what, she wondered, had it to do with Russia? He and Egon Vàsàrhely were not friends so intimate that they had any common interests one with the other. The mystery had interested her intensely when her rapid intuition had connected the resignation of Sabran's appointment with the messenger sent to him from Taróc. Her impatience to be again in his presence grew intense. She imagined a thousand stories, to cast each aside in derision as impossible. All her suppositions were built upon no better basis than a fragment of charred paper; but her shrewd intuition bore her into the region of truth, though the actual truth of course never suggested itself to her even in her most fantastic and dramatic visions. Finally she thus proposed to visit Hohenszalras in the midsummer months.
'Last year you had such a crowd about you,' she wrote, 'that I positively saw nothing of you,liebeWanda. You are alone now, and I venture to propose myself for a fortnight. You cannot exactly be said to be in the way to anywhere, but I shall make you so. When one is going to Russia, a matter of another five hundred miles or so is a bagatelle.'
'We must let her come,' said Wanda, as she gave the letter to Sabran, who, having read it, said with much sincerity——
'For heaven's sake, do not. A fortnight of Madame Olga! as well have——a century of "Madame Angot!"'
'Can I prevent her?'
'You can make some excuse. I do not like Mdme. Brancka.'
'Why?'
He hesitated; he could not tell her what he had felt at the ball of the Hofburg. 'She reminds me of a woman who drew me into a thousand follies, and to cap her good deeds betrayed me to the Prussians. If you must let her come I will go away. I will go and see your haras on the Pusztas.'
'Are you serious?'
'Quite serious. Were I not ashamed of such a weakness, I should use a feminine expression. I should say "elle me donne des nerfs."'
'I think she has a great admiration for you, and she does not conceal it.'
'Merely because she is sensible that I do not like her. Such women as she are discontented if only one person fail to admit their charm. She is accustomed to admiration, and she is not scrupulous as to how she obtains it.'
'My dear! pray remember that she is our guest, and doubly our relative.'
'I will try and remember it; but, believe me, all honour is wholly wasted upon Mdme. Olga. You offer her a coin of which the person and the superscription are alike unknown to her.'
'You are very severe,' said his wife.
She looked at him, and perceived that he was not jesting, that he was on the contrary disturbed and annoyed, and she remembered the persistence with which Olga Brancka had sought his companionship and accompanied him on his sport in the summer of her visit there.
'If she had not married first my brother and then my cousin, she would never have been an intimate friend of mine,' she continued. 'She is of a world wholly opposed to all my tastes. For you to be absent, if she came, would be too marked, I think; but we can both leave, if you like. I am well enough for any movement now, and I can leave the child with his nurse. Shall we make a tour in Hungary? The haras will interest you. There are the mines, too, that one ought to visit.'
He received her assent with gratitude and delight. He felt that he would have gone to the uttermost ends of the earth rather than run the risk of spending long lonely summer days in the excitation of Mdme. Brancka's presence. He detested her, he would always detest her; and yet when he shut his eyes he saw her so clearly, with the malicious light in her dusky glance, and the jewelled butterfly trembling about her breasts.
'She shall never come under Wanda's roof if I can prevent it,' he thought, remembering her as she had been that night.
A few days later the Countess Brancka, much to her rage, had a note from the Hohenszalrasburg, which said that they were on the point of leaving for Hungary and Galicia, but that if she would come there in their absence, the Princess Ottilie, who remained, would be charmed to receive her. Of course she excused herself, and did not go. A visit to the solitudes of the Iselthal, where she would, see no one but a lady of eighty years old and four little children, had few attractions for the adventurous and vivacious wife of Stefan Brancka.
'It is only Wanda's jealousy,' she thought, and was furious; but she looked at herself in the mirror, and was almost consoled as she thought also, 'He avoids me. Therefore he is afraid of me!'
She went to her god,le monde, and worshipped at all its shrines and in all its fashions; but in the midst of the turmoil and the triumphs, the worries and the intoxications of her life, she did not lose her hold on her purpose, nor forget that he had slighted her. His beautiful face, serene and scornful, was always before her. He might have been at her feet, and he chose to dwell beside his wife under those solitary forests, amongst those solitary mountains of the High Tauern!
'With a woman he has lived with all these eight years!' she thought, with furious impatience. 'With a woman who has grafted the Lady of La Garaye on Libussa, who never gives him a moment's jealousy, who is as flawless as an ivory statue or a marble throne, who suckles her children and could spin their clothes if she wanted, who never cares to go outside the hills of her own home——the TeutonHausfrauto her finger-tips.' And she was all the more bitter and the more angered because, always as she tried to think thus, the image of Wanda rose up before her, as she had seen her so often at Vienna or Hohenszalras, with the great pearls on her hair and on her breast.
A planet at whose passing, lo!All lesser stars recede, and nightGrows clear as day thus lighted upBy all her loveliness, which burnsWith pure white flame of chastity;And fires of fair thought....
CONTENTSCHAPTER XI.CHAPTER XII.CHAPTER XIII.CHAPTER XIV.CHAPTER XV.CHAPTER XVI.CHAPTER XVII.CHAPTER XVIII.CHAPTER XIX.CHAPTER XX.CHAPTER XXI.CHAPTER XXII.CHAPTER XXIII.CHAPTER XXIV.CHAPTER XXV.CHAPTER XXVI.CHAPTER XXVII.CHAPTER XXVIII.