Greswold withdrew and left them alone. Vàsàrhely was still wrapped in the furs in which he had travelled. He stood erect and listened; his face was very stern.
'Did you give up my secret to your brother's wife?' said Sabran, abruptly.
'Can you ask that?' said Vàsàrhely. 'You had my word.'
'Madame Brancka knows all that you know. She said that you had betrayed me to her. She would have told Wanda. I chose sooner to tell her myself. The shock has killed the child. It may kill her. Your sister-in-law is here. If she used your name falsely it is for you to avenge it.'
'Tell me what passed between you,' said Prince Egon. His face was dark as night.
Sabran hesitated a moment. Even now he could not bring himself to disclose the passion which his enemy had conceived for him. It was one of those women's secrets which no gentleman can surrender to another.
'You are aware,' he replied, 'that Madame Brancka has been always envious of your cousin; always willing to hurt her. When she got possession of the story of my past she used it without mercy. She would have told my wife with brutality; I told her myself, hoping to spare her something by my own confession. Madame Brancka affirmed to me, twice or thrice over, that you had given her all the information against me.'
'How could you believe her? You had had my promise.'
'How could I doubt her?'
'It is natural you should know nothing of honour!' thought Vàsàrhely, but he did not utter what he thought. He saw that, dark as had been the crimes of Sabran against those of his race, the chastisement of them was as great.
He said simply:
'You might sooner have doubted anything than have believed that I should entrust the Countess Brancka with such a secret, and have given her such a power to injure my cousin. How can she have learned your history? Have you betrayed yourself?'
'Never! Since she had it not from you, I cannot conceive how or where she learned it. Not a soul lives that knows me as——'
He paused; he could not bring himself to say the name he bore from birth.
'My brother is unfortunate,! said Vàsàrhely, curtly. 'He has wedded a vile woman. Leave her to me.'
He saluted Sabran with cold but careful ceremony, and went, to his own apartments. Sabran passed to the corridor which led to his wife's rooms, and there resumed his miserable restless walk to and fro before her door. He dared not enter. In her conscious hours she had not asked for him. He had ever present before his eyes that movement of horror, of repulsion, with which she had drawn the hem of her gown from his grasp.
Now and again, when her attendants came in and out, he saw through the opening of the door the bed on which she lay and the outline of her form in the pale light of the lamp. He could not rest. He could not even sit down or break a mouthful of bread. If she died, his sin against her would have slain her as surely as though his hand had taken her life. It was about six of the clock in the chilly dawn of the autumnal day.
Egon Vàsàrhely passed the next three hours in mental conflict with his own passions. It would have been precious to him—would have been a blessed and sacred duty—to avenge the woman he adored. But he had a harder task. For her sake he had to befriend the traitor who had wronged her, and shelter him from the just opprobrium of the world. Crueller combat with temptation none ever waged than he fought now against his own truest instincts, his own dearest affections. She lay there, perchance dying, of this treachery which had struck her down in her happiest hours; and it seemed to him as if, through the silence of the darkened and melancholy house, he heard her voice saying to him: 'For my sake, spare him—spare my children!'
'I give you more than my life, my beloved!' he murmured, as he sat alone, whilst the grey day widened over forest and mountain, and for her sake prepared to shield the man who had deceived her from disgrace and death.
'The hound!' he thought. 'He should be branded as a perjurer and thief throughout the world! Yet for her—for her—one must protect him.'
An hour or two later he sent his name to the Countess Brancka, with a request to be received by her. She was but then awaking, and heard with astonishment and alarm of his arrival, so unlooked for and so dreaded. It had never occurred to her as possible that he would come to Hohenszalras.
'Wanda must have sent for him!' she thought. 'Oh heavens! why could she not die with the child!'
It was impossible for her to avoid him; shut up here she could neither deceive nor escape him. She could not go away without her departure being known to the whole household. She was afraid of him, terribly afraid; the Vàsàrhely had a hand of iron when they were offended or injured. But she put a fair face on a bitter obligation, and, when she was dressed, went with a pretty smile into the salon to receive him.
Vàsàrhely gave her no greeting as he entered. A great fear took possession of her as she saw the expression of his eyes. He was the only living being of whom she was in awe. He approached her without any observances of courtesy. He said, simply and sternly:
'I hear that you have used my name falsely, to the husband of Wanda; that you have dared to give me as your authority for accusations against him. What is your excuse?'
She was for the moment so bewildered and disturbed by his presence and his charge that she lost all her ability and power of interminable falsehood. She was silent, and he saw her bosom heave and her hands tremble a little.
'What is your excuse?' he said again. 'Why did you come into this house to injure Wanda von Szalras? How did you dare to use my name to do her that injury?'
She tried to laugh a little, but she was nervous and thrown off her guard.
'I wished to do her a service! Since she has married an adventurer—an impostor—she ought to know it and be free.'
'What is your authority for calling the Marquis de Sabran an adventurer? To him you employed my name as your authority. What truth was beneath that lie?'
She was silent. For the only time in her life she knew not what to say. She had no facts in her hands. Her ground was too uncertain to sustain her in a steady attitude.
'You know that he is Vassia Kazán!' she said, with another little laugh.
The face of Vàsàrhely revealed nothing.
'Who is Vassia Kazán?' he repeated.
'He is—the man who robbed you of Wanda.'
'He could not rob me of what I never possessed. What grounds have you for calling him by this name?'
'I have reason to believe it.'
'Reason to believe it! You told him that you heard this story from myself.'
'He never denied it.'
'I am not concerned to discuss what he did or did not do. I come here to know on what grounds you employed my name?'
'Egon, I will tell you the truth!'
'Can you?'
'Yes; I can and I will. When I was at Taróc, three summers ago, I saw a fragment of a letter in Sabran's writing. I saw the name of Vassia Kazán. I put this and that together. I heard something from Russia; I sent some people to Mexico. I had always had my suspicions. I do not say I have any positive legal proof, but I am morally convinced that he is no Marquis de Sabran, and that he was born a serf near the city of Kazán. I have charged him with it, and he has as good as confessed it. He was struck dumb with consciousness.'
She watched the face of Vàsàrhely, but it might have been cast in bronze for anything that it told her.
'You saw a fragment of a letter, of which you knew nothing,' he said coldly; 'you formed some vague suspicions; you descended to the use of spies, and, because you have invented a theory of your own on your so-called discoveries, you deem you have a title to ruin the happiness of your cousin's home. And you father your work upon me! Often have I pitied my brother, but never so deeply as now.'
'If my so-called discoveries were false,' she interrupted, with hardihood, 'why did he not say so? He was convicted by his own admissions. If my charge had been baseless, would he have said that he would tell his wife himself rather than let her learn it from me?'
'I neither know nor care what he said,' answered Vàsàrhely. 'I have only your version for it. You must pardon me if I do not attach implicit credence to your word. What I do know is that you ventured to use my name to give force and credibility to your accusations. Had you really known for certainty such a history, you would, had you had any decency or feeling, have consulted your husband and myself on the best means of shielding our cousin's honour. But you have always envied and hated her. What is her husband to you—what is it to you whether he be a noble or a clown? You snatch at the first brand you think you see, in the hope to scorch her honour with it. But when you used my name falsely you did a dangerous thing for yourself. I shall waste no more words upon you, but you will sign what I write now, or you will repent it.'
She affected to laugh.
'My dear Egon,quel ton de maître!What authority have you over me? Even if you invest yourself in your brother's, that counts for very little, I assure you.'
'Perhaps so; but if my brother be too careless of his honour and too credulous of your deceptions, he is yet man enough to resent such infamy as you have been guilty of now. You will sign this.'
He passed to her a few lines which he had already written and brought with him. They ran thus:
'I, Olga, Countess Brancka, do acknowledge that I most untruthfully used the name of my husband's brother, the Prince Vàsàrhely, in an endeavour to injure the gentleman known as the Marquis de Sabran; and I hereby do ask the pardon of them both, and confess that in such pardon I receive great leniency and forbearance.'
'Sign it,' said Prince Egon.
'Pshaw!' said Madame Brancka, and pushed it away with a loud laugh, deigning no further answer.
'Will you sign it or not?' asked Vàsàrhely.
She replied by tearing it in shreds.
'It is easily rewritten,' he said, unmoved. He went to a writing-table that stood in the room, looked for paper and found it, and wrote out the same formula.
'Do not be foolish, Olga,' he said curtly, as he returned. 'You are a clever woman, and always consult your own interests. I dare say you have done a thousand things as base as your attempt to ruin my cousin's happiness, but I do not suppose you have often done anything so unwise. You will sign this at once, or you will regret it very greatly.'
'Why should I sign it?' she said insolently. 'The man is what I say; he could not deny it. If I only guessed at the truth, I guessed aright. I wonder that you do not seeyourinterests lie in exposing him. When the world knows he is an impostor Wanda will divorce him and put the children under other names in religious houses. Then you will be able to marry her. I told him she would marry youpour balayer la honte.'
For the moment she was alarmed at the fires that leapt from Vàsàrhely's sombre eyes. It cost him much—as much as it had cost Sabran—not to strike her where she stood. He paused a second to control himself, then answered her coldly and calmly—
'My cousin will never seek a divorce, nor shall I wed with a divorced woman. Your hate misleads you; there is no blinder thing than hate. You will sign this paper, or I shall telegraph for my brother.'
'For Stefan!'
All her boundless indifference to her husband, and her contempt for him, were spoken in the accent she gave his name.
'For Stefan. You are pleased to despise him because you can lead him into mad follies, and can make him believe you are an innocent woman. But Stefan is not altogether the ignoble dupe you think him. He is a dupe, wiser men than he have been so; but he would not bear your infidelity to him if he really knew it, nor would he bear other things if he knew of them. Two years ago you took two hundred thousand florins' worth of diamonds, in my name, from my jeweller Landsee in the Graben. How should a tradesman suspect that a Countess Brancka was dishonest? At the end of the year he brought his bill for that and other things to me, whilst I was in Vienna. He had never, of course, doubted that you went on my authority. Equally, of course, I did not betray you, but paid the amount. When you do such things you should not give written orders. They remain against you. Now, if Stefan knew this, or if he knew that you had taken money from the richest of your lovers, the young Duc de Blois, as I knew it so long as seven years ago, you would no longer find him the malleable easily-cozened fool you deem him. You would learn that he has Vàsàrhely blood in him. I have only named two out of the many questionable facts I know against you. They have been safe with me. I would never urge Stefan to a public scandal. But, unless you sign this, and apologise for using my name to the husband of my cousin, as you used it to Landsee of the Graben, I shall tell my brother. He will not divorce you. That is not our way; we do not go to lawyers to redress our wrongs. But he will compel you to retire for your life into a religious house—as you would compel the harmless children of Wanda; or he would imprison you himself in one of our lonely places in the mountains, where you would cry in vain for your lovers, and your friends, and yourmenus plaisirs, and none would hear you. Do not mistake me. You have often called us barbaric; you will find we can be so. As I say, we do not carry our wrongs to lawyers. We can avenge ourselves.'
She had lost all colour as he spoke. A nervous spasm of laughter contracted her mouth, and remained on it like the ghastlyrictusof death. She knew him well enough to know that he meant every syllable he said. The Vàsàrhely had had stern tragedies in their annals, and to women impure and unfaithful had been merciless as Othello.
She felt that she was vanquished; that she would have to obey him or suffer worse things. But though she was aware of her own impotence, she could not resist a retort that should sting him.
'You are very chivalrous! I always knew you had an insane adoration of your cousin, but I never should have thought you would have put on sabre and spurs in her husband's defence. Will he reward you by effacing himself? Will he end as he has begun, like the hero of a melodrama at the Gymnase, and shoot himself at Wanda's feet? You would marry a widow, though you would not marry a divorced woman!'
'Some time ago, when we spoke of him,' he replied, still with stern self-control, 'I told you that were his honour called in question I would defend it as I would my brother's—not for his sake, for hers. I would, for her sake, defend it so were he the guiltiest soul on earth. He belongs to her. He is sacred to me. You mistake if you deem her such a woman as yourself. She has loved him. She will love no other whilst she lives. She has given herself to him. She will give herself to no other, though she outlive him from this hour. You make your calculations unwisely, for when you make them you suppose that every man and every woman have your own dishonesty, your own passions, your own baseness. You are short of sight, because you only see in the circle of your own conceptions.'
She understood that he knew the secret of the man he protected, but that he would never admit that he did so; would never reveal it or let any other reveal it. She understood that he had himself forborne from its exposure, and would never, whilst he lived, allow any other to hold it up to the derision of the world. She understood that, if need were, Vàsàrhely would defend, as he said, the honour of his cousin's husband at the point of the sword against all foes or mockers.
'For her sake!' she cried, 'always for her sake! What can you both see so marvellous in her? She has been a greater fool than any woman that has ever lived, though she can read Greek and write in Latin! What has she done with all her wisdom and her holiness? You know as well as though it were written there upon the wall that he is what I say. Why do you put your lance in rest for him? Why are you ready to shed blood on his behalf? He is an impostor who has taken in first the world and then the mistress of Hohenszalras. If you were the hero you have always seemed to me you would tear his heart out of his breast, shoot him like a wolf in these very woods! If her honour is yours, avenge her dishonour!'
She spoke with force and fire, and longing to behold the spirit of evil roused in her hearer's soul and stung to action.
But she might as well have tried to move the mountains from their base as rouse either pain or rage in her brother-in-law. Vàsàrhely kept his attitude of stern, cold, contemptuous disgust. Not a muscle of his face changed. He said merely:
'You have been told what I shall do if you do not sign this paper. The choice is yours. If you desire to hear any more episodes of your past I can tell you many.'
Then she changed her attitude and her eloquence. She dissolved in tears; she wept; she implored; she tried to kneel to him. But he was inflexible.
'You are a good actress,' he said simply. 'But you forget; it is Stefan whom you can deceive, not me.'
When she had vainly used all her resources of alternate entreaty and invective, of cajolery and insolence, she sank into her chair, exhausted, hysterical, nerveless.
'I am ill; call my woman,' she said faintly.
He replied:
'You are no more ill than I am.'
'You are brutal, Egon,' she said, raising herself, with flashing eyes and hissing tongue.
'What have you been to her?' said Vàsàrhely.
He waited with cold, inflexible patience. When another half-hour had gone by she signed the paper, and flung it with fury to him.
'You know very well it is true!' she cried, as she leaned across the table like a slender snake that darted. 'Would she lie dying of it if it were only a lie?'
'That I know not,' said Vàsàrhely, coldly. 'What I know is that your carriage will be ready in an hour, and that you will go hence. If ever you be tempted to speak of what has occurred here, you will remember that my silence to Stefan and your own people is only conditional on yours on another matter.'
Then he left her.
She was cowed, intimidated, vanquished. When the hour was over she went through the two lines of bowing servants, and left Hohenszalras ere the noon was past.
'It is the first time in my life I ever failed,' she thought, as the pinnacles and towers of the burg were lost to her sight. 'What do these men see in that woman?'
Vàsàrhely, when he left her, went straight to Sabran, who, seated on an oaken bench in the corridor of his wife's apartments, knew not how the hours passed, and seemed aged ten years in a day. Vàsàrhely motioned him to pass into one of the empty chambers. There he gave him the lines which Olga Brancka had signed.
'You are safe from her,' he said. 'She cannot tell your story to the world. She will not dare even to whisper it as a conjecture.'
Sabran did not speak. This great debt owed to his greatest foe hurt him even whilst it delivered him.
'For the first time I have concealed the truth,' pursued Vàsàrhely. 'I affected to disbelieve her story. There was no other way to save it from publicity. That alone would not have sufficed, but I had means to coerce her.'
'You have been very generous.'
Vàsàrhely shrank from his praise as though from some insolence. He did not look at Sabran; he spoke briefly between his closed teeth. All his soul was full of longing to strike this man; to meet him in open combat and to kill him; forcing him and his foul secret together down underneath the sole sure cover of the grave. But the sense that so near, within a few feet of them, she lay in peril of her life, made even vengeance seem for the moment profane and blasphemous.
'There will be always time,' he thought.
That hushed and darkened chamber hard by awed his hatred into silence. What would she wish? What would she command? Could he but know that, how clear would be his path!
He hesitated a moment, then turned away.
'I shall wait here until the danger is past, or she is called to God,' he said hoarsely.
Then he walked away down the corridor slowly, like a man wounded with a wound that bleeds within.
Sabran stood awhile where he had left him, his eyes bent on the ground, his heart sick with shame.
'Hewas worthy of her!' he thought with the most bitter pang of his life.
Three more days and nights passed; they were to him like a hideous nightmare; at times he thought with horror that he would lose his reason. The dreadful stillness, the dreadful silence, the knowledge that death was so near that bed which he dared not approach, the impossibility of learning what memories of him, what hatred of him, might not be haunting the stupor in which she lay, together made up a torture to which her bitterest reproach, her deadliest punishment would have seemed merciful.
All through that exhaustion, in which they believed her mind was without consciousness, the memory of all that he had told her was alive in it, in that poignant remembrance which the confusion of a dulled brain only makes but the more terrible, turning and changing what it suffers from into a thousand shapes. In her worst agony this consciousness never left her; she kept silence because in her uttermost weakness she was strong enough not to give her woe to the ears of the others, but in her heart there seemed a great knife plunged, a knife rusted with blood that was dishonoured.
When she knew that the child she bore was dead, she felt no sorrow, she thought only—'Begotten of a serf, of a coward!'
The intolerable outrage, the intolerable deception, were like flames of fire that seemed to eat up her life; her love for him, for the hour at least, had been stunned and ceased to speak. To the woman who came of the races of Szalras and Vàsàrhely, the dishonour covered every other memory.
'All his life only one long lie!' she thought.
Her race had been stainless through a thousand years of chivalry and heroism, and she—its sole descendant—had sullied it with the blood of a base-born impostor!
Whilst she lay sunk in what they deemed a perfect apathy, the disgrace done to her, to her name, to her ancestry, was ever present to her mind: a spectre which no one saw save herself. Every other emotion was for the time quenched in that. She felt as though the whole world had struck her on the cheek and she was powerless to resent or to revenge the blow. In hours of delirium she thought she saw all the men and women of her race who had reigned there before her standing about her bed, and saying: 'You held our honour, and what did you do with it? You let it sink to the earth in the arms of a nameless coward.'
One night she said suddenly: 'My cousin—is he here?'
When they told her that he had remained at Hohenszalras she seemed reassured. At sunrise she asked the same question. When they answered with the same affirmative, she said: 'Bid him come to me.'
They fetched him instantly. As he passed Sabran in the corridor he paused.
'Your wife has sent for me,' he said; 'have I your permission to see her?'
Sabran bent his head, but his heart beat thickly with the only jealousy he had ever felt. She asked for Egon Vàsàrhely in her stupor of misery, and he, her husband, had lost the right to enter her chamber, dared not approach her presence!
'Wanda, I am here!' said Vàsàrhely, softly, as he bent over her. She looked at him with eyes full of unspeakable agony.
'Is it true?' she murmured.
'Yes!' he said bitterly between his teeth.
'And you knew it?'
'Too late! But Wanda—my beloved Wanda—trust to me. The world shall never hear it.'
Her eyes had closed, a shiver ran through all her frame. 'Olga?' she muttered.
'She is in my power. I will deal with her,' he answered. 'She will be silent as the grave.'
She gave a long shuddering sigh, and her head sank back upon her pillows.
Vàsàrhely fell on his knees beside her bed, and buried his face on her hands.
'My violated saint!' he murmured. 'Fear not; I will avenge you.'
Low though the words were, they reached and moved her in her dim blind weakness. She stretched out her hand, and touched his bowed head.
'No, no—notthat.He is my children's father. He must be sacred; give me your word, Egon, there shall be no bloodshed between him and you.'
'I am your next friend,' he said, with intense appeal in his voice. 'You are insulted and dishonoured—your race is affronted and stained—who should avenge that if not I, your kinsman? There is no male of your house. It falls to me.'
All the manhood and knighthood in him were athirst for the life of the impostor who had dishonoured what he adored.
'Promise me,' she said again.
'Your brothers are dead,' he muttered. 'I may well stand in their place. Their swords would have found him out ere he were an hour older.'
She raised herself with a supreme effort, and through the pallor and misery of her face there came a momentary flash of anger, a momentary flash of the old spirit of command.
'My brothers are dead, and I forbid any other to meddle with my life. If anyone slew him it would be I—I—in my own right.'
Her voice had been for the instant stern and sustained, but physical faintness overcame her; her lips grew grey, and the darkness of great weakness came before her sight.
'I forbid you! I forbid you!' she said, as her breath failed her.
Vàsàrhely remained kneeling beside her bed. His shoulders trembled with restrained emotion. Even now she shut him out of her life. She denied him the right to be her champion and avenger.
She moved her hand towards him as a blind woman would have done.
'Give me your word.'
'You are my law,' he answered. 'I will do nothing that you forbid.'
She inclined her head with a feeble gesture of recognition of the words. He rose slowly, kissed the white fingers that lay near him, and, without speaking, left her presence.
'Bloodshed, bloodshed!' she thought, in the vague feverish confusion of half-conscious thought. 'Though rivers of blood rolled between him and me what could they wash away of the shame that is with me for ever? What could death do? Death could blot out nothing.'
A sense of awful impotence lay upon her like a weight of iron. Do what she would she could never change the past! Her sons must grow to youth and manhood tainted and dishonoured in her sight. There were times when all the martial and arrogant spirit in her was like flame in her veins, and she thought: 'Could I but rise and kill him—I, myself!'
It seemed to her that it would be but justice.
When Vàsàrhely, coming out from her chamber, passed the impostor who had done her this dishonour, it cost him the greatest self-sacrifice of his life not to order him out yonder in the chilly twilight of the leafless woods, to stand before him in that ordeal of combat which, in the code of honour of the Magyar Prince, was the sole tribunal to which a man of honour could appeal. But she had forbade him to avenge her. He felt that he had no share in her life sufficient to give him title to disobey her. His own love for her told him that this offender was still dear enough to her for his life to be sacred in her sight.
'If I had not loved her,' he thought, 'I could have avenged her without suspicion; but what would it seem to her and to the world?—only that I slew him out of jealous rancour! In her soul she loves him still. Her hate will fade, her love will survive, traitor and hound though he be.'
He motioned Sabran towards one of the empty chambers in the gallery. When he had closed the door of it he spoke with a low, hoarse voice:
'Sir, I have the right as her kinsman, I have the right her brothers would have had, to publicly insult you, to publicly chastise you. But she has commanded me to abstain; she will have no feud between us. I obey her; so must you. I have but one thing to say to you. Once you spoke of suicide. I forbid you to follow up your crimes by causing the unending misery that death by your own hand would bring to her. You have been coward enough. Have courage at least not to leave a woman alone under the disgrace you have brought upon her.'
'Alone!' echoed Sabran. 'She will never admit me to her presence again. She will demand her divorce as soon as ever she has strength to remember and to speak.'
'Do you know her so ill after nine years of marriage? Whatever she do it will be for you to accept it, and not evade your chastisement by the poltroon's refuge of oblivion in the grave. You have said you think yourself my debtor; all the quittance I desire is this. You will obey me when I forbid you to entail on your wife the lifelong remorse that your suicide—however you disguised it—would bring upon her. In obeying her, by holding back my hand from avenging her, I make the greatest sacrifice that she could have demanded. Make yours likewise. It would be easy for you to escape chastisement in death. You must forego that ease, and live. I leave you to your conscience and to her.'
He opened the door and passed down the corridor, his steps echoing on the oaken floor.
In half an hour he had left the house, and gone on his lonely way to Taróc.
Sabran stood mute.
He had lost the power to resent; he knew that if this man chose to strike him across the eyes with his whip he would be within his right. The insults cut him to the bone as though the lash were on him; but he held his peace and bore them, not in submission, but in silence. His profound humiliation, his absolute despair, had broken the nerve in him. He felt that he had no title to look a gentleman in the face, no power to defend himself, whatever outrages were heaped on him.
In time the convulsions ceased, the stupor lightened; they began to hope.
The danger had been great, but it was well-nigh past; the vigour and perfection of her strength had enabled her to keep her hold on life. After those few words to her kinsman she spoke seldom, she appeared sunk in silent thought; when the door opened she shrank with a sort of apprehension. Greswold watching her said to himself: 'She is afraid lest her husband should enter.'
She never spoke of him or of the children.
Sabran did not dare to ask to see her. When Greswold would fain have urged him, he refused with vehemence.
'I dare not—it would be to insult her more. Only if she summon me—but that she will never do.'
'He has been faithless to her,' thought the old man.
All those weeks of her slow and painful restoration to life she was mute, her lips only moving in reply to the questions of her physicians. It seemed to her strange that when her spiritual and mental life had been poisoned to their source, her bodily life should be able mechanically to gather force, and resume its functions. Had matter so far more resistance than the soul?
Her women were frightened at the look upon her face; it had the rigidity, the changelessness of marble, and all the blood seemed gone out of it for ever.
In after days her heart would speak; remembered happiness, lost beliefs, ruined love, would in their turn have place in her misery; but now all she was sensible of was the unbearable insult, the ineffaceable outrage. She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.
Any other thing she would have pardoned—infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion—but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honour, the purity of a race.
It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them:. 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race for ever; for ever my blood flows with yours.'
The greatness of a great race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme, its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed holding as you do that lamp of honour in your hands.
So had she always thought; and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.
Her convalescence came in due course; but the silence, almost absolute silence, which she preserved on the full recovery of her consciousness alarmed her physicians, who had no clue to the cause. Greswold alone, who divined that there was some wrong or disaster which severed her from her husband, guessed that this immutable speechlessness was but the cover and guard of some great sorrow. No tears ever dimmed her eyes or relieved her bursting heart; she lay still, absorbed in mute and terrible retrospection. As her great weakness left her, there came upon her features the colder darker look of her race, the look which he who had betrayed her had always feared. She never spoke of him, nor of the children. Her women would have ventured to bring the children to her, unbidden, but Greswold forbade them; he knew that for the devoted tenderness she bore them to be thus utterly still and changed, some shock must have befallen her so great that the instincts of maternity were momentarily quenched in her, as water springs are dried up by earthquake.
'She never speaks of me, nor of them?' asked Sabran with agony every day of Greswold, and the old man answered him:
'She never speaks at all. She replies to our questions as to her health, she asks briefly for what she needs; no more.'
'The children are innocent!' he said wearily, and his heart had never gone forth to them so much as it did now, when they were shut out like himself from the arms of their mother.
Yet he understood how she shrank from them—might well almost abhor them—seeing in them, as Vàsàrhely saw, the living proofs of her surrender to a coward and a traitor.
'What can he have done?' mused Greswold. 'Infidelity, perhaps, she would not forgive; but it would not make her thus blind and deaf to the children.'
He passed his days in utter wretchedness; he wandered in the wintry woods for hours, or sat in weary waiting outside her door. He cared nothing what his household thought or guessed. He had forgotten every living creature save herself. When he saw his young sons in the distance he avoided them; he dreaded their guileless questions, the stab of their unconscious words. Again and again he was tempted to blow out his brains, or fling himself from the ice walls that towered above him; but the sense that it would seem to her the last cowardice—the last shame—restrained him.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the tie between them was so strong, the memories of their past passion so sweet, that even his crime could not part them. Then he remembered of what race she came, of what honour she was the representative and guardian, and his heart sank within him, and he knew that his offence was one beyond all pardon.
The whole household dimly felt that some great grief had fallen on their master. His attitude, his absence from his wife's room, the arrival of Prince Vàsàrhely, the abrupt departure of the Countess Brancka, all told them that some calamity had come, though they were loyally silent one to the other, their service having been always one of devotion and veneration for their mistress, since they were all Tauern-born people, bred up by their fathers in loyalty to Hohenszalras.
'The first who speaks of aught he suspects goes for ever,' old Hubert had said to his numerousdienerschaftin the hearing of them all, when one of the pages—he who had borne the note to his master in Olga Brancka's rooms—ventured to hint that he thought some evil was abroad, and would part their lord and lady. But all the faithful silence of their attendants could not wholly conceal from the elder children that something wrong, some greater sorrow even than their mother's illness, was hanging over the old house. They were dull and vaguely alarmed. They had not even the kindly presence of the Princess, who, if she sometimes wearied them with admonitions, treated them with tenderness, and atoned for her homilies by unending gifts. They were very unhappy, though they said little, and wandered like little ghosts among the wintry woods and in their spacious play-rooms. They were tended, amused, provided for in all the same ways as usual. There were all their pastimes and playthings; all their comforts and habits were unaltered; but from the background of their sports and studies the stately figure of their mother was missing, with her serene smile and her happy power of checking all dispute or turbulence with a mere word or a mere glance.
The winter had come at a stroke, as it does without warning oftentimes in the old Archduchy; the snow falling fast and thick, the waters freezing in a night, the hills and valleys growing white and silent between a sunset and a sunset.
Their sledges carried them like lightning over the frozen roads, and their little skates bore them swift as circling swallows over the ice. It was the season Bela loved so well; but he had no joy in anything. There was no twilight hour in the white-room at their mothers feet, whilst she told them legends and stories: there was no moment in the mornings when she came into their study and found their little puzzled brains weary over a Latin declension or a crabbed page of history, and made all clear to them by a few lucid graphic sentences; there was no possible hope that, when the day was broad and bright over the wintry land, she would call to them to bring the dogs and go with her and her black horses through the glittering forests, where every bough was heavy with the diamonds of the frost. To the little boys it seemed as if the whole world had grown suddenly silent, and they were left all alone in it.
Their troops of attendants were no more consolation to them than his crowd of courtiers is to a bereaved sovereign.
Then, again, when Egon Vàsàrhely had by chance met them he had looked at them strangely, and had always turned away without a greeting. 'And when I was quite little he was so kind,' thought Bela, whose pride seemed falling from him like a useless ragged garment.
'It's all since Madame Olga came,' he said once to his brother. 'She is a bad, bad woman. She was rude to our mother.'
'I thought ladies were always good?' said Gela.
'They are much wickeder than men,' said Bela, with premature wisdom. 'At least, when theyarewicked. I heard a gentleman say so in Paris.'
'What could she do when she was here, do you think?' asked Gela, with a tremor.
'I do not know,' said Bela, gravely and sadly. 'But I am sure that she hated our mother.'
He was sure that all the evil had come from her; he had heard of evil spirits, the people believed in them, and had charms against them. She was one of them. Had she not tempted him to disobedience and revolt, with her pictures of the grand gaiety, the magnificent gatherings, the heart-rousing 'Halali!' of the Chantilly hunt?
Bela did not forget.
He would have cut off his little right hand, now, never to have vexed his mother.
He was yet more sorrowful still for his father. Though they were not allowed to approach their mother's apartments, he had disobeyed the injunction more than once, and had seen Sabran walking to and fro that long gallery, or seated with bent head and folded arms on one of the oaken benches. With all his boldness Bela had not dared to approach that melancholy figure; but it had haunted his dreams, and troubled him sorely as he rode and drove, and played and did his lessons. The snow had come on the second week of his mother's illness, and when he visited his riding-pony in its loose box on these frosted days on which he could not use it, he buried his face in its abundant mane, and wept bitterly, though he boasted that he never cried.
Eight weeks passed by after the departure of Olga Brancka before his mother could leave her bed; and all that while, save for a brief question now and again as to their health, put to her physician, she had never mentioned the children once. 'She does not want us any more,' said Bela, with the great tears dimming his bold eyes.
In the ninth week she was lifted on to a great chair, placed beside one of the windows, and she turned her weary gaze on to the snow world without. What use was life? Why had it returned to her? All emotion of maternity, all memory of love, were for the time killed in her. She was only conscious of an intolerable indignity, for which neither God nor man could give her consolation.
She would have gone barefoot all the world over sooner than be again in his presence, had not the imperious courage which was the strongest instinct of her nature refused to confess itself unable to meet the man who had wronged her. In the long dark night which these past two months had seemed to her, she had brought herself to face the inevitable end. She had nerved herself to be her own judge and his. Weaker women would have made the world their judge; she did not. She did not even seek the counsel of that Church of which she was a reverent daughter. Her priest had no access to her.
'God must see my torture, but no other shall,' she said in her heart, nor should the world ever have her fate to make an hour's jesting wonder of, as is its way with all calamity. It would be her lifelong companion; a rusted iron for ever piercing deeper, and deeper into her flesh; but she would dwell alone with it—unpitied. The men of her race had always been their own lawgivers, their own avengers; she would be hers.
Once she bade them bring her pens and ink, and she began to use them. Then she laid them down, and tore in two an unfinished letter. 'Only cowards write to save themselves from pain,' she thought, and on the tenth day after she had risen from her bed she said to Greswold:
'Tell the women to leave me alone, and ask—my husband—to come here.'
She said the last words as if they choked her in their utterance. Her husband he was; nothing could change the past.
The old man hesitated, and ventured to suggest that any exertion was dangerous; would it be wise, he asked, to speak of what might agitate her? And thereon he paused and stammered, knowing that it was not his place to have observed that there was any estrangement between them.
She looked at him with suspicion.
'Have I spoken in my sleep or in my unconsciousness?' she thought.
Aloud she said only:
'Be so good as to go to him at once.'
He bowed and went, and to himself mused:
'Since she loves him, her heart will melt when she meets his eyes. His sin after all cannot be beyond those which women have forgiven a million times over since first creation began.'
Yet in himself he was not sure of that. The Szalras had had many great and many generous qualities, but forgiveness of offence had never been among them.
She remained still, her hands folded on her knees, her face set as though it were cast in bronze. The great bedchamber, with its hangings of pale blue plush and its silver-mounted furniture, was dim and shadowy in the greyness of a midwinter afternoon. Doors opened, here to the bath and dressing chambers, there to the oratory, yonder to the apartments of Sabran. She looked across to the last, and a shudder passed over her; a sense of sickness and revulsion came on her.
She sat still and waited; she was too weak to go further than this room. She was wrapped in a long loose gown of white satin, lined and trimmed with sable. There were black bearskins beneath her feet; the atmosphere was warmed by hot air, and fragrant with, some bowls full of forced roses, which her women had placed, there at noon. The grey light of the fading afternoon touched the silver scroll-work of the bed, and the silver frame of one large mirror, and fell on her folded hands and on the glister of their rings. Her head leaned backward against the high carved ebony of her chair. Her face was stern and bitterly cold, as that of Maria Theresa when she signed the loss of Silesia.
He approached from his own apartments, and came timidly and with a slow step forward. He did not dare to salute her, or go near to her; he stood like a banished man, disgraced, a few yards from her seat.
Two months had gone by since he had seen her. When he entered he read on her features that he must leave all hope behind.
Her whole frame shrank within her as she saw him there, but she gave no sign of what she felt. Without looking at him she spoke, in a voice quite firm though it was faint from feebleness.
'I have but little to say to you, but that little is best said, not written.'
He did not reply; his eyes were watching her with a terrible appeal, a very agony of longing. They had not rested on her for two months. She had been near the gates of the grave, within the shadow of death. He would have given his life for a word of pity, a touch, a regard—and he dared not approach her!
She did not look at him. After that first glance, in which there had been so much of horror, of revulsion, she did not once look towards him. Her face had the immutability of a mask of stone; so many wretched days and haunted nights had she spent nerving herself for this inevitable moment that no emotion was visible in her; into her agony she had poured her pride, and it sustained her, as the plaster poured into the dry bones at Pompeii makes the skeleton stand erect, the ashes speak.
'After that which you have told me,' she said, after a moment's silence in which he fancied she must hear the throbbing of his heart, 'you must know that my life cannot be lived out beside yours. The law gives you many, rights, no doubt, but I believe you will not be so base as to enforce them.'
'I have no rights!' he muttered. 'I am a criminal before the law. The law will free you from me, if you choose.'
'I do not choose,' she said coldly; 'you understand me ill. I do not carry my wrongs or my woes to others. What you have told me is known only to Prince Vàsàrhely and to the Countess Brancka. He will be silent; he has the power to make her so. The world need know nothing. Can you think that I shall be its informant?'
'If you divorce me——' he murmured.
A quiver of bitter anger passed over her features, but she retained her self-control.
'Divorce? What could divorce do for me? Could it destroy the past? Neither Church nor Law can undo what you have done. Divorce would make me feel that in the past I had been your mistress, not your wife, that is all.'
She breathed heavily, and again pressed her hand on her breast.
'Divorce!' she repeated. 'Neither priest nor judge can efface a past as you clean a slate with a sponge! No power, human or divine, can freeme, purifyme, wash your dishonoured blood from your children's veins.'
She almost lost her self-control; her lips trembled, her eyes were full of flame, her brow was black with passion. With a violent effort she restrained herself; invective or reproach seemed to her low and coarse and vile.
He was silent; his greatest fear, the torture of which had harassed him sleeping and waking ever since he had placed his secret in her hands, was banished at her words. She would seek no divorce—the children would not be disgraced—the world of men would not learn his shame; and yet as he heard a deeper despair than any he had ever known came over him. She was but as those sovereigns of old who scorned the poor tribunals of man's justice because they held in their own might the power of so much heavier chastisement.
'I shall not seek for a legal separation,' she resumed; 'that is to say, I shall not, unless you force me to do so to protect myself from you. If you fail to abide by the conditions I shall prescribe, then you will compel me to resort to any means that may shelter me from your demands. But I do not think you will endeavour to force on me conjugal rights which you obtained over me by a fraud.'
All that she desired was to end quickly the torture of this interview, from which her courage had not permitted her to shrink. She had to defend herself because she would not be defended by others, and she only sought to strike swiftly and unerringly so as to spare herself and him all needless or lingering throes. Her speech was brief, for it seemed to her that no human language held expression deep and vast enough to measure the wrong done to her, could she seek to give it utterance.
She would not have made a sound had any murderer stabbed her body; she would not now show the death-wound of her soul and honour to this man who had stabbed both to the quick. Other women would have made their moan aloud, and cursed him. The daughter of the Szalras choked down her heart in silence, and spoke as a judge speaks to one condemned by man and God.
'I wish no words between us,' she said, with renewed calmness. 'You know your sin; all your life has been a lie. I will keep me and mine back from vengeance; but do not mistake—God may pardon you, I never! What I desired to say to you is that henceforth you shall wholly abandon the name you stole; you shall assign the land of Romaris to the people; you shall be known only as you have been known here of late, as the Count von Idrac. The title was mine to give, I gave it you; no wrong is done save to my fathers, who were brave men.'
He remained silent; all excuse he might have offered seemed as if from him to her it would be but added outrage. He was her betrayer, and she had the power to avenge betrayal; naught that she could say or do could seem unjust or undeserved beside the enormity of her irreparable wrongs.
'The children?' he muttered faintly, in an unuttered supplication.
'They are mine,' she said, always with the same unchanging calm that was cold as the frozen earth without. 'You will not, I believe, seek to enforce your title to dispute them with me?'
He gave a gesture of denial.
He, the wrong-doer, could not realise the gulf which his betrayal had opened betwixt himself and her. On him all the ties of their past passion were sweet, precious, unchanged in their dominion. He could not realise that to her all these memories were abhorred, poisoned, stamped with ineffable shame; he could not believe that she who had loved the dust that his feet had brushed could now regard him as one leprous and accursed. He was slow to understand that his sin had driven him out of her life for evermore.
Commonly it is the woman on whom the remembrance of love has an enthralling power when love itself is traitor; commonly it is the man on whom the past has little influence, and to whom its appeal is vainly made; but here the position was reversed. He would have pleaded by it: she refused to acknowledge it, and remained as adamant before it. His nerve was too broken, his conscience was too heavily weighted for him to attempt to rebel against her decisions or sway her judgment. If she had bidden him go out and slay himself he would gladly have obeyed.
'Once you said,' he murmured timidly, 'that repentance washes out all crimes. Will you count my remorse as nothing?'
'You would have known no remorse had your secret never been discovered!'
He shrank as from a blow.
'That is not true,' he said wearily. 'But how can I hope you will believe me?'
She answered nothing.
'Once you told me that there was no sin you would not pardon me!' he muttered.
She replied:
'We pardon sin; we do not pardon baseness.'
She paused and put her hand to her heart; then she spoke again in that cold, forced, measured voice, which seemed on his ear as hard and pitiless as the strokes of an iron hammer, beating life out beneath it.
'You will leave Hohenszalras; you will go where you will; you have the revenues of Idrac. Any other financial arrangements that you may wish to make I will direct my lawyers to carry out. If the revenues of Idrac be insufficient to maintain you——'
'Do not insult me—so,' he murmured, with a suffocated sound in his voice, as though some hand were clutching at his throat.
'Insultyou!' she echoed, with a terrible scorn.
She resumed, with the same inflexible calmness:
'You must live as becomes the rank due to my husband. The world need suspect nothing. There is no obligation to make it your confidante. If anyone were wronged by the usurpation of the name you took it would be otherwise, but as it is you will lose nothing in the eyes of men; society will not flatter you the less. The world will only believe that we are tired of one another, like so many. The blame will be placed on me. You are a brilliant comedian, and can please and humour it. I am known to be a cold, grave, eccentric woman, a recluse, of whom it will deem it natural that you are weary. Since you allow that I have the right to separate from you—to deal with you as with a criminal—you will not seek to recall your existence to me. You will meet my abstinence by the only amends you can make to me. Let me forget—as far as I am able—let me forget that ever you have lived!'
He staggered slightly, as if under some sword-stroke from an unseen hand. A great faintness came upon him. He had been prepared for rage, for reproach, for bitter tears, for passionate vengeance; but this chill, passionless, disdainful severance from him for all eternity he had never dreamed of: it crept like the cold of frost into his very marrow; he was speechless and mute with shame. If she had dragged him through all the tribunals of the world she would have hurt him and humiliated him far less. Better all the hooting gibes of the whole earth than this one voice, so cold, so inflexible, so full of utter scorn!
Despite her bodily weakness she rose to her full height, and for the first time looked at him.
'You have heard me,' she said; 'now go!'
But instead, blindly, not knowing what he did, he fell at her feet.
'But you loved me,' he cried, 'you loved me so well!'
The tears were coursing down his cheeks.
She drew the sables of her robe from his touch.
'Do not recallthat,' she said, with a bitter smile. 'Women of my race have killed men before now for less outrage than yours has been to me.'
'Kill me!' he cried to her. 'I will kiss your hand.'
She was mute.
He clung to her gown with an almost convulsive supplication.
'Believe, at least, that I lovedyou!' he cried, beside himself in his misery and impotence. 'Believe that, at the least!—--'
She turned from him.
'Sir, I have been your dupe for ten long years; I can be so no more!'
Under that intolerable insult he rose slowly, and his eyes grew blind, and his limbs trembled, but he walked from her, and sought not again either her pity or her pardon.
On the threshold he looked back once. She stood erect, one hand resting upon the carved work of her high oak chair; cold, stalely, motionless, the furred velvets falling to her feet like a queen's robes.
He looked, then passed the threshold and closed the door behind him. He walked down the corridors blindly, not knowing whither he went.
They were dusky, for the twilight of the winter's day had come. He did not see a little figure which was coming towards him until the child had stopped him with a timid outstretched hand.
'Shall we never see her again?' said Bela, in a hushed voice. 'It is so long!—so long! Oh, please do tell me!'
Sabran paused, and looked down on the boy with blood-shot burning eyes. For a moment or so he did not answer; then, with a sudden movement, he drew his son to him, lifted him in his arms and kissed him passionately.
'You will see her, not I—not I!' he said with a sob like a woman's. 'Bela, listen! Be obedient to her, adore her, have no will but hers; be loyal, be truthful, be noble in all your words and all your thoughts, and then in time perhaps—perhaps—she will pardon you for being also mine!'
The child, terrified, clung to him with all his force, dimly conscious of some great agony near him, but far beyond his comprehension or consolation.
'I love you, I will always love you!' he said, with his hands clasped around his father's throat.
'Love your mother!' said Sabran, as he kissed the boy's soft cheeks, made wet by his own tears; then he released the little frightened form, and went himself away into the darkness.
In a little time, with no word to any living soul there, he had harnessed some horses with his own hands, and in the fast falling gloom of the night had driven from Hohenszalras.
Bela heard the galloping hoofs of the horses, and ran with his fleet feet, quick as a fawn's, down the grand staircase and out on to the terrace, where the winds of the north were driving with icy cold and furious force over a world of snow. With his golden hair streaming in the blast, he strained his eyes into the gloom of the avenues below, but the animals had vanished from sight. He turned sadly and went into the Rittersaal.
'Is that my father who has gone?' he said in a low voice to Hubert, who was there. The old servant, with the tears in his eyes, told him that it was. A groom had come to him to say that their lord had made ready a sledge and driven away without a word to any one of them, while the night was falling apace.
Bela heard and said nothing; he had his mother's power of silence in sorrow. He climbed the staircase silently, and went and listened in the corridor where his father had waited and watched so long. His heart was heavy, and ached with an indefinable dread. He did not seek Gela. It seemed to him that this sorrow was his alone. He alone had heard his father's farewell words; he alone had seen his father weep.
All the selfishness and vanity of his little soul were broken up and vanished, and the first grief he had ever known filled up their empty place. He had adored his father with an unreasoning blind devotion, like a dog's; and this intense affection had been increased rather than repressed by the indifference with which he had been treated.
His father was gone; he felt sure that it was for ever: if he could not see his mother he thought he could not live. To the mind of a child such gigantic and unutterable terrors rise up under the visitation of a vague alarm. Abroad in the woods, or under any bodily pain or fear, he was as brave as a lion whelp, but he had enough of the German mystic in his blood to be imaginative and visionary when trouble touched him. The sight of his father's grief had shaken his nerves, and filled him with the first passionate pity he had ever known. A man so great, so strong, so wonderful in prowess, so far aloof from himself as Sabran had always seemed to his little son, to be so overwhelmed in such helpless sorrow, appeared to Bela so terrible a thing that an intense fear took for the first time possession of his little valiant soul. His father could slay all the great beasts of the forests; could break in the horse fresh from the freedom of the plains; could breast the stormy waters like a petrel; could scale the highest heights of the mountains. And yet someone—something—had had power to break down all his strength, and make him flee in wretchedness.
It could not be his mother who had done this thing? No, no! never, never! It had been done because she was lying ill, helpless, perhaps was dead.
As that last dread came over him he lost all control over himself. He knew what death was. A little girl he had been fond of in Paris had died whilst he was her playmate, and he had seen her lying, so waxen, so cold, so unresponsive, when he had laid his lilies on her little breast. A great despair came over him, and made him reckless what he did. In the desperation of terror blent with love, he started up and ran to the door of his mother's apartments. It yielded to his pressure; he ran across the ante chamber and the dressing-rooms, and pulled aside the tapestry.
Then he saw her; seated at the further side of the great bedchamber. There was a feeble grey light from the western sky, to which the casements of the chamber turned. It was very pale and dim, but by it he saw her lying back, rigid and colourless, the white satin, the dusky fur, the deep shadows gathered around her. There was that in her look and in her attitude which made the child's heart grow cold, as his father's had done.
She was alone; for she had bade her women not come unless she summoned them. Bela stood and gazed, his pulses beating loud and hard; then with a cry he ran forward and sprang to her, and threw his arms about her.
'Oh, mother, mother, you are not dead!' he cried. 'Oh, speak to me; do speak to me! He is gone away for ever and ever, and if we cannot see you we shall all die. Oh, do not look at me so! Pray, pray, do not. Shall I fetch Lili?—-'
In his vague terror he thought to disarm her by his little sister's name. She had thrust him away from her, and was looking with cold and cruel eyes on his face, that was so like the face of his father. She was thinking:
'You are the son of a serf, of a traitor, of a liar, of a bastard, and yet you aremine! I bore you, and yet you are his. You are shame incarnate. You are the living sign of my dishonour. You bear my name—my untainted name—and yet you were begotten by him.'
Bela dropped down at her feet as his father had done.
'Oh, do not look at me so,' he sobbed. 'Oh, mother, what have I done? I have tried to be good all this while. He is gone away, and he is so unhappy, and he bade me never vex or disobey you, and I never will.'
His voice was broken in his sobs, and he leaned his head upon her knees, and clasped them with both his arms. She looked down on him, and drew a deep shuddering breath. The holiest joy of a woman's life was, for her, poisoned at the springs.
Then, at the child's clinging embrace, at his piteous and innocent grief, the motherhood in her welled up under the frost of her heart, and all its long-suffering and infinite tenderness revived, and overcame the horror that wrestled with it. She raised him up and strained him to her breast.
'You are mine, you are mine!' she murmured over him. 'I must forget all else.'
He spring dawned once more on Hohenszalras, and the summer followed it. The waters leapt, the woods rejoiced, the gardens blossomed, and the children played; but the house was silent as a house in which the dead are tying. There was indeed a corpse there—the corpse of buried joy, of murdered love, of ruined honour.
The household resumed its calm order, the routine of the days was unbroken, the quiet yet stately life had been taken up in its course as though it had never been altered; and wherever young children are there will always be some shout of mirth, some sound of happy laughter somewhere; the children laugh as the birds sing, though those amidst them bury their dead.
But the house was as a house of mourning, and the sense of death was there as utterly as though he who was gone had been laid in his grave amidst the silver figures and the marble tombs in the Chapel of the Knights. No one ever heard a sigh from her lips, or ever saw the tears beneath her eyelids; but the sense of her bereavement, as one terrible, inconsolable, eternal, weighed like a pall on all those who were about her; the lowliest peasant on her estates understood that the sanctity of some untold woe had built up a wall of granite between her and all the living world.
She had always been grateful to fate for her old home set amidst the silence of the mountains, but she had never been so thankful for it as now. It shielded her from all the observation and interrogation of the world; no one came thither unbidden, unless she chose, no visitant would ever break that absolute solitude which was the sole approach to peace that she would ever know. Even her relatives could not pass the icy barrier of her cold denial. They wearied her for a while with written importunities and suggestions, hinted wonder, delicately expressed questions. But they made no way into her confidence; they soon left her to herself and to her children. They said angrily to themselves that she had been always whimsical and a solitary; they had been certain that soon or late that ill-advised union would be dissolved in some way, private or public. They were all people haughty, sensitive, abhorrent of scandal; they were content that the separation should be by mutual consent and noiseless.
She had had letters from Egon Vàsàrhely full of delicate tenderness; in the last he had asked with humility if he might visit Hohenszalras. She had written in return to him:
'You have my gratitude and my affection, but until we are quite old we will not meet. Leave me alone; you can do naught for me.'
He obeyed; he understood the loyalty to one disloyal which made her refuse to meet him, of whose loyalty she was so sure.
He sent a magnificent present to the child who was his namesake, and wrote to her no more save upon formal anniversaries.
The screen of her dark forests protected her from all the cruel comment and examination of the men and women of her world. She knew them well enough to know that when she ceased to appear amidst them, when she ceased to contribute to their entertainment, when she ceased to bid them to her houses, she would soon cease also to be remembered by them; even their wonder would live but for a day. If they blamed her in their ignorance, their blame would be as indifferent as their praise had been.
She had been told by her lawyers that her husband had refused to touch a coin of the revenues of Idrac, and had once visited them to sign a power of procuration, whereby they could receive those revenues and set them aside in accumulation for his son Gela. That was all she heard. Whither he had gone she was ignorant. She did not make any effort to learn. On the night following his departure a peasant had been sent with the sleigh and horses home to Hohenszalras. The solicitors of Salzburg had seen him a week or two later at their ancient offices under the Calvarienburg: that was all. She had bade him let it be forgotten that he had ever lived beside her. He had obeyed her.
The days, and weeks, and months went on, and his place knew him no more. The jägers, seated round their fires in their forest-huts, spoke longingly and wonderingly of his absence. The hunters, when they brought down a steinbock with unusual effort or skill, said that it had been a shot that would have been worthy of his praise. His old friend wept for him with the slow sad tears of age, and the child Bela prayed for his return every night that he knelt down before his crucifix. But his name never passed his wife's lips, and was never written by her hand. She had given her all with the superb generosity of a sovereign; she had in her wrongs the intense abiding unutterable disgust of a sovereign betrayed and outraged. When she let grief have its way, it was when no eyes beheld her, when the night was down and solitude sheltered her.
She had never spoken of what had befallen her to any human ear; not even to her priest's. The horror of it was buried in her own breast; its sepulchre all the waste and ashes of her perished joys.
When the Princess Ottilie, weeping, entreated to be told the worst, she answered briefly:
'He betrayed me. How, matters nothing.'
More than that she never said. The Princess supposed that she spoke of the disloyalty of the passions, and dared not urge her to more confidence. 'I warned him that she would never forgive if he were faithless,' she thought, and wept for hours at her orisons, her gentle soul resenting the inflexibility of this mute immutable bitterness of offended love.
Too proud and too delicate to intrude undesired into any confidence, and too tenderhearted to utter censure aloud to one she loved, the Princess showed in a thousand ways without speech that she considered there were cruelty and egotism in her unexplained separation from her husband. Believing as she did that his offence was that conjugal infidelity which, however blameable, is one of those injuries which all women who love forgive, and which those who do not love endure in silence from patience and dignity, herself offended at her exclusion from all knowledge of the facts, she said but little; but her whole attitude was one of restrained reproach.