'With time she will change,' she said to herself. But time passed on, and she could see no change, nor any hope of it.
The grave severe beauty of their mother had a vague terror for her children. She never now smiled at their mirth, laughed at their sports, or joined in their pastimes. She was almost always silent. Bela longed to throw his arms about her knees, and cry out to her: 'Mother, mother, where ishe?' But he did not venture to do so. Without his reasoning upon it, the child instinctively felt that her frozen calm covered depths of suffering which he did not dare disturb. He had been so completely terrified once, that the remembrance of that hour lay like ice upon his bright courage. Even the younger ones felt something of the same fear. Their mother remembered them, cared for them, was heedful that their needs of body and of brain were perfectly supplied. But they felt, as young children feel what they cannot explain, that they were outside her life, insufficient for her, even fraught with intense pain to her. Often when she stooped to kiss them a shudder passed over her; often when they came into her presence she looked away from them, as though the sight of them stung and blinded her. They never heard an angry word from her lips, but even repeated anger would have kept them at less distance from her than did that mute majesty of a grief they could not comprehend.
She was more severe to all her dependants; she never became unjust, but she was often stern; the children at the schools saw her smile no more. Santa Claus still filled their stockings on Christmas Eve; but of the stately figure which moved amidst them, robed in black, they grew afraid. She seldom went to them or to her peasantry. Bela and Gela were sent with her winter gifts. In the summer the sennerins never now saw her enter their high huts and drink a cup of milk, talking with them of their herds and flocks.
She was tranquil as of old. She fulfilled the duties of her properties, and attended to all the demands made upon her by her people; her liberalities were unchanged, her justice was unwarped, her mind was clear and keen. But she never smiled, even on her young daughter; and the little Lili said once to her brothers:
'Do you know, I think our mother is changing to marble. She will soon be of stone, like the statues in the chapel. When I touch her I feel cold.'
Bela was angered.
'You are ungrateful, you little child,' he said to his sister. 'Who loves us, who cares for us, who thinks of us, as our mother does? If her lips are cold, perhaps her heart is broken. We are only children; we can do so little.'
He had treasured the words of his father in his soul. He had never told them, except to Gela, but they were always present to him. He alone had seen and heard enough to understand that some dire disaster had shattered in pieces the beautiful life which his parents had led together. He had received an indelible impression from the two scenes of that evening. Without comprehending, he had felt that something had befallen them, which struck at their honour no less than at their peace. He had a clear conception of what honour was; it was the first tuition that Wanda von Szalras gave her children. Vague as his understanding of their grief had been, it had been sufficient to strike at that pride winch was inborn in him. He was like the Dauphin of whom he had thought in Paris. He had seen his father driven from his throne; he had seen his mother in the sackcloth and ashes of affliction. He was humiliated, bewildered, softened; he, who had believed himself omnipotent because all the people of the Iselthal ran to do his bidding, felt how helpless he was in truth. He was shut out from his mother's confidence; he had been powerless to console her or to retain his father; there was something even in himself from which his mother shrank. What had his father said? 'She will in time pardon you for being mine.' What had been the meaning of those strange words? And where had his father gone?
When the summer came and Bela rode through the glad green woods, his heart was heavy. Would his father never ride there any more? Bela had often watched, himself unseen, the fiery horse that bore the man he loved come plunging and leaping through bough and brake till it passed him as though the wind bore it. He had always thought as he had watched, 'When I grow up I will be just what he is'; and now that splendid and gracious figure which had been always present on the horizon of his child's mind, magnified and glorified like the illuminated figures in the painted chronicles, was no more there—had faded utterly away in the dusk and the snow of that wintry twilight.
A thousand times was the question to his mother on his lips: 'Will he never come back? Shall we never see him again?' But he dared not speak it when he saw that look of a revulsion they could not comprehend always upon her face.
'He bade me never vex her,' Bela thought, and obeyed.
'I wonder if ever he think of us,' he said once to Gela, as their ponies walked down one of the grassy rides of the home woods.
'Perhaps he is dead,' said Gela, in a hushed, wistful voice.
'How dare you say that, Gela?' said his brother, angry from an intolerable pain. 'If he were—were—that, we should be told it. There would be masses in the chapel. We should have black clothes. Oh no! he is not dead. I should know it, I am sure I should know it. He would send down some angel to tell me.'
'Why do you care so much for him?' said Gela, very low. 'It must be he who has made our mother so changed, so unhappy; and it is she whom we should love most. You say even he told you so.'
Bela's lips unclosed to loose an angry answer. He was thinking; 'It is she who sent him away, she who made him weep.' But his loyalty checked it; he would not utter what he thought, even to his brother.
'I think he would not wish us to talk of it,' he said gravely and sadly. 'We will pray for him; that is all we can do.'
'And for her,' said Gela, under his breath.
They were both mute, and let the bridles lie on their ponies' necks as they rode home quietly and sorrowfully in the still summer afternoon to the great house, which, with all its thousand casements gleaming in the sun, seemed to them so silent, so empty, so deserted now. Bela looked up at the banner, with its deep red and its blazoned gold streaming on a westerly wind. 'The flag would be half-mast high if it werethat,' he thought, his heart wrung by the dread which Gela had suggested to him. He had seen the banner lowered when Prince Lilienhöhe had died.
On the lawn under the terrace the other children were playing with little painted balloons; the boys did not go to them, but riding round to the stables entered the house by the side entrance. Gela went to his violin, which he loved better than any toy, and studied seriously. Bela wandered wearily over the building, tormented by the doubt which his brother had put in his thoughts. They were always enjoined to keep to their own wing of the house; but he often broke the rule, as he did most others. He walked listlessly along the innumerable galleries, and up and down the grand staircases, his St. Hubert hound following his steps. His face was very pale, his little hands were folded behind his back, his head was bent. He knew that the Latin and Greek for the morrow were all unprepared, but he could not think of them. He was thinking only: 'If it should be, if it should be?'
He came at last to the door of the library. It was there that his mother now spent most of her time. She took long rides alone, always alone; and often chose for them the wildest weather. When she was indoors, she passed her time in unremitting application to all the business of her estates. He opened the great oak door very softly, and saw her seated at the table; Donau and Neva, who now were old, were lying near her feet. She was studying some papers. The sunset glow came through the painted casements and warmed all the light about her, but by its contrast, her attitude, her expression, her features, looked only the graver, the colder, the more colourless. Her gown was black, her pearls were about her throat, her profile was severe, her cheek, turned to the light, was pale and thin. She did not see the little gallant figure of her son in his white summer riding-clothes, and with his golden hair cut across his brows, looking like a boy's portrait by Reynolds.
He stood a moment irresolute; then he went across the long room and stood before her, and bowed as he knew he ought to do. She started and turned her head and saw the pallor of the child's face. She put out her hand to him; it was very thin, and the rings were large upon it. He saw a contraction on her features as of pain; it was but of a moment, because he looked so like his father.—
'What is it, Bela?' she said to him. 'You ought not to come here.'
His lower lip quivered. He hesitated; then, gathering all his courage, said timidly:
'May I ask you just one thing?'
'Surely, my child—are you afraid of me?'
It struck her, with a sudden sense of contrition, that she had made the children afraid of her. She had never thought of it before.
Bela hesitated once more, then said boldly: Gela said to dayhemight be dead. Oh, if he ever die, will you please tell me? I shall think of it day and night.'
Her face changed terribly; the darker passions of her nature were spoken on it.
'I have forbidden you to speak of your father, if it be him you mean,' she said sternly and very coldly.
But Bela, though frightened, clung to his one thought.
'But he may die!' he said piteously. 'Will you tell me? Please, will you tell me? He might be dead now—we never hear.'
She leaned her arm upon the table, and covered her eyes with her hand. She was silent. She strove with herself so as not to treat the child with harshness. Though he hurt her so cruelly, he was right. She honoured him for his courage.
'If you will only tell me that,' said the boy, with tears in his throat, 'I will never ask anything else—never—never!'
'Why do you cling so to his memory?' she said, with a sudden impatience of jealousy. 'He never took heed of you.'
'I was so little,' said Bela, with a sigh. 'But I loved him—oh! I have always loved him—and I was the last to see him that night.'
'I know!' she said harshly, ashamed meanwhile of her own harshness, for how could the child suspect the torture his words were to her? What had his father given her beautiful boy?—disgraced descent, sullied blood, the heritage of falsehood and of dishonour. Yet the boy loved his memory better than he loved her presence. And the time had been, not so long passed, when she would have recognised the preference with fond and generous delight.
Bela stood beside her, his eyes watching her with timid interrogation, with longing appeal. The look upon his face went to her heart. She knew not what to say to him. She had hoped he would be always silent, and forget, as children usually forget.
'You are right to feel so,' she said to him at last, with a violent effort. 'Cherish his memory, and pray for him always; but do not speak of him to me. When you are grown to manhood, if I be living then, you shall hear what has parted your father and me; you shall judge us yourself. But there are many years to that; many weary years for me. I shall endeavour that they shall be happy ones for you; but you must never ask me, never speak, of him. I gave you that command that night; but you are very young, you have forgotten.'
Bela listened with a sinking heart. He gathered from her words that his father's absence was, as he had feared, for ever.
'I had not forgotten,' he said in a whisper, for the moment was terrible to him. 'But if—if what Gela said should ever be, will you tell me that? I will not disobey again, but pray—pray—tell methat.'
His mother's face seemed to him to grow colder and colder, paler and paler, till she scarcely looked a living woman.
'I will tell you—if I know,' she said, with a pause between each slow spoken word. Then the only smile that had come upon her lips for many months came there; a smile sadder than tears, more bitter than all scorn.
'He will outlive me, fear not,' she said, as she put out her hand to the child. 'Now leave me, my dear; I am occupied.'
Bela touched her hand with his lips, which, despite his will, quivered as he did so. He felt that he had failed, that he had disobeyed and hurt her, that he had been unable to show one tenth of all the feelings which choked him with their force and longing. He hung his head as he went sorrowfully away. 'She may not know! She may not know!' he thought, with terror.
He looked back at her timidly as he closed the door. She had resumed her writing; the red sunset light fell on her black gown, on her stately head, on her profile, cut clear as on a cameo.
He dared not return.
The mother whom he had known in other years, on whose knee he had rested his head as she told him tales in the twilight hour, whose hand had caressed his curls, whose smile had rewarded his stammering Latin or his hardly achieved line of handwriting, who had stooped over him in his drowsy dreams, and made him think of angels, the mother who had said to Egon Vàsàrhely: 'This is my Bela: love him a little for my sake,' seemed as far from him as though she were lying in her tomb.
She, when the tapestry had fallen behind the slender figure of her little son, continued to write on. It was hard, dry matter that she wrote of; the condition of her miners amongst the silver ore of the north-east. She forced her mind to it, she compelled her will and her hand; that was all. These things depended on her; she would not neglect them, she strove to find in them that distraction which lighter natures seek in pleasure. But in vain she now endeavoured to compel her attention to the details she was following and correcting; soon they became to her so confused that they were unintelligible; for once her intelligence refused to obey her will. The child's words haunted her. She laid down her pen, pushed aside the reports and the letter in which she was replying to them, and rising paced to and fro the long polished floor of the library.
It was here that he had first bowed before her on that night when Hohenszalras had sheltered him from the storm.
'We had a mass of thanksgiving!' she thought.
The child's words haunted her. Not to know eventhatwhen they had passed nine years together in the closest of all human ties! For the first time the misgiving came to her, had she been too harsh? No; it would have been impossible to have done less; many would have done far more in chastisement of the fraud upon their honour and good faith. Yet as she recalled their many hours of joy it seemed as if she had remembered these too little. Then again she scouted her own weakness. What had been all his life beside her save one elaborate lie?
The broad shafts of the blazing sunset slanted across the inlaid woods of the floor which she paced; the windows were open, the birds sang in the rose boughs and ivy without. The summers would come thus, one after another, with their intolerable light, and the intolerable laughter of the unconscious children; and she would carry her burden through them, though the day was for ever dark for her.
Time had been when she had thought that she should die if he were lost to her; but she lived on and marvelled at herself. Her very soul seemed to have gone from her with the destruction of her love. Her body seemed to her but a mere shell, an inanimate pulseless thing. The only thing that seemed alive in her was shame.
She paced now up and down the long room while the sunset died and the grey evening dulled the painted panes of the casements. The boy's question had pierced through her frozen serenity. It was true that she had no knowledge where his father was; he might be dead, he might be killed by his own hand—she knew nothing. She had bidden him let her forget that he had ever lived beside her, and he had obeyed her. He might be in the world of men, careless and content, consoled by others, or he might be in his grave.
All she knew was that he never touched the revenues of Idrac.
She paused on the same spot where he had stood before her first, with his fair beauty, his courtier's smile, his easy grace, the very prince of gentlemen; and her hands clenched the folds of her gown as she thought—'the first of actors! Nothing more.'
And she, Wanda von Szalras, had been the dupe of that inimitable mimicry and mockery!
The thought was like a rusted iron, eating deeper and deeper into her heart each day. When her consciousness, her memory, would have said otherwise, would have told her that in much he was loyal and sincere, though in one great thing he had been false, she would not trust herself to hearken to the suggestion. 'Let me see clearly, though I die of what I see!' she said in her soul. She would be blind no more. She hated herself that she had been ever blind.
She had been always his dupe, from the first sonorous phrases she had heard him utter in the French Chamber to the last sentence with which he had left her when he went from her to the presence of Olga Brancka. So she believed. Here she did him wrong; but how was she to tell that? To her it seemed but one long-sustained comedy, one brilliant and hateful imposture.
Sometimes his cry to her rang in her ears: 'Believe at least that I did love you!' and some subtle true instinct in her whispered to her that he had there been sincere, that in passion and devotion at least he had never been false. But she thrust the thought away; it seemed but another form of self-deception.
The dull slow evening passed as usual; it was late in summer and the night came early. She dined in company with Madame Ottilie and sat with her as usual afterwards. The room seemed full of his voice, of his laughter, of the music of which he had had such mastery.
She never opened her lips to say to the Princess Ottilie: 'But for you he would have passed from my life a mere stranger, seen but once.' But the tender conscience of the Princess made her feel the bitterest reproach every time that the eyes of her niece met her own, every time that she passed the blank space in the picture gallery where once had hung the portrait of Sabran, painted in court dress by Mackart. The portrait was locked away in a dark closet that opened out from the oratory of his wife. With its emblazoned arms and marquis's coronet on the frame, it had seemed such a perpetual record of his sin that she had had it taken from the wall and shut in darkness, feeling that it could not hang in its falsehood amidst the portraits of her people. But often she opened the door of her oratory and let the light stream upon the portrait where it leaned against the closet wall. It seemed then as if he stood living before her, looking as he had looked so often at the banquets and balls of the Hofburg, when she had felt so much pride in his personal beauty, his grace of bearing, his supreme distinction.
'Who could have dreamed that it was but a perfect comedy,' she thought, 'as much a comedy as Got's or Bressant's!'
Then her conscience smote her with a sense that she did him injustice when she thought so. In all things save his one crime he had been as true a gentleman as any of the great nobles of the empire. His intelligence, his bearing, his habits, his person, were all those of a patrician of the highest culture. The fraud of his name apart, there had been nothing in him that the most fastidious aristocrats would have disowned. He had inherited the qualities of a race of princes, though he had been descended unlawfully from them. His title had been a borrowed thing, unlawfully worn; but his supreme distinction of manner, his tact, his bodily grace, that large and temperate view of men and things which marks a gentleman, these had all been inborn and natural to him. He had been no mere actor when he had moved through a throne-room by her side. Her calmer reason told her this, but her instincts of candour and of pride made her deny that where there was one fraud there could be any truth.
She span on now at her ivory wheel because it was mere mechanical work, which left thought free. The Princess, in lieu of slumbering, looked at her ever and again. Suddenly she gathered her courage and spoke.
'Wanda, you are a Christian woman,' she said slowly and softly. 'Is it Christian never to forgive?'
Her face did not change as she turned the spinning-wheel.
'What is forgiveness?' she said coldly. 'Is it abstinence from vengeance? I have abstained.'
'It is far more than that!'
'Then I do not reach it.'
'No; you do not. That is why I presumed to ask you, is it in consonance with your tenets, with your duties?'
'I think so.'
'Then change your creed,' said the Princess.
A sombre wrath shone in her eyes as she looked up one moment.
'I have the blood in me of men who were not always Christians, but who, even when Pagan, knew what honour was. There are some things which are so vile that one must be vile oneself before one can forgive them.'
The Princess sighed.
'I am in ignorance of the nature of your wrongs; but this I know—they erred who gave you absolution at Eastertide, whilst you still bore bitterness in your soul.'
'Would I lay bare my soul and his shame now to any priest?' thought Wanda; but she repressed the answer. She said simply: 'Dear mother, believe me, I have been more merciful than many would have been.'
'You mean that you have not sought for a divorce? Nay, that is not mercy; that is decency, dignity, self-respect. When they of a great race go to the public with their wrongs they drag their escutcheon in the mud for the pleasure of the crowd. That you have not done; that is not mercy. You do but follow your instincts; you are a gentlewoman.'
A momentary impulse came over her, as she heard, to tell her companion his sin and her own shame; the woman's weakness, desiring sympathy and comprehension, assailed her for an instant. But she resisted and repressed it. The Princess Ottilie was aged and feeble. She had had no slight share in bringing about this union, which was now so cruelly broken; she had been ever proud of her penetration and devoted to his defence. To learn the truth would be a shock so terrible to her that it must needs be veiled from her for ever. Besides, his wife felt as though the relation would blister her lips were she to make it even to her oldest friend.
Had she known all, the elder woman would have been even more bitter in her hatred, even more inflexible in her sense of outrage than she herself; but she could not purchase sympathy at such a price. She chose rather to be herself condemned.
Offended, the Princess rose slowly to go to her own apartments. The tears welled painfully in her eyes.
'You were so happy, he was so devoted,' she murmured. 'Can all that have crumbled like a house of sand?'
Wanda von Szalras said bitterly:
'What did I say once, the day of my betrothal? That I leaned on a reed. The reed has withered, that is all. You see, I can stand without it.'
She conducted her aunt to her bedchamber with the usual courteous observances; then returned and sat long alone in the silent chamber.
'Forgive! what is the obligation of forgiveness?' she thought. 'It is the obligation to pardon offences, infidelity, unkindness, cruelty, but not dishonour. To forgive dishonour is to be dishonoured. So would my fathers have said.'
Bela that dawn was awakened by his mother standing beside his bed. She stooped and touched his curls with her lips.
'I was harsh to you yesterday, my child,' she said to him. 'I come to tell you now that you were quite right to have the thought you had. You are his son; you must not forget him.'
Bela lifted up his beautiful flushed face and his eye brilliant from sleep.
'I am glad I may remember,' he said simply; then he added, with his cheeks burning: 'When I am a man I will go and find him and bring him back.'
His mother turned away her face.
When his manhood should come and he should hear the story of his father's sin, what would he say? Would not all his soul cry out aloud and curse the impostor who had begotten him?
The eyes of Bela followed the dark form of his mother as she passed from his room.
'She is very unhappy,' he thought wistfully. 'If I could find himnow, would it make her happy again, I wonder?'
And the chivalry that was in his blood stirred in his childish veins.
'But you said that she sent him away?' whispered Gela, when Bela got upon his brother's bed and confided his thoughts to him.
'I did think so; but I might mistake,' said Bela. 'Perhaps he went because he was obliged, and that it is which grieves her.'
'Perhaps,' said Gela, meditatively.
'If I only knew where to go to find him I would go all over the world,' said Bela, with passion. 'I would ride Folko to the earth's very, very, end to reach him.'
'You could not get over the seas so,' said Gela; 'and he may be over the seas.'
'And we have never even seen the sea!' said Bela, to whom the suggested distance seemed more terrible than he had ever imagined. 'What can we do, Gela, do you think? you are clever about everything.'
Gela was silent a moment.
'Let us pray for him with all our might,' he said solemnly; and the two little boys knelt down by the bedside in their little nightshirts and prayed together for their father.
When Bela rose his face was very troubled, but very resolute. He drew out of its sheath a small sword with a handle of gold, which Egon Vàsàrhely had sent him years before. 'One must pray first,' he thought, 'but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.'
In the day he went out all alone and found Otto; the children were allowed to go over the home woods at their pleasure. Thejägermeisterwas very dear to Bela, for he told such wondrous tales of sport and danger, and spoke with such reverent affection of his lost lord.
'Wherecanhe be, Otto?' said the child now, in a low hushed voice, as they sat under the green oak boughs.
'Ah, my little Count, if only I knew!' said Otto. 'I would walk a thousand miles to him, and take him the first blackcock that shall fall to my gun this autumn.'
'You really say the truth? You do not know?' said Bela, with stern questioning eyes.
'Would I tell a lie, my little lord?' said the old hunter, reproachfully. 'Since your father drove away that cruel night none of us have set eyes on him, or ever heard a word. If Her Excellency do not know, how should we?'
'I mean to find him,' said the child, solemnly.
The old man sighed.
'How should you do that? Our hills are between us and all the rest of the world. Perhaps he is gone because he was tired of being here.'
'No,' said Bela, who remembered his father's farewell to him, of which he could never bring himself to speak to any living creature.
Otto was silent too: he could not tell the child what all the household believed—that his father had found too great a charm in the presence of the Countess Brancka.
The weeks and months stole on their course, which in the forest-heart of the old Archduchy seems so leisurely beside the feverish haste of the mad world. The ways of life went on unchanged; the children throve, and studied, and played, and grew apace; the health of the Princess became more delicate, and her strength more feeble; the seasons succeeded each other with monotony; no sound from the cities of men that lay beyond the ramparts of the glaciers broke the silence and the calm of Hohenszalras.
Wanda herself would not have known that one year was different to another had she not been forced to count time by the inches which it added to the stature of her offspring, and the recurrence of the days of their patron saints. They grew as fast as reeds in peaceful waters, and forced her to recognise that the years were dropping into the past. Time for her was shod with lead, and crept tamely, like a cripple upon broken ground. For the children's sake she lived; but for them she knew not why she rose to these long, colourless, lonely hours. But her corporeal life ailed nothing, whilst her spiritual life was sick unto death. Almost she could have wished for the lassitude of weakness to dull her pain; her bodily strength seemed to intensify what she suffered.
In the frosted brilliant winter time she still drove her fiery horses over the snow that was like marble, plunging into the recesses of the woods, seeing above her the ramparts, and bastions, and pinnacles of the great ice-range of the Glöckner glaciers. The intense cold, the rushing air, the whiteness as of a virgin earth, the sense of profound solitude, did her good, cooled the sense of shame that seemed burnt into her life, soothed the anguish of a love fooled, betrayed, and widowed. She felt with horror that the longer she kneeled beside the altar, the longer she prayed before the great Christ in her chapel, the more passionately she rebelled against the fate that had overtaken her. But, alone in the rarefied air, with the vastness of the mountains about her, with the cold wind pouring like spring water down a thirsty throat in its merciful coldness, with the white peaks meeting the starry skies, and the waters hushed in their shroud of ice, she gathered some kind of peace, some power of endurance: consolation neither earth nor heaven could give to her.
Of him she never heard. She could only have heard through her lawyers, and they knew nothing. Neither in Paris nor in Vienna was he seen. By a letter she received from the priest of Romaris she had learned that he was not there. She had sent one of her men of business thither with money and plans, to build on the site of the old house of the Sabrans a Maison de Dieu for the aged and sick fishermen of the coast and their widows.' It will be achapelle expiatoire,' she had thought bitterly, and she had endowed it richly, so that it should be independent of all those who should come after her. In all the occupations entailed by this and similar projects she was as attentive as of yore to all demands made on her.
When she perused a lawyer's long preamble, or corrected an architect's estimates and drawings, she was the same woman as she had been ere her betrayer had crossed the threshold of her home. Her character had been built on lines too strong, on a base too firm, for the earthquake of calamity, the whirlwind of passion, to undo it. But in her heart there was utter shipwreck. She had given herself and all that was hers with magnificent generosity; and she had received in return betrayal and a dishonour under which day and night all the patrician in her writhed and suffered.
When in the autumn of that year Cardinal Vàsàrhely, travelling in great state from Buda Pesth, arrived at Hohenszalras—a guest whom none could deny, a judge whom none could evade—he did not spare her open interrogation, searching censure, stern rebuke.
The Lilienhöhe she had excused herself from receiving; the Kaulnitz she had also refused; others as nearly related to her had encountered the same resistance to their overtures; but Cardinal Vàsàrhely came to take up his residence at the Holy Isle, with the weight of authority and the sanctity of the Church.
He visited his niece for the sole purpose of remonstrance. When he found himself met by a respectful but firm refusal to acquaint him with the reasons for her conduct, he did not, either, spare her the stately wrath of the incensed ecclesiastic. He was a man of noble presence, and of austere if arrogant life. He spoke with all the weight of his sixty years and of his eminence in the service of the Church. His eyes were bent on her in stern scrutiny as he stood drawn up to all his great height beside her in the library.
'If your griefs against your husband,' he urged, 'are of sufficient gravity to justify you in desiring eternal separation from him, you should not lean merely upon your own strength. You should seek the support of your spiritual counsellors. Although the Holy Church has never sanctioned the concubinage which the laws of men have called by the name of divorce; yet, as you are aware, my daughter, in extreme cases the Holy Father has himself deigned to unloose an unworthy bond, to annul an unsuitable marriage. In your case, if the offences of your lord have been so grave, I make no doubt that by my intercession with His Sanctity it would be possible to dissolve an union which has become unholy.'
She met his gaze calmly and coldly.
'Your Eminence is very good to interest yourself in my sorrows,' she replied; 'but for the intercession with our Holy Father which you offer, I will not trouble you. Whatever the offences of my husband be against me, they can concern me alone. I have summoned no one to hear them. I seek no one's judgment. As regards the power of the Supreme Pontiff to bind and loose, I would bow to it in all matters spiritual, but I cannot admit that even he can release me from an earthly tie which I voluntarily assumed.'
A rebuking wrath flashed from the eagle eyes of the great Churchman.
'I did not think that Wanda von Szalras would heretically deny the Pope his power over all souls!' he said sternly. 'Are you not aware that when the Holy Father deigns in his mercifulness to decree a marriage as null and void, it becomes so from that instant? It is as though it had never been; the union is effaced, the woman is decreed pure.'
'And the children,' she said bitterly; 'can the Holy Father effacethem?'
The Cardinal was affronted and appalled.
'You would call in question the infallible omnipotence of the Head of the Church!' he said with horror.
'The days of miracles are past,' she said coldly. 'I shall not entreat for them to be wrought for me. I trust your Eminence will pardon me if I say that no human, nay, no heavenly, permission could legitimate adultery in my sight or in my person.'
'You merit excommunication, my daughter,' said the haughty prelate, his brow black with wrath. He saw no reason why this marriage, which had offended all her house, should not be annulled by the all-powerful verdict of the Vatican. Such cases were rare, but it would be possible to include hers amongst them. The children could be consigned to religious houses, brought up to religious lives, unknown to and unknowing of the world.
'If the man whom you chose to wed,' he continued sternly, 'has offended or outraged you so greatly, let your relatives judge him and deal with him. You were warned against the gift of your hand to a stranger with an uncertain past behind him; he had not the eminence, the repute, the character that should have been demanded in your husband. But you were inflexible in your resolve then, as you are now in your silence.'
'I know of no one living to whom I owe any account,' she said with haughty decision; 'no one to whom I was bound to lay bare my mind and heart then, or to whom I am so bound now.'
'You are so bound every time you kneel in the confessional.'
'To reveal my own sins, perchance, not his.'
'Your soul should be as an open book before your priest.'
'Your Eminence will pardon me. I bow willingly and reverently to the Church in all matters spiritual, but in the rule of my own conduct I admit no guide but my conscience. My sorrows are all my own. No priest or layman shall intrude upon them.'
She spoke with peremptory and unyielding decision; the old spirit of her race was aroused in her, which in times bygone had bearded popes and monarchs, and braved the thunders of excommunication. They had been pious sons of Rome, but yet ofttimes rebellious ones; when their honour called one way and the priests pointed the other, they had lifted their swords in the sunlight and gone whither honour bade.
The Churchman knew that power of secular revolt which had been always latent in the Szalras blood; he knew now that, armed with the weapons of the Church though he was, he might as well seek to bow the mountains down as bend her will. He took for granted that her wrongs were great enough to entitle her to freedom; he had thought that she might wed again with his nephew, who had loved her so long; their mighty fortunes would have fitly met; this hateful union with a foreigner, a sceptic, a debauchee, would have become a thing of the past, washed away into absolute non-existence;—so he had dreamed, and he found himself confronted with a woman's illogical inconsistency and obstinacy.
He was deeply incensed. He assailed her for many days with all the subtle arguments of the ecclesiastical armoury, but he made no impression. She utterly refused to tell why she had exiled her husband from her house, and she as utterly refused to take any measures to attain her own freedom. When he left her he said a word of rebuke that long lingered in her memory. 'You are rebellious and almost heretical, my daughter. You entrench yourself in your silence and your pride, which you appear to forget are heinous sins when opposed to your spiritual superiors. But this only I will remind you of: if you deny the Church the power to annul the union of which its sacrament sanctified the consummation, be at least consistent: do not absolve yourself from its duties.'
With that keen home thrust in parting he left her, giving his blessing to the kneeling household; and six white mules, always kept there in readiness for his visits, bore him away through the embrowning woods.
When he reached his palace in Buda he summoned Egon Vàsàrhely and related what had passed.
His nephew heard in silence.
'Your Eminence erred in your judgment of Wanda,' he said at length. 'She would never make her wrongs, whatever they be, public, nor seek for dissolution of her marriage. She may repent it, but she will repent it in solitude.'
'If the marriage be so sacred in her eyes,' said the angry prelate, 'let her continue to live with her husband. She has been a law to herself; she has parted from him; where is the wifely submission there? Where the sanctity of the immutable bond?'
'Perhaps some day she will bid him return,' said Vàsàrhely, whose features were very grave and pale.
'She could forget this fatal folly like a bad dream,' continued the Cardinal, unheeding. 'She could begin a new life; she could wed with you.'
'Your Eminence mistakes,' said Vàsàrhely, abruptly. 'Though that man were dead ten times over, Wanda would never wed with me—nor I with her.'
'You are both wiser than the wisdom and holier than the holiness of the Church,' said the incensed ecclesiastic, with boundless scorn. He was accustomed to bend human volition like a willow wand in his hand.
When she herself had left the terrace where she had parted from the prelate, having accompanied him there in that stately etiquette which, though she had been dying, habit would have compelled her to observe in every detail, she had turned with a sense of intolerable pain from the sunshine of the September day.
It was a pretty scene that stretched before her, the children standing bareheaded, the household hushed and kneeling still where the mighty dignitary of the Mother Church had given them his benediction; the gold embroideries and rich colours of the liveries glowing in the light; the white mules and the scarlet-clothed attendants of the Cardinal passing down the avenue of oaks, with the immediate background of the darksome yews, and, further, the flushed foliage of the forests and the shine of the snow peaks; but to her it was fraught with unendurable associations. The central figure was missing from it which for so many years had graced all pageants and conducted all ceremonies there. It was the sole time since the exile of her husband that there had been any arrival or departure at Hohenszalras.
She had been compelled to receive the Cardinal with all due state and observance, and the oppressiveness of his three days' sojourn had worn and wearied her.
'I would sooner receive five emperors than one Churchman,' she said to the Princess. 'We are far from the days of the Apostles!'
'Christ must be honoured in His Vicars,' said the Princess, coldly, and with disapprobation chill on all her features.
Wanda turned away as the white mules disappeared in a bend of the avenue, and went into the house alone, whilst the children and the household still lingered in the sunshine. She traversed the whole length of the building to reach her octagon-room, where she was certain to be alone. The interrogation and censure of her uncle had left on her a harassed sense of being somewhere at fault: not to him, nor to the Church he represented and invoked, but to her own Conscience.
As she passed through one of the galleries she saw her youngest child Egon, now nearly two years old, playing with his nurse, an old, grave North German woman. They were the only living beings of the house who had not been upon the terraces to receive the Cardinal's last blessing; the one too young, the other too old to care. The child, with his fair face and his light curls, was like the child Christ of Carlo Dolce, yet there was the same resemblance in him to his father which pierced her soul whenever she looked in the faces of her other offspring.
She paused and stooped towards him now, where he played with a toy lamb in the breadth of sunlight that fell warm and broad through the open lattices of an oriel window, in the embrasure of which his attendant was sitting. The baby looked up under his long dark lashes, and made a little timid movement towards his nurse.
'Is he afraid of me?' said Wanda, with the same vague sense of remorse which she had felt before his eldest brother.
'Oh no! he is not afraid, my lady,' said the old woman with him, hurriedly. 'But he sees you so rarely now, and when they are so young they are frightened at grave faces.'
The nurse stopped herself, fearing she had said too much; but her mistress listened without anger and with a sharp pang of self-reproach.
'Come for him to my room when I ring,' she said; and she stooped again and lifted the little boy in her arms.
'Are you all afraid of me, my poor children,' she murmured to him. 'Surely I have never been cruel to you?'
He did not understand; he was still frightened, but he put his arm about her throat and hid his pretty face on her shoulder with a gesture that was half terror, half confidence. She took him to her own room and soothed and caressed and amused him, till he regained his natural fearlessness and sat happy on her knee, playing with some Indian ivory toys; then he grew tired, and leaned his head against her breast, and fell asleep as prettily as a Star of Bethlehem shuts its white leaves up at sunset.
She watched him with an aching heart.
She could look on none of her children without a throb of intolerable shame. They were the symbols as they were the offspring of all her hours of love. Another woman might have forgotten all except that they were hers.
She could not.
From that day she had the younger children brought to her more often, drove them out at times, and soon regained their affection, although to them all a majesty and melancholy, as inseparable from her now as shadows from the night, made her presence inspire them with a certain awe; even Lili, the most willful of them all, in her pretty, gay, childish vanity and naughtiness, never ventured to disobey or to weary her.
'When I am with her it is as if I were at Mass,' Lili said to her brothers. 'You know what one feels when the Host comes and the bell rings, and it is all so still, and only the Latin words——'
'It is the presence of God that we feel at Mass,' said Gela, in a hushed voice. 'And I think our mother has God with her very much. Only He makes her sad.'
'But she never does cry,' said her little daughter.
'No,' said Gela, 'I think she is too sad for that. You know when it is very, very cold the skies cannot rain. I think that it is just so cold with her.'
And Gela's own eyes filled, for he, the most thoughtful and the most quick in perception of them all, adored his mother. When he could he would sit in her presence for hours, mute and motionless, with a book on his knees, glancing at her with his meditative eyes now and then in rapt veneration.
'When Bela grows up he will wander, I dare say, and perhaps be a great soldier,' Gela thought at such times. 'But for me, I shall stay always with our mother, and read every thing that is written, and do all I can for the people, and care for nothing but for her and them.'
She had not let loose in the presence of Cardinal Vàsàrhely the burning wrath which had consumed her. And yet the valedictory words of the prelate recurred to her with haunting persistency. He had said to her: 'If you refuse to be released from your marriage, do not absolve yourself from its duties.' Was it possible, she asked herself, that she still owed allegiance to one who, whilst he had embraced her, had dishonoured her?
'As well,' she thought bitterly, 'as well say that the man and woman chained and drowned together in the Noyades of Nantes were united in a holy union!'
'Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.'
'Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.'
As she remembered those words of the Marriage Sacrament, uttered as she had stood beside him in the midst of the incense, the colour, the pomp, the gorgeous grandeur of the Court Chapel in Vienna, she felt that they had bound on her eternal silence, perpetual constancy, even in a sense continual submission; they forbade her to disgrace him before the world; they made his shame hers, they required her to defend him so far as in her lay from the punishment with which the laws would have met his wrong-doing: but she could not bring herself to acknowledge that it demanded more. Truth could not be forced to dwell beside falsehood. Honour could not take the kiss of peace from dishonour.
The natural veneration she bore to the speaker added to the weight of the reproach implied in the Cardinal's words. Even beyond her pride was her intense sense of the obligations of duty. She asked herself a thousand times a week if she had indeed failed in these. Honour was a yet higher thing than duty. Offended honour had its title to any choice. Her race had never gone to others with their wrongs; they had known how to avenge themselves by their own hand, in their own way. If she had chosen to stab him in the throat which had lied to her she would not, she thought, have gone outside her right. Yet she had been merciful to him; she had neither exposed nor chastised him; she had simply cut his life adrift from hers, which he had outraged.
No man's repute is hurt by separation from his wife; he was in no worse circumstance than he had been ere he had met her; she did not withdraw her gifts. She had given a noble name to one nameless; she had granted a feudal title to a bastard; she had enriched a man who previously had owned nothing, save half a million of francs won at play and a strip of sea-shore that was stolen. She withdrew none of her gifts; she left the impostor to the full enjoyment of the world; she did not even move a step to secure the world's sympathy with herself. All she had done as her just vengeance was to withdraw herself from the pollution of his touch, and to exile him from the home of her fathers. Who could have done less? His children would in the future possess all she had, though through him they destroyed the purity of her race for ever: centuries would not wash out in her sight the stain that was in their blood: but she did not disinherit them. She could not see that she had failed anywhere in her duty; she had been more generous in her judgment than many could have been. Wherever women spoke of her and of her separation from her husband, there would they surely, with many a bitter word, repay her all the affronts which she had put upon them by her indifference and by what they had esteemed her arrogance. She knew that in such a position as she had perforce created, unexplained, the man is easily and constantly absolved of blame, the woman is always and certainly condemned. Therefore she had never doubted that the future would lie lightly on his shoulders, passed in sensual idleness, in oblivion more or less easily attained. Could it be possible that though she had been so cruelly betrayed her own obligations remained the same? Had her marriage vows compelled her to endure even such offence as this without alteration in her own obedience? Was she inconsistent in sending her betrayer from her, whilst she still considered her bond to him binding? Since she refused to take advantage of the release that the Law and the Church would give her, was it unjustifiable to free herself from his hourly presence, his daily contact? No! she could not believe that it was so.
On her name-day, in the following spring, addressing his felicitations to her, Egon Vàsàrhely added words which had cost him much to write.
'You know how dear, more dear than any earthly thing, you have been ever to me,' he wrote, 'therefore you will pardon me what I am about to say. If I had followed my own selfish desires I should have entreated you to disgrace him publicly, begged you to shake off publicly all bonds to a traitor; and I should have shot him dead, with or without the formula of a quarrel; he himself knew that well. But for your own sake I would say to you now, pardon him if you can. Though you are the possessor of a position and of a character rare amongst women, yet even you must suffer as a separated wife. The children as they grow older will suffer from it likewise. You could divorce your husband; the Law and the Church would set you free from an union contracted in ignorance with a man guilty of a fraud. You would be free, and he would endure his fit chastisement. But I understand why you refuse to do that. I comprehend your feeling. Publicity would to you intensify disgrace. Divorce could do nothing to heal your cruel wounds. Therefore I urge on you forgiveness. It has cost me many months' bitter struggle to be able to write this to you. His offence is vile. His past is hateful. He himself merits nothing. But for your commands I would have set my heel on his throat as on a snake's. But there may have been excuses even for him; and since you acknowledge him as your husband you will, in the end, be more at peace if you do not continue to insist on a separation which will be food for the world's calumny. Besides, though you know it not, you have not exiled him from your heart, though you have sent him from your house. If you had not still loved him you would have said to me—Slay him. I believe that he loved you, though he had such foul guilt against you, and he must have some true qualities of character and mind since he satisfied yours for many long years. Of where he may be now I know not. Since I saw you I have not quitted my own country. But I would say to you—wherever he be, send for him. You will understand without words what it costs me to say to you—Since you will not accept the freedom of the Law, summon him to you and cleanse his soul in yours. I speak for you, not him. If I saw him lying dead like a dog in a ditch, for myself, I should thank God. Sometimes I look with stupor at my sword. Can it lie idle there and you be unavenged?'
The letter touched her profoundly. She realised the grandeur of generosity, the force of compelling duty, which had enabled Vàsàrhely to write it, proudest of gentlemen as he was, most devoted of lovers as he had been.
She replied to him:
'I have thought myself strong, but of late years I have found that there are things beyond my strength; what you counsel is one of them. Religion enjoins, indeed, forgiveness without limit; but there are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension. Nevertheless, I thank you for him and for myself.'
Any crime, any folly, any violence or faithlessness, which yet should have left his honour pure, she thought it would have been possible to condone; the life of a woman who loves must ever be one long pardon. But such shame as this of his ate into her very soul, as rust into the pure metal. It was such shame that when her heart went out to what she had once loved in the yearning of affection, she felt herself disgraced, feeling that the dominion of the senses, the weakness of remembered and desired joys made her oblivious of indignity, feeble as an enamoured fool.
Her friends, her priests, even her own conscience might say to her 'Forgive,' but she could not bend her will to do it. Forgiveness would mean reconciliation, union, life spent together as in their days of love. She could not bring herself to endure that perpetual contact, that incessant communion. To her sight he was stained with a moral leprosy. She could not consent to admit that one in spiritual health, and clean of guilt, must dwell with one spiritually diseased.
Another year passed by, and of him she still heard nothing. As, once before, his silence had told her of his passion more eloquently than speech could have done, so now the same silence tended to soften her wrath, to soothe her horror. She had expected him to take one of two courses: either to assail her with written entreaties for pardon, and ceaseless efforts to palliate his crime in her sight, or to go out into the world of men to seek oblivion in pleasure, and perhaps absolution in ambition.
He had done neither.
Once she, having occasion to go to the room which had been set aside for the boys' studies, saw the old professor absorbed in the perusal of a letter. Confused and startled he slipped it hurriedly beneath a Latin exercise of Bela's, which lay with other papers on the table. The children were out riding.
His mistress looked at him, and her face grew a shade paler still.
'You correspond with my husband?' she said abruptly, pausing, as she always paused, before she said the latter words.
Greswold flushed consciously, stammered a few unintelligible words, and was silent.
'You hear from him?' she continued with correct inference. 'You know where he is?'
'I have promised that I will not say. I pray your Excellency to pardon me,' murmured the old man, the colour mounting upward to his grey locks.
She was silent a moment; she knew not what emotion moved her, whether wrath, or wonder, or offence; or whether even relief from long suspense.
'Do not be angered, my lady,' pleaded Greswold, timidly. 'It is the only way in which he can hear of you and of his children. Could your Excellency believe that all these months, these years, he lived on without any tidings?'
'I think you have exceeded your duty,' she said coldly. 'I think that you should have asked my permission.'
The old man stood penitent, like a chidden child. He was afraid of her interrogations; but she made none.
'You will give me your word,' she pursued, 'never to speak of this correspondence to Herr Bela or to any of the children.'
Greswold bowed his assent. 'My lord has forbidden me also,' he said eagerly.
Her brows contracted.
'You have committed an imprudence,' she said, in a tone which chilled the old man to the marrow. 'Be heedful that no one knows of it.'
She said no more; took the volume she had needed, and quitted the room.
'Who shall tell the heart of a woman?' thought Greswold, left to himself. 'She knows not whether the man she once adored be living or dead, and she does not put to me one single question, does not even seek to learn where he dwells or what he does! What could his sin be to sweep all love away as fire makes a desert of a smiling meadow? And be it what it would, of what use is human love if it have not enough of the divine love in it to rejoice over the sinner who repents?'
He knew not that the sin she might, she would, have forgiven, but that the shame ate into the fair marble of her honour like a corroding acid.
From that time he expected daily some fresh question, some allusion at least to the confession which she had surprised from him. But she never spoke to him again of it. If she placed a violent control upon herself, because she did not think it fitting to speak of her husband to one in her employ, or if her husband were absolutely dead to her memory and her affections, he could not tell. He only knew that by no word or sign did she appear to recall the brief conversation which had passed between them.
Although what he had done was innocent enough, the old physician, in his scrupulous sense of duty, began to have a sense of guilt. Had he any right to retain any hidden knowledge from the mistress whose roof sheltered him, and whose bread he ate?
But his loyalty to his pledged word, and to him whom the world of men still called Sabran, obliged him to be mute.
'After all,' he thought, 'if she knew it might be better, but my first duty is to keep my word.'
She never tempted him to break it. She was not callous and hardened as he supposed. She felt a growing desire to learn where and how her husband had taken up the broken threads of his severed life. She had believed either that he would return to the unfettered existence that could be dreamed away under the cedar groves of Mexico, with the senses satisfied and the moral law set at naught, or that he would go amongst the men and women of the great world, popular, pitied, and easily consoled. She had seen that world exercise a potent fascination over him, and if it were called to pronounce against her or against him, she was well aware that he would bear away all its suffrages. He had always humoured and flattered it; she never.
He had passed from the sight of those who knew him as utterly as though he had descended to his grave. No sound or hint told her of his destiny. She still thought at times that he must have sought those flowery recesses of the West which had given his youth their shelter. It might well be that in his total ruin his instincts had urged him to return to the free barbaric life of his early manhood, where none would reproach him, none deride him, none know his secret or his sin. His correspondence with Greswold suggested a doubt to her. Perhaps remorse was with him and the weight of remembrance.
When, too harshly, she had assumed that all his love and life had been a lie, because one lie had been beneath it, she had told herself that he would find solace in those vices and pastimes which, in his earlier years, had been fatal to his ambition and to his perseverance. But since he cared to hear of his children's welfare, it might well be that their life together was nearer to his heart than she had credited. She believed that, if he had been sunk in the kind of self-indulgence she had imagined, he would have shunned all tidings, all memories, of his lost home.
Then again, with the inconsistency of all great suffering, an intense indignation possessed her that he did dare to remember, did dare to recall, that her offspring were also his. Even alone the hot flush of an ever-increasing shame came to her face when she thought that she had been for nine long years his, in the most absolute possession that woman can grant to man. Exile, severance, silence, cold and dark as the winters of the land of his birth, could not alter that. Whenever he chose to think of her she must be his in remembrance still.
Once the Princess ventured to say again to her a word which came from her heart. They were standing on the terrace watching the blush of evening glow on the virginal snows of the mountains.
'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,' she murmured. 'Wanda, mine, do never you think of those words—you who let so many suns rise and set, and find your wrath unchanged?'
'If it wereonlythat!' she answered bitterly. 'It is so much else—so much else! Crimes deep as yonder water, high as yonder hills, I could have forgiven, but—a baseness—never! Nay, there are pardons that would only be as base as what they pardoned.'
So it seemed to her.
When again and again her heart was thrilled with its old tenderness, her mind was haunted by a million memories of dead delights, she strove against herself, and trod down her temptation with the merciless self-punishment of an ascetic. It humbled and stained her in her own sight to feel that love could live within her without honour.
'Forgive me,' said the Princess, 'but it always seems to me that you—noble and generous and pure of mind as you are—yet have met ill the supreme trial, the supreme test of your life. You believed that you loved the man you wedded, but you loved your own pride more. If love be not endless forbearance, endless compassion, endless pity and sympathy, what is it but the mere fever and instincts of carnal passions? What raises it above the self-indulgence of the senses if not its sacrifice of will and its long-suffering? You have said so yourself in other days than these.'
'And what,' she thought passionately as she heard, 'what would it be but the basest indulgence of the senses to let oneself love and be beloved by what one scorned?—to stoop and kiss the lips that lied for mere sake of their sweetness?—to gather in one's arms the coward, the traitor, and persuade oneself that one forgave because one grew blind with amorous remembrance?'
'Is it well,' pursued her companion with soft solemnity, 'to let anyone who is so near to you live his own life when that life may be one of sin? You send him from you, and how can you tell into what extremes of evil or of folly despair may not drive him? A man cast forth from his home is like a ship cut loose from its anchor and rudderless. Whatever may have been his weakness, his offences, they cannot absolve you from your duty to watch over your husband's soul, to be his first and most faithful friend, to stand between him and his temptations and perils. That is the nobler side of marriage. When the light of love is faded, and its joys are over, its duties and its mercies remain. Because one of the twain has failed in these the other is not acquitted of obligation. Pardon me if I seem to censure. Look in your own heart and judge if I err.'
'You do not know! You do not know! If I forgave him I should never forgive myself!'
She turned her head from the roseate and happy light that spoke to her of other days, and went with a swift uneven step into the house, now darkened by the passing of the day.
She flung his memory from her as so much unholiness. Had passion not yet lived in her, the coldness of unforgiving sorrow might not have seemed to her so sovereign a duty.
Some weeks after she had seen the letter in Greswold's hands a small hamlet was burnt down during a high north wind. It belonged to her. Hearing of the calamity she went thither at once. It was some two and a half German miles from the castle. She drove, herself, four young Hungarian horses, whose fretting graces and tempestuous gallop gave her the only pleasure which she was now capable of enjoying. They were harnessed to a carriage light and strong, built on purpose to scour rapidly rough forest roads and steep hill-sides. When she had visited the melancholy scene, given what consolation she could, and distributed money to the homeless peasants, promising to rebuild the houses with her own timber and shingles—for the conflagration had been the fault of no one, but of the wild wind which had scattered the burning embers of a hearth-fire on a neighbouring wood-stack—her horses were rested, and she began her homeward drive as the pale afternoon grew grey and the twilight fell on the little grassy vale, now charred and smoking with the smouldering ruins of the châlets.
'Our Countess never leaves us alone in any trouble,' said the women gathered about the stone statue of S. Florian, their most trusted patron, who, despite their prayers, had refused to save them from the flames. The hamlet was not far from the Maurer glaciers, and was shut in by a complete wall of mountains; it was green, fresh, beautifully cool in summer. Now, in the late spring, it was still dreary, and patches of snow still lay on its sward; it was set high on the mountain side, and dense forests sloped down from it, seldom traversed, and dark early in the afternoon. Her groom lit the lamps of her carriage as she entered the deep woods, through which the road was little more than a timber-track. The long gallops and the steep inclines coming thither had calmed and pacified her young horses. They gave her no trouble to control them, as they trotted rapidly along the shadowy forest ways. In other parts of the country the sun had not then set, but here the gloom was grey, like that of a cloudy dawn. Yet it was not so dark but that she perceived ahead of her, as her horses turned a curve in the moss-grown path, a figure, whose height and outline made her heart stand still. As the animals went past him in their swinging trot the blaze of the lamps fell full upon him. He turned and retreated quickly into the undergrowth beneath the drooping boughs of the Siberian pines, but she saw him, he saw her. Mechanically he uncovered his head and bowed low; she drove onward with a sense of suffocation at her throat and a chill like ice in her veins. She had recognised him in that moment of time. He was changed, aged, and there were threads of grey in his hair. He wore a forester's dress and had a gun on his shoulder.
Where they had met, in these woods that lay under the snow saddle of the Reggen Thörl, it was still twenty English miles away from the burg. It was late when she reached home, but her people were used to those long night drives, and even the Princess had become resigned to them. On the plea of fatigue she went to her own rooms and there remained. A faintness and sense of confusion stayed with her. She had not thought that merely meeting him thus would affect her. She had underrated, the power of the past.
When she had deemed him far away in other countries he was there in her own lands, not twenty miles from her. The knowledge of his vicinity moved her with a mingled sense of unendurable pain, partial anger, reviving love. It seemed horrible to have passed him by as any stranger would have passed, without a sign or word. Yet he was dead to her, whether oceans were between them or only a few leagues of hill and grass and forest.
She did not sleep, she did not even lie down that night. He seemed always before her; in the stillness of her chamber she heard his voice, and she started up thinking he touched her.
He had looked aged, ill, weary, unhappy; the sight of him bore conviction to her that he, like herself, found no compensation, no consolation. Perchance her monitress had been right; she had been cruel. Perchance, whatever sin his present or his future life might hold would lie, directly indeed at his own door, but indirectly at hers. She had always held that high and spiritual view of marriage which, rising above mere sensual indulgence, regarded the bond of souls as sacred, and made the life on earth mere passage and preparation for eternity. She had loved to believe that she ennobled, purified, exalted his life by union with hers. Was she now false to her own creed when she left him alone, unfriended, unpardoned, to drift to any solace in vice, or any distraction in evil, which might be his fate? The sensitiveness and apprehension of her conscience before the possibility of a neglected duty made of her meditations a very martyrdom. All her life long she had been resolute and serene in action, deciding quickly, and carrying resolve into action without hesitation; but here, in the supreme crisis of her fate, she was irresolute and wrung by continual doubt. Had it only been any other crime than this!—this which cankered all the honour of her race, and was rank with the abhorred putridity of fraud!
The spring passed into summer, and the children played amidst masses of roses and sweet ranks of lilies, stretching down the green grass alleys of the gardens. More than once she went to the same hamlet, where now châlets were arising, made of pine and elm, cut in the past winter in her own woods. But of him she saw no more. She could not bend her will to ask of him of any of her household, not even of Greswold. Whether he lingered amidst her mountains, or whether he had but come thither in a momentary impulse, she knew not.
The infinite yearning of affection, which is wholly outside the instincts of the passions, awoke in her once more. She began to doubt her own reading of obligation and of duty. Had her counsellors been right—had she met the supreme test of her character and had failed before it?
Was it true that a great love must be as exhaustless as the ocean in its mercy and as profound in its comprehension?
Had his sin to her released her from her duties towards him? Because he had been disloyal was she absolved from loyalty to him? Ought she sooner to have said to him,—'Nay, no crime, no untruth, no failure in yourself shall divide you from me; the darker be your soul the greater need hath it to lean on mine?'
In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honour, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone?
In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience?
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite, To forgive wrongs darker than death or night, To defy power which seems omnipotent, To love, and live to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates, Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite, To forgive wrongs darker than death or night, To defy power which seems omnipotent, To love, and live to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates, Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.
This, perchance, had been the higher diviner way which she had missed—this the obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted.
Resolutely she had gone on upon her joyless path, not doubting that her course was right. It had seemed to her that there was no other way possible; that, stretching her hand to him across the gulf of shame that severed them, she would do nothing to raise him, but only fall herself, degraded to his likeness.
So it had always seemed to her.
Now alone the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to the traditions of honour, she had forgotten the obligations of mercy. Had it been any other thing, any other sin, she thought, rather than this, which struck at the very root of all the trusts, of all the faiths, which she had most venerated as the legacy of her fathers!——
Sometimes it seemed to her as though, were that time of torture to be lived through again, she would not send him from her; she would say to him:
'What we love once we love for ever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth?'