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.
'_He_ was 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--not _that._ 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.