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 numerous _dienerschaft_ in 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 they _are_ wicked. 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 free
_me_, purify _me_, 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.
'Insult _you_!' 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 recall _that_,' 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 loved _you_!' 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.