He spring dawned once more on Hohenszalras, and the summer followed it.
The waters leapt, the woods rejoiced, the gardens blossomed, and the
children played; but the house was silent as a house in which the dead
are tying. There was indeed a corpse there--the corpse of buried joy,
of murdered love, of ruined honour.
The household resumed its calm order, the routine of the days was
unbroken, the quiet yet stately life had been taken up in its course
as though it had never been altered; and wherever young children are
there will always be some shout of mirth, some sound of happy laughter
somewhere; the children laugh as the birds sing, though those amidst
them bury their dead.
But the house was as a house of mourning, and the sense of death was
there as utterly as though he who was gone had been laid in his grave
amidst the silver figures and the marble tombs in the Chapel of the
Knights. No one ever heard a sigh from her lips, or ever saw the tears
beneath her eyelids; but the sense of her bereavement, as one terrible,
inconsolable, eternal, weighed like a pall on all those who were about
her; the lowliest peasant on her estates understood that the sanctity
of some untold woe had built up a wall of granite between her and all
the living world.
She had always been grateful to fate for her old home set amidst the
silence of the mountains, but she had never been so thankful for it
as now. It shielded her from all the observation and interrogation of
the world; no one came thither unbidden, unless she chose, no visitant
would ever break that absolute solitude which was the sole approach
to peace that she would ever know. Even her relatives could not pass
the icy barrier of her cold denial. They wearied her for a while with
written importunities and suggestions, hinted wonder, delicately
expressed questions. But they made no way into her confidence; they
soon left her to herself and to her children. They said angrily to
themselves that she had been always whimsical and a solitary; they
had been certain that soon or late that ill-advised union would be
dissolved in some way, private or public. They were all people haughty,
sensitive, abhorrent of scandal; they were content that the separation
should be by mutual consent and noiseless.
She had had letters from Egon Vàsàrhely full of delicate tenderness; in
the last he had asked with humility if he might visit Hohenszalras. She
had written in return to him:
'You have my gratitude and my affection, but until we are quite old we
will not meet. Leave me alone; you can do naught for me.'
He obeyed; he understood the loyalty to one disloyal which made her
refuse to meet him, of whose loyalty she was so sure.
He sent a magnificent present to the child who was his namesake, and
wrote to her no more save upon formal anniversaries.
The screen of her dark forests protected her from all the cruel comment
and examination of the men and women of her world. She knew them well
enough to know that when she ceased to appear amidst them, when she
ceased to contribute to their entertainment, when she ceased to bid
them to her houses, she would soon cease also to be remembered by them;
even their wonder would live but for a day. If they blamed her in their
ignorance, their blame would be as indifferent as their praise had
been.
She had been told by her lawyers that her husband had refused to touch
a coin of the revenues of Idrac, and had once visited them to sign a
power of procuration, whereby they could receive those revenues and set
them aside in accumulation for his son Gela. That was all she heard.
Whither he had gone she was ignorant. She did not make any effort to
learn. On the night following his departure a peasant had been sent
with the sleigh and horses home to Hohenszalras. The solicitors of
Salzburg had seen him a week or two later at their ancient offices
under the Calvarienburg: that was all. She had bade him let it be
forgotten that he had ever lived beside her. He had obeyed her.
The days, and weeks, and months went on, and his place knew him no
more. The jägers, seated round their fires in their forest-huts, spoke
longingly and wonderingly of his absence. The hunters, when they
brought down a steinbock with unusual effort or skill, said that it had
been a shot that would have been worthy of his praise. His old friend
wept for him with the slow sad tears of age, and the child Bela prayed
for his return every night that he knelt down before his crucifix. But
his name never passed his wife's lips, and was never written by her
hand. She had given her all with the superb generosity of a sovereign;
she had in her wrongs the intense abiding unutterable disgust of a
sovereign betrayed and outraged. When she let grief have its way, it
was when no eyes beheld her, when the night was down and solitude
sheltered her.
She had never spoken of what had befallen her to any human ear; not
even to her priest's. The horror of it was buried in her own breast;
its sepulchre all the waste and ashes of her perished joys.
When the Princess Ottilie, weeping, entreated to be told the worst, she
answered briefly:
'He betrayed me. How, matters nothing.'
More than that she never said. The Princess supposed that she spoke
of the disloyalty of the passions, and dared not urge her to more
confidence. 'I warned him that she would never forgive if he were
faithless,' she thought, and wept for hours at her orisons, her gentle
soul resenting the inflexibility of this mute immutable bitterness of
offended love.
Too proud and too delicate to intrude undesired into any confidence,
and too tenderhearted to utter censure aloud to one she loved, the
Princess showed in a thousand ways without speech that she considered
there were cruelty and egotism in her unexplained separation from
her husband. Believing as she did that his offence was that conjugal
infidelity which, however blameable, is one of those injuries which
all women who love forgive, and which those who do not love endure in
silence from patience and dignity, herself offended at her exclusion
from all knowledge of the facts, she said but little; but her whole
attitude was one of restrained reproach.
'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 is _he?_' 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 were _that_,'
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 day _he_ might
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 me _that._'
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 even _that_ when 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.'