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 him
_now_, 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. The _jägermeister_
was very dear to Bela, for he told such wondrous tales of sport and
danger, and spoke with such reverent affection of his lost lord.
'Where _can_ he 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 a _chapelle 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 efface
_them?_'
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._'
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.