Sabran was still insensible when he was carried to the house.
When he regained consciousness he was on his own bed, and his wife was
bending over him. A convulsion of grief crossed his face as he lifted
his eyelids and looked at her.
'Wanda,' he murmured feebly, 'Wanda, you will forgive----'
She kissed him passionately, while her tears fell like rain upon his
forehead. She did not hear his words distinctly; she was only alive to
the intense joy of his recovered consciousness, of the sound of his
voice, of the sense of his safety. She kneeled by his bed, covering his
hands with caresses, prodigal of a thousand names of love, given up to
an abandonment of terror and of hope which broke down all the serenity
and self-command of her habitual temper. She was not even aware of the
presence of others. The over-mastering emotions of anguish and of joy
filled her soul, and made her seem deaf, indifferent to all living
things save one.
Sabran lay motionless. He felt her lips, he heard her voice; he did not
look up again, nor did he speak again. He shut his eyes, and slowly
remembered all that had passed. Greswold approached him and held his
fingers on his wrist, and held a little glass to his mouth. Sabran put
it away. 'It is an opiate,' he said feebly; 'I will not have it.'
He was resolute; he closed his teeth, he thrust the calming draught
away.
He was thinking to himself: 'Sometimes in unconsciousness one speaks.'
'You are not in great pain?' asked the physician. He made a negative
movement of his head. What were the fire and the smart of his lacerated
flesh, of his torn muscles, to the torments of his fears, to the agony
of his long stifled conscience?
'Do not torment him, let him be still,' she said to the physician; she
held his hand in both her own and pressed it to her heart. His languid
eyes thanked her, then closed again.
Herr Greswold withdrew to a little distance and waited. It seemed to
him strange that a man of the high courage and strong constitution of
Sabran should be thus utterly broken down by any wound that was not
mortal; should be thus sunk into dejection and apathy, making no effort
to raise himself, even to console and reassure his wife. It was not
like his careless and gallant temper, his virile and healthful strength.
It was true, the doctor reflected, that he had lost a great amount of
blood. Such a loss he knew sometimes affects the heart and shatters the
nervous system in many unlooked-for ways. Yet, he thought, there was
something beyond this; the attitude and the regard of Egon Vàsàrhely
had been unnatural at such an hour of peril. 'When he said just now
"forgive," what did he mean?' reflected the old man, whose ear had
caught the word which had escaped that of Wanda, who had been only
alive to the voice she adored.
The next four days were anxious and terrible. Sabran did not recover as
the physician expected that he would, seeing the nature of his wounds
and the naturally elastic and sanguine temperament he possessed. He
slept little, had considerable fever, woke from the little rest he
had, startled, alarmed, bathed in cold sweats; at other times he lay
still in an apathy almost comatose, from which all the caresses and
entreaties of his wife failed to rouse him. They began to fear that the
discharge from the arteries had in some subtle and dangerous manner
affected the action of the heart, the composition of the blood, and
produced aneurism or pyæmia. 'The hero of Idrac to be prostrated by a
mere flesh wound!' thought Herr Greswold in sore perplexity. He sent
for a great man of science from Vienna, who, when he came, declared the
treatment admirable, the wounds healthy, the heart in a normal state,
but added it was evident the nervous system had received a severe
shock, the effects of which still remained.
'But it is that which I cannot understand,' said the old man in
despair. 'If you only knew the Marquis de Sabran as I know him; the
most courageous, the most gay, the most resolute of men! A man to laugh
at death in its face! A man absolutely without fear!'
The other assented.
'Every one knows what he did in the floods at Idrac,' he answered; 'but
he has a sensitive temperament for all that. If you did not tell me it
is impossible, I should say that he had had some mental shock, some
great grief. The prostration seems to me more of the mind than the
body. But you have assured me it is impossible?'
'Impossible! There does not live on earth a man so happy, so fortunate,
so blessed in all the world as he.'
'Men have a past that troubles them sometimes,' said the Vienna
physician. 'Nay, I mean nothing, but I believe that M. de Sabran was a
man of pleasure. The cup of pleasure sometimes has dregs that one must
drink long afterwards. I do not mean anything; I merely suggest. The
prostration has to my view its most probable origin in mental trouble;
but it would do him more harm than good to excite him by any effort to
certify this. To the Countess von Szalras I have merely said, that his
state is the result of the large loss of blood, and, indeed, after all
it may be so.'
On the fifth day, Sabran, still lying in that almost comatose silence
which had been scarcely broken since his accident, said in a scarce
audible voice to his wife:
'Is your cousin here?'
She stooped towards him and answered:
'Yes; he is here, love. All the others went immediately, but Egon
remained. I suppose he thought it looked kinder to do so. I have
scarcely seen him, of course.'
The pallor of his face grew greyer; he turned his head away restlessly.
'Why does he not go?' he muttered in his throat. 'Does he wait for my
death?'
'Oh, Réné! hush, hush!' she said, with horror and amaze. 'My love, how
can you say such things? You are in no danger; the doctor assures me
so. In a week or two you will be well, you will be yourself.'
'Send your cousin away.'
She hesitated; troubled by his unreasoning, restless jealousy, which
seemed to be the only consciousness of life remaining with him. 'I will
obey you, love; you are lord here,' she said softly; 'but will it not
look strange? No guest can well be told to go.'
'A guest!--he is an enemy!'
She sighed, knowing how hopelessly reason can struggle against the
delusions of a sick bed. 'I will tell him to go to-morrow,' she said,
to soothe him. 'To-night it is too late.'
'Write to him--do not leave me.'
There was a childlike appeal in his voice, that from a man so strong
had a piteous pathos. Her eyes swam with tears as she heard.
'Oh, my dearest, I will not leave you!' she said passionately, 'not for
one moment whilst I live; and oh, my beloved! what could death ever
change in _me_? Have you so little faith?'
'You do not know,' he said, so low that his breath scarcely stirred the
air.
She thought that he was tormented by a doubt that she would not be
faithful to him if he died. She stooped and kissed him.
'My own, I would sooner be faithless to you in your life than after
death. Surely you know me well enough to know that at the least?'
He was silent. A great sigh struggled from his breast and escaped his
pale lips like a parting breath.
'Kiss me again,' he murmured; 'kiss me again, whilst----That gives me
life,' he said, as he drew her head down upon his bosom, where his
heart throbbed labouredly. A little while later he fell asleep. He
slept some hours. When he awoke he was consumed by a nameless fear.
'Is your cousin gone?' he asked.
She told him that it was one o'clock in the same night; she had not
written yet.
'Let him stay,' he said feverishly. 'He shall not think I fear him. Do
you hear me? Let him stay.'
The words seemed to her the causeless caprice of a jealousy magnified
and distorted by the weakness of fever. She strove to answer him
calmly. 'He shall go or stay as you please,' she assured him. 'What
does it matter, dear, what Egon does? You always speak of Egon. You
have never spoken of the children once.'
She wanted to distract his thoughts. She was pained to think how deep,
though unspoken, his antagonism to her cousin must have been, that now
in his feebleness it--was the one paramount absorbing thought.
A great sadness came upon his face as she spoke; his lips trembled a
little.
'Ah! the children,' he repeated. 'Yes, bring them to me to-morrow. Bela
is too like me. Poor Bela, it will be his curse.'
'It is my joy of joys,' she murmured, afraid to see how his mind seemed
astray.
A shudder that was almost a spasm passed over him. He did not reply. He
turned his face away from her, and seemed to sleep.
The day following he was somewhat calmer, somewhat stronger, though his
fever was high.
The species of paralysis that had seemed to; fall on all his faculties
had in a great measure left him. 'You wish, me to recover,' he said to
her. 'I will do so, though perhaps it were, better not?'
'He says strange things,' she said to Greswold. 'I cannot think why he
has such thoughts.'
'It is not he, himself, that has them, it is his fever,' answered the
doctor. 'Why, in fever, do people often hate what they most adore when
they are in health?'
She was reassured, but not contented.
The children were brought to see him. Bela had with him an ivory
air-gun, with which he was accustomed to blow down his metal soldiers;
he looked at his father with awed, dilated eyes, and said that he would
go out with the gun and kill the brothers of the bear that had done the
harm.
'The bear was quite right,' said Sabran. 'It was I who was wrong to
take a life not my own.'
'That is beyond Bela,' said his wife. 'But I will translate it to him
into language he shall understand, though I fear very much, say what I
will, he will be a hunter and a soldier one day.'
Bela looked from one to the other, knitting, his fair brows as he sat
on the edge of the bed.
'Bela will be like Egon,' he said, 'with all gold and fur to dress up
in, and a big jewelled sword, and ten hundred men and horses, and Bela
will be a great killer of things!'
Sabran smiled languidly, but she saw that he flinched at her cousin's
name.
'I shall not love you, Bela, if you are a killer of things that are
God's dear creatures,' she said, as she sent the child away.
His blue eyes grew dark with anger.
'God only cares about Bela,' he said in innocent profanity, with
a profound sense of his own vastness in the sight of heaven, 'and
Gela,' he added, with the condescending tenderness wherewith he always
associated his brother and himself.
'Where could he get all that overwhelming pride?' she said, as he was
led away. 'I have tried to rear him so simply. Do what I may he will
grow arrogant and selfish.'
'My dear,' said Sabran, very bitterly, 'what avails that he was borne
in your bosom? He is my son!'
'Gela is your son, and he is so different,' she answered, not seeking
to combat the self-censure to which she was accustomed in him, and
which she attributed to faults or follies of a past life, magnified by
a conscience too sensitive.
'He is all yours then,' he said, with a wan smile. 'You have prevailed
over evil.'
In a few days later his recovery had progressed so far that he had
regained his usual tone and look; his wounds were healing, and his
strength was returning. He seemed to the keen eyes of Greswold to have
made a supreme effort to conquer the moral depression into which he had
sunk, and to have thrust away his malady almost by force of will. As he
grew better he never spoke of Egon Vàsàrhely.
On the fifteenth day from his accident he was restored enough to health
for apprehension to cease. He passed some hours seated at an open
window in his own room. He never asked if Vàsàrhely were still there or
not.
Wanda, who never left him, wondered at that silence, but she forbore to
bring forward a name which had had such power to agitate him. She was
troubled at the nervousness which still remained to him. The opening of
a door, the sound of a step, the entrance of a servant made him start
and turn pale. When she spoke of it with anxiety to Herr Joachim, he
said vague sentences as to the nervousness which was consequent on
great loss of blood, and brought forward instances of soldiers who had
lost their nerve from the same cause. It did not satisfy her. She was
the descendant of a long line of warriors; she could not easily believe
that her husband's intrepid and careless courage could have been
shattered by a flesh wound.
'Did you really mean,' he said abruptly to her that afternoon, as he
sat for the first time beside the open panes of the oriel; 'did you
really mean that were I to die you would never forget me for any other?'
She rose quickly as if she had been stung, and her face flushed.
'Do I merit that doubt from you? she said. 'I think not.'
She spoke rather in sadness than in anger. He had hurt her, he could
not anger her. He felt the rebuke.
'Even if I were dead, should I have all your life?' he murmured, in
wonder at that priceless gift.
'You and your children,' she said gravely. 'Ah! what can death do
against great love? Make its bands stronger perhaps, its power purer.
Nothing else.'
'I thank you,' he said very low, with great humility, with intense
emotion. For a moment he thought----should he tell her, should he trust
this deep tenderness which could brave death; and might brave even
shame unblenching? He looked at her from under his drooped eyelids, and
then--he dared not. He knew the pride which was in her better than she
did----her pride, which was inherited by her firstborn, and had been
the sign manual of all her imperious race.
He looked at her where she stood with the light falling on her through
the amber hues of painted glass; worn, wan, and tired by so many days
and nights of anxious vigil, she yet looked a woman whom a nation
might salute with the _pro rege nostro!_ that Maria Theresa heard. All
that a great race possesses and rejoices in of valour, of tradition,
of dignity, of high honour, and of blameless truth were expressed in
her; every movement, attitude, and gesture spoke of the aristocracy of
blood. All that potent and subtle sense of patrician descent which had
most allured and intoxicated him in other days now awed and daunted
him. He dared not tell her of his treason. He dared not. He was as a
false conspirator before a great queen he has betrayed.
'Are you faint, my love?' she asked him, alarmed to see the change upon
his face and the exhaustion with which he sunk, backward against the
cushions of his chair.
'Mere weakness; it will pass,' he said, smiling as best he might, to
reassure her. He felt like a man who slides down a crevasse, and has
time and consciousness enough to see the treacherous ice go by him,
the black abyss yawning below him, the cold, dark death awaiting him
beyond, whilst on the heights the sun is shining.
That night he entreated her to leave him and rest. He assured her he
felt well; he feigned a need of sleep. For fifteen nights she had not
herself lain down. To please him she obeyed, and the deep slumber of
tired nature soon fell upon her. When he thought she slept, he rose
noiselessly and threw on a long velvet coat, sable-lined, that was by
his bedside, and looked at his watch. It was midnight.
He crossed the threshold of the open door into his wife's chamber and
stood beside her bed for a moment, gazing at her as she slept. She
seemed like the marble statue of some sleeping saint; she lay in the
attitude of S. Cecilia on her bier at Home. The faint lamplight made
her fair skin white as snow. Bound her arm was a bracelet of his hair
like the one which he wore of hers. He stood and gazed on her, then
slowly turned away. Great tears fell down his cheeks as he left her
chamber. He opened the door of his own room, the outer one which led
into the corridor, and walked down the long tapestry-hung gallery
leading to the guest-chambers. It was the first time that he had walked
without assistance; his limbs felt strange and broken, but he held on,
leaning now and then to rest against the arras. The whole house was
still.
He took his way straight to the apartments set aside for guests. All
was dark. The little lamp he carried shed a circle of light about his
steps but none beyond him. When he reached the chamber which he knew
was Egon Vàsàrhely's he did not pause. He struck on its panels with a
firm hand.
The voice of Vàsàrhely asked from within, 'Who is there? Is there
anything wrong?'
'It is I! Open,' answered Sabran.
In a moment more the door unclosed. Vàsàrhely stood within it; he was
not undressed. There were a dozen wax candles burning in silver sconces
on the table within. The tapestried figures on the walls grew pale and
colossal in their light. He did not speak, but waited.
Sabran entered and closed the door behind him. His face was bloodless,
but he carried himself erect despite the sense of faintness which
assailed him.
'You know who I am?' he said simply, without preface or supplication.
Vàsàrhely gave a gesture of assent.
'How did you know it?'
'I remembered,' answered the other.
There was a moment's silence. If Vàsàrhely could have withered to the
earth by a gaze of scorn the man before him, Sabran would have fallen
dead. As it was his eyes dropped beneath the look, but the courage and
the dignity of his attitude did not alter. He had played his part of
a great noble for so long that it had ceased to be assumption and had
become his nature.
'You will tell her?' he said, and his voice did not tremble, though his
very soul seemed to swoon within him.
'I shall not tell her!'
Vàsàrhely spoke with effort; his words were hoarse and stern.
'You will not?'
An immense joy, unlooked for, undreamed of, sprang up in him, checked
as it rose by incredulity.
'But you loved her!' he said, on an impulse which he regretted even
as the exclamation escaped him. Vàsàrhely threw his head back with a
gesture of fine anger.
'If I loved' her what is that to you?' he said, with a restrained
violence vibrating in his words. 'It is, perhaps, because I once loved
her that your foul secret is safe with me now. I shall not tell her. I
waited to say this to you. I could not write it lest it should meet her
eyes. You came to ask me this? Be satisfied and go.'
'I came to ask you this because, had you said otherwise, I would have
shot myself ere she could have heard.'
Vàsàrhely said nothing; a great scorn was still set like the grimness
of death upon his face. He looked far away at the dim figures on the
tapestries; he shrunk from the sight of his boyhood's enemy as from
some loathly unclean thing he must not kill.
'Suicide!' he thought, 'the Slav's courage, the serf's refuge!
Before the sight of Sabran the room went round, the lights grew dull,
the figures on the walls became, fantastic and unreal. His heart beat
with painful effort, yet his ears, his throat, his brain seemed full
of blood. The nerves of his whole body seemed to shrink and thrill and
quiver, but the force of habit kept him composed and erect before this
man who was his foe, yet did for him what few friends would have done.
'I do not thank you,' he said at last. 'I understand; you spare me for
her sake, not mine.'
'But for her, I would treat you so.'
As he spoke he broke in two a slender agate ruler which lay on the
writing-table at his elbow.
'Go,' he added, 'you have had my word; though we live fifty years you
are safe from me, because----because----God forgive you! you are hers.'
He made a gesture towards the door. Sabran shivered under the insult
which his conscience could not resent, his hand dared not avenge.
Hearing this there fell away from him the arrogance that had been his
mask, the courage that had been his shield. He saw himself for the
first time as this man saw him, as all the world would see him if once
it knew his secret. For the first time his past offences rose up like
ghosts naked from their graves. The calmness, the indifference, the
cynicism, the pride which had been so long in his manner and in his
nature deserted him. He felt base-born before a noble, a liar before a
gentleman, a coward before a man of honour.
Where he stood, leaning on a high caned chair to support himself
against the sickly weakness which still came on him from his scarce
healed wounds, he felt for the first time to cower and shrink before
this man who was his judge, and might become his accuser did he choose.
Something in the last words of Egon Vàsàrhely suddenly brought home
to him the enormity of his own sin, the immensity of the other's
forbearance. He suddenly realised all the offence to honour, all the
outrage to pride, all the ineffaceable indignity which he had brought
upon a great race: all that he had done, never to be undone by any
expiation of his own, in making Wanda von Szalras the mother of his
sons. Submissive, he turned without a word of gesture or of pleading,
and felt his way out of the chamber through the dusky mists of the
faintness stealing on him.