In the morning, after breakfast in the little Saxe room, she said to
him with gentle firmness: 'Réné, you must tell me now--why have you
refused Russia?'
He had known that the question must come, and all the way on his
homeward journey he had been revolving in his mind the answer he would
give to it. He was very pale, but otherwise he betrayed no agitation as
he turned and looked at her.
'That is what I cannot tell you,' he replied.
She could not believe she heard aright.
'What do you mean?' she asked him. 'I have had a message from Kunst;
he is deeply angered. I understand that, after all was arranged, you
abruptly resigned the Russian mission. I ask your reasons. It is a very
grave step to have taken. I suppose your motives must be very strong
ones?'
'They are so,' said Sabran; and he continued in the forced and measured
tone of one who recites what he has taught himself to say: 'It is quite
natural that your cousin Kunst should be offended; the Emperor also.
You perhaps will be the same when I say to you that I cannot tell you,
as I cannot tell them, the grounds of my withdrawal. Perhaps you, like
them, will not forgive it.'
Her nostrils dilated and her breast heaved: she was startled,
mortified, amazed. 'You do not choose to tell _me_!' she said in
stupefaction.
'I cannot tell you.'
'She gazed at him with the first bitterness of wrath that he had ever
seen upon her face. She had been used to perfect submission of others
all her life. She had the blood in her of stern princes, who had meted
out rule and justice against which there had been no appeal. She was
accustomed even in him to deference, homage, consideration, to be
consulted always, deferred to often. His answer for the moment seemed
to her an unwarrantable insult.
Her influence, her relatives, her sovereign, had given him one of the
highest honours conceivable, and he did not choose to even say why he
was thankless for it! Passionate and withering words rose to her lips,
but she restrained their utterance. Not even in that moment could she
bring herself to speak what might seem to rebuke him with the weight
of all his debt to her. She remained silent, but he understood all the
intense indignation that held her speechless there. He approached her
more nearly, and spoke with emotion, but with a certain sternness in
his voice----
'I know very well that I must offend and even outrage you. But I
cannot tell you my motives. It is the first time that I have ever
acted independently of you or failed to consult your wishes. I only
venture to remind you that marriage does give to the man the right to
do so, though I have never availed myself of it. Nay, even now, I owe
you too much to be ingrate enough to take refuge in my authority as
your husband. I prefer to owe more, as I have owed so much, to your
tenderness. I prefer to ask of you, by your love for me, not to press
me for an answer that I am not in a position to make; to be content
with what I say--that I have relinquished the Russian mission because I
have no choice but to do so.'
He spoke firmly, because he spoke only the truth, although not all the
truth.
A great anger rose up in her, the first that she had ever been moved to
by him. All the pride of her temper and all her dignity were outraged
by this refusal to have confidence in her. It seemed incredible
to her. She still thought herself the prey of some dream, of some
hallucination. Her lips parted to speak, but again she withheld the
words she was about to utter. Her strong justice compelled her to admit
that he was but within his rights, and her sense of duty was stronger
than her sense of self-love.
She did not look at him, nor could she trust her voice. She turned
from him without a syllable, and left the room. She was afraid of the
violence of the anger that she felt.
'If it had been only to myself I would pardon it,' she thought; 'but an
insult to my people, to my country, to my sovereign!--an insult without
excuse, or explanation, or apology----'
She shut herself alone within her oratory and passed the most bitter
hour of her life. The imperious and violent temper of the Szalras
was dormant in her character, though she had chastened and tamed it,
and the natural sweetness and serenity of her disposition had been a
counterpoise to it so strong that the latter had become the only thing
visible in her. But all the wrath of her race was now aroused and in
arms against what she loved best on earth.
'If it had been anything else,' she thought; 'but a public act like
this--an ingratitude to the Crown itself! A caprice for all the world
to chatter of and blame!'
It would have been hard enough to bear, difficult enough to explain
away to others, if he had told her his reasons, however captious,
unwise, or selfish they might be; but to have the door of his soul
thus shut upon her, his thoughts thus closed to her, hurt her with
intolerable pain, and filled her with a deep and burning indignation.
She passed all the early morning hours alone in her little temple of
prayer, striving in vain against the bitterness of her heart; above
her the great ivory Crucifixion, the work of Angermayer, beneath which
so many generations of the women of the House of Szalras had knelt in
their hours of tribulation or bereavement.
When she left the oratory she had conquered herself. Though she could
not extinguish the human passions that smarted and throbbed within her,
she knew her duty well enough to know that it must lie in submission
and in silence.
She sought for him at once. She found him in the library: he was
playing to himself a long dreamy concerto of Schubert's, to soothe the
irritation of his own nerves and pass away a time of keen suspense. He
rose as she came into the room, and awaited her approach with a timid
anxiety in his eyes, which she was too absorbed by her own emotions to
observe. He had assumed a boldness that he had not, and had used his
power to dominate her rather in desperation than in any sense of actual
mastery. In his heart it was he who feared her.
'You were quite right,' she said simply to him. 'Of course, you are
master of your own actions, and owe no account of them to me. We will
say no more about it. For myself, you know I am content enough to
escape exile to any embassy.'
He kissed her hand with an unfeigned reverence and humility.
'You are as merciful as you are great,' he murmured. 'If I be silent it
is my misfortune.' He paused abruptly.
A sudden thought came over her as he spoke.
'It is some State secret that he knows and cannot speak of, and that
has made him unwilling to go. Why did I never think of that before?'
An explanation that had its root in honour, a reticence that sprang
from conscience, were so welcome to her, and to her appeared so
natural, that they now consoled her at once, and healed the wounds to
her own pride.
'Of course, if it be so, he is right not to speak even to me,' she
mused, and her only desire was now to save him from the insistence and
the indignation of the Princess, and the examination which these were
sure to entail upon him when he should meet her at the noon breakfast
now at hand.
To that end she sought out her aunt in her own apartments, taking
with her the tiny Ottilie, who always disarmed all irritation in her
godmother by the mere presence of her little flower-like face.
'Dear mother,' she said softly, when the child had made her morning
obeisance, 'I am come to ask of you a great favour and kindness to me.
Réné returned last night. He has done what he thought right. I do not
even ask his reasons. He has acted from _force majeure_ by dictate of
his own honour. Will you do as I mean to do? Will you spare him any
interrogation? I shall be so grateful to you, and so will he.'
Mdme. Ottilie, opening her bonbonnière for her namesake, drew up her
fragile figure with a severity unusual to her.
'Do I hear you aright? You do not even know the reasons of the insult
M. de Sabran has passed upon the Crown and Cabinet, and you do not even
mean to ask them?'
'I do mean that; and what I do not ask I feel sure you will admit no
one else has any right to ask of him.'
'No one certainly except His Majesty.'
'I presume His Majesty has had all information due to him as our
Imperial master. All I entreat of you, dearest mother, is to do as
I have done; assume, as we are bound to assume, that Réné has acted
wisely and rightly, and not weary him with questions to which it will
be painful to him not to respond.'
'Questions! I never yet indulged in anything so vulgar as curiosity,
that you should imagine I shall be capable of subjecting your husband
to a cross-examination. If you be satisfied, I can have no right to
be more exacting than yourself. The occurrence is to me lamentable,
inexcusable, unintelligible; but if explanation be not offered me you
may rest assured I shall not intrude my request for it.'
'Of that I am sure; but I am not contented only with that. I want you
to feel no dissatisfaction, no doubt, no anger against him. You may be
sure that he has acted from conviction, because he was most desirous to
go to Russia, as you saw when you urged him to accept the mission.'
'I have said the utmost that I can say,' replied the Princess, with a
chill light in her blue eyes. 'This little child is no more likely to
ask questions than I am, after what you have stated. But you must not
regard my silence as any condonation of what must always appear to me a
step disrespectful to the Crown, contrary to all usages of etiquette,
and injurious to his own future and that of his children. His scruples
of conscience came too late.'
'I did not say they were exactly that. I believe he learned something
which made him consider that his honour required him to withdraw.'
'That may be,' said the Princess, frigidly. 'As I observed, it came
lamentably late. You will excuse me if I breakfast in my own rooms this
morning.'
Wanda left her, gave the child to a nurse who waited without, and
returned to the library. She had offended and pained Mdme. Ottilie,
but she had saved her husband from annoyance. She knew that though
the Princess was by no means as free from curiosity as she declared
herself, she was too high-bred and too proud to solicit a confidence
withheld from her.
Sabran was seated at the piano where she had left him, but his forehead
rested on the woodwork of it, and his whole attitude was suggestive
of sad and absorbed thought and abandonment to regrets that were
unavailing.
'It has cost him so much,' she reflected as she looked at him. 'Perhaps
it has been a self-sacrifice, a heroism even; and I, from mere wounded
feeling, have been angered against him and almost cruel!'
With the exaggeration in self-censure of all generous natures, she was
full of remorse at having added any pain to the disappointment which
had been his portion; a disappointment none the less poignant, as she
saw, because it had been voluntarily, as she imagined, accepted.
As he heard her approach he started and rose, and the expression of his
face startled her for a moment; it was so full of pain, of melancholy,
almost (could she have believed it) of despair. What could this matter
be to affect him thus, since being of the State it could be at its
worst only some painful and compromising secret of political life which
could have no personal meaning for him? It was surely impossible that
mere disappointment----a disappointment self-inflicted----could bring
upon him such suffering? But she threw these thoughts away. In her
great loyalty she had told herself that she must not even think of this
thing, lest she should let it come between them once again and tempt
her from her duty and obedience. Her trust in him was perfect.
The abandonment of a coveted distinction was in itself a bitter
disappointment, but it seemed to him as nothing beside the sense of
submission and obedience compelled from him to Vàsàrhely. He felt as
though an iron hand, invisible, weighed on his life, and forced it into
subjection. When he had almost grown secure that his enemy's knowledge
was a buried harmless thing, it had risen and barred his way, speaking
with an authority which it was not possible to disobey. With all his
errors he was a man of high courage, who had always held his own with
all men. How the old forgotten humiliation of his earliest years
revived, and enforced from him the servile timidity of the Slav blood
which he had abjured. He had never for an instant conceived it possible
to disregard the mandate he received; that an apparently voluntary
resignation was permitted to him was, his conscience acknowledged, more
mercy than he could have expected. That Vàsàrhely would act thus had
not occurred to him; but before the act he could not do otherwise than
admit its justice and obey.
But the consciousness of that superior will compelling him, left in him
a chill tremor of constant fear, of perpetual self-abasement. What was
natural to him was the reckless daring which many Russians, such as
Skobeleff, have shown in a thousand ways of peril. He was here forced
only to crouch and to submit; it was more galling, more cruel to him
than utter exposure would have been. The sense of coercion was always
upon him like a dragging chain. It produced on him a despondency, which
not even the presence of his wife or the elasticity of his own nature
could dispel.
He had to play a part to her, and to do this was unfamiliar and hateful
to him. In all the years before he had concealed a fact from her, but
he had never been otherwise false. Though to his knowledge there had
been always between them the shadow of a secret untold, there had
never been any sense upon him of obligation to measure his words, to
feign sentiments he had not, to hide behind a carefully constructed
screen of untruth. Now, though he had indeed not lied with his lips,
he had to sustain a concealment which was a thousand times more trying
to him than that concealment of his birth and station to which he had
been so long accustomed that he hardly realised it as any error. The
very nobility with which she had accepted his silence, and given it,
unasked, a worthy construction, smote him with a deeper sense of shame
than even that which galled him when he remembered the yoke laid on him
by the will of Egon Vàsàrhely.
He roused himself to meet her with composure.
She rested her hand caressingly on his.
'We will never speak of Russia any more. I should be sorry were the
Kaiser to think you capricious or disloyal, but you have too much
ability to have incurred this risk. Let it all be as though there had
never arisen any question of public life for you. I have explained
to Aunt Ottilie; she will not weary you with interrogation; she
understands that you have acted as your honour bade you. That is enough
for those who love you as do she and I.'
Every word she spoke entered his very soul with the cruellest irony,
the sharpest reproach. But of these he let her see nothing. Yet he
was none the less abjectly ashamed, less passionately self-condemned,
because he had to consume his pain in silence, and had the self-control
to answer, still with a smile, as he touched a chord or two of music:
'When the Israelites were free they hankered after the flesh-pots of
Egypt. They deserved eternal exile, eternal bondage. So do I, for
having ever been ingrate enough to dream of leaving Hohenszalras for
the world of men!'
Then he turned wholly towards the Erard keyboard, and with splendour
and might there rolled forth under his touch the military march of
Rákóczi: he was glad of the majesty and passion of the music which
supplanted and silenced speech.
'That is very grand,' she said, when the last notes had died away.
'One seems to hear the _Eljén!_ of the whole nation in it. But play me
something more tender, more pathetic----some _lieder_ half sorrow and
half gladness, you know so many of all countries.'
He paused a moment; then his hands wandered lightly across the notes,
and called up the mournful folk-songs that he had heard so long, so
long, before; songs of the Russian peasants, of the maidens borne off
by the Tartar in war, of the blue-eyed children carried away to be
slaves, of the homeless villagers beholding their straw-roofed huts
licked up by the hungry hurrying flame lit by the Kossack or the Kurd;
songs of a people without joy, that he had heard in his childish days,
when the great rafts had drifted slowly down the Volga water, and
across the plains the lines of chained prisoners had crept as slowly
through the dust; or songs that he had sung to himself, not knowing
why, where the winter was white on all the land, and the bay of the
famished wolves afar off had blent with the shrill sad cry of the wild
swans dying of cold and of hunger and of thirst on the frozen rivers,
and the reeds were grown hard as spears of iron, and the waves were
changed to stone.
The intense melancholy penetrated her very heart. She listened with
the tears in her eyes, and her whole being stirred and thrilled by a
pain not her own. A kind of consciousness came to her, borne on that
melancholy melody, of some unspoken sorrow which lived in this heart
which beat so near her own, and whose every throb she had thought she
knew. A sudden terror seized her lest all this while she who believed
his whole life hers was in truth a stranger to his deepest grief, his
dearest memories.
When the last sigh of those plaintive songs without words had died
away, she signed to him to approach her.
'Tell me,' she said very gently, 'tell me the truth. Réné, did you ever
care for any woman, dead or lost, more than, or as much as, you care
for me? I do not ask you if you loved others. I know all men have many
caprices, but was any one of them so dear to you that you regret her
still? Tell me the truth; I will be strong to bear it.'
He, relieved beyond expression that she but asked him that on which his
conscience was clear and his answer could be wholly sincere, sat down
at her feet and leaned his head against her knee.
'Never, so hear me God!' he said simply. 'I have loved no woman as I
love you.'
'And there is not one that you regret?'
'There is not one.'
'Then what is it that you do regret? Something more weighs on you than
the mere loss of diplomatic life, which; after all, to you is no more
than the loss of a toy to Bela.'
'If I do regret,' he said, with a smile, 'it is foolish and thankless.
The happiness you give me here is worth all the fret and fever of
the world's ambitions. You are so great and good to be so little
angered with me for my reticence. All my life, such as it is, shall be
dedicated to my gratitude.'
Once more an impulse to tell her all passed over him----a sense that
he might trust her absolutely for all tenderness and all pity came
upon him; but with the weakness which so constantly holds back human
souls from their own deliverance, his courage once again failed him.
He once more looking at her thought: 'Nay! I dare not. She would never
understand, she would never pardon, she would never listen. At the
first word she would abhor me.'
He did not dare; he bent his face down on her knees as any child might
have done.
'What I ever must regret is not to be worthy of you!' he murmured; and
the subterfuge was also a truth.
She looked down at him wistfully with doubt and confusion mingled. She
sighed, for she understood that buried in his heart there was some pain
he would not share, perchance some half involuntary unfaithfulness he
did not dare confess. She thrust this latter thought away quickly; it
hurt her as the touch of a hot iron hurts tender flesh; she would not
harbour it. It might well be, she knew.
She was silent some little time, then she said calmly:
'I think you worthy. Is not that enough? Never say to me what you do
not wish to say. But----but----if there be anything you believe that I
should blame, be sure of this, love: I am no fair weather friend. Try
me in deep water, in dark storm!'
And still he did not speak.
His evil angel held him back and said to him, 'Nay! she would never
forgive.'