The Salzburg lawyers employed all the resources of the Viennese police
to discover the sender of the envelope, but vainly; nothing was
learned by all the efforts made. But the letter constantly haunted her
thoughts. It produced in her an uneasiness and an apprehensiveness
wholly foreign to her temper. The impossibility also of saying anything
about it increased the weight of it on her memory. Yet she never once
thought of asking Vàsàrhely. She wrote to him now and then, as she had
always done, to give him tidings of her health or of her movements,
but she never once alluded in the most distant terms to the anonymous
information she had received. If he had been there beside her she would
not have spoken of it. Of the two, she would sooner have reopened the
subject to her husband. But she never did so. She had promised him
to be silent, and to her creed a promise was inviolate, never to be
retracted, be the pressure or the desire to do so what it would.
It was these grand lines on which her character and her habits were
cast that awed him, and made him afraid to tell her his true history.
Had he revered her less he would probably have deceived her less. Had
she been of a less noble temperament she would also probably have been
much less easy to deceive.
Her health was at this time languid, and more uncertain than usual,
and the two lines of the letter were often present to her thoughts,
tormenting her with idle conjecture, painful doubt, none the less
painful because it could take no definite shape. Sometimes when she
was not well enough to accompany him out of doors or drive her own
sleigh through the keen clear winter air, she sat doing nothing, and
thinking only of this thing, in the same room, with the same smell of
violets about her, musing on what it might by any possibility mean. Any
secret was safe with Egon, but then since the anonymous writer was in
possession of it the secret was not only his. She wondered sometimes in
terror whether it could be anything that might in after years affect
her children's future, and then as rapidly discarded the bare thought
as so much dishonour to their father. 'It is only because I am now
nervous and impressionable,' she said to herself,'that this folly takes
such a hold upon me. When I am well again I shall not think of it. Who
is it says of anonymous letters that they are like "_les immondices des
rues: il faut boucher le nez, tourner la tête et passer outre?_"'
But '_les immondices_' spoiled the odours of the new year violets to
her.
In the early spring of the year she gave birth to another son. She
suffered more than she had ever done before, and recovered less
quickly. The child was like all the others, fair, vigorous, and full
of health. She wished to give him her husband's name, but Sabran so
strenuously opposed the idea that she yielded, and named him after her
brother Victor, who had fallen at Magenta.
There were the usual rejoicings throughout the estates, rejoicings
that were the outcome of genuine affection and fealty to the race of
Szalras, whose hold on the people of the Tauern had resisted all the
revolutionary movements of the earlier part of the century, and had
fast root in the hearts of the staunch and conservative mountaineers.
But for the first time as she heard the hearty '_Hoch!_' of the
assembled peasantry echoing beneath her windows, and the salvos fired
from the old culverins on the keep, a certain fear mingled with her
maternal pride, and she thought: 'Will the people love them as well
twenty years hence, fifty years hence, when I shall be no more? Will my
memory be any shield to them? Will the traditions of our race outlast
the devouring changes of the world?'
Meantime the Princess, happy and smiling, showed the little new-born
noble to the stalwart chamois hunters, the comely farmers and
fishermen, the clear-eyed stout-limbed shepherds and labourers gathered
bareheaded round the Schloss.
Bela stood by contemplating the crowd he knew so well; he did not see
why they should cheer any other child beside himself. He stood with his
little velvet cap in his hand, because he was always told to do so, but
he felt very inclined to put it on; if his father had not been present
there he would have done so.
'If I have ever so many brothers,' he said at last thoughtfully to
Greswold, who was by his side, 'it will not make any difference, will
it? I shall always be _the_ one?'
'What do you mean?' asked the physician.
'They will none of them be like me? They will none of them be as great
as I am? Not if I have twenty?'
'You will be always the eldest son, of course,' said the old man,
repressing a smile. 'Yes; you will be their head, their chief, their
leading spirit; but for that reason you will have much more expected of
you than will be expected of them; you will have to learn much more,
and try to be always good. Do you follow me, Count Bela?'
Bela's little rosy mouth shut itself up contemptuously. 'I shall be
always the eldest, and I shall do whatever I like. I do not see why
they want any others than me.'
'You will not do always what you like, Count Bela.'
'Who shall prevent me?'
'The law, which you will have to obey like everyone else.'
'I shall make the laws when I am a little older,' said Bela. 'And they
will be for my brothers and all the people, but not for me. I shall do
what I like.'
'That will be very ungenerous,' said Greswold, quietly. 'Your mother,
the Countess, is very different. She is stern to herself, and indulgent
to all others. That is why she is beloved. If you will think of
yourself so much when you are grown up, you will be hated.'
Bela flushed a little guiltily and angrily.
'That will not matter,' he said sturdily. 'I shall please myself
always.'
'And be unkind to your brothers?'
'Not if they do what I tell them; I will be very kind if they are good.
Gela always does what I tell him,' he added after a little pause; 'I do
not want any but Gela.'
'It is natural you should be fondest of Gela, as he is nearest your
age, but you must love all the brothers you may have, or you will
distress your mother very greatly.'
'Why does she want any but me?' said Bela, clinging to his sense of
personal wrong. And he was not to be turned from that.
'She wants others beside you,' said the physician, adroitly, 'because
to be happy she needs children who are tender-hearted, unselfish, and
obedient. You are none of those things, my Count Bela, so Heavens ends
her consolation.'
Bela opened his blue eyes very wide, and he coloured with mortification.
'She always loves me best!' he said haughtily. 'She always will!'
'That will depend on yourself, my little lord,' said Greswold, with a
significance which was not lost on the quick intelligence of the child;
and he never forgot this day when his brother Victor was shown to the
people.
'There will be no lack of heirs to Hohenszalras,' said the Princess
meanwhile to his father.
He thought as he heard:
'And if ever she know she can break her marriage like a rotten thread!
Those boys can all be made as nameless as I was! Would she do it?
Perhaps not, for the children's sake. God knows----she might change
even to them; she might hate them as she loves them now, because they
are mine.'
Even as he sat beside her couch with her hand in his these thoughts
pursued and haunted him. Remorse and fear consumed him. When she looked
at the blue eyes of her new-born son, and said to him with a happy
smile: 'He will be just as much like you as the others are,' he could
only think with a burning sense of shame, 'Like me! like a traitor!
like a liar! like a thief!'----and the faces of these children seemed
to him like those of avenging angels.
He thought with irrepressible agony of the fact that her country's
laws would divorce her from him if she chose, did ever the truth come
to her ear. He had always known this indeed, as he had known all the
other risks he ran in doing what he did. Put it had been far away,
indistinct, unasserted; whenever the memory of it had passed over him
he had thrust it away. Now when another knew his secret, he could
not do so. He had a strange sensation of having fallen from some
great height; of having all his life slide away like melting ice out
of his hands. He never once doubted for an instant the good faith of
Egon Vàsàrhely. He knew that his lips would no more unclose to tell
his secret than the glaciers yonder would find human voice. But the
consciousness that one man lived, moved, breathed, rose with each day,
and went amongst other men, bearing with him that fatal knowledge,
made it now impossible for himself ever to forget it. A dull remorse,
a sharp apprehension, were for ever his companions, and never left him
for long even in his sweetest hours. He did justice to the magnificent
generosity of the one who spared him. Egon Vàsàrhely knew, as he knew,
that she, hearing the truth, could annul the marriage if she chose.
His children would have no rights, no name, if their mother chose to
separate herself from him. The law would make her once more as free
as though she had never wedded him. He knew that, and the other man
who loved her knew it too. He could measure the force of Vàsàrhely's
temptation as that simple and heroic soldier could not stoop to measure
his.
He was deeply unhappy, but he concealed it from her. Even when his
heart beat against hers it seemed to him always that there was an
invisible wall between himself and her. He longed to tell the whole
truth to her, but he was afraid; if the whole pain and shame had been
his own that the confession would have caused, he would have dared it;
but he had not the heart to inflict on her such suffering, not the
courage to destroy their happiness with his own hand. Egon Vàsàrhely
alone knew, and he for her sake would never speak. As for the reproach
of his own conscience, as for the remorse that the words of his
children might at any moment call up in him, these lie must bear. He
was a man of cool judgment and of ready resource, and though he had
never foreseen the sharp repentance which his better nature now felt,
he knew that he would be able to live it down as he had crushed out so
many other scruples. He vowed to himself that as far as in him lay he
would atone for his act. The moral influence of his wife had not been
without effect on him. Not altogether, but partially, he had grown to
believe in what she believed in, of the duty of human life to other
lives; he had not her sympathy for others, but he had admired it, and
in his own way followed it, though without her faith.