Delphi collected works o.., p.581
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 581
She never spoke of him or of the children.
Sabran did not dare to ask to see her. When Greswold would fain have urged him, he refused with vehemence.
‘I dare not — it would be to insult her more. Only if she summon me — but that she will never do.’
‘He has been faithless to her,’ thought the old man.
All those weeks of her slow and painful restoration to life she was mute, her lips only moving in reply to the questions of her physicians. It seemed to her strange that when her spiritual and mental life had been poisoned to their source, her bodily life should be able mechanically to gather force, and resume its functions. Had matter so far more resistance than the soul?
Her women were frightened at the look upon her face; it had the rigidity, the changelessness of marble, and all the blood seemed gone out of it for ever.
In after days her heart would speak; remembered happiness, lost beliefs, ruined love, would in their turn have place in her misery; but now all she was sensible of was the unbearable insult, the ineffaceable outrage. She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor.
Any other thing she would have pardoned — infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood’s caprice or passion — but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honour, the purity of a race.
It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them:. ‘Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race for ever; for ever my blood flows with yours.’
The greatness of a great race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme, its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed holding as you do that lamp of honour in your hands.
So had she always thought; and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.
Her convalescence came in due course; but the silence, almost absolute silence, which she preserved on the full recovery of her consciousness alarmed her physicians, who had no clue to the cause. Greswold alone, who divined that there was some wrong or disaster which severed her from her husband, guessed that this immutable speechlessness was but the cover and guard of some great sorrow. No tears ever dimmed her eyes or relieved her bursting heart; she lay still, absorbed in mute and terrible retrospection. As her great weakness left her, there came upon her features the colder darker look of her race, the look which he who had betrayed her had always feared. She never spoke of him, nor of the children. Her women would have ventured to bring the children to her, unbidden, but Greswold forbade them; he knew that for the devoted tenderness she bore them to be thus utterly still and changed, some shock must have befallen her so great that the instincts of maternity were momentarily quenched in her, as water springs are dried up by earthquake.
‘She never speaks of me, nor of them?’ asked Sabran with agony every day of Greswold, and the old man answered him:
‘She never speaks at all. She replies to our questions as to her health, she asks briefly for what she needs; no more.’
‘The children are innocent!’ he said wearily, and his heart had never gone forth to them so much as it did now, when they were shut out like himself from the arms of their mother.
Yet he understood how she shrank from them — might well almost abhor them — seeing in them, as Vàsàrhely saw, the living proofs of her surrender to a coward and a traitor.
‘What can he have done?’ mused Greswold. ‘Infidelity, perhaps, she would not forgive; but it would not make her thus blind and deaf to the children.’
He passed his days in utter wretchedness; he wandered in the wintry woods for hours, or sat in weary waiting outside her door. He cared nothing what his household thought or guessed. He had forgotten every living creature save herself. When he saw his young sons in the distance he avoided them; he dreaded their guileless questions, the stab of their unconscious words. Again and again he was tempted to blow out his brains, or fling himself from the ice walls that towered above him; but the sense that it would seem to her the last cowardice — the last shame — restrained him.
Sometimes it seemed to him that the tie between them was so strong, the memories of their past passion so sweet, that even his crime could not part them. Then he remembered of what race she came, of what honour she was the representative and guardian, and his heart sank within him, and he knew that his offence was one beyond all pardon.
The whole household dimly felt that some great grief had fallen on their master. His attitude, his absence from his wife’s room, the arrival of Prince Vàsàrhely, the abrupt departure of the Countess Brancka, all told them that some calamity had come, though they were loyally silent one to the other, their service having been always one of devotion and veneration for their mistress, since they were all Tauern-born people, bred up by their fathers in loyalty to Hohenszalras.
‘The first who speaks of aught he suspects goes for ever,’ old Hubert had said to his numerous dienerschaft in the hearing of them all, when one of the pages — he who had borne the note to his master in Olga Brancka’s rooms — ventured to hint that he thought some evil was abroad, and would part their lord and lady. But all the faithful silence of their attendants could not wholly conceal from the elder children that something wrong, some greater sorrow even than their mother’s illness, was hanging over the old house. They were dull and vaguely alarmed. They had not even the kindly presence of the Princess, who, if she sometimes wearied them with admonitions, treated them with tenderness, and atoned for her homilies by unending gifts. They were very unhappy, though they said little, and wandered like little ghosts among the wintry woods and in their spacious play-rooms. They were tended, amused, provided for in all the same ways as usual. There were all their pastimes and playthings; all their comforts and habits were unaltered; but from the background of their sports and studies the stately figure of their mother was missing, with her serene smile and her happy power of checking all dispute or turbulence with a mere word or a mere glance.
The winter had come at a stroke, as it does without warning oftentimes in the old Archduchy; the snow falling fast and thick, the waters freezing in a night, the hills and valleys growing white and silent between a sunset and a sunset.
Their sledges carried them like lightning over the frozen roads, and their little skates bore them swift as circling swallows over the ice. It was the season Bela loved so well; but he had no joy in anything. There was no twilight hour in the white-room at their mothers feet, whilst she told them legends and stories: there was no moment in the mornings when she came into their study and found their little puzzled brains weary over a Latin declension or a crabbed page of history, and made all clear to them by a few lucid graphic sentences; there was no possible hope that, when the day was broad and bright over the wintry land, she would call to them to bring the dogs and go with her and her black horses through the glittering forests, where every bough was heavy with the diamonds of the frost. To the little boys it seemed as if the whole world had grown suddenly silent, and they were left all alone in it.
Their troops of attendants were no more consolation to them than his crowd of courtiers is to a bereaved sovereign.
Then, again, when Egon Vàsàrhely had by chance met them he had looked at them strangely, and had always turned away without a greeting. ‘And when I was quite little he was so kind,’ thought Bela, whose pride seemed falling from him like a useless ragged garment.
‘It’s all since Madame Olga came,’ he said once to his brother. ‘She is a bad, bad woman. She was rude to our mother.’
‘I thought ladies were always good?’ said Gela.
‘They are much wickeder than men,’ said Bela, with premature wisdom. ‘At least, when they are wicked. I heard a gentleman say so in Paris.’
‘What could she do when she was here, do you think?’ asked Gela, with a tremor.
‘I do not know,’ said Bela, gravely and sadly. ‘But I am sure that she hated our mother.’
He was sure that all the evil had come from her; he had heard of evil spirits, the people believed in them, and had charms against them. She was one of them. Had she not tempted him to disobedience and revolt, with her pictures of the grand gaiety, the magnificent gatherings, the heart-rousing ‘Halali!’ of the Chantilly hunt?
Bela did not forget.
He would have cut off his little right hand, now, never to have vexed his mother.
He was yet more sorrowful still for his father. Though they were not allowed to approach their mother’s apartments, he had disobeyed the injunction more than once, and had seen Sabran walking to and fro that long gallery, or seated with bent head and folded arms on one of the oaken benches. With all his boldness Bela had not dared to approach that melancholy figure; but it had haunted his dreams, and troubled him sorely as he rode and drove, and played and did his lessons. The snow had come on the second week of his mother’s illness, and when he visited his riding-pony in its loose box on these frosted days on which he could not use it, he buried his face in its abundant mane, and wept bitterly, though he boasted that he never cried.
Eight weeks passed by after the departure of Olga Brancka before his mother could leave her bed; and all that while, save for a brief question now and again as to their health, put to her physician, she had never mentioned the children once. ‘She does not want us any more,’ said Bela, with the great tears dimming his bold eyes.
In the ninth week she was lifted on to a great chair, placed beside one of the windows, and she turned her weary gaze on to the snow world without. What use was life? Why had it returned to her? All emotion of maternity, all memory of love, were for the time killed in her. She was only conscious of an intolerable indignity, for which neither God nor man could give her consolation.
She would have gone barefoot all the world over sooner than be again in his presence, had not the imperious courage which was the strongest instinct of her nature refused to confess itself unable to meet the man who had wronged her. In the long dark night which these past two months had seemed to her, she had brought herself to face the inevitable end. She had nerved herself to be her own judge and his. Weaker women would have made the world their judge; she did not. She did not even seek the counsel of that Church of which she was a reverent daughter. Her priest had no access to her.
‘God must see my torture, but no other shall,’ she said in her heart, nor should the world ever have her fate to make an hour’s jesting wonder of, as is its way with all calamity. It would be her lifelong companion; a rusted iron for ever piercing deeper, and deeper into her flesh; but she would dwell alone with it — unpitied. The men of her race had always been their own lawgivers, their own avengers; she would be hers.
Once she bade them bring her pens and ink, and she began to use them. Then she laid them down, and tore in two an unfinished letter. ‘Only cowards write to save themselves from pain,’ she thought, and on the tenth day after she had risen from her bed she said to Greswold:
‘Tell the women to leave me alone, and ask — my husband — to come here.’
She said the last words as if they choked her in their utterance. Her husband he was; nothing could change the past.
The old man hesitated, and ventured to suggest that any exertion was dangerous; would it be wise, he asked, to speak of what might agitate her? And thereon he paused and stammered, knowing that it was not his place to have observed that there was any estrangement between them.
She looked at him with suspicion.
‘Have I spoken in my sleep or in my unconsciousness?’ she thought.
Aloud she said only:
‘Be so good as to go to him at once.’
He bowed and went, and to himself mused:
‘Since she loves him, her heart will melt when she meets his eyes. His sin after all cannot be beyond those which women have forgiven a million times over since first creation began.’
Yet in himself he was not sure of that. The Szalras had had many great and many generous qualities, but forgiveness of offence had never been among them.
She remained still, her hands folded on her knees, her face set as though it were cast in bronze. The great bedchamber, with its hangings of pale blue plush and its silver-mounted furniture, was dim and shadowy in the greyness of a midwinter afternoon. Doors opened, here to the bath and dressing chambers, there to the oratory, yonder to the apartments of Sabran. She looked across to the last, and a shudder passed over her; a sense of sickness and revulsion came on her.
She sat still and waited; she was too weak to go further than this room. She was wrapped in a long loose gown of white satin, lined and trimmed with sable. There were black bearskins beneath her feet; the atmosphere was warmed by hot air, and fragrant with, some bowls full of forced roses, which her women had placed, there at noon. The grey light of the fading afternoon touched the silver scroll-work of the bed, and the silver frame of one large mirror, and fell on her folded hands and on the glister of their rings. Her head leaned backward against the high carved ebony of her chair. Her face was stern and bitterly cold, as that of Maria Theresa when she signed the loss of Silesia.
He approached from his own apartments, and came timidly and with a slow step forward. He did not dare to salute her, or go near to her; he stood like a banished man, disgraced, a few yards from her seat.
Two months had gone by since he had seen her. When he entered he read on her features that he must leave all hope behind.
Her whole frame shrank within her as she saw him there, but she gave no sign of what she felt. Without looking at him she spoke, in a voice quite firm though it was faint from feebleness.
‘I have but little to say to you, but that little is best said, not written.’
He did not reply; his eyes were watching her with a terrible appeal, a very agony of longing. They had not rested on her for two months. She had been near the gates of the grave, within the shadow of death. He would have given his life for a word of pity, a touch, a regard — and he dared not approach her!
She did not look at him. After that first glance, in which there had been so much of horror, of revulsion, she did not once look towards him. Her face had the immutability of a mask of stone; so many wretched days and haunted nights had she spent nerving herself for this inevitable moment that no emotion was visible in her; into her agony she had poured her pride, and it sustained her, as the plaster poured into the dry bones at Pompeii makes the skeleton stand erect, the ashes speak.
‘After that which you have told me,’ she said, after a moment’s silence in which he fancied she must hear the throbbing of his heart, ‘you must know that my life cannot be lived out beside yours. The law gives you many, rights, no doubt, but I believe you will not be so base as to enforce them.’
‘I have no rights!’ he muttered. ‘I am a criminal before the law. The law will free you from me, if you choose.’
‘I do not choose,’ she said coldly; ‘you understand me ill. I do not carry my wrongs or my woes to others. What you have told me is known only to Prince Vàsàrhely and to the Countess Brancka. He will be silent; he has the power to make her so. The world need know nothing. Can you think that I shall be its informant?’
‘If you divorce me — —’ he murmured.
A quiver of bitter anger passed over her features, but she retained her self-control.
‘Divorce? What could divorce do for me? Could it destroy the past? Neither Church nor Law can undo what you have done. Divorce would make me feel that in the past I had been your mistress, not your wife, that is all.’
She breathed heavily, and again pressed her hand on her breast.
‘Divorce!’ she repeated. ‘Neither priest nor judge can efface a past as you clean a slate with a sponge! No power, human or divine, can free me, purify me, wash your dishonoured blood from your children’s veins.’
She almost lost her self-control; her lips trembled, her eyes were full of flame, her brow was black with passion. With a violent effort she restrained herself; invective or reproach seemed to her low and coarse and vile.
He was silent; his greatest fear, the torture of which had harassed him sleeping and waking ever since he had placed his secret in her hands, was banished at her words. She would seek no divorce — the children would not be disgraced — the world of men would not learn his shame; and yet as he heard a deeper despair than any he had ever known came over him. She was but as those sovereigns of old who scorned the poor tribunals of man’s justice because they held in their own might the power of so much heavier chastisement.
‘I shall not seek for a legal separation,’ she resumed; ‘that is to say, I shall not, unless you force me to do so to protect myself from you. If you fail to abide by the conditions I shall prescribe, then you will compel me to resort to any means that may shelter me from your demands. But I do not think you will endeavour to force on me conjugal rights which you obtained over me by a fraud.’
All that she desired was to end quickly the torture of this interview, from which her courage had not permitted her to shrink. She had to defend herself because she would not be defended by others, and she only sought to strike swiftly and unerringly so as to spare herself and him all needless or lingering throes. Her speech was brief, for it seemed to her that no human language held expression deep and vast enough to measure the wrong done to her, could she seek to give it utterance.
She would not have made a sound had any murderer stabbed her body; she would not now show the death-wound of her soul and honour to this man who had stabbed both to the quick. Other women would have made their moan aloud, and cursed him. The daughter of the Szalras choked down her heart in silence, and spoke as a judge speaks to one condemned by man and God.
