Delphi collected works o.., p.582
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 582
‘I wish no words between us,’ she said, with renewed calmness. ‘You know your sin; all your life has been a lie. I will keep me and mine back from vengeance; but do not mistake — God may pardon you, I never! What I desired to say to you is that henceforth you shall wholly abandon the name you stole; you shall assign the land of Romaris to the people; you shall be known only as you have been known here of late, as the Count von Idrac. The title was mine to give, I gave it you; no wrong is done save to my fathers, who were brave men.’
He remained silent; all excuse he might have offered seemed as if from him to her it would be but added outrage. He was her betrayer, and she had the power to avenge betrayal; naught that she could say or do could seem unjust or undeserved beside the enormity of her irreparable wrongs.
‘The children?’ he muttered faintly, in an unuttered supplication.
‘They are mine,’ she said, always with the same unchanging calm that was cold as the frozen earth without. ‘You will not, I believe, seek to enforce your title to dispute them with me?’
He gave a gesture of denial.
He, the wrong-doer, could not realise the gulf which his betrayal had opened betwixt himself and her. On him all the ties of their past passion were sweet, precious, unchanged in their dominion. He could not realise that to her all these memories were abhorred, poisoned, stamped with ineffable shame; he could not believe that she who had loved the dust that his feet had brushed could now regard him as one leprous and accursed. He was slow to understand that his sin had driven him out of her life for evermore.
Commonly it is the woman on whom the remembrance of love has an enthralling power when love itself is traitor; commonly it is the man on whom the past has little influence, and to whom its appeal is vainly made; but here the position was reversed. He would have pleaded by it: she refused to acknowledge it, and remained as adamant before it. His nerve was too broken, his conscience was too heavily weighted for him to attempt to rebel against her decisions or sway her judgment. If she had bidden him go out and slay himself he would gladly have obeyed.
‘Once you said,’ he murmured timidly, ‘that repentance washes out all crimes. Will you count my remorse as nothing?’
‘You would have known no remorse had your secret never been discovered!’
He shrank as from a blow.
‘That is not true,’ he said wearily. ‘But how can I hope you will believe me?’
She answered nothing.
‘Once you told me that there was no sin you would not pardon me!’ he muttered.
She replied:
‘We pardon sin; we do not pardon baseness.’
She paused and put her hand to her heart; then she spoke again in that cold, forced, measured voice, which seemed on his ear as hard and pitiless as the strokes of an iron hammer, beating life out beneath it.
‘You will leave Hohenszalras; you will go where you will; you have the revenues of Idrac. Any other financial arrangements that you may wish to make I will direct my lawyers to carry out. If the revenues of Idrac be insufficient to maintain you — —’
‘Do not insult me — so,’ he murmured, with a suffocated sound in his voice, as though some hand were clutching at his throat.
‘Insult you!’ she echoed, with a terrible scorn.
She resumed, with the same inflexible calmness:
‘You must live as becomes the rank due to my husband. The world need suspect nothing. There is no obligation to make it your confidante. If anyone were wronged by the usurpation of the name you took it would be otherwise, but as it is you will lose nothing in the eyes of men; society will not flatter you the less. The world will only believe that we are tired of one another, like so many. The blame will be placed on me. You are a brilliant comedian, and can please and humour it. I am known to be a cold, grave, eccentric woman, a recluse, of whom it will deem it natural that you are weary. Since you allow that I have the right to separate from you — to deal with you as with a criminal — you will not seek to recall your existence to me. You will meet my abstinence by the only amends you can make to me. Let me forget — as far as I am able — let me forget that ever you have lived!’
He staggered slightly, as if under some sword-stroke from an unseen hand. A great faintness came upon him. He had been prepared for rage, for reproach, for bitter tears, for passionate vengeance; but this chill, passionless, disdainful severance from him for all eternity he had never dreamed of: it crept like the cold of frost into his very marrow; he was speechless and mute with shame. If she had dragged him through all the tribunals of the world she would have hurt him and humiliated him far less. Better all the hooting gibes of the whole earth than this one voice, so cold, so inflexible, so full of utter scorn!
Despite her bodily weakness she rose to her full height, and for the first time looked at him.
‘You have heard me,’ she said; ‘now go!’
But instead, blindly, not knowing what he did, he fell at her feet.
‘But you loved me,’ he cried, ‘you loved me so well!’
The tears were coursing down his cheeks.
She drew the sables of her robe from his touch.
‘Do not recall that,’ she said, with a bitter smile. ‘Women of my race have killed men before now for less outrage than yours has been to me.’
‘Kill me!’ he cried to her. ‘I will kiss your hand.’
She was mute.
He clung to her gown with an almost convulsive supplication.
‘Believe, at least, that I loved you!’ he cried, beside himself in his misery and impotence. ‘Believe that, at the least! — —’
She turned from him.
‘Sir, I have been your dupe for ten long years; I can be so no more!’
Under that intolerable insult he rose slowly, and his eyes grew blind, and his limbs trembled, but he walked from her, and sought not again either her pity or her pardon.
On the threshold he looked back once. She stood erect, one hand resting upon the carved work of her high oak chair; cold, stalely, motionless, the furred velvets falling to her feet like a queen’s robes.
He looked, then passed the threshold and closed the door behind him. He walked down the corridors blindly, not knowing whither he went.
They were dusky, for the twilight of the winter’s day had come. He did not see a little figure which was coming towards him until the child had stopped him with a timid outstretched hand.
‘Shall we never see her again?’ said Bela, in a hushed voice. ‘It is so long! — so long! Oh, please do tell me!’
Sabran paused, and looked down on the boy with blood-shot burning eyes. For a moment or so he did not answer; then, with a sudden movement, he drew his son to him, lifted him in his arms and kissed him passionately.
‘You will see her, not I — not I!’ he said with a sob like a woman’s. ‘Bela, listen! Be obedient to her, adore her, have no will but hers; be loyal, be truthful, be noble in all your words and all your thoughts, and then in time perhaps — perhaps — she will pardon you for being also mine!’
The child, terrified, clung to him with all his force, dimly conscious of some great agony near him, but far beyond his comprehension or consolation.
‘I love you, I will always love you!’ he said, with his hands clasped around his father’s throat.
‘Love your mother!’ said Sabran, as he kissed the boy’s soft cheeks, made wet by his own tears; then he released the little frightened form, and went himself away into the darkness.
In a little time, with no word to any living soul there, he had harnessed some horses with his own hands, and in the fast falling gloom of the night had driven from Hohenszalras.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
BELA HEARD THE galloping hoofs of the horses, and ran with his fleet feet, quick as a fawn’s, down the grand staircase and out on to the terrace, where the winds of the north were driving with icy cold and furious force over a world of snow. With his golden hair streaming in the blast, he strained his eyes into the gloom of the avenues below, but the animals had vanished from sight. He turned sadly and went into the Rittersaal.
‘Is that my father who has gone?’ he said in a low voice to Hubert, who was there. The old servant, with the tears in his eyes, told him that it was. A groom had come to him to say that their lord had made ready a sledge and driven away without a word to any one of them, while the night was falling apace.
Bela heard and said nothing; he had his mother’s power of silence in sorrow. He climbed the staircase silently, and went and listened in the corridor where his father had waited and watched so long. His heart was heavy, and ached with an indefinable dread. He did not seek Gela. It seemed to him that this sorrow was his alone. He alone had heard his father’s farewell words; he alone had seen his father weep.
All the selfishness and vanity of his little soul were broken up and vanished, and the first grief he had ever known filled up their empty place. He had adored his father with an unreasoning blind devotion, like a dog’s; and this intense affection had been increased rather than repressed by the indifference with which he had been treated.
His father was gone; he felt sure that it was for ever: if he could not see his mother he thought he could not live. To the mind of a child such gigantic and unutterable terrors rise up under the visitation of a vague alarm. Abroad in the woods, or under any bodily pain or fear, he was as brave as a lion whelp, but he had enough of the German mystic in his blood to be imaginative and visionary when trouble touched him. The sight of his father’s grief had shaken his nerves, and filled him with the first passionate pity he had ever known. A man so great, so strong, so wonderful in prowess, so far aloof from himself as Sabran had always seemed to his little son, to be so overwhelmed in such helpless sorrow, appeared to Bela so terrible a thing that an intense fear took for the first time possession of his little valiant soul. His father could slay all the great beasts of the forests; could break in the horse fresh from the freedom of the plains; could breast the stormy waters like a petrel; could scale the highest heights of the mountains. And yet someone — something — had had power to break down all his strength, and make him flee in wretchedness.
It could not be his mother who had done this thing? No, no! never, never! It had been done because she was lying ill, helpless, perhaps was dead.
As that last dread came over him he lost all control over himself. He knew what death was. A little girl he had been fond of in Paris had died whilst he was her playmate, and he had seen her lying, so waxen, so cold, so unresponsive, when he had laid his lilies on her little breast. A great despair came over him, and made him reckless what he did. In the desperation of terror blent with love, he started up and ran to the door of his mother’s apartments. It yielded to his pressure; he ran across the ante chamber and the dressing-rooms, and pulled aside the tapestry.
Then he saw her; seated at the further side of the great bedchamber. There was a feeble grey light from the western sky, to which the casements of the chamber turned. It was very pale and dim, but by it he saw her lying back, rigid and colourless, the white satin, the dusky fur, the deep shadows gathered around her. There was that in her look and in her attitude which made the child’s heart grow cold, as his father’s had done.
She was alone; for she had bade her women not come unless she summoned them. Bela stood and gazed, his pulses beating loud and hard; then with a cry he ran forward and sprang to her, and threw his arms about her.
‘Oh, mother, mother, you are not dead!’ he cried. ‘Oh, speak to me; do speak to me! He is gone away for ever and ever, and if we cannot see you we shall all die. Oh, do not look at me so! Pray, pray, do not. Shall I fetch Lili?—’
In his vague terror he thought to disarm her by his little sister’s name. She had thrust him away from her, and was looking with cold and cruel eyes on his face, that was so like the face of his father. She was thinking:
‘You are the son of a serf, of a traitor, of a liar, of a bastard, and yet you are mine! I bore you, and yet you are his. You are shame incarnate. You are the living sign of my dishonour. You bear my name — my untainted name — and yet you were begotten by him.’
Bela dropped down at her feet as his father had done.
‘Oh, do not look at me so,’ he sobbed. ‘Oh, mother, what have I done? I have tried to be good all this while. He is gone away, and he is so unhappy, and he bade me never vex or disobey you, and I never will.’
His voice was broken in his sobs, and he leaned his head upon her knees, and clasped them with both his arms. She looked down on him, and drew a deep shuddering breath. The holiest joy of a woman’s life was, for her, poisoned at the springs.
Then, at the child’s clinging embrace, at his piteous and innocent grief, the motherhood in her welled up under the frost of her heart, and all its long-suffering and infinite tenderness revived, and overcame the horror that wrestled with it. She raised him up and strained him to her breast.
‘You are mine, you are mine!’ she murmured over him. ‘I must forget all else.’
CHAPTER XXXIX.
HE SPRING DAWNED once more on Hohenszalras, and the summer followed it. The waters leapt, the woods rejoiced, the gardens blossomed, and the children played; but the house was silent as a house in which the dead are tying. There was indeed a corpse there — the corpse of buried joy, of murdered love, of ruined honour.
The household resumed its calm order, the routine of the days was unbroken, the quiet yet stately life had been taken up in its course as though it had never been altered; and wherever young children are there will always be some shout of mirth, some sound of happy laughter somewhere; the children laugh as the birds sing, though those amidst them bury their dead.
But the house was as a house of mourning, and the sense of death was there as utterly as though he who was gone had been laid in his grave amidst the silver figures and the marble tombs in the Chapel of the Knights. No one ever heard a sigh from her lips, or ever saw the tears beneath her eyelids; but the sense of her bereavement, as one terrible, inconsolable, eternal, weighed like a pall on all those who were about her; the lowliest peasant on her estates understood that the sanctity of some untold woe had built up a wall of granite between her and all the living world.
She had always been grateful to fate for her old home set amidst the silence of the mountains, but she had never been so thankful for it as now. It shielded her from all the observation and interrogation of the world; no one came thither unbidden, unless she chose, no visitant would ever break that absolute solitude which was the sole approach to peace that she would ever know. Even her relatives could not pass the icy barrier of her cold denial. They wearied her for a while with written importunities and suggestions, hinted wonder, delicately expressed questions. But they made no way into her confidence; they soon left her to herself and to her children. They said angrily to themselves that she had been always whimsical and a solitary; they had been certain that soon or late that ill-advised union would be dissolved in some way, private or public. They were all people haughty, sensitive, abhorrent of scandal; they were content that the separation should be by mutual consent and noiseless.
She had had letters from Egon Vàsàrhely full of delicate tenderness; in the last he had asked with humility if he might visit Hohenszalras. She had written in return to him:
‘You have my gratitude and my affection, but until we are quite old we will not meet. Leave me alone; you can do naught for me.’
He obeyed; he understood the loyalty to one disloyal which made her refuse to meet him, of whose loyalty she was so sure.
He sent a magnificent present to the child who was his namesake, and wrote to her no more save upon formal anniversaries.
The screen of her dark forests protected her from all the cruel comment and examination of the men and women of her world. She knew them well enough to know that when she ceased to appear amidst them, when she ceased to contribute to their entertainment, when she ceased to bid them to her houses, she would soon cease also to be remembered by them; even their wonder would live but for a day. If they blamed her in their ignorance, their blame would be as indifferent as their praise had been.
She had been told by her lawyers that her husband had refused to touch a coin of the revenues of Idrac, and had once visited them to sign a power of procuration, whereby they could receive those revenues and set them aside in accumulation for his son Gela. That was all she heard. Whither he had gone she was ignorant. She did not make any effort to learn. On the night following his departure a peasant had been sent with the sleigh and horses home to Hohenszalras. The solicitors of Salzburg had seen him a week or two later at their ancient offices under the Calvarienburg: that was all. She had bade him let it be forgotten that he had ever lived beside her. He had obeyed her.
The days, and weeks, and months went on, and his place knew him no more. The jägers, seated round their fires in their forest-huts, spoke longingly and wonderingly of his absence. The hunters, when they brought down a steinbock with unusual effort or skill, said that it had been a shot that would have been worthy of his praise. His old friend wept for him with the slow sad tears of age, and the child Bela prayed for his return every night that he knelt down before his crucifix. But his name never passed his wife’s lips, and was never written by her hand. She had given her all with the superb generosity of a sovereign; she had in her wrongs the intense abiding unutterable disgust of a sovereign betrayed and outraged. When she let grief have its way, it was when no eyes beheld her, when the night was down and solitude sheltered her.
She had never spoken of what had befallen her to any human ear; not even to her priest’s. The horror of it was buried in her own breast; its sepulchre all the waste and ashes of her perished joys.
