‘Perhaps never. It is to be good-bye. You must find another husband for Hilda, for I may not come back. That is what I wanted to say.’
The baroness turned a startled look upon him and leant forwards toward him from her seat. She had not expected such a turn in the drama.
‘You do not suppose that I, an honourable man, would expect you to give your daughter to the son of a murderer?’
The question was put so sharply and concisely that Frau von Sigmundskron was taken unawares. The thought had been painful enough when it had passed unspoken through the confusion of her reflexions, but Greif’s statement gave it a new and horrible vividness. With a single sharp sob, she hid her face in her hands, and Greif saw that they trembled. His own heart was beating violently, for he had nerved himself to make the effort, but he had not anticipated the reaction that followed closely upon it. He felt as though, in pronouncing the detested word, he had struck his father’s dead face with his hand.
‘God knows how I loved him,’ he said, under his breath. ‘But he did the deed.’
Frau von Sigmundskron did not distinguish the words he spoke, but she felt that she must say something. Her hands dropped from her strained and tearless eyes and fell upon her knees.
‘Oh, Greif! Greif!’ she almost moaned, as she stared at the blazing logs.
‘That is what it comes to in the end,’ he answered, summoning all his courage. ‘I cannot marry Hilda. It was bad enough to be half disgraced by my father’s brother—you were kind enough to set that aside. It is worse now, for the stain is on the name itself. I cannot give it to Hilda. Would you have her called Greifenstein?’
The baroness could not speak. Half an hour earlier she would not have dared to hope that Greif would himself renounce her daughter, but it was different now. She could not look upon his agonised face, and listen to the tones that came from his tortured heart, as he gave up all he held dear for the sake of acting honourably, she could not see his suffering and hear his words, and yet brutally admit that he was right, and that his sacrifice was a necessity. And yet her own conscience told her that her first thought must be for her own child, and not for him. She stared at the fire and answered nothing.
‘Would you have her write her name “Hilda von Greifenstein”?’ he asked, forcing the words sternly from his lips. ‘Would you have her angel purity darkened with the blood that is on my house?’