CHAPTER XVI.
LIGHT WITHOUT AND NIGHT WITHIN.
Yet it had to be.
Madame Kárpáthy had promised her friend to share her labours as hostess on the occasion of the feast in honour of her husband's installation as Lord-Lieutenant, just as Lady Szentirmay had shared hers before the fox-hunt. She had vainly tortured her brain for a whole fortnight in order that she might find an excuse to release her from her promise, and not one could she find. Unfortunately, she was so well that she could not even complain on that score. What she feared above all happened. Flora did not forget the promise that had been made, and when the great day was only a week off, she wrote to her friend that she should rely upon her at the end of that time. And so for a whole week Fanny, resigned to her fate, but with the torment of her secret passion in her bosom, suffered in silence at the thought of going to the house of him whom she loved as her soul's ideal, but who would not have been too far away from her, so she thought, if he had lived in another planet.
Flora welcomed her friend with great joy, her satisfaction was unmistakably visible on her honest, lovely face as she pressed Fanny between her arms. Rudolf's manner was kindly and courtly, but nothing more. He was glad to see his pretty neighbour in his house and anxious to make her
comfortable, but she did not interest him in the very least.
And indeed Fanny herself found the situation much less dangerous than she had imagined. Ideals, especially ideals of the masculine gender, in their domestic circles lose very much of the nimbus which they carry about with them elsewhere. At home you hear them whistle and shout, and bully their servants and domestics, and see them immersed in everyday household affairs. You see them eat and drink and look bored. You see them with imperfect or unaccomplished toilets, and often with muddy boots, especially when they look after their own horses. You begin to realize that ideals also are as much subject to the petty necessities of life as ordinary men, and do not always preserve the precise postures you are wont to see them in when their portraits adorn the picture-galleries. With women it is quite different. Woman is born to beautify the domestic circle, woman is always fascinating whether she be dressed up or domestically dowdy, but man is least of all fascinating at home.
In a word, Fanny felt the danger to be much less when it was actually before her than it had seemed to be when seen from afar, and she looked at Rudolf much more calmly with her bodily eyes than she had been wont to do with the eyes of her imagination.