My wife went everywhere with me.
She quitted a comfortable home, sacrificed a fortune, a brilliant career, to endure hunger, cold, and hardship with me. And I never heard her utter one word of complaint. When I was downhearted, she comforted me. And when all my hopes were stifled, she shared her hopes with me. At the new seat of the Hungarian Government, Debreczin, we were huddled together in a tiny little room, compared with which the hut of Peter Gyuricza was a palace from the Thousand-and-one Nights. And my queen worked like a slave, like the wife of a Siberian convict. She worked not for a joke, not in sheer defiance; she did not play the part of a peasant girl, she was a serving-woman in grim earnest.
The hazard of the die of war changed. We advanced. We marched in triumph from one battle-field to another. I was present at the storming of the citadel of Buda. Even in those awful days she never left me, when every night the sky seemed about to plunge down upon our heads.
The brilliant days of triumph were again succeeded by misfortune. The Northern ogre[57] threw all his legions upon us. Again we had to fly, to leave our happy hut, and continue our marriage tour through desolate wildernesses, where savage hordes had devastated whole villages. Our night's lodging was four bare sooty walls, our couch a bundle of charred straw. Hated by strangers, feared by acquaintances, we were a terror to the people from whom we begged a shelter.
[57] Pastliewich, by command of the Tzar, invaded Hungary in 1849, with 100,000 men.
The chaos of war finally parted us. I insisted that she should remain away from me. I could not endure to see her suffering any longer. It was not right that I should accept such sacrifices. I bade her leave me to meet my fate alone.
After the catastrophe of Vilagós[58] my life was ended. That mighty giant, the famous Hungary of our dreams, collapsed into atoms: her great men became grains of dust.
[58] When the Hungarian Commander-in-chief finally capitulated to the Russians.
I also became a nameless, weightless, aimless grain of dust.
The end of all things had arrived. The prophecy of the lady with the eyes like the sea lay literally fulfilled before me. Either the gibbet or suicide was to be my fate. I was twenty-four years of age, and a dead man. My former chief, the brave Catonian, Joseph Molnar, the president of the national court martial, had set me the example. He lay before me on the sward of Vilagós, slain by his own hand. The last hussar breaking his sword was a spectacle he could not bear to survive. Then it was that a burning hand seized my hand. It was hers, the hand of the woman who loved me. When all was lost, her love was not lost. She came after me. She took me with her. She set me free. When all Hungary was already subdued, there was still one corner in our native land where the hand of authority never came. She discovered that corner, and led me thither with her through every hostile camp.