One day he announced to her without preface that he had decided to renounce the name of Sabran; that he preferred to any other the title which she had given him in the Countship of Idrac. She was astonished, but on reflection only saw, in his choice, devotion and deference to herself. Perhaps, too, she reflected with a pang, he desired some foreign mission such as she had once proposed to him; perhaps the life at Hohenszalras was monotonous and too quiet for a man so long used to the movement and excitation of Paris. She suggested the invitation of a circle of guests more often, but he rejected the idea with some impatience. He, who had previously amused himself so well with the part of host to a brilliant society, now professed that he saw nothing but trouble and ennui in a house full of people, who changed every week, and of royal personages who exacted ceremonious observances that were tedious and burdensome. So they remained alone, for even the Princess Ottilie had gone away to Lilienslust. For her own part she asked nothing better. Her people, her lands, her occupations, her responsibilities, were always interest enough. She loved the stately, serene tread of Time in these mountain solitudes. Life always seemed to her a purer, graver, more august thing when no echo of the world without jarred on the solemnity of the woods and hills. She wanted her children to grow up to love Hohenszalras, as she had always done, far above all pomps and pleasures of courts and cities.
The winter went by, and he spent most of the days out of doors in violent exercise, sledging, skating, wolf hunting. In the evenings he made music for her in the white room: beautiful, dreamy music, that carried her soul from earth. He played for hours and hours far into the night; he seemed more willing to do anything than to converse. When he talked to her she was sensible of an effort of constraint; it was no longer the careless, happy, spontaneous conversation of a man certain of receiving sympathy in all his opinions, indulgence in all his errors, comprehension in even his vaguest or most eccentric ideas: a certain charm was gone out of their intercourse. She thought sometimes humbly enough, was it because a man always wearies of a woman? Yet she could scarcely think that, for his reverential deference to her alternated with a passion that had lost nothing of its voluptuous intensity.
So the winter passed away. Madame Ottilie was in the South for her health, with her relatives of Lilienhöhe; they invited no one, and so no one could approach them. The children grew and throve. Bela and his brother had a little sledge of their own, drawn by two Spanish donkeys, white as the snows that wrapped the Iselthal in their serenity and silence. In their little sable coats and their sable-lined hoods the two little boys looked like rosebuds wrapped in brown moss. They were a pretty spectacle upon the ice, with their stately Heiduck, wrapped in his scarlet and black cloak, walking by the gilded shell-shaped sledge.
'Bela loves the ice best. Bela wishes the summer never was!' said the little heir of the Counts of Szalras one day, as he leaped out from under the bearskin of his snow-carriage. His father heard him, and smiled a little bitterly.
'You have the snow in your blood,' he thought. 'I, too, know how I loved the winter with all its privations, how I skimmed like a swallow down the frozen Volga, how I breasted the wind of the North Sea, sad with the dying cries of the swans! But I had an empty stomach and naked limbs under my rough goatskin, and you ride there in your sables and velvets, a proud little prince, and yet you are my son!'
Was he almost angered against his own child for the great heirship to which he was born, as kings are often of their dauphins? Bela looked up at him a little timidly, always being in a certain awe of his father.
'May Bela go with you some day with the big black horses, one day when you go very far?'
'Ask your mother,' said Sabran.
'She will like it,' said the child. 'Yesterday she said you never do think of Bela. She did not say it to Bela, but he heard.'
'I will think of him,' said Sabran, with some emotion: he had a certain antagonism to the child, of which he was vaguely ashamed; he was sorry that she should have noticed it. He disliked him because Bela so visibly resembled himself that he was a perpetual reproach; a living sign of how the blood of a Russian lord and of a Persian peasant had been infused into the blood of the Austrian nobles.