Bela looked at him with troubled suffused eyes; he went within doors a little sadly, led away by Hubert, and when he reached his nursery and had his furs taken from off him he was still serious, and for once he did not tell his thoughts to Gela, for they were too many for him to be able to master them in words. His father was a beautiful, august, terrible, magnificent figure in his eyes; with the confused fancies of a child's scarce-opened mind he blended together in his admiration Sabran and the great marble form of S. Johann of Prague which stretched its arm towards the lake from the doors of the great entrance, and, as Bela always understood, controlled the waters and the storms at will. Bela feared no one else in all the world, but he feared his father, and for that reason loved him as he loved nothing else in his somewhat selfish and imperious little life.
'It is so good of you to have given Bela that pleasure,' his wife said to him when he entered the white room. 'I know you cannot care to hear a child chatter as I do. It can only be tiresome to you.'
'I will drive him every day if it please you,' said Sabran.
'No, no; that would be too much to exact from you. Besides, he would soon despise his donkeys, and desert poor Gela. I take him but seldom myself for that reason. He has an idea that he is immeasurably older than Gela. It is true a year at their ages is more difference than are ten years at ours.'
'The child said something to me, as if he had heard you say I do not care for him?'
'You do not, very much. Surely you are inclined to be harsh to him?'
'If I be so, it is only because I see so much of myself in him.'
He looked at her, assailed once more by the longing which at times came over him to tell her the truth of himself, to risk everything rather than deceive her longer, to throw himself upon her mercy, and cut short this life which had so much of duplicity, so much of concealment, that every year added to it was a stone added to the mountain of his sins. But when he looked at her he dared not. The very grace and serenity of her daunted him; all the signs of nobility in her, from the repose of her manner to the very beauty of her hands, with their great rings gleaming on the long and slender fingers, seemed to awe him into silence. She was so proud a woman, so great a lady, so patrician in all her prejudices, her habits, her hereditary qualities, he dared not tell her that he had betrayed her thus. An infidelity, a folly, even any other crime he thought he could have summoned courage to confess to her; but to say to her, the daughter of a line of princes: 'I, who have made you the mother of my children, I was born a bastard and a serf!' How could he dare say that? Anything else she might forgive, he thought, since love is great, but never that. Nay, a cold sickness stole over him as he thought again that she came of great lords who had meted justice out over whole provinces for a thousand years; and he had wronged her so deeply that the human tongue scarcely held any word of infamy enough to name his crime. The law would set her free, if she chose, from a man who had so betrayed her, and his children would be bastards like himself.
He had stretched himself on a great couch, covered with white bear-skins. He was in shadow; she was in the light that came from the fire on the wide hearth, and from the oriel window near, a red warm dusky light, that fell on the jewels on her hands, the furs on her skirts, the very pearls about her throat.
She glanced at him anxiously, seeing how motionless he lay there, with his head turned backward on the cushions.