He had to play a part to her, and to do this was unfamiliar and hateful to him. In all the years before he had concealed a fact from her, but he had never been otherwise false. Though to his knowledge there had been always between them the shadow of a secret untold, there had never been any sense upon him of obligation to measure his words, to feign sentiments he had not, to hide behind a carefully constructed screen of untruth. Now, though he had indeed not lied with his lips, he had to sustain a concealment which was a thousand times more trying to him than that concealment of his birth and station to which he had been so long accustomed that he hardly realised it as any error. The very nobility with which she had accepted his silence, and given it, unasked, a worthy construction, smote him with a deeper sense of shame than even that which galled him when he remembered the yoke laid on him by the will of Egon Vàsàrhely.
He roused himself to meet her with composure.
She rested her hand caressingly on his.
'We will never speak of Russia any more. I should be sorry were the Kaiser to think you capricious or disloyal, but you have too much ability to have incurred this risk. Let it all be as though there had never arisen any question of public life for you. I have explained to Aunt Ottilie; she will not weary you with interrogation; she understands that you have acted as your honour bade you. That is enough for those who love you as do she and I.'
Every word she spoke entered his very soul with the cruellest irony, the sharpest reproach. But of these he let her see nothing. Yet he was none the less abjectly ashamed, less passionately self-condemned, because he had to consume his pain in silence, and had the self-control to answer, still with a smile, as he touched a chord or two of music:
'When the Israelites were free they hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt. They deserved eternal exile, eternal bondage. So do I, for having ever been ingrate enough to dream of leaving Hohenszalras for the world of men!'
Then he turned wholly towards the Erard keyboard, and with splendour and might there rolled forth under his touch the military march of Rákóczi: he was glad of the majesty and passion of the music which supplanted and silenced speech.
'That is very grand,' she said, when the last notes had died away. 'One seems to hear the Eljén! of the whole nation in it. But play me something more tender, more pathetic——some lieder half sorrow and half gladness, you know so many of all countries.'
He paused a moment; then his hands wandered lightly across the notes, and called up the mournful folk-songs that he had heard so long, so long, before; songs of the Russian peasants, of the maidens borne off by the Tartar in war, of the blue-eyed children carried away to be slaves, of the homeless villagers beholding their straw-roofed huts licked up by the hungry hurrying flame lit by the Kossack or the Kurd; songs of a people without joy, that he had heard in his childish days, when the great rafts had drifted slowly down the Volga water, and across the plains the lines of chained prisoners had crept as slowly through the dust; or songs that he had sung to himself, not knowing why, where the winter was white on all the land, and the bay of the famished wolves afar off had blent with the shrill sad cry of the wild swans dying of cold and of hunger and of thirst on the frozen rivers, and the reeds were grown hard as spears of iron, and the waves were changed to stone.
The intense melancholy penetrated her very heart. She listened with the tears in her eyes, and her whole being stirred and thrilled by a pain not her own. A kind of consciousness came to her, borne on that melancholy melody, of some unspoken sorrow which lived in this heart which beat so near her own, and whose every throb she had thought she knew. A sudden terror seized her lest all this while she who believed his whole life hers was in truth a stranger to his deepest grief, his dearest memories.