'These are our flowers,' she said as she gave them to him. 'They mean love and peace.'
He turned from her slightly as he fastened them where the others had been.
All the evening she was pre-occupied and nervous. She could not forget the intimation she had received. It was intolerable to her to have anything of which she could not speak to her husband. Though they had their own affairs apart one from the other, there had been nothing of moment in hers that she had ever concealed from him. But here it was impossible for her to speak to him, since she had pledged herself never to seek to know the reason of an action which, however plausibly she explained it to herself, remained practically inexplicable and unintelligible. It was terrible to her, too, to feel that the lines of a coward who dared not sign them had sunk so deeply into her mind that she did not question their veracity. They had at once carried conviction to her that Egon Vàsàrhely did know what they said he did. She could not have told why this was, but it was so. It was what hurt her most——others knew; she did not.
She felt that if she could have spoken to Sabran of it, the matter would have become wholly indifferent to her; but the obligation of reticence, the sense of separation which it involved, oppressed her greatly. She was also haunted by the memory of the enmity which existed between these men, whose names were so strangely coupled in the anonymous counsel given her.
She stayed long in her oratory that night, seeking vainly for calmness and patience under this temptation; seeking beyond all things for strength to put the poison of it wholly from her mind. She dreaded lest it should render her irritable and suspicious. She reproached herself for having been guilty of even so much insinuation of rebuke to him as her words with the flower had carried in them. She had ideas of the duties of a woman to her husband widely different to those which prevail in the world. She allowed herself neither irritation nor irony against him. 'When the thoughts rebel, the acts soon revolt,' she was wont to say to herself, and even in her thoughts she would never blame him.
Prayer, even if it have no other issue or effect, rarely fails to tranquillise and fortify the heart which is lifted up ever so vaguely in search of a superhuman aid. She left her oratory strengthened and calmed, resolved in no way to allow such partial success to their unknown foe as would be given if the treacherous warning brought any suspicion or bitterness to her mind. She passed through the open archway in the wall which divided his rooms from hers, and looked at him where he lay already asleep upon his bed, early fatigued by the long cold drive from which he had returned at nightfall. He was never more handsome than sleeping calmly thus, with the mellow light of a distant lamp reaching the fairness of his face. She looked at him with all her heart in her eyes; then stooped and kissed him without awaking him.
'Ah! my love,' she thought, 'what should ever come between us? Hardly even death, I think, for if I lost you I should not live long without you.'
[CHAPTER XXVII.]
The Salzburg lawyers employed all the resources of the Viennese police to discover the sender of the envelope, but vainly; nothing was learned by all the efforts made. But the letter constantly haunted her thoughts. It produced in her an uneasiness and an apprehensiveness wholly foreign to her temper. The impossibility also of saying anything about it increased the weight of it on her memory. Yet she never once thought of asking Vàsàrhely. She wrote to him now and then, as she had always done, to give him tidings of her health or of her movements, but she never once alluded in the most distant terms to the anonymous information she had received. If he had been there beside her she would not have spoken of it. Of the two, she would sooner have reopened the subject to her husband. But she never did so. She had promised him to be silent, and to her creed a promise was inviolate, never to be retracted, be the pressure or the desire to do so what it would.