It was these grand lines on which her character and her habits were cast that awed him, and made him afraid to tell her his true history. Had he revered her less he would probably have deceived her less. Had she been of a less noble temperament she would also probably have been much less easy to deceive.
Her health was at this time languid, and more uncertain than usual, and the two lines of the letter were often present to her thoughts, tormenting her with idle conjecture, painful doubt, none the less painful because it could take no definite shape. Sometimes when she was not well enough to accompany him out of doors or drive her own sleigh through the keen clear winter air, she sat doing nothing, and thinking only of this thing, in the same room, with the same smell of violets about her, musing on what it might by any possibility mean. Any secret was safe with Egon, but then since the anonymous writer was in possession of it the secret was not only his. She wondered sometimes in terror whether it could be anything that might in after years affect her children's future, and then as rapidly discarded the bare thought as so much dishonour to their father. 'It is only because I am now nervous and impressionable,' she said to herself,'that this folly takes such a hold upon me. When I am well again I shall not think of it. Who is it says of anonymous letters that they are like "les immondices des rues: il faut boucher le nez, tourner la tête et passer outre?"'
But 'les immondices' spoiled the odours of the new year violets to her.
In the early spring of the year she gave birth to another son. She suffered more than she had ever done before, and recovered less quickly. The child was like all the others, fair, vigorous, and full of health. She wished to give him her husband's name, but Sabran so strenuously opposed the idea that she yielded, and named him after her brother Victor, who had fallen at Magenta.
There were the usual rejoicings throughout the estates, rejoicings that were the outcome of genuine affection and fealty to the race of Szalras, whose hold on the people of the Tauern had resisted all the revolutionary movements of the earlier part of the century, and had fast root in the hearts of the staunch and conservative mountaineers. But for the first time as she heard the hearty 'Hoch!' of the assembled peasantry echoing beneath her windows, and the salvos fired from the old culverins on the keep, a certain fear mingled with her maternal pride, and she thought: 'Will the people love them as well twenty years hence, fifty years hence, when I shall be no more? Will my memory be any shield to them? Will the traditions of our race outlast the devouring changes of the world?'
Meantime the Princess, happy and smiling, showed the little new-born noble to the stalwart chamois hunters, the comely farmers and fishermen, the clear-eyed stout-limbed shepherds and labourers gathered bareheaded round the Schloss.
Bela stood by contemplating the crowd he knew so well; he did not see why they should cheer any other child beside himself. He stood with his little velvet cap in his hand, because he was always told to do so, but he felt very inclined to put it on; if his father had not been present there he would have done so.
'If I have ever so many brothers,' he said at last thoughtfully to Greswold, who was by his side, 'it will not make any difference, will it? I shall always be the one?'
'What do you mean?' asked the physician.
'They will none of them be like me? They will none of them be as great as I am? Not if I have twenty?'