'What would you? He has been made of buckram and parchment; besides which; nothing that is not German has, to his mind, any right to exist. By the way, Egon wrote to me this morning; he will be here at last.'
He looked up quickly in unspoken alarm: 'Your cousin Egon? Here?'
'Why are you so surprised? I was sure that sooner or later he would conquer that feeling of being unable to meet you. I begged him to come now; it is eight whole years since I have seen him. When once you have met you will be friends—for my sake.'
He was silent; a look of trouble and alarm was still upon his face.
'Why should you suppose it any easier to him now than then?' he said at length. 'Men who love you do not change. There are women who compel constancy, sans le vouloir. The meeting can but be painful to Prince Vàsàrhely.'
'Dear Réné,' she answered in some surprise, 'my nearest male relative and I cannot go on for ever without seeing each other. Even these years have done Egon a great deal of harm. He has been absent from the Court for fear of meeting us. He has lived with his hussars, or voluntarily confined to his estates, until he grows morose and solitary. I am deeply attached to him. I do not wish to have the remorse upon me of having caused the ruin of his gallant and brilliant life. When he has been once here he will like you: men who are brave have always a certain sympathy. When he has seen you here he will realise that destiny is unchangeable, and grow reconciled to the knowledge that I am your wife.'
Sabran gave an impatient gesture of denial, and began to write the list of invitations for the autumn circle of guests who were to meet the Prince and Princess of Lilienhöhe.
Once every summer and every autumn Hohenszalras was filled with a brilliant house-party, for she sacrificed her own personal preferences to what she believed to be for the good of her husband. She knew that men cannot always live alone; that contact with the world is needful to their minds and bracing for it. She had a great dread lest the ghost ennui should show his pale face over her husband's shoulder, for she realised that from the life of the asphalte of the Champs-Élysées to the life amidst the pine forests of the Iselthal was an abrupt transition that might easily bring tedium in its train. And tedium is the most terrible and the most powerful foe love ever encounters.
Sabran completed the list, and when he had corrected it into due accordance with all Lilienhöhe's personal and political sympathies and antipathies, despatched the invitations, 'for eight days,' written on cards that bore the joint arms of the Counts of Idrac and the Counts of Szalras. He had adopted the armorial bearings of the countship of Idrac as his own, and seemed disposed to abandon altogether those of the Sabrans of Romaris.
When they were written he went out by himself and rode long and fast through the mists of a chilly afternoon, through dripping forest ways and over roads where little water-courses spread in shining shallows. The coming of Egon Vàsàrhely troubled him and alarmed him. He had always dreaded his first meeting with the Magyar noble; and as the years had dropped by one after another, and her cousin had failed to find courage to see her again, he had begun to believe that they and Vàsàrhely would remain always strangers. His wish had begotten his thought. He knew that she wrote at intervals to her cousin, and he to her; he knew that at the birth of each of their children some magnificent gift, with a formal letter of felicitation, had come from the Colonel of the White Hussars; but as time had gone on and Prince Egon had avoided all possibility of meeting them, he had grown to suppose that the wound given her rejected lover was too profound ever to close; nor did he wonder that it was so: it seemed to him that any man who loved her must do so for all eternity, if eternity there should be. To learn suddenly that within another month Vàsàrhely would be his guest, distressed and alarmed him in a manner she never dreamed. They had been so happy. On their cloud less heaven there seemed to him to rise a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but bearing with it disaster and a moonless night.