He took no notice of her words.
'The children would always be yours,' he muttered. 'You would never leave him, never disgrace him for their sake; even if one knew—it would be of no use.'
'Dear Egon,' she said in real distress, 'what strange things are you saying? Are you mad? Whose disgrace do you mean?'
'Let us suppose an extreme case,' he said, with a hard laugh. 'Suppose their father were base, or vile, or faithless, would you hate the children? Surely you would.'
'I have not imagination enough to suppose any such thing,'she said very coldly. 'And you do not know what a mother's love is, my cousin.'
He walked away, leaving her abruptly.
'How strange he grows!' she thought. 'Surely his mind must be touched; jealousy is a sort of madness.'
She bade the children's attendants keep Count Bela more in the nurseries; she told them that the child teased her guests, and must not be allowed to run so often at his will and whim over the house.' She never seriously feared that Egon would harm the child: his noble and chivalrous nature could not have changed so cruelly as that; but it hurt her to see his eyes fixed on the son of Sabran with such persistent interrogation and so strange an intensity of observation. It made her think of old Italian tales of the evil eye.
She did not know that Vàsàrhely had come thither with a sincere and devout intention to conquer his jealous hatred of her husband, and to habituate himself to the sight of her in the new relations of her life. She did not know that he would probably have honestly tried to do his duty, and honestly striven to feel at least esteem for one so near to her, if the suspicion which had become almost certainty in his own mind had not made him believe that he saw in Sabran a traitor, a bastard, and a criminal whose offences were the deepest of all possible offences, and whose degradation was the lowest of all possible degradation, in the sight of the haughty magnate of Hungary, steeped to the lips in all the traditions and the convictions of an unsullied nobility. If what he believed were, indeed, the truth, he would hold Sabran lower than any beggar crouching at the gate of his palace in Buda, than any gipsy wandering in the woods of his mountain fortress of Taróc. If what he believed were the truth, no leper would seem to him so loathsome as this brilliant and courtly gentleman to whom his cousin had given her hand, her honour, and her life.
'Doubt, like a raging tooth,' gnawed at his heart, and a hope, which he knew was dishonourable to his chivalry, sprang up in him, vague, timid, and ashamed. If, indeed, it were as he believed, would not such crime, proven on the sinner, part him for ever from the pure, proud life of Wanda von Szalras? And then, as he thought thus, he groaned in spirit, remembering the children—the children with their father's face and their father's taint in them, for ever living witnesses of their mother's surrender to a lying hound.