Throughout the Archduke's visit, and after the Prince's departure, Vàsàrhely continued to stay on, whilst a succession of other guests came and went, and the summer deepened into autumn. He felt that he could not leave his cousin's house with that doubt unsolved; yet he knew that he might stay on for ever with no more certainty to reward him and confirm his suspicions than he possessed now. His presence annoyed his host, but Sabran was too polished a gentleman to betray his irritation; sometimes Vàsàrhely shunned his presence and his conversation for days together, at other times he sought them and rode with him, shot with him, and played cards with him, in the vain hope of gathering from some chance admission or allusion some clue to Sabran's early days. But a perfectly happy man is not given at any time to retrospection, and Sabran less than most men loved his past. He would gladly have forgotten everything that he had ever done or said before his marriage at the Hofburg.
The intellectual powers and accomplishments of Sabran dazzled Vàsàrhely with a saddened sense of inferiority. Like most great soldiers he had a genuine humility in his measurement of himself. He knew that he had no talents except as a leader of cavalry. 'It is natural that she never looked at me,' he thought, 'when she had once seen this man, with his wit, his grace, his facility.' He could not even regard the skill of Sabran in the arts, in the salon, in the theatre with the contempt which the 'Wild Boar of Taróc' might have felt for a mere maker of music, a squire of dames, a writer of sparkling little comedies, a painter of screens, because he knew that both at Idrac and in France Sabran had showed himself the possessor of those martial and virile qualities, by the presence or the absence of which the Hungarian noble measured all men. He himself could only love well and live well: he reflected sadly that honesty and honour are not alone enough to draw love in return.
As the weeks passed on, his host grew so accustomed to his presence there that it ceased to give him offence or cause him anxiety.
'He is not amusing, and he is not always polite,' he said to his wife, 'but if he likes to consume his soul in gazing at you, I am not jealous, my Wanda; and so taciturn a rival would hardly ever be a dangerous one.'
'Do not jest about it,' she answered him, with some real pain. 'I should be very vexed at his remaining here, were it not that I feel sure he will in time learn to live down his regrets, and to esteem and appreciate you.'
'Who knows but his estimation of me may not be the right one?' said Sabran, with a pang of sad self-knowledge. And although he did not attach any significance to the prolonged sojourn of the lord of Taróc and Mohacs, he began to desire once more that his guest would return to the solitudes of the Carlowitz vineyards, or of the Karpathian mountains and gorges of snow.
When over seven weeks had passed by, Vàsàrhely himself began to think that to stay in the Iselthal was useless and impossible, and he had heard from Taróc tidings which annoyed him—that his brother Stefan and his wife, availing themselves of his general permission to visit any one of his places when they chose had so strained the meaning of the permission that they had gone to his castle, with a score of their Parisian friends, and were there keeping high holiday and festival, to the scandal of his grave old stewards, and their own exceeding diversion. Hospitable to excess as he was, the liberty displeased him, especially as his, men wrote him word that his favourite horses; were being ruined by over-driving, and in the list of the guests which they sent him were the names of more than one too notorious lady, against whose acquaintance he had repeatedly counselled Olga Brancka. He would not have cared much what they had done at any other of his houses, but at Taróc, his mother, whom he had adored, had lived and died, and the place was sacred to him.
He determined to tear himself away from Hohenszalras, and go and scatter these gay unbidden revellers in the dusky Karpathian ravines. 'I cannot stay here for ever,' he thought, 'and I might be here for years without acquiring any more certainty than my own conviction. Either I am wrong, or he has nothing to conceal, or if I be right he is too wary to betray himself. If only I could see his shoulder where I struck the dagger—but I cannot go into his bath-room and say to him, "You are Vassia Kazán!"'
He resolved to leave on the day after the morrow. For the next day there was organised on a large scale a hunting party, to which the nobility of the Tauern had been bidden. There were only some half-dozen men then staying in the Burg, most of them Austrian soldiers. The delay gave him the chance he longed for, which but for an accident he might never have had, though he had tarried there half a century.
Early in the morning there was a great breakfast in the Rittersaal, at which Wanda did not appear. Sabran received the nobles and gentry of the province, and did the honours of his table with his habitual courtliness and grace. He was not hospitable in Vàsàrhely's sense of the word: he was too easily wearied by others, and too contemptuous of ordinary humanity; but he was alive to the pleasure of being lord of Hohenszalras, and sensible of the favour with which he was looked upon by a nobility commonly so exclusive and intolerant of foreign invasion.