In his vague terror he thought to disarm her by his little sister's name. She had thrust him away from her, and was looking with cold and cruel eyes on his face, that was so like the face of his father. She was thinking:
'You are the son of a serf, of a traitor, of a liar, of a bastard, and yet you are mine! I bore you, and yet you are his. You are shame incarnate. You are the living sign of my dishonour. You bear my name—my untainted name—and yet you were begotten by him.'
Bela dropped down at her feet as his father had done.
'Oh, do not look at me so,' he sobbed. 'Oh, mother, what have I done? I have tried to be good all this while. He is gone away, and he is so unhappy, and he bade me never vex or disobey you, and I never will.'
His voice was broken in his sobs, and he leaned his head upon her knees, and clasped them with both his arms. She looked down on him, and drew a deep shuddering breath. The holiest joy of a woman's life was, for her, poisoned at the springs.
Then, at the child's clinging embrace, at his piteous and innocent grief, the motherhood in her welled up under the frost of her heart, and all its long-suffering and infinite tenderness revived, and overcame the horror that wrestled with it. She raised him up and strained him to her breast.
'You are mine, you are mine!' she murmured over him. 'I must forget all else.'
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
He spring dawned once more on Hohenszalras, and the summer followed it. The waters leapt, the woods rejoiced, the gardens blossomed, and the children played; but the house was silent as a house in which the dead are tying. There was indeed a corpse there—the corpse of buried joy, of murdered love, of ruined honour.