She had never spoken of what had befallen her to any human ear; not even to her priest's. The horror of it was buried in her own breast; its sepulchre all the waste and ashes of her perished joys.
When the Princess Ottilie, weeping, entreated to be told the worst, she answered briefly:
'He betrayed me. How, matters nothing.'
More than that she never said. The Princess supposed that she spoke of the disloyalty of the passions, and dared not urge her to more confidence. 'I warned him that she would never forgive if he were faithless,' she thought, and wept for hours at her orisons, her gentle soul resenting the inflexibility of this mute immutable bitterness of offended love.
Too proud and too delicate to intrude undesired into any confidence, and too tenderhearted to utter censure aloud to one she loved, the Princess showed in a thousand ways without speech that she considered there were cruelty and egotism in her unexplained separation from her husband. Believing as she did that his offence was that conjugal infidelity which, however blameable, is one of those injuries which all women who love forgive, and which those who do not love endure in silence from patience and dignity, herself offended at her exclusion from all knowledge of the facts, she said but little; but her whole attitude was one of restrained reproach.
'With time she will change,' she said to herself. But time passed on, and she could see no change, nor any hope of it.
The grave severe beauty of their mother had a vague terror for her children. She never now smiled at their mirth, laughed at their sports, or joined in their pastimes. She was almost always silent. Bela longed to throw his arms about her knees, and cry out to her: 'Mother, mother, where is he?' But he did not venture to do so. Without his reasoning upon it, the child instinctively felt that her frozen calm covered depths of suffering which he did not dare disturb. He had been so completely terrified once, that the remembrance of that hour lay like ice upon his bright courage. Even the younger ones felt something of the same fear. Their mother remembered them, cared for them, was heedful that their needs of body and of brain were perfectly supplied. But they felt, as young children feel what they cannot explain, that they were outside her life, insufficient for her, even fraught with intense pain to her. Often when she stooped to kiss them a shudder passed over her; often when they came into her presence she looked away from them, as though the sight of them stung and blinded her. They never heard an angry word from her lips, but even repeated anger would have kept them at less distance from her than did that mute majesty of a grief they could not comprehend.
She was more severe to all her dependants; she never became unjust, but she was often stern; the children at the schools saw her smile no more. Santa Claus still filled their stockings on Christmas Eve; but of the stately figure which moved amidst them, robed in black, they grew afraid. She seldom went to them or to her peasantry. Bela and Gela were sent with her winter gifts. In the summer the sennerins never now saw her enter their high huts and drink a cup of milk, talking with them of their herds and flocks.
She was tranquil as of old. She fulfilled the duties of her properties, and attended to all the demands made upon her by her people; her liberalities were unchanged, her justice was unwarped, her mind was clear and keen. But she never smiled, even on her young daughter; and the little Lili said once to her brothers:
'Do you know, I think our mother is changing to marble. She will soon be of stone, like the statues in the chapel. When I touch her I feel cold.'