'No,' said Gela, 'I think she is too sad for that. You know when it is very, very cold the skies cannot rain. I think that it is just so cold with her.'
And Gela's own eyes filled, for he, the most thoughtful and the most quick in perception of them all, adored his mother. When he could he would sit in her presence for hours, mute and motionless, with a book on his knees, glancing at her with his meditative eyes now and then in rapt veneration.
'When Bela grows up he will wander, I dare say, and perhaps be a great soldier,' Gela thought at such times. 'But for me, I shall stay always with our mother, and read every thing that is written, and do all I can for the people, and care for nothing but for her and them.'
She had not let loose in the presence of Cardinal Vàsàrhely the burning wrath which had consumed her. And yet the valedictory words of the prelate recurred to her with haunting persistency. He had said to her: 'If you refuse to be released from your marriage, do not absolve yourself from its duties.' Was it possible, she asked herself, that she still owed allegiance to one who, whilst he had embraced her, had dishonoured her?
'As well,' she thought bitterly, 'as well say that the man and woman chained and drowned together in the Noyades of Nantes were united in a holy union!'
'Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.'
As she remembered those words of the Marriage Sacrament, uttered as she had stood beside him in the midst of the incense, the colour, the pomp, the gorgeous grandeur of the Court Chapel in Vienna, she felt that they had bound on her eternal silence, perpetual constancy, even in a sense continual submission; they forbade her to disgrace him before the world; they made his shame hers, they required her to defend him so far as in her lay from the punishment with which the laws would have met his wrong-doing: but she could not bring herself to acknowledge that it demanded more. Truth could not be forced to dwell beside falsehood. Honour could not take the kiss of peace from dishonour.
The natural veneration she bore to the speaker added to the weight of the reproach implied in the Cardinal's words. Even beyond her pride was her intense sense of the obligations of duty. She asked herself a thousand times a week if she had indeed failed in these. Honour was a yet higher thing than duty. Offended honour had its title to any choice. Her race had never gone to others with their wrongs; they had known how to avenge themselves by their own hand, in their own way. If she had chosen to stab him in the throat which had lied to her she would not, she thought, have gone outside her right. Yet she had been merciful to him; she had neither exposed nor chastised him; she had simply cut his life adrift from hers, which he had outraged.
No man's repute is hurt by separation from his wife; he was in no worse circumstance than he had been ere he had met her; she did not withdraw her gifts. She had given a noble name to one nameless; she had granted a feudal title to a bastard; she had enriched a man who previously had owned nothing, save half a million of francs won at play and a strip of sea-shore that was stolen. She withdrew none of her gifts; she left the impostor to the full enjoyment of the world; she did not even move a step to secure the world's sympathy with herself. All she had done as her just vengeance was to withdraw herself from the pollution of his touch, and to exile him from the home of her fathers. Who could have done less? His children would in the future possess all she had, though through him they destroyed the purity of her race for ever: centuries would not wash out in her sight the stain that was in their blood: but she did not disinherit them. She could not see that she had failed anywhere in her duty; she had been more generous in her judgment than many could have been. Wherever women spoke of her and of her separation from her husband, there would they surely, with many a bitter word, repay her all the affronts which she had put upon them by her indifference and by what they had esteemed her arrogance. She knew that in such a position as she had perforce created, unexplained, the man is easily and constantly absolved of blame, the woman is always and certainly condemned. Therefore she had never doubted that the future would lie lightly on his shoulders, passed in sensual idleness, in oblivion more or less easily attained. Could it be possible that though she had been so cruelly betrayed her own obligations remained the same? Had her marriage vows compelled her to endure even such offence as this without alteration in her own obedience? Was she inconsistent in sending her betrayer from her, whilst she still considered her bond to him binding? Since she refused to take advantage of the release that the Law and the Church would give her, was it unjustifiable to free herself from his hourly presence, his daily contact? No! she could not believe that it was so.
On her name-day, in the following spring, addressing his felicitations to her, Egon Vàsàrhely added words which had cost him much to write.