'He is worthier to give them a name than I,' he thought bitterly.
They did not care to move from the green Iselthal. Of Olga Brancka they heard but rarely. Now and then she sent a little witty flippant note to Hohenszalras, dated from Paris or Trouville, or Biarritz, or Vienna, or Monaco, or St. Petersburg, according to the season and her caprices. Of these little meaningless notes Wanda did not speak to her husband. She could not bring herself to talk to him of the woman who had so nearly wrecked their peace, and it seemed to her that the old saw was wise: 'Let sleeping dogs lie.' It appeared to her, too, that theirs and Madame Brancka's paths in life would henceforth very seldom, if ever, meet.
Sabran believed that her overtures towards him had sprung from one of those insane unhealthy passions which sometimes are created by their very sense of their own immorality; he fancied it had died of its own fire. He did not credit her with the tenacity and endurance she really possessed. He had little doubt that long ere now some dandy of the boulevards, some soldier of the palace, had supplanted him in that brazier of heated senses which she called by courtesy her heart. He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.
The summer was a soft and sunny one, and they enjoyed it in simple and healthful pleasures of the open air and of the affections. The children throve and never ailed a day. Sabran had lost all desire to return to the excitations and passions of the world; his wife was more than content in the joys of her home; and if above her a storm brooded, if in his heart there fretted ceaselessly the chafing sense of a gross treachery, of an incessant peril, she was as ignorant of what menaced her as the child to whom she had given birth. With present security also, the sense of dread often wore away from him.
The months sped on swiftly and serenely for the mistress of Hohenszalras, the only shadows cast on them coming from accidents to her poor people through flood or avalanche, and the occasional waywardness and turbulence of her eldest born. Bela had not been the better for his sojourn in a great city, where parasites are never lacking to the heir of wealth, and where his companions had been small coquettes and dandies pétris du monde at six years old. The bright vigorous hardihood of the child had escaped the contagion of affectation, but he had arrived at an inordinate sense of his own importance and dignity, despite the memory of the Dauphin which often came to him. He grew quite beyond the management of his governantes, and though he never disobeyed his mother, gave little heed to anyone else's authority. Of Sabran he was alone afraid; but at the same time he preserved for him that silent intense admiration which a young child sometimes nourishes for a man by whom he is little noticed, but who is his ideal of all power, force, and achievement, and of whom he hears heroic tales.
He was now seven years old. It was time to think of a tutor for him, since he was beyond the control of the women entrusted with his education. When she spoke of it to his father, he answered at once:
'Take Greswold. He has the best temper in the world to govern a child, and he is a great scholar.'
'But he is a physician,' she objected.
'He has studied the mind no less than the body. He adores the boy, and will influence him as a stranger could not. Speak to him; he will be only too happy. As no one is ever ill here,' he added with a smile, 'his present position is a sinecure; he can very well combine another office with it.'
'I wanted you to take Bela in your hands,' he said later to the old doctor, 'because I say to you what I should not care to say to a stranger. The boy has all my faults in him. As he exactly resembles me physically so he does morally. There is in him, too, I am afraid, a tendency to tyranny that I have never had. I am not cruel to anything, though I am indifferent to most things; he would be cruel if he were allowed; perhaps it is mere masterfulness which may be conquered by time. I imagine he has also my fatal facility. I call it fatal because it renders acquisition and proficiency so easy that it prevents laboriousness and depth of knowledge. You are much wiser than I am, and will know how to educate the child much better than I can tell you how to do. Only remember two things: first, that he is cursed by certain hereditary passions coming to him from me which must be checked and calmed, or he will grow up with a character dangerous to himself, and odious to others in the great position he will one day occupy. Secondly, that if any child of mine ever bring any kind of sorrow upon her, I shall be of all men the most wretched. You have always been my good friend. Be yet more so in preventing my suffering from the pain of seeing my own moral deformities face me and accuse me in the life of her eldest son.'