'I will remember,' said Bela thoughtfully; 'when I am a man I want to be just what you are.'
Sabran turned away at the innocent words. 'Be what your mother's people were, and I shall be content,' he said gravely.
'But your people too,' said Bela; 'they were very great and very good. The Herr Professor reads us things out of that big book on Mexico, and the Marquis Xavier was a saint,' he says. Gela likes the book better than I because it is all about birds, and beasts, and flowers; but the part about the Indians, and the Incas, that pleases me; and then there are the Breton stories too that are in real history, they are quite beautiful, and I would die like that.'
Bela's tongue once loosened seldom paused of its own accord; his eyes were dark and animated, his face was eager and proud.
'The Marquis Xavier was a saint, indeed,' said his father abruptly. 'Revere his name. All my children should revere his name and memory. But lean most to your mother's people; you are Austrian born, and the chief of your duties and possessions will be in Austria. I think you would die heroically, my boy, but you will find that it is harder to live so. The horses are rested, let us ride home; it grows late for you.'
Bela, whose mind was quick in intuition, felt that his father did not care to talk about Mexico or Bretagne.
'I will ask the Herr Professor if I did wrong to speak to him of the big book,' he said to himself as he mounted his pony; he was very anxious to please his father, but he was afraid he had missed the way. 'I suppose it is because they were only saints, and the Szalras were all soldiers,' he thought on reflection, soldiers being by far the foremost in his esteem.
'He says it is harder to live well than to die well,' said Bela over his bread and milk that night to his brother.
'I suppose that is because dying is over so soon,' said the meditative Gela; 'and you know it must take an enormous time to live to be old—quite old—like Aunt Ottilie.'
'I should like to die very grandly,' said Bela with shining eyes, 'and have all the world remember me for ever and for ever, as they do great Rudolph.'