'I should like to die saving somebody,' said Gela, 'just as Uncle Bela saved the pilgrims; that would please our mother best.'
'I should like to die in battle,' said the living Bela; 'and that would please our mother, because so many of us have always died so fighting the French, or the Prussians, or the Turks. When I am a man I shall die like Wallenstein.'
'But Wallenstein was killed in a room,' said Gela, who was very accurate.
'You are always so particular!' said Bela impatiently, who had himself only a vague idea of Wallenstein, as of someone who had gone on fighting without stopping for thirty years.
'The Herr Professor says it is just being particular which makes the difference between the scholar and the sciolist,' said Gela solemnly, his pretty rosy lips closing carefully over the long word halbgelehrte.
This night after the ride he and she dined quite alone. As he sat in the Rittersaal and looked at the long line of knights, the many blazoned shields, the weapons borne in gallant warfare, a sudden sensation came to him of the vile thing that he did in being in this place. It seemed to him that those armoured figures should grow animate and descend and drive him out. Bela, then sleeping happily, dreaming of the glories of his ride, had raised with his innocent words a torturing spirit in his father's breast. What had he brought to this haughty and chivalrous race?—the servile Slav, the barbaric Persian, blood, and all the dishonour that their creed would hold the basest upon earth. Besides, to lie to her children! Even the blue eyes of the boy had made him embarrassed and humiliated, as if she were judging him through her first-born's gaze. What would it be when that child, grown to man's estate, should speak to him of his people, of his forefathers?
For the first time it occurred to him that these boys would inevitably, as they grew older, ask him many questions, wish to know many things. He could turn aside a child's inquisitive interest, but it would be more painful, less easy, to refuse to supply a grown youth's legitimate interrogations. All these children would some time or another make many inquiries of him that his wife, out of delicate sympathy, never had intruded upon him. The fallen fortunes of the Sabran race had always seemed to her one of those blameless misfortunes for which the best respect is shown by silence. But her sons would naturally, one day or another, be more interested in learning more of those from whom they were descended.
The lie in reply would be easy and secure. There were all the traditions and recollections of the Sabrans of Romaris to be gathered from the tongues of the people in Finisterre, and the private papers of their race which he possessed. He could answer well enough, but it would be a lie, and a lie seemed to him now a disgrace? Before his marriage he had looked on falsehood as a necessary part of the world's furniture, but he had not lived all these years beside a noble nature, to which even a prevarication was impossible, without growing ashamed of his former laxities.
'There is not a dead man amongst all those knights who bore these arms that should not rise to punish and disown me!' he thought with poignant hatred of his past.
When he went to his room the impulse once more came over him to tell his wife all; to throw himself on her mercy, and let her do the worst she would; but he had a certain fear of her which acted like a spell on that moral cowardice, which his Slav temperament and his hidden secret combined to bind in a dead weight on the physical courage and natural pride of his character.