When she knew that the child she bore was dead, she felt no sorrow, she thought only—'Begotten of a serf, of a coward!'
The intolerable outrage, the intolerable deception, were like flames of fire that seemed to eat up her life; her love for him, for the hour at least, had been stunned and ceased to speak. To the woman who came of the races of Szalras and Vàsàrhely, the dishonour covered every other memory.
'All his life only one long lie!' she thought.
Her race had been stainless through a thousand years of chivalry and heroism, and she—its sole descendant—had sullied it with the blood of a base-born impostor!
Whilst she lay sunk in what they deemed a perfect apathy, the disgrace done to her, to her name, to her ancestry, was ever present to her mind: a spectre which no one saw save herself. Every other emotion was for the time quenched in that. She felt as though the whole world had struck her on the cheek and she was powerless to resent or to revenge the blow. In hours of delirium she thought she saw all the men and women of her race who had reigned there before her standing about her bed, and saying: 'You held our honour, and what did you do with it? You let it sink to the earth in the arms of a nameless coward.'
One night she said suddenly: 'My cousin—is he here?'
When they told her that he had remained at Hohenszalras she seemed reassured. At sunrise she asked the same question. When they answered with the same affirmative, she said: 'Bid him come to me.'
They fetched him instantly. As he passed Sabran in the corridor he paused.
'Your wife has sent for me,' he said; 'have I your permission to see her?'
Sabran bent his head, but his heart beat thickly with the only jealousy he had ever felt. She asked for Egon Vàsàrhely in her stupor of misery, and he, her husband, had lost the right to enter her chamber, dared not approach her presence!