It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them:. 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race for ever; for ever my blood flows with yours.'
The greatness of a great race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme, its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed holding as you do that lamp of honour in your hands.
So had she always thought; and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust.
Her convalescence came in due course; but the silence, almost absolute silence, which she preserved on the full recovery of her consciousness alarmed her physicians, who had no clue to the cause. Greswold alone, who divined that there was some wrong or disaster which severed her from her husband, guessed that this immutable speechlessness was but the cover and guard of some great sorrow. No tears ever dimmed her eyes or relieved her bursting heart; she lay still, absorbed in mute and terrible retrospection. As her great weakness left her, there came upon her features the colder darker look of her race, the look which he who had betrayed her had always feared. She never spoke of him, nor of the children. Her women would have ventured to bring the children to her, unbidden, but Greswold forbade them; he knew that for the devoted tenderness she bore them to be thus utterly still and changed, some shock must have befallen her so great that the instincts of maternity were momentarily quenched in her, as water springs are dried up by earthquake.
'She never speaks of me, nor of them?' asked Sabran with agony every day of Greswold, and the old man answered him:
'She never speaks at all. She replies to our questions as to her health, she asks briefly for what she needs; no more.'
'The children are innocent!' he said wearily, and his heart had never gone forth to them so much as it did now, when they were shut out like himself from the arms of their mother.
Yet he understood how she shrank from them—might well almost abhor them—seeing in them, as Vàsàrhely saw, the living proofs of her surrender to a coward and a traitor.
'What can he have done?' mused Greswold. 'Infidelity, perhaps, she would not forgive; but it would not make her thus blind and deaf to the children.'
He passed his days in utter wretchedness; he wandered in the wintry woods for hours, or sat in weary waiting outside her door. He cared nothing what his household thought or guessed. He had forgotten every living creature save herself. When he saw his young sons in the distance he avoided them; he dreaded their guileless questions, the stab of their unconscious words. Again and again he was tempted to blow out his brains, or fling himself from the ice walls that towered above him; but the sense that it would seem to her the last cowardice—the last shame—restrained him.