'What could she do when she was here, do you think?' asked Gela, with a tremor.
'I do not know,' said Bela, gravely and sadly. 'But I am sure that she hated our mother.'
He was sure that all the evil had come from her; he had heard of evil spirits, the people believed in them, and had charms against them. She was one of them. Had she not tempted him to disobedience and revolt, with her pictures of the grand gaiety, the magnificent gatherings, the heart-rousing 'Halali!' of the Chantilly hunt?
Bela did not forget.
He would have cut off his little right hand, now, never to have vexed his mother.
He was yet more sorrowful still for his father. Though they were not allowed to approach their mother's apartments, he had disobeyed the injunction more than once, and had seen Sabran walking to and fro that long gallery, or seated with bent head and folded arms on one of the oaken benches. With all his boldness Bela had not dared to approach that melancholy figure; but it had haunted his dreams, and troubled him sorely as he rode and drove, and played and did his lessons. The snow had come on the second week of his mother's illness, and when he visited his riding-pony in its loose box on these frosted days on which he could not use it, he buried his face in its abundant mane, and wept bitterly, though he boasted that he never cried.
Eight weeks passed by after the departure of Olga Brancka before his mother could leave her bed; and all that while, save for a brief question now and again as to their health, put to her physician, she had never mentioned the children once. 'She does not want us any more,' said Bela, with the great tears dimming his bold eyes.
In the ninth week she was lifted on to a great chair, placed beside one of the windows, and she turned her weary gaze on to the snow world without. What use was life? Why had it returned to her? All emotion of maternity, all memory of love, were for the time killed in her. She was only conscious of an intolerable indignity, for which neither God nor man could give her consolation.
She would have gone barefoot all the world over sooner than be again in his presence, had not the imperious courage which was the strongest instinct of her nature refused to confess itself unable to meet the man who had wronged her. In the long dark night which these past two months had seemed to her, she had brought herself to face the inevitable end. She had nerved herself to be her own judge and his. Weaker women would have made the world their judge; she did not. She did not even seek the counsel of that Church of which she was a reverent daughter. Her priest had no access to her.
'God must see my torture, but no other shall,' she said in her heart, nor should the world ever have her fate to make an hour's jesting wonder of, as is its way with all calamity. It would be her lifelong companion; a rusted iron for ever piercing deeper, and deeper into her flesh; but she would dwell alone with it—unpitied. The men of her race had always been their own lawgivers, their own avengers; she would be hers.