CHAPTER XXXII. THE VALE OF VIOLETS
In the Prince’s mind the whole affair seemed clear as day, and he explained the vague anxiety with which he had been afflicted for several days as a mysterious premonition of a new sorrow. Menko was at Florence! Menko, for it could be no other than he, had telegraphed to Marsa, arranging a meeting with her. That very evening he was to be in the house of Marsa Laszlo—Marsa who bore, in spite of all, the title and name of the Zilahs. Was it possible? After the marriage, after this woman’s vows and tears, these two beings, separated for a time, were to be united again. And he, Andras, had almost felt pity for her! He had listened to Varhely, an honest man; drawing a parallel between a vanquished soldier and this fallen girl—Varhely, the rough, implacable Varhely, who had also been the dupe of the Tzigana, and one evening at Sainte-Adresse had even counselled the deceived husband to pardon her.
In a state bordering on frenzy, Zilah returned to his hotel, thinking:
“He will be with her this evening!”
This was worse than all the rest. How could he punish her?
Punish her?
Why not? Was not Marsa Laszlo his wife? That villa of Maisons-Lafitte, where she thought herself so safe, was his by law. He, the husband, had a right to enter there at any hour and demand of his wife an account of his honor.
“She wished this name of Zilah! Well! she shall know at least what it costs and what it imposes upon her!” he hissed through his clenched teeth. He walked nervously to and fro in the library of his hotel, his excitement increasing at every step.
“She is Princess Zilah! She—a princess! Nothing can wrest from her that title which she has stolen! Princess be it, then; but the Prince has the right to deal out life or death to his wife—to his wife and to the lover of his wife!” with a spasmodic burst of laughter. “Her lover is to be there; Menko is to be there, and I complain! The man whom I have sought in vain will be before me. I shall hold him at my mercy, and I do not thank the kind fate which gives me that joy! This evening! He will be at her house this evening! Good! Justice shall be done!”
Every moment added to his fever. He would have given ten years of his life if it were already evening. He waited impatiently for the hour to come when he could go and surprise them. He even thought of meeting Menko at the railway station on his arrival from Italy: but what would be the use? Menko would be at Maisons; and he would kill him before her face, in a duel if Menko would fight, or like a thief caught in the act if he attempted to fly. That would be better. Yes, he would kill him like a dog, if the other—but no! The Hungarian, struck in the presence of the Tzigana, would certainly not recoil before a pistol. Marsa should be the sole witness of the duel, and the blood of the Prince or of Menko should spatter her face—a crimson stain upon her pale cheek should be her punishment.
Early in the evening Andras left the hotel, after slipping into the pocket of his overcoat a pair of loaded pistols: one of them he would cast at Menko’s feet. It was not assassination he wished, but justice.
He took the train to Maisons, and, on his arrival there, crossed the railway bridge, and found himself almost alone in the broad avenue which runs through the park. As he walked on through the rapidly darkening shadows, he began to feel a strange sensation, as if nothing had happened, and as if he were shaking off, little by little, a hideous nightmare. In a sort of voluntary hallucination, he imagined that he was going, as in former days, to Marsa’s house; and that she was awaiting him in one of those white frocks which became her so well, with her silver belt clasped with the agraffe of opals. As he advanced, a host of memories overwhelmed him. He had walked with Marsa under these great lindens forming an arch overhead like that of a cathedral. He remembered conversations they had had in the evening, when a slight mist silvered the majestic park, and the white villa loomed vaguely before them like some phantom palace of fairyland. With the Tzigana clinging to his arm, he had seen those fountains, with their singing waters, that broad lawn between the two long lines of trees, those winding paths through the shrubbery; and, in the emotion aroused by these well-remembered places, there was a sensation of bitter pain at the thought of the happiness that might have been his had fate fulfilled her promises, which increased, rather than appeased, the Prince’s anger.
As his steps led him mechanically nearer and nearer to the house where she lived, all the details of his wedding-day rose in his memory, and he turned aside to see again the little church, the threshold of which they had crossed together—she exquisitely lovely in her white draperies, and he overflowing with happiness.
The square in front of the sanctuary was now deserted and the leaves were beginning to fall from the trees. A man was lying asleep upon the steps before the bolted door. Zilah stood gazing at the Gothic portal, with a statue of the Virgin Mother above it, and wondered whether it were he who had once led there a lovely girl, about to become his wife; and the sad, closed church produced upon him the effect of a tomb.
He dragged himself away from the contemplation of the stone threshold, where slept the tired man—drunk perhaps, at all events happier than the Prince—and proceeded on his way through the woods to the abode of Marsa Laszlo.
There was, Zilah remembered well, quite near there, a sort of narrow valley (where the Mayor of Maisons was said to have royally entertained Louis XIV and his courtiers, as they were returning from Marly), a lovely spot, surrounded by grassy slopes covered with violets, a little shady, Virgilian wood, where he and Marsa had dreamed away many happy hours. They had christened it The Vale o f Violets. How many memories were in that sweet name, each one of which stabbed and exasperated Zilah, rising before him like so many spectres.
He hastened his steps, repeating:
“He is there! She is waiting for him! Her lover is there!”
At the end of the road, before the villa, closed and silent like the old church, he stopped. He had reached his destination; but what was he about to do, he who—who up to this time had protected his name from the poisonous breath of scandal?
He was about to kill Menko, or to be killed himself. A duel! But what was the need of proposing a duel, when, exercising his rights as a husband, he could punish both the man and the woman?
He did not hesitate long, however, but advanced to the gate, saying, aloud:
“I have a right to enter my own house.”
The ringing of the bell was answered by the barking of Duna, Bundas, and Ortog, who tore furiously at their iron chains.
A man presently appeared on the other side of the gate. It was a domestic whom Andras did not know and had never seen.
“Whom do you wish to see?” asked the man.
“The Princess Zilah!”
“Who are you?” demanded the man, his hand upon the inner bolt of the gate.
“Prince Zilah!”
The other stood stock-still in amazement, trying to see, through the darkness, the Prince’s face.
“Do you hear me?” demanded Andras.
And, as the domestic opened the gate, as if to observe the appearance of the visitor, the Prince gave it a nervous push, which threw the servant backward; and, once within the garden, he came close to him, and said:
“Look well at me, in order that you may recognize me again. I am master here.”
Zilah’s clear eye and imperious manner awed the man, and he bowed humbly, not daring to speak.
Andras turned on his heel, mounted the steps, and entered the house; then he stopped and listened.
She was with him. Yes, a man was there, and the man was speaking, speaking to Marsa, speaking doubtless of love.
Menko, with his twisted moustache, his pretty smile and his delicate profile, was there, behind that door. A red streak of light from the salon where Marsa was showed beneath the door, which the Prince longed to burst open with his foot. With anger and bitterness filling his heart, he felt capable of entering there, and striking savagely, madly, at his rival.
How these two beings had played with him; the woman who had lied to him, and the coward who had sent him those letters.
Suddenly Marsa’s voice fell upon his ear, that rich, contralto voice he knew so well, speaking in accents of love or joy.
What was he waiting for? His hot, feverish hand sought the handle of his pistol, and, striding forward, he threw open the door of the room.
The light from an opal-tinted lamp fell full upon his face. He stood erect upon the threshold, while two other faces were turned toward him, two pale faces, Marsa’s and another’s.
Andras paused in amazement.
He had sought Menko; he found—Varhely!
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE DUEL
“Yanski!”
Marsa recoiled in fear at hearing this cry and the sudden appearance of the Prince; and, trembling like a leaf, with her face still turned toward that threshold where Andras stood, she murmured, in a voice choked with emotion:
“Who is there? Who is it?”
Yanski Varhely, unable to believe his eyes, advanced, as if to make sure.
“Zilah!” he exclaimed, in his turn.
He could not understand; and Zilah himself wondered whether he were not the victim of some illusion, and where Menko could be, that Menko whom Marsa had expected, and whom he, the husband, had come to chastise.
But the most bewildered, in her mute amazement, was Marsa, her lips trembling, her face ashen, her eyes fixed upon the Prince, as she leaned against the marble of the mantelpiece to prevent herself from falling, but longing to throw herself on her knees before this man who had suddenly appeared, and who was master of her destiny.
“You here?” said Varhely at last. “You followed me, then?”
“No,” said Andras. “The one whom I expected to find here was not you.”
“Who was it, then?”
“Michel Menko!”
Yanski Varhely turned toward Marsa.
She did not stir; she was looking at the Prince.
“Michel Menko is dead,” responded Varhely, shortly. “It was to announce that to the Princess Zilah that I am here.”
Andras gazed alternately upon the old Hungarian, and upon Marsa, who stood there petrified, her whole soul burning in her eyes.
“Dead?” repeated Zilah, coldly.
“I fought and killed him,” returned Varhely.
Andras struggled against the emotion which seized hold of him. Pale as death, he turned from Varhely to the Tzigana, with an instinctive desire to know what her feelings might be.
The news of this death, repeated thus before the man whom she regarded as the master of her existence, had, apparently, made no impression upon her, her thoughts being no longer there, but her whole heart being concentrated upon the being who had despised her, hated her, fled from her, and who appeared there before her as in one of her painful dreams in which he returned again to that very house where he had cursed her.
“There was,” continued Varhely, slowly, “a martyr who could not raise her head, who could not live, so long as that man breathed. First of all, I came to her to tell her that she was delivered from a detested past. Tomorrow I should have informed a man whose honor is my own, that the one who injured and insulted him has paid his debt.”
With lips white as his moustache, Varhely spoke these words like a judge delivering a solemn sentence.
A strange expression passed over Zilah’s face. He felt as if some horrible weight had been lifted from his heart.
Menko dead!
Yet there was a time when he had loved this Michel Menko: and, of the three beings present in the little salon, the man who had been injured by him was perhaps the one who gave a pitying thought to the dead, the old soldier remaining as impassive as an executioner, and the Tzigana remembering only the hatred she had felt for the one who had been her ruin.
Menko dead!
Varhely took from the mantelpiece the despatch he had sent from Florence, three days before, to the Princess Zilah, the one of which Vogotzine had spoken to Andras.
He handed it to the Prince, and Andras read as follows:
“I am about to risk my life for you. Tuesday evening either I shall be at Maisons-Lafitte, or I shall be dead. I fight tomorrow with Count M. If you do not see me again, pray for the soul of Varhely.”
Count Varhely had sent this despatch before going to keep his appointment with Michel Menko.
It had been arranged that they were to fight in a field near Pistoja.
Some peasant women, who were braiding straw hats, laughed as they saw the men pass by.
One of them called out, gayly:
“Do you wish to find your sweethearts, signori? That isn’t the way!”
A little farther, Varhely and his adversary encountered a monk with a cowl drawn over his head so that only his eyes could be seen, who, holding out a zinc money-box, demanded ‘elemosina’, alms for the sick in hospitals.
Menko opened his pocketbook, and dropped in the box a dozen pieces of gold.
“Mille grazie, signor!”
“It is of no consequence.”
They arrived on the ground, and the seconds loaded the pistols.
Michel asked permission of Yanski to say two words to him.
“Speak!” said Varhely.
The old Hungarian stood at his post with folded arms and lowered eyes, while Michel approached him, and said:
“Count Varhely, I repeat to you that I wished to prevent this marriage, but not to insult the Prince. I give you my word of honor that this is true. If you survive me, will you promise to repeat this to him?”
“I promise.”
“I thank you.”
They took their positions.
Angelo Valla was to give the signal to fire.
He stood holding a white handkerchief in his outstretched hand, and with his eyes fixed upon the two adversaries, who were placed opposite each other, with their coats buttoned up to the chin, and their pistols held rigidly by their side.
Varhely was as motionless as if made of granite. Menko smiled.
“One! Two!” counted Valla.
He paused as if to take breath: then—
“Three!” he exclaimed, in the tone of a man pronouncing a death-sentence; and the handkerchief fell.
There were two reports in quick succession.
Varhely stood erect in his position; Menko’s ball had cut a branch above his head, and the green leaves fell fluttering to the ground.
Michel staggered back, his hand pressed to his left side.
His seconds hastened toward him, seized him under the arms, and tried to raise him.
“It is useless,” he said. “It was well aimed!”
And, turning to Varhely, he cried, in a voice which he strove to render firm:
“Remember your promise!”
They opened his coat. The ball had entered his breast just above the heart.
They seated him upon the grass, with his back against a tree.
He remained there, with fixed eyes, gazing, perhaps, into the infinite, which was now close at hand.
His lips murmured inarticulate names, confused words: “Pardon—punishment—Marsa—”
As Yanski Varhely, with his two seconds, again passed the straw-workers, the girls saluted them with:
“Well, where are your other friends? Have they found their sweethearts?”
And while their laughter rang out upon the air, the gay, foolish laughter of youth and health, over yonder they were bearing away the dead body of Michel Menko.
Andras Zilah, with a supreme effort at self-control, listened to his old friend relate this tale; and, while Varhely spoke, he was thinking:
It was not a lover, it was not Menko, whom Marsa expected. Between the Tzigana and himself there was now nothing, nothing but a phantom. The other had paid his debt with his life. The Prince’s anger disappeared as suddenly in proportion as his exasperation had been violent.
He contemplated Marsa, thin and pale, but beautiful still. The very fixedness of her great eyes gave her a strange and powerful attraction; and, in the manner in which Andras regarded her, Count Varhely, with his rough insight, saw that there were pity, astonishment, and almost fear.
He pulled his moustache a moment in reflection, and then made a step toward the door.
Marsa saw that he was about to leave the room; and, moving away from the marble against which she had been leaning, with a smile radiant with the joy of a recovered pride, she held out her hand to Yanski, and, in a voice in which there was an accent of almost terrible gratitude for the act of justice which had been accomplished, she said, firmly:
“I thank you, Varhely!”
Varhely made no reply, but passed out of the room, closing the door behind him.
The husband and wife, after months of torture, anguish, and despair, were alone, face to face with each other.
Andras’s first movement was one of flight. He was afraid of himself. Of his own anger? Perhaps. Perhaps of his own pity.
He did not look at Marsa, and in two steps he was at the door.
Then, with a start, as one drowning catches at a straw, as one condemned to death makes a last appeal for mercy, with a feeble, despairing cry like that of a child, a strange contrast to the almost savage thanks given to Varhely, she exclaimed:
“Ah! I implore you, listen to me!”
Andras stopped.
“What have you to say to me?” he asked.
“Nothing—nothing but this: Forgive! ah, forgive! I have seen you once more; forgive me, and let me disappear; but, at least, carrying away with me a word from you which is not a condemnation.”
“I might forgive,” said Andras; “but I could not forget.”
“I do not ask you to forget, I do not ask you that! Does one ever forget? And yet—yes, one does forget, one does forget, I know it. You are the only thing in all my existence, I know only you, I think only of you. I have loved only you!”
Andras shivered, no longer able to fly, moved to the depths of his being by the tones of this adored voice, so long unheard.
“There was no need of bloodshed to destroy that odious past,” continued Marsa. “Ah! I have atoned for it! There is no one on earth who has suffered as I have. I, who came across your path only to ruin your life! Your life, my God, yours!”
She looked at him with worshipping eyes, as believers regard their god.
“You have not suffered so much as the one you stabbed, Marsa. He had never had but one love in the world, and that love was you. If you had told him of your sufferings, and confessed your secret, he would have been capable of pardoning you. You deceived him. There was something worse than the crime itself—the lie.”
“Ah!” she cried, “if you knew how I hated that lie! Would to heaven that some one would tear out my tongue for having deceived you!”
There was an accent of truth in this wild outburst of the Tzigana; and upon the lips of this daughter of the puszta, Hungarian and Russian at once, the cry seemed the very symbol of her exceptional nature.
“What is it you wish that I should do?” she said. “Die? yes, I would willingly, gladly die for you, interposing my breast between you and a bullet. Ah! I swear to you, I should be thankful to die like one of those who bore your name. But, there is no fighting now, and I can not shed my blood for you. I will sacrifice my life in another manner, obscurely, in the shadows of a cloister. I shall have had neither lover nor husband, I shall be nothing, a recluse, a prisoner. It will be well! yes, for me, the prison, the cell, death in a life slowly dragged out! Ah! I deserve that punishment, and I wish my sentence to come from you; I wish you to tell me that I am free to disappear, and that you order me to do so—but, at the same time, tell me, oh, tell me, that you have forgiven me!”
“I!” said Andras.
In Marsa’s eyes was a sort of wild excitement, a longing for sacrifice, a thirst for martyrdom.
“Do I understand that you wish to enter a convent?” asked Andras, slowly.
“Yes, the strictest and gloomiest. And into that tomb I shall carry, with your condemnation and farewell, the bitter regret of my love, the weight of my remorse!”
The convent! The thought of such a fate for the woman he loved filled Andras Zilah with horror. He imagined the terrible scene of Marsa’s separation from the world; he could hear the voice of the officiating bishop casting the cruel words upon the living, like earth upon the dead; he could almost see the gleam of the scissors as they cut through her beautiful dark hair.
Kneeling before him, her eyes wet with tears, Marsa was as lovely in her sorrow as a Mater Dolorosa. All his love surged up in his heart, and a wild temptation assailed him to keep her beauty, and dispute with the convent this penitent absolved by remorse.
She knelt there repentant, weeping, wringing her hands, asking nothing but pardon—a word, a single word of pity—and the permission to bury herself forever from the world.
“So,” he said, abruptly, “the convent cell, the prison, does not terrify you?”
“Nothing terrifies me except your contempt.”
“You would live far from Paris, far from the world, far from everything?”
“In a kennel of dogs, under the lash of a slavedriver; breaking stones, begging my bread, if you said to me: ‘Do that, it is atonement!’”
“Well!” cried Andras, passionately, his lips trembling, his blood surging through his veins. “Live buried in our Hungary, forgetting, forgotten, hidden, unknown, away from all, away from Paris, away from the noise of the world, in a life with me, which will be a new life! Will you?”
She looked at him with staring, terrified eyes, believing his words to be some cruel jest.
“Will you?” he said again, raising her from the floor, and straining her to his breast, his burning lips seeking the icy ones of the Tzigana. “Answer me, Marsa. Will you?”
Like a sigh, the word fell on the air: “Yes.”
CHAPTER XXXIV. A NEW LIFE
The following day, with tender ardor, he took her away to his old Hungarian castle, with its red towers still bearing marks of the ravages of the cannon—the castle which he never had beheld since Austria had confiscated it, and then, after long years, restored it to its rightful owner. He fled from Paris, seeking a pure existence, and returned to his Hungary, to the country of his youth, the land of the vast plains. He saw again the Danube and the golden Tisza. In the Magyar costume, his heart beating more proudly under the national attila, he passed before the eyes of the peasants who had known him when a child, and had fought under his orders; and he spoke to them by name, recognizing many of his old companions in these poor people with cheeks tanned by the sun, and heads whitened by age.
He led Marsa, trembling and happy, to the door of the castle, where they offered him the wine of honor, drank from the ‘tschouttora’, the Hungarian drinking-vessel, the ‘notis’ and cakes made of maize cooked in cream.
Upon the lawns about the castle, the ‘tschiko’ shepherds, who had come on horseback to greet the Prince, drank plum brandy, and drank with their red wine the ‘kadostas’ and the bacon of Temesvar. They had come from their farms, from their distant pusztas, peasant horsemen, like soldiers, with their national caps; and they joyously celebrated the return of Zilah Andras, the son of those Zilahs whose glorious history they all knew. The dances began, the bright copper heels clinked together, the blue jackets, embroidered with yellow, red, or gold, swung in the wind, and it seemed that the land of Hungary blossomed with flowers and rang with songs to do honor to the coming of Prince Andras and his Princess.
Then Andras entered with Marsa the abode of his ancestors. And, in the great halls hung with tapestry and filled with pictures which the conquerors had respected, before those portraits of magnates superb in their robes of red or green velvet edged with fur, curved sabres by their sides and aigrettes upon their heads, all reproducing a common trait of rough frankness, with their long moustaches, their armor and their hussar uniforms—Marsa Laszlo, who knew them well, these heroes of her country, these Zilah princes who had fallen upon the field of battle, said to the last of them all, to Andras Zilah, before Ferency Zilah, before Sandor, before the Princesses Zilah who had long slept in “dull, cold marble,” and who had been no prouder than she of the great name they bore:
“Do you know the reason why, equal to these in devotion and courage, you are superior to them all! It is because you are good, as good as they were brave.
“To their virtues, you, who forgive, add this virtue, which is your own: pity!”
She looked at him humbly, raising to his face her beautiful dark eyes, as if to let him read her heart, in which was only his image and his name. She pressed closely to his side, with an uneasy, timid tenderness, as if she were a stranger in the presence of his great ancestors, who seemed to demand whether the newcomer were one of the family; and he, putting his arm about her, and pressing to his beating heart the Tzigana, whose eyes were dim with tears, said: “No, I am not better than these. It is not pity which is my virtue, Marsa: it is my love. For—I love you!”
Yes, he loved her, and with all the strength of a first and only love. He loved her so that he forgot everything, so that he did not see that in Marsa’s smile there was a look of the other side of the great, eternal river. He loved her so that he thought only of this woman, of her beauty, of the delight of her caresses, of his dream of love realized in the air of the adored fatherland. He loved her so that he left without answers the charming letters which Baroness Dinati wrote him from Paris, so far away now, and the more serious missives which he received from his compatriots, wishing him to utilize for his country, now that he had returned to it, his superior intelligence, as he had formerly utilized his courage.
“The hour is critical,” wrote his old friends. “An attempt is being made to awaken in Hungary, against the Russians, whom we like, memories of combats and extinct hatreds, and that to the profit of a German alliance, which is repugnant to our race. Bring the support of your name and your valor to our cause. Enter the Diet of Hungary. Your place is marked out for you there in the first rank, as it was in the old days upon the battlefield.”
Andras only smiled.
“If I were ambitious!” he said to Marsa. Then he added: “But I am ambitious only for your happiness.”
Marsa’s happiness! It was deep, calm, and clear as a lake. It seemed to the Tzigana that she was dreaming a dream, a beautiful dream, a dream peaceful, sweet, and restful. She abandoned herself to her profound happiness with the trustfulness of a child. She was all the more happy because she had the exquisite sensation that her dream would have no awakening. It would end in all the charm of its poetry.
She was sure that she could not survive the immense joy which destiny had accorded her; and she did not rebel against this decree. It seemed to her right and just. She had never desired any other ending to her love than to die beloved, to die with Andras’s kiss of forgiveness upon her lips, with his arms about her, and to sink with a smile into the eternal sleep. What more beautiful thing could she, the Tzigana, have wished?
When the Prince’s people saluted her by that title of “Princess” which was hers, she trembled as if she had usurped it; she wished to be Marsa to the Prince, Marsa, his devoted slave, who looked at him with her great eyes full of gratitude and love. And she wished to be only that. It seemed to her that, in the ancient home of the Zilahs, the birthplace of soldiers, the eyrie of eagles, she was a sort of stranger; but, at the same time, she thought, with a smile:
“What matters it? It is for so short a time.”
One day Prince Zilah received from Vienna a large sealed envelope. Minister Ladany earnestly entreated him to come to the Austrian capital and present, in the salons of Vienna and at the imperial court, Princess Zilah, of whose beauty the Austrian colony of Paris raved.
Marsa asked the Prince what the letter contained.
“Nothing. An invitation to leave our solitude. We are too happy here.”
Marsa questioned him no further; but she resolved that she would never allow the Prince to take her to that court which claimed his presence. In her eyes, she was always the Tzigana; and, although Menko was dead, she would never permit Zilah to present her to people who might have known Count Michel.
No, no, let them remain in the dear old castle, he living only for her, she breathing only for him; and let the world go, with its fascinations and its pleasures, its false joys and its false friendships! Let them ask of life only what truth it possesses; an hour of rest between two ordeals, a smile between two sobs, and—the right to love each other. To love each other until that fatal separation which she felt was coming, until that end which was fast advancing; her poor, frail body being now only the diaphanous prison of her soul. She did not complain, as she felt the hour gently approach when, with a last kiss, a last sigh, she must say to Andras, Adieu!
He, seeing her each day more pale, each day more feeble, was alarmed; but he hoped, that, when the winter, which was very severe there, was over, Marsa would regain her strength. He summoned to the castle a physician from Vienna, who battled obstinately and skilfully against the malady from which the Tzigana was suffering. Her weakness and languor kept Marsa, during the cold months, for whole days before the lofty, sculptured chimney-piece, in which burned enormous logs of oak. As the flames gave a rosy tinge to her cheeks and made her beautiful eyes sparkle, Andras said to herself, as he watched her, that she would live, live and be happy with him.
The spring came, with the green leaflets and the white blossoms at the ends of the branches. The buds opened and the odors of the rejuvenated earth mounted subtly into the soft air.
At her window, regarding the young grass and the masses of tender verdure in which clusters of pale gold or silvery white gleamed like aigrettes, Marsa said to Andras:
“It must be lovely at Maisons, in the Vale of Violets!” but she added, quickly:
“We are better here, much better! And it even seems to me that I have always, always lived here in this beautiful castle, where you have sheltered me, like a swallow beaten by the wind.”
There was, beneath the window, stretching out like a ribbon of silver, a road, which the mica dust caused, at times, in the sunlight to resemble a river. Marsa often looked out on this road, imagining that she saw again the massive dam upon the Seine, or wondering whether a band of Tzigani would not appear there with the April days.
“I should like,” she said one day to Andras, “to hear again the airs my people used to play.”
She found that, with the returning spring, she was more feeble than she had ever been. The first warmth in the air entered her veins like a sweet intoxication. Her head felt heavy, and in her whole body she felt a pleasant languor. She had wished to sink thus to rest, as nature was awakening.
The doctor seemed very uneasy at this languidness, of which Marsa said:
“It is delicious!”
He whispered one evening to Andras:
“It is grave!”
Another sorrow was to come into the life of the Prince, who had known so many.
A few days after, with a sort of presentiment, he wrote to Yanski Varhely to come and spend a few months with him. He felt the need of his old friend; and the Count hastened to obey the summons.
Varhely was astonished to see the change which so short a time had produced in Marsa. In seven months her face, although still beautiful, had become emaciated, and had a transparent look. The little hand, white as snow, which she gave to Varhely, burned him; the skin was dry and hot.
“Well, my dear Count,” said Marsa, as she lay extended in a reclining-chair, “what news of General Vogotzine?”
“The General is well. He hopes to return to Russia. The Czar has been appealed to, and he does not say no.”
“Ah! that is good news,” she said. “He must be greatly bored at Maisons; poor Vogotzine!”
“He smokes, drinks, takes the dogs out—”
The dogs! Marsa started. Those hounds would survive Menko, herself, the love which she now tasted as the one joy of her life! Mechanically her lips murmured, too low to be heard: “Ortog! Bundas!”
Then she said, aloud:
“I shall be very, glad if the poor General can return to St. Petersburg or Odessa. One is best off at home, in one’s own country. If you only knew, Varhely, how happy I am, happy to be in Hungary. At home!”
She was very weak. The doctor made a sign to Andras to leave her for a moment.
“Well,” asked the Prince anxiously of Varhely, “how do you think she is?”
“What does the doctor say?” replied Yanski. “Does he hope to save her?”
Zilah made no response. Varhely’s question was the most terrible of answers.
Ensconced in an armchair, the Prince then laid bare his heart to old Varhely, sitting near him. She was about to die, then! Solitude! Was that to be the end of his life? After so many trials, it was all to end in this: an open grave, in which his hopes were to be buried. What remained to him now? At the age when one has no recourse against fate, love, the one love of his life, was to be taken away from him. Varhely had administered justice, and Zilah had pardoned—for what? To watch together a silent tomb; yes, yes, what remained to him now?
“What remains to you if she dies?” said old Yanski, slowly. “There remains to you what you had at twenty years, that which never dies. There remains to you what was the love and the passion of all the Zilah princes who lie yonder, and who experienced the same suffering, the same torture, the same despair, as you. There remains to you our first love, my dear Andras, the fatherland!”
The next day some Tzigana musicians, whom the Prince had sent for, arrived at the castle. Marsa felt invigorated when she heard the czimbalom and the piercing notes of the czardas. She had been longing for those harmonies and songs which lay so near her heart. She listened, with her hand clasped in that of Andras, and through the open window came the “March of Rakoczy,” the same strains which long ago had been played in Paris, upon the boat which bore them down the Seine that July morning.
An heroic air, a song of triumph, a battle-cry, the gallop of horses, a chant of victory. It was the air which had saluted their betrothal like a fanfare. It was the chant which the Tzigani had played that sad night when Andras’s father had been laid in the earth of Attila.
“I would like,” said Marsa, when the music had ceased, “to go to the little village where my mother rests. She was a Tzigana also! Like them, like me! Can I do so, doctor?”
The doctor shook his head.
“Oh, Princess, not yet! Later, when the warm sun comes.”
“Is not that the sun?” said Marsa, pointing to the April rays entering the old feudal hall and making the bits of dust dance like sparks of gold.
“It is the April sun, and it is sometimes dangerous for—”
The doctor paused; and, as he did not finish, Marsa said gently, with a smile which had something more than resignation in it—happiness:
“For the dying?”
Andras shuddered; but Marsa’s hand, which held his, did not even tremble.
Old Varhely’s eyes were dim with tears.
She knew that she was about to die. She knew it, and smiled at kindly death. It would take away all shame. Her memory would be to Andras the sacred one of the woman he adored. She would die without being held to keep that oath she had made not to survive her dreamed-of happiness, the union she had desired and accepted. Yes, it was sweet and welcome, this death, which taking her from Andras’s love, washed away all stain.
She whispered in his ear the oft-repeated avowal:
“I love you! I love you! I love you! And I die content, for I feel that you will love me always. Think a moment! Could I live? Would there not be a spectre between you and your Marsa?”
She threw her arms about him as he leaned over the couch upon which she lay, and he made a gesture of denial, unable to speak, for each word would have been a sob.
“Oh, do not deny it!” she said. “Now, no. But later, who knows? On the other hand, you see, there will be no other phantom near you but mine, no other image but mine. I feel that I shall be always near you, yes, always, eternally, my beloved! Dear death! blessed death! which renders our love infinite, yes, infinite. Ah, I love you! I love you!”
She wished to see once more, through the open window, the sunny woods and the new blossoms. Behind those woods, a few leagues away, was the place where Tisza was buried.
“I should like to rest by her side,” said the Tzigana. “I am not of your family, you see. A princess, I? your wife? I have been only your sweetheart, my Andras.”
Andras, whiter than the dying girl, seemed petrified by the approach of the inevitable grief.
Now, as they went slowly down the white road, the Tzigani played the plaintive melancholy air of Janos Nemeth, that air impregnated with tears, that air which she used so often to play herself—“The World holds but One Fair Maiden!”
And this time, bursting into tears, he said to her, with his heart breaking in his breast:
“Yes, there is but thee, Marsa! but thee, my beloved, thee, thee alone! Do not leave me! Stay with me! Stay with me, Marsa, my only love!”
Then, as she listened, over the lovely face of the Tzigana passed an expression of absolute, perfect happiness, as if, in Zilah’s tears, she read all his forgiveness, all his love, all his devotion. She raised herself, her little hands resting upon the window-sill, her head heavy with sleep—the deep, dreamless sleep-and held up her sweet lips to him: when she felt Andras’s kiss, she whispered, so that he barely heard it:
“Do not forget me! Never forget me, my darling!” Then her head drooped slowly, and fell upon the Prince’s shoulder, like that of a tired child, with a calm sweet smile upon her flower-like face.
Like the salute they had once given to Prince Sandor, the Tzigani began proudly the heroic march of free Hungary, their music sending a fast farewell to the dead as the sun gave her its last kiss.
Then, as the hymn died slowly away in the distance, soft as a sigh, with one last, low, heart-breaking note, Andras Zilah laid the light form of the Tzigana upon the couch; and, winding his arms about her, with his head pillowed upon her breast, he murmured, in a voice broken with sobs: “I will love only, now, what you loved so much, my poor Tzigana. I will love only the land where you lie asleep.”