CHAPTER XXVI

“Am I avenged?”

After this episode, the Prince lived a more solitary existence than before, and troubled himself no further about the outside world.  Why should he care, that some penny-aliner had slipped those odious lines into a newspaper?  His sorrow was not the publishing of the treachery, it was the treachery itself; and his hourly suffering caused him to long for death to end his torture.

“And yet I must live,” he thought, “if to exist with a dagger through one’s heart is to live.”

Then, to escape from the present, he plunged into the memories of the war, as into a bath of oblivion, a strange oblivion, where he found all his patriotic regrets of other days.  He read, with spasmodic eagerness, the books in which Georgei and Klapka, the actors of the drama, presented their excuses, or poured forth their complaints; and it seemed to him that his country would make him forget his love.

In the magnificent picture-gallery, where he spent most of his time, his eyes rested upon the battle-scenes of Matejks, the Polish artist, and the landscapes of Munkacsy, that painter of his own country, who took his name from the town of Munkacs, where tradition says that the Magyars settled when they came from the Orient, ages ago.  Then a bitter longing took possession of him to breathe a different air, to fly from Paris, and place a wide distance between himself and Marsa; to take a trip around the world, where new scenes might soften his grief, or, better still, some accident put an end to his life; and, besides, chance might bring him in contact with Menko.

But, just as he was ready to depart, a sort of lassitude overpowered him; he felt the inert sensation of a wounded man who has not the strength to move, and he remained where he was, sadly and bitterly wondering at times if he should not appeal to the courts, dissolve his marriage, and demand back his name from the one who had stolen it.

Appeal to the courts?  The idea of doing that was repugnant to him.  What! to hear the proud and stainless name of the Zilahs resound, no longer above the clash of sabres and the neighing of furious horses, but within the walls of a courtroom, and in presence of a gaping crowd of sensation seekers?  No! silence was better than that; anything was better than publicity and scandal.  Divorce!  He could obtain that, since Marsa, her mind destroyed, was like one dead.  And what would a divorce give him?  His freedom?  He had it already.  But what nothing could give back, was his ruined faith, his shattered hopes, his happiness lost forever.