In the morning, after the Princess had retired to her own apartments, she immediately summoned to her presence Michael Teleki, who, living at that time at the Prince’s court as if it were his own home, was not very long in making his appearance, and obeyed the command to be seated with as much cheerful alacrity as if he had been asked to sit down at a banquet, though well aware that a bitter cup had been prepared for him which he must drain to the dregs.
“Sir,” said the Princess, “Apafi was very ill last night.”
“That was owing to the fast, he isn’t used to such practices. Generally, he has a good supper, and if he departs from his usual course of life he is bound to sleep badly. Bad dreams plague an empty stomach just as much as an overburdened one.”
“And how about an overburdened conscience, sir? I have spent the whole night at his bedside, only this instant have I quitted him; he would not let me leave him, he pressed my hand continually, and he talked, soberly and wide-awake, of things which I should have thought could only have been talked about in the delirium of typhus. He said that that night he had stood before the judgment-seat of God, before a great table—which was so long that he could not see the end of it—and at this table sat the accusing witnesses, first of all Denis Banfi, and then Béldi, Dame Béldi and their daughter, and eldest son, who died in prison; Kepi, too, was there, and young Kornis, and old John Bethlen, and the rest of them; all these familiar faces were before him, and as tremblingly he approached the throne of God they all fixed their eyes upon him and pointed their fingers at him. Sir, it was a terrible picture.”
“Does your Highness fancy that I am an interpreter of dreams?” asked Teleki maliciously.
“Sir, this is more than a dream—it is a vision, a revelation.”
“It may be so; the souls of the gentlemen enumerated are, no doubt, in Heaven, and it is possible that countless other souls will follow them thither.”
“And will the soul that shed their blood ascend thither too?”
“Will your Highness deign to speak quite plainly—I suppose you mean me? Of course, I am the cause of all the evils of Transylvania. Till I came upon the scene, none but lamblike men inhabited this state, in whose veins flowed milk and honey instead of blood! King Sigismund, Bethlen, Bocskai, George Rákóczy, for instance! Under them only some fifty or sixty thousand men lost their lives in their party feuds and ambitious struggles! Fine fellows, every one of them of course, everyone calls them great patriots. But I, whose sword has never aimed at a self-sought crown, I, who am animated by a great and mighty thought, a sublime idea, I am a murderer, and responsible not only for those who have fallen in battle, but also for those who have died quietly in their beds, if they were not my good friends.”
“There was a time, sir, when you used every effort to prevent Transylvania from going to war.”
“That was the very time when your Highness pleaded before the Prince for war in the name of your exiled Hungarian kinsfolk. Other times, other men.”
“I knew not then that such a desire would lead to the ruin of so many great and honourable men.”
“You feared war, and yet you fanned it. He who resists a snowstorm is swept away. Not the fate of men alone, but the fate of kingdoms also is here in question. Apafi may console himself with the reflection that God regards us both as far too petty instruments to lay upon our souls what He Himself has decreed in the fullness of time, and what will and must happen in spite of us, for the weeping and mourning which we listen to here is also heard in Heaven. The mottoes of our escutcheons go very well together. Apafi’s is ‘Fata viam inveniunt,’ mine is ‘Gutta cavat lapidem.’ Let us trust ourselves to our mottoes.”
The Princess, with folded arms, gazed out of the window and remained in a brown study for some time. And now, as though her thoughts were wandering far away, she suddenly sighed: “Ah! this Béldi family so unhappily ruined, and how many more must be ruined likewise!”
“Your Highness!” rejoined the Minister, without moving a muscle of his face, “when, in time of drought, we pray for rain the whole day, does anybody inquire what will become of the poor travellers who may be caught in the downpour? Yet it may well happen that some of them may take a chill and die in consequence.”
“I don’t grasp the metaphor.”
“Well, the whole Principality is now praying for rain—a rain of blood, I admit—and there is every sign that God will grant it. I do not mean those signs and wonders in which the common folks believe, but those signs of the times which rivet the attention of thinking men. Formerly there was a large party in Transylvania which had engaged to uphold an indolent peace, and which had so many ties, amongst the leading men both of the Kaiser and the Sultan, that Denis Banfi could at one time boldly tell me to my face that that Party was a hand with a hundred fingers, which could squeeze everything it laid hold of like a
