se proud language the word honor recurs again
and again.
Marsa grew up in the Muscovite castle, loving nothing in the world except
her mother, and regarding with frightened eyes the blond stranger who
sometimes took her upon his knees and gazed sadly into her face. Before
this man, who was her father, she felt as if she were in the presence of
an enemy. As Tisza never went out, Marsa rarely quitted the castle; and,
when she went to Moscow, she hastened to return to her mother. The very
gayeties of that noisy city weighed upon her heart; for she never forgot
the war-tales of the Tzigana, and, perhaps, among the passers-by was the
wretch who had shot down her grandfather, old Mihal.
The Tzigana cultivated, with a sort of passion, a love of far-off Hungary
and a hatred for the master in the impressionable mind of her daughter.
There is a Servian proverb which says, that when a Wallachian has crossed
the threshold the whole house becomes Wallachian. Tisza did not wish the
house to become Hungarian; but she did wish that the child of her loins
should be and should remain Hungarian.
The servants of Prince Tchereteff never spoke of their mistress except as
The Tzigana, and this was the name which Marsa wished to bear also. It
seemed to her like a title of nobility.
And the years passed without the Tzigana pardoning the Russian, and
without Marsa ever having called him father.
In the name of their child, the Prince one day solemnly asked Tisza
Laszlo to consent to become his wife, and the mother refused.
"But our daughter?" said the Prince.
"My daughter? She will bear the name of her mother, which at least is not
a Russian name."
The Prince was silenced.
As Marsa grew up, Moscow became displeasing to the Prince. He had his
daughter educated as if she were destined to be the Czarina. He summoned
to the castle a small army of instructors, professors of music and
singing; French, English, and German masters, drawing masters, etc., etc.
The young girl, with the prodigious power of assimilation peculiar to her
race, learned everything, loving knowledge for its own sake, but,
nevertheless, always deeply moved by the history of that unknown country,
which was that of her mother, and even her own, the land of her heart and
her soul-Hungary. She knew, from her mother, about all its heroes:
Klapka, Georgei, Dembiski; Bem, the conqueror of Buda; Kossuth, the
dreamer of a sort of feudal liberty; and those chivalrous Zila
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