I was ill in bed for a long time. I lay supine and motionless,
feeling--as once, long before--as if I were lying at the bottom of a well.
In the distance, far above me, life and the world went whirling on; but
nothing in me or of me stirred, except that at every pulse-beat my
life-blood seemed to be gently, inexorably ebbing away. The doctors bent
over me with anxious faces; on my body I felt the burning weight of ice;
my arteries contracted under the grip of ergot and chloride of iron.
Still slowly and inexorably I glided, as on a smooth and shallow river,
towards death.
Tioka and Grania had been sent to stay with friends in Kharkov.
Naumoff came every day to ask for news, and sent me flowers; but he was
never allowed to see me. Kamarowsky had permission to come into my room
for ten minutes every morning, but he was not allowed to speak to me.
Prilukoff, locked in my rooms, watched over me night and day.
Nobody knew of his existence, for no one was allowed to enter my
apartment. How and when he slept and took his meals I do not know.
Perhaps Elise looked after that. He undoubtedly grew thinner, more
haggard and spectral every day with sleeplessness, fasting and anxiety.
Night and day he sat at my bedside watching me. Sometimes, as I lay
prostrate with closed eyes, I said to myself that I must open them and
look at him; but so great seemed the effort of raising my heavy eyelids,
that frequently hours passed and I could not do so. When at last I
lifted my leaden lashes, I saw him, always sitting motionless beside me
with his gaze fixed on my face. With renewed effort I faintly contracted
the muscles of my face and attempted to smile at him. Then, worn out
with fatigue, I dropped my heavy lids and my soul floated away again
towards unconsciousness....
When I began to get better I noticed to my amazement that Prilukoff
talked to himself all the time. Perhaps he had done so from the first,
but then I was too weak to understand or even to hear him. Now that a
little strength was coming back to me each day, I could hear and
comprehend the words he uttered; it was a succession of imprecations, of
incoherent and disconnected maledictions hurled against Naumoff and
Kamarowsky, who as he thought had snatched my heart from him, and would
be the ruin and the death of me. I could hear him murmuring:
"They must be got rid of; we have sworn it. They must die."
Towards evening his meager face grew red as if with fever, and his
mutterings increased, became more rapid and excited. He would bend over
me with his nightmare face as I lay weak and helpless on my pillows.
"They are outside there, in the corridor, both of them. I can hear them
walking up and down, whispering together--talking about you. But they are
doomed, are they not? Irrevocably doomed. You have sworn it. Tell me
that it is so."
I faltered "Yes," hoping to silence him, but he never ceased his uncanny
mutterings; and the idea of murder completely possessed his disordered
brain. Elise, moving like a little frightened ghost through the locked
and darkened rooms, frequently attempted to come to my aid.
"Go away; leave her alone," she would say to Prilukoff. "Do you want her
to fall ill again? Why don't you go to sleep? Why don't you eat? Why
don't you go out?"
But Prilukoff stared at her with vacant eyes, then went into the
dining-room and drank some vodka, and soon he was bending over me again.
"Mind, I am not going to do it alone," he whispered, "so that afterwards
you would be afraid and horrified of me. No, no. You shall help me. You
shall attend to one, and I to the other."
By degrees, as strength returned to me and dispelled the torpor that had
numbed my brain, I understood Prilukoff's ravings, and was aghast at
them. Absorbed in his monstrous dream, he delighted in planning all the
details of the double crime.
"What I want is to be alone with the man I saw holding you in his arms
the other evening." He ground his teeth. "As for your betrothed, you
shall give him a dose of curare or atropine. An exquisite wedding cup
for the bridegroom!"
Then I burst into tears of terror and weakness, while the indignant
Elise, hastening to my aid, would grasp Prilukoff's arm and compel him
to leave me. He would sit gloomily in a corner, or go into the adjoining
room, but a little while afterwards he was there again, raving as
before.
"Elise," I whispered to her one evening, "I am afraid, I am terribly
afraid of him."
"Shall I tell some one about it? Shall I tell Monsieur the Count?"
exclaimed Elise.
"No, no," I cried.
"Might I--might I tell Monsieur Naumoff?"
I hesitated; but when I recalled those golden eyes that turned to me
filled with such trust and adoration I shook my head. "No, tell no one,
Elise, tell no one." And I hid my face in the pillows.
At last a day came when I was able to be up for an hour, and it was no
longer possible to prevent Kamarowsky from coming to see me. Prilukoff
refused to go away; I could not get him to stir from my room. At last,
having compelled me to repeat the abominable vow, having forced me to
invoke once more the seraphic image of little Tioka as tutelar genius of
a monstrous crime, he went away, passing through my dressing-room to an
outer passage at the back of the hotel.
Elise dressed me and placed me in an armchair near the window, where I
reclined, trembling and weak. Then I sent word to Count Kamarowsky that
I would see him.
He came in full of emotion and joy. "At last, at last you are better,"
he cried, his kind eyes alight with pleasure. "But how pale you are, how
dreadfully pale." And bending over me, he kissed my hair with infinite
tenderness.
As I saw him standing before me, smiling and well, the murderous ravings
of Prilukoff and my own iniquitous vow seemed but a figment of my morbid
fancy, a half-forgotten illusion of my delirium, dissolving and fading
away like a dark dream at daylight.
Kamarowsky held my hand tightly clasped in his, as if he were half
afraid I might vanish from him. "What a poor little blue-white hand!" he
said. "You have become quite transparent, Mura; I think I can look right
through you and see your soul, trembling and flickering like a little
flame!"
I smiled at him. All my morbid fear and dislike of him, even as all my
sudden insensate infatuation for Naumoff, was spent. Nothing remained of
the storm my soul and senses had passed through but a limitless weakness
and languor. I yearned to rest, to sleep, to sink out of life and be no
more....
A few moments later they announced Naumoff, who had brought me some
roses. I was neither glad nor sorry to see him. Punctually when an hour
had elapsed Elise Perrier sent my visitors away and put me to bed again.