Despair.
THE HOURS, those mysterious sisters, who cleave the air hand-in-hand with a flight so slow for the wretched, so rapid for the happy, paused in their onward motion, folding their heavy wings over this chamber loaded with sighs and groans.
Death on one side, agony on the other, and between them despair — grievous as agony, deep as death.
Balsamo had not uttered a word since the terrible cry which had been wrung from his breast.
Since the terrible revelation which had cast down the ferocious joy of Althotas, Balsamo had not moved.
As for the hideous old man, thus violently thrown back into life such as God grants to man, he seemed as much bewildered in this new element as the bird struck by a leaden bullet and fallen from the skies into a lake, on whose surface it flutters, unable to employ its wings.
The horror expressed in his pale and agonized features revealed the immeasurable extent of his disappointment.
In fact, Althotas no longer even took the trouble to think, since he had seen the goal at which his spirit aimed, and which it thought firm as a rock, vanish like empty vapor.
His deep and silent despair seemed almost like insensibility. To a mind unaccustomed to measure his, it might have seemed an indication of reflection; to Balsamo’s, who, however, did not even look upon him, it marked the death-agony of power, of reason, and of life.
Althotas never took his eyes from the broken phial, the image of the nothingness of his hopes. One would have said ho counted the thousand scattered fragments, which, in falling, had diminished his life by so many days. One would have said he wished to drink in with his look the precious fluid which was spilled upon the floor, and which, for a moment, he had believed to be immortality.
At times, also, as if the grief of this disenchantment was too poignant, the old man raised his dull eyes to Balsamo, then from Balsamo his glance wandered to Lorenza’s corpse.
He resembled, at these moments, one of those savage animals which the huntsman finds in the morning caught in the trap by the leg, and which he stirs for a long time with his foot without making them turn their heads, but who, when he pricks them with his hunting-knife, or with the bayonet of his fowling-piece, obliquely raise their bloodshot eyes, throwing on him a look of hatred, vengeance, reproach, and surprise.
“Is it possible,” said this look, so expressive even in its agony, “is it credible that so many misfortunes, so many shocks, should overwhelm me, caused by such an insignificant being as the man I see kneeling there a few yards from me, at the feet of such a vulgar object as that dead woman? Is it not a reversion of nature, an overturning of science, a cataclysm of reason, that the gross student should have deceived the skillful master? Is it not monstrous that the grain of sand should have arrested the wheel of the superb chariot, so rapid in its almost unlimited power, in its immortal flight?”
As for Balsamo — stunned, heartbroken, without voice or motion, almost without life — no human thought had yet dawned amid the dark vapors of his brain.
Lorenza! his Lorenza! His wife, his idol, doubly precious to him as his revealing angel and his love — Lorenza, his delight and his glory, the present and the future, his strength and faith — Lorenza, all he loved, all he wished for, all he desired in this world — Lorenza was lost to him forever!
He did not weep, he did not groan, he did not even sigh.
He was scarcely surprised at the dreadful misfortune which had befallen him. He was like one of those poor wretches whom an inundation surprises in their bed in the midst of darkness. They dream that the water gains upon them, they awake, they open their eyes and see a roaring billow breaking over their head, while they have not even time to utter a cry in their passage from life to death.
During three hours Balsamo felt himself buried in the deepest abyss of the tomb. In his overwhelming grief, he looked upon what had happened to him as one of the dark dreams which torment the dead in the eternal silent night of the sepulcher.
For him there no longer existed Althotas, and with him all hatred and revenge had vanished. For him there no longer existed Lorenza, and with her all life, all love had fled. All was sleep, night, nothingness! Thus the hours glided past, gloomily, silently, heavily, in this chamber were the blood congealed and the lifeless form grew rigid.
Suddenly amid the deathlike silence a bell sounded thrice.
Fritz, doubtless, was aware that his master was with Althotas, for the bell sounded in the room itself.
But although it sounded three times with an insolently strange noise, the sound died away in space.
Balsamo did not raise his head.
In a few moments, the same tinkling, only louder this time, sounded again; but, like the first, it could not rouse Balsamo from his torpor.
Then, at a measured interval, but not so far from the second as it had been from the first, the angry bell a third time made the room resound with multiplied echoes of its wailing and impatient sounds.
Balsamo did not start, but slowly raised his head and interrogated the empty space before him with the cold solemnity of a corpse rising from the tomb.
The bell never ceased ringing.
At last his increasing energy awoke him to partial consciousness. The unfortunate husband took his hand from the hand of the corpse. All the heat had left his body without passing into his lifeless bride’s.
“Some important news or some great danger,” muttered Balsamo to himself. “May it prove a great danger!” And he rose to his feet. “But why should I reply to this summons?” continued he, aloud, without heeding the gloomy sound of his words echoing beneath the somber vault of this funereal chamber; “can anything in this world henceforth interest or alarm me?” Then, as if in reply, the bell struck its iron tongue so rudely against its brazen sides, that the clapper broke and fell upon a glass retort, which flew in pieces with a metallic sound, and scattered the fragments upon the floor.
Balsamo resisted no longer; besides, it was important that, none, not even Fritz, should come to seek him where he was.
He walked, therefore, with steady step to the spring, pressed it, and placed himself upon the trap, which descended slowly and deposited him in the chamber of furs.
As he passed the sofa, he brushed against the scarf which had fallen from Lorenza’s shoulders when the pitiless old man, impassible as death itself, had carried her off in his arms.
This contact, more living seemingly than Lorenza herself, sent an icy shudder through Balsamo’s veins. He took the scarf and kissed it, using it to stifle the cries which burst from his heaving breast.
Then he proceeded to open the door of the staircase.
Death of Althotas.
On the topmost steps stood Fritz, all pale and breathless, holding a torch in one hand, and in the other the cord of the bell, which, in his terror and impatience, he continued to pull convulsively. On seeing his master, he uttered a cry of satisfaction, followed by one of surprise and fear. But Balsamo, ignorant of the cause of this double cry, replied only by a mute interrogation.
Fritz did not speak, but he ventured — he, usually so respectful — to take his master’s hand, and lead him to the large Venetian mirror that ornamented the mantelpiece at the back of which was the passage into Lorenza’s apartment.
“Oh! look, your excellency,” said he, showing him his own image in the glass.
Balsamo shuddered. Then a smile — one of those deadly smiles which spring from infinite and incurable grief — flitted over his lips. He had understood the cause of Fritz’s alarm.
Balsamo had grown twenty years older in an hour. There was no more brightness in his eyes, no more color in his cheek; an expression of dullness and stupefaction overspread his features; a bloody foam fringed his lips; a large spot of blood stained the whiteness of his cambric shirt.
Balsamo looked at himself in the glass for a moment without being able to recognize himself, then he determinedly fixed his eyes upon the strange person reflected in the mirror.
“Yes, Fritz,” said he, “you are right.”
Then, remarking the anxious look of his faithful servant:
“But why did you call me?” inquired he.
“Uh! master, for them.”
“For them?”
“Yes.”
“Whom do you mean by them?”’
“Excellency,” whispered Fritz, putting his mouth close to his master’s ear, “the FIVE MASTERS.”
Balsamo shuddered.
“All?” asked he.
“Yes, all.”
“And they are here?”
“Here.”
“Alone?”
“No; each has an armed servant waiting in the courtyard.”
“They came together?”
“Yes, master, together, and they were getting impatient; that is why I rang so many times and so violently.”
Balsamo, without even concealing the spot of blood beneath the folds of his frill, without attempting to repair the disorder of his dress, began to descend the stairs, after having asked Fritz if his guests had installed themselves in the salon or in the large study.
“In the salon, excellency,” replied Fritz, following his master.
Then at the foot of the stairs, venturing to stop Balsamo, he asked:
“Has your excellency no orders to give me?”
“None, Fritz.”
“Excellency—” stammered Fritz.
“Well?” asked Balsamo, with infinite gentleness.
“Will your excellency go unarmed?”
“Unarmed? yes.”
“Even without your sword?”
“And why should I take my sword, Fritz?”
“I do not know,” said the faithful servant, casting down his eyes, “but I thought — I believed — I feared—”
“It is well, Fritz — you may go.”
Fritz moved away a few steps in obedience to the order he had received, but returned.
“Did you not hear?” asked Balsamo.
“Excellency, I merely wished to tell you that your double-barreled pistols are in the ebony case upon the gilt stand.”
“Go, I tell you!” replied Balsamo.
And he entered the salon.