Marie Tarnowska

I staggered and sank to the floor.

Naumoff bent over me. I felt his icy hands passing over my face. Then we remained quite silent in the dark.

Slowly, reluctantly Kamarowsky's footsteps had passed away down the corridor....

I mustered strength enough to whisper to Naumoff: “Go—send Elise to me—quickly!”

Naumoff obeyed.

Yes, Nicolas Naumoff—submissive soul!—has always obeyed.

XXXIII

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.

I fell asleep almost immediately.

When I reopened my eyes, twilight filled my room with shadows and there was Prilukoff, sitting beside my bed, talking to himself about murder, revenge and poison.

XXXIV

Every day my fear of Prilukoff increased. I had only one thought—to escape from him, to go far away where he could never find me; better still, to hide with Tioka and Elise in some distant spot, where neither this terrible maniac nor yet Naumoff, nor even Kamarowsky, could ever reach me.

I thought of Otrada, my home. But how could my unhappy father protect me against the loving persistence of Kamarowsky, against Naumoff's passionate daring, or Prilukoff's diabolic designs?

In the rare moments when I was alone with Elise, we talked it over. In trembling whispers, glancing constantly round lest the Scorpion should be on the watch, we concerted the manner of our flight.

We made a thousand different plans, all equally extravagant and impracticable. In our luxurious hotel rooms we were imprisoned like mice in a trap. We never opened a door without finding a maid awaiting our orders, or a zealous and obsequious waiter bowing to us, or Kamarowsky asking for news, or Naumoff waiting with a bunch of flowers in his hand.

We closed the door, and found ourselves shut up with Prilukoff, ferocious and maniacal, who glowered at us with the eye of a tiger.

A thousand times in my weakness and despair I was on the point of throwing the door wide open and calling for help—calling Kamarowsky and Naumoff, and crying to them: “Look! a man is shut up in here. For days and days he has been torturing and threatening me. The man is a criminal and a thief, and he has been my lover. Save me from him!”

But then I pictured to myself the scene of violence that would follow, the room echoing with revolver shots; and at the mere thought of it, in my weak and exhausted state, I fell into long fainting fits from which Elise had the greatest difficulty in reviving me.

One morning Elise had an idea: “Let us confide in the doctor.”

I agreed. But the thought agitated me so that when the doctor came he found me trembling, with a rapid, irregular pulse and panting breath.

“Doctor—” I began.

“Ah, but this is bad, very bad. What is the meaning of all this agitation? Did you sit up too long? If you are not a better patient, I shall have to complain of you to my friend Paul.”