It was an exclamation of uttermost weariness. He picked at his strings and tightened them with absent fingers. Then he flashed a smile at his companion:
"You are amazed, are you not, at my ingratitude? What! Here have I, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, preserved the existence of this wretched tramp at the risk of my noble, valuable one—here have I shed my blue blood to save his muddy fluid, and the creature has not even a 'Thank you'! ... Comrade," went on the musician, and his eye dilated, his countenance assumed a lofty mien, "I would not shame myself and you by such a word as 'Thanks'! The creature that would not give himself to save his fellow-creature when he can is not worth the name of man."
Steven, abashed that he had indeed thought himself heroic, blushed again and, looking down, began idly plucking with his unhurt right hand the wood-violets that grew in patches on the bank. The fiddler followed his movements, then his eye suddenly grew fixed, his jaw dropped. Slowly the healthy colour ebbed from his cheek and left it ashen. Steven, looking at him, was astonished and alarmed.
"For heaven's sake!" he cried, "are you ill?"
The fiddler stretched out his hand and culled the posy from the other's grasp. The touch of his fingers was as cold as death.
"Violets!" said he, in a sort of whisper. "There is blood on them!" He shuddered from head to foot.
"Perhaps all the mystery is but that he is a poor mad gentleman," thought Steven, It was an idea which could not fail to recur to him in the company of this fantastic being; but never had it seemed so justified.
"Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours! ... Hurl down the Guard, aha!"
CHAPTER XIX