“The matter will not end here.... Have a care, young man....”
As I thought of all this, as the whole meaning of what had seemed so mysterious now lay clear before me, I would be seized with a sort of deadly anguish, compared to which all my previous sufferings, whether of body or mind, had been but trivial. Could she, could Ottilie, have known of this work? Could she—have inspired it?
The sweat that would break out upon me at such a thought was more than all my fever had wrung from my body, and my faithful leech would wonder to find me faint and reeking, and would puzzle his poor brains in vain upon the cause, and decoct me new teas of dreadful compounds, febrifuges which he vowed had never failed.
But then at other times the vision of my wife would rise before me and shame me. I would see again her noble brow, her clear eye, her arched and innocent lip, and in my weakness and the passion of my longing I would turn and weep upon my pillow to think that, having to my sorrow lost her, I should come now to lose even my faith in her, and yet should love her still with such mad love.
Now there must be, as János would have it, something remarkably tough in the breed of Jennico for me to recover from such wounds both bodily and mental. Recover I did, however, in spite of all odds; and a resolve I made with returning strength did a good deal to ease my mind, tossed between such torturing fluctuations.
This resolve was no less than to leave the country some fine morning, in secret, so soon as I could undertake the journey with any likelihood of being able to persevere in it, to speed to Budissin, and discover for myself the real attitude of Ottilie towards me. I was determined that, according as I found her,—either what my heart would still deem her, or yet so base a thing as the fiend whispered,—that I would try to win her back, were I to die in the attempt, or thrust her from my life for ever.
Thus when I heard that my enemy and the world believed me dead, when I realised that she too must probably share in the delusion, I was glad, for not only would it materially facilitate my re-entering the Duchy, but it would afford me an excellent opportunity of judging her real feelings. I had no doubt but that, if I set to work in a proper manner and duly preserved my incognito, I should be able, now that all pretext for quarantine had disappeared, to secure an interview without too much difficulty.
So all my desires hastening towards that goal, I set myself to become a whole man again with so much energy that even János was surprised at the rapidity of my progress.