“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.