The murder? The murder!
Two of the uniformed men hold my arms.
“But,” I try to say, with chattering teeth, “Count Kamarowsky lives ... he will recover.”
The man replies, “Count Kamarowsky is dead.”
I laugh out loud. The car on the switchback rushes, whirls, plunges—falls with me to destruction.
XLII
Like a dream within a dream.—Poe.
It was in the prison infirmary that I first heard the details of what had passed in the Villa Santa Maria del Giglio, on that fatal morning of August the 3rd. As the nursing sister sat beside me, renewing from time to time the cold bandages placed on my throbbing forehead, she told me in low tones the mournful and tragic story. I listened as if I were listening in a dream to the story of a dream.
“When (she said) at early morning the Venetian servant-girl heard a knock at the door she went to open it, and a pale youth stepped quickly across the threshold. He asked for Count Kamarowsky, and bade the girl tell him that Nicolas Naumoff, of Orel, had arrived and desired to see him. The girl went to her master's door and knocked. He was awake and had risen. On hearing her message, he hurried out to meet his friend, for he loved him like a brother—”