He wanted to get up and call for candles; but some strange torpor paralyzed him. That grey cobweb, which the shadows, like spiders, had woven in the corners, twined and clung round him; he was too lazy to move; his eyes were heavy, he vainly tried to keep them open, nevertheless he fell asleep. It was for a few moments only, yet when he woke it seemed to him he had slept a long time. He had dreamt something unpleasant, something he could no longer recall, but which had left a feeling of untold weariness in his soul, and again there was somehow a link between this dream, the vacant smile of the red-haired girl, and the growing suffocation caused by the sirocco. When he opened his eyes he saw just in front of him a pale, spectre-like face. For a long time he could not make it out; at last he recognised his own face reflected in the dim pierglass before the arm-chair in which he had fallen asleep. The same mirror reflected a door just behind his back. Was not the dream going on? The door will suddenly burst open and let in something terrible, something he cannot define, yet dimly remembers.
The door opened noiselessly; on its threshold appeared lighted tapers and figures. Still looking at the glass without turning round he recognised one face, then another, then a third. He jumped up and held his hands out in the desperate hope that all this was only an apparition, but the same figure stood before him as in the mirror, and a cry of boundless terror escaped his breast:—
“It is He! He! He!——”
Alexis would have fallen had not the secretary Weingart supported him.
“Water! water! the Tsarevitch is ill.”
Weingart led him back to the arm-chair, and Alexis saw bending over him the kind old face of Count Daun, who gently stroked his shoulder and held some spirit to his nose.
“Calm yourself, for God’s sake calm yourself! Nothing bad has happened. We bring the best of news.”
Alexis drank the water, his teeth knocked against the glass. Unable to take his eyes off the door, he was trembling all over as in a high fever.
“How many came in?” he asked Count Daun in a whisper.
“Two your Highness—only two.”