So saying, he thrust the little case into his breast-pocket, and quickly left the room.
The alarming report which Everard had conveyed to the Countess turned out to be a most exaggerated one. The accident that had befallen Edmund was of no serious importance. While scrambling through, or over, a hedge, his gun had been accidentally discharged, but fortunately the shot had only grazed his left hand. The injury was very slight, hardly deserving to be called a wound, yet the whole castle was in commotion about it. Baron Heideck hastened to his nephew's room, and the Countess could find neither rest nor peace until the doctor, sent for in post-haste, had assured her positively there was no cause for uneasiness, and that the lesion would be healed in a few days.
Edmund himself took the matter most lightly. He laughed and joked with his mother about her anxiety until it yielded beneath his cheery influence, protested strongly against being treated as a disabled man, and was with difficulty prevailed on to listen to the doctor, who prescribed absolute rest and quiet.
Evening closed in. Oswald was alone in his own room, which he had not left since his great discovery of the morning. The lamp burning on the table threw but a partial light over the apartment, which was large and rather sombre at night, with its heavy leather hangings and deep bay-window. The furniture was massive and good, as in every room throughout the house, but it had not been renewed for years, and was in strong contrast to the bright and handsome appointments of the main building, and especially of that part of it dedicated to the young Count's use. The nephew, the offshoot of a younger branch, had been banished to a distant wing. In this, as in all else, his inferiority to the heir must be well marked; he must stand back, yielding the precedence to the master of the house.
So the Countess had ordered it, and the temper of Oswald's mind was such that under no circumstances could he have brought himself to seek aid or protection from Edmund, or to complain to him of the constant mortifications to which he was subjected.
The side-table was strewn with letters and papers which Oswald had intended to set in order before leaving. Now he gave them not a thought. With restless steps he paced to and fro in the room, the excessive pallor of his countenance and his heaving breast telling of the terrible agitation that reigned within him. The dim tormenting doubt which had beset his soul for years, the vague presentiment which he had driven from him only by the full exercise of his powerful will, now stood revealed as truth. Though the actual course events had taken and the story of that portrait were as yet unknown to him, the always-recurring suspicions had resolved themselves into a certainty, calling up within him a perfect storm of contradictory emotions.
Oswald paused before the writing-table, and again took up the fatal portrait which lay there among the papers.
'After all, what avails this?' he said bitterly. 'I indeed, for my own part, require no further proof, but all corroboration is wanting, and the one person who could afford it will certainly keep silence. She would die rather than make a confession which would bring ruin on herself and on her son, and I cannot compel her to speak--I must not, could not, offer up the honour of our name, even though it be a question of the heirship of Ettersberg. Yet full and complete knowledge I must have--I must, cost what it may.'
He slowly closed the case and laid it down again, still standing before it, musing profoundly, moodily.
'Perhaps there might be a way, one single way. If I were to go to Edmund with this picture, and were to call upon him to explain, to inquire into the facts of the case, he could force the truth from his mother if he seriously set himself to the task, and he would so set himself if once I introduced the suspicion to his mind. I know him well enough to be sure of that. But what a terrible blow it would be to him--to him, with his sensitive notions of honour, with his candid, open nature, which has never condescended to a lie. To be hurled suddenly from a position which, in the fulness of his happiness and prosperity, must appear absolutely safe; to be branded as the instrument, perhaps the accomplice, of a fraud!--I think the knowledge of this would kill him.'