"Waltenberg too stayed behind. He paused, hesitating and seeming engaged in an inward struggle, but when he saw the engineer-in-chief walk towards the Wolkenstein chasm he followed, and overtook him.
"Herr Elmhorst!"
Wolfgang turned; his face was unnaturally calm, and there was a hard ring in his voice as he said, "You come to remind me of my promise? I am at your service at any hour; my duties are at an end."
Ernst had entertained no such intention; he made a gesture of dissent: "I think neither of us is in the mood to pursue our quarrel at present. I am sure that you, at least, are not fit for it."
Elmhorst passed his hand across his brow; now when the terrible tension of his nerves had relaxed he first perceived how utterly exhausted he was.
"You are probably right," he said, with the same rigid, unnatural look. "It comes from overwork. I have not slept for three nights; but a couple of hours' rest will restore me entirely, and, as I said, I am at your service."
Ernst silently gazed into the face of the man who had just lost his all; this forced calm did not mislead him. A reply was upon his lips, but he suppressed it, and his glance wandered to the spot where he had been thrown down in his flight. Just there one of the columns had fallen, and the iron part of it was buried deep in the earth. There he would have lain crushed and mangled but for the hand which had rescued him from destruction; perhaps he was not as unconscious as he seemed of whose the hand was.
"I must go and see how the president is," he said, hurriedly. "Dr. Reinsfeld has promised to stay with us to-night, and we will send you word of what happens."
"Thanks," said Wolfgang, seeming both to hear and to speak merely mechanically: his thoughts were elsewhere; and when Waltenberg turned away, he slowly walked on to the place where the Wolkenstein bridge had stood.
The night that ensued was a terrible one for the family and household at the villa. Its master lay struggling with death, which seemed slow to come in the midst of such agony. Incapable of motion or of speech, but entirely conscious, he knew that the son of the former friend whom he had deceived and betrayed, condemning him to a life of poverty and hardship, while he himself enjoyed wealth and distinction as the fruits of his treachery, was unwearied in his efforts to minister to him, to soothe the death-bed from which he could not dismiss the dark messenger. Nothing could be more ready and unselfish than the aid afforded by Benno, and this very forgetfulness of self awakened the dying man's most pungent remorse. Face to face with death falsehood and deceit vanished, truth alone showed its inexorable countenance, and the effect was annihilating. The agonized struggle lasted, it is true, but for a single night, but in that time were compressed the torture of a lifetime and the penance of a lifetime.