"Do you think my father will live longer?" replied Wanda, with a trembling voice. "We have nothing more to hope or expect from life, but we will at least die together."
"And I?" asked Waldemar, with bitter reproach.
She turned away without answering him.
"And I?" he repeated, more vehemently. "What shall I do? What is to become of me?"
"You at least are free. You have life before you. Bear it--I have worse to bear!"
An angry remonstrance was on Waldemar's lips; but he glanced at that pale, troubled face, and that glance made him pause. He forced himself to be calm.
"Wanda, when, a year ago, we came at last to understand each other, the promise you had given my brother stood between us. I would have fought my battle, have won you from him at any cost; but it never came to that. His death has torn down the barrier, and no matter what may threaten us from without, it is down, and we are free. By Leo's newly opened grave, while the sword was still impending over your father's head, I did not dare speak to you of love, of our union. I forced myself to wait, to see you but seldom, and only for a few minutes at a time. When I came over to Rakowicz, you and my mother let me feel that you still looked on me as an enemy; but I hoped for better days, for a happier future, and now you meet me with such a determination as this! Can you not understand that I will combat it as long as breath is left in me? 'We will die together!'--easily said and easily done when bullets are flying thick and fast, when, like Leo, one may be shot to the heart in a moment. But have you reflected what death in exile really may be? A slow wasting away; a long protracted struggle against privations which break the spirit before they destroy the body; far from one's country, cut off from the world and its interests, from all that intellectual life which to you is as necessary as the air you breathe; to be weighed down and gradually stifled by the load of misery! And you require of me that I shall endure to see it, that I shall stand by, and suffer you voluntarily to dedicate yourself to such a fate?"
A slight shudder passed through the young Countess's frame. The truth of his description may have gone home to her; but she persisted in her silence.
"And your father accepts this incredible sacrifice," went on Waldemar, more and more excitedly, "and my mother gives her approval to the plan. Their object is simply this, to drag you from my arms, to achieve which they will even subject you to a living death. Had I fallen instead of Leo, and the present cruel fate overtaken the Count, he would have commanded you to stay, my mother would energetically have defended her son's rights, and would have compelled you to give up so ill-judged a scheme; but now, they themselves have suggested these ideas of martyrdom, although they know that it will be your death. It does away with all prospect of our union, even in the far distant future, and that is enough for them!"
"Do not speak so bitterly," Wanda interrupted him. "You do my family injustice. I give you my word that, in taking this resolution, I have been guided by none. My father is advancing towards old age. His wounds, his long imprisonment, more than all else, the defeat of our cause, have broken him down morally and physically. I am all that is left to him, the one tie which still binds him to life. I am his altogether. The lot, which you so forcibly described just now, will be his lot. Do you think I could have one hour's peace at your side, knowing him to be journeying towards such a fate alone, abandoned to his doom, feeling that I myself was bringing on him the crudest grief of his life, by marrying you, whom he still looks on as one of our enemies? The one mitigation of his terrible sentence I could obtain--and that with the utmost difficulty--was a permission for me to accompany my father. I knew that I should have a hard fight with you--how hard it would be I am only learning now. Spare me, Waldemar, I have not much strength left."