But unfortunately the doctor did not think very seriously of Zaluski’s case. In that dreary prison he had patients in the last stages of all kinds of disease, and Sigismund, who had been in confinement too short a time to look as ill as the others, did not receive much attention. Certainly, the doctor admitted, his lungs were affected; probably the sudden change of climate and the lack of good food and fresh air had been too much for him; so the solemn farce ended, and he was left to his fate. “If I were indeed a Nihilist, and suffered for a cause which I had at heart,” he telegraphed to Valerian, “I could bear it better. But to be kept here for an imaginary offence, to bear cold and hunger and illness all to no purpose—that beats me. There can’t be a God, or such things would not be allowed.”
“To me it seems,” said Valerian, “that we are the victims of violated law. Others have shown tyranny, or injustice, or cruelty, and we are the victims of their sin. Don’t say there is no God. There must be a God to avenge such hideous wrong.”
So they spoke to each other through their prison wall as men in the free outer world seldom care to speak; and I, who knew no barriers, looked now on Valerian’s gaunt figure, and brave but prematurely old face, now on poor Zaluski, who, in his weary imprisonment, had wasted away till one could scarcely believe that he was indeed the same lithe, active fellow who had played tennis at Mrs. Courtenay’s garden-party.
Day and night Valerian listened to the terrible cough which came from the adjoining cell. It became perfectly apparent to him that his friend was dying; he knew it as well as if he had seen the burning hectic flush on his hollow cheeks, and heard the panting, hurried breaths, and watched the unnatural brilliancy of his dark eyes.
At length he thought the time had come for another sort of comfort.
“My friend,” he said one day, “it is too plain to me now that you are dying. Write to the procurator and tell him so. In some cases men have been allowed to go home to die.”
A wild hope seized on poor Sigismund; he sat down to the little table in his cell and wrote a letter to the procurator—a letter which might almost have drawn tears from a flint. Again and again he passionately asserted his innocence, and begged to know on what evidence he was imprisoned. He began to think that he could die content if he might leave this terrible cell, might be a free agent once more, if only for a few days. At least he might in that case clear his character, and convince Gertrude that his imprisonment had been all a hideous mistake; nay, he fancied that he might live through a journey to England and see her once again.
But the procurator would not let him be set free, and refused to believe that his case was really a serious one.
Sigismund’s last hope left him.
The days and weeks dragged slowly on, and when, according to English reckoning, New Year’s Eve arrived, he could scarcely believe that only seventeen weeks ago he had actually been with Gertrude, and that disgrace and imprisonment had seemed things that could never come near him, and death had been a far-away possibility, and life had been full of bliss.