Rex’s hand trembled, as he set down the goblet. The mistake was rectified in an instant and Rex drank the baroness’s health. This time as he looked at her, he saw her white hair and delicate thin face in all their reality. The shadow was gone. He had pledged its emptiness in an empty glass.
That night his light burned late, and the owls, if they had looked, might have seen his shadow pass and repass many hundreds of times behind the curtain of the open window. Hour after hour he paced his lonely room, asking himself the meaning of what was happening in his brain. It seemed to him that he was suffering from an extraordinary hallucination, which he had indulged until it had taken possession of his whole being. Again and again he went back to the first beginnings of his fancy, recalling the time when he had begun to construct out of nothing a love for himself in the past, imagining for Hilda an imaginary mother, who should have been his own imaginary wife. He cursed the puerility of the thought, and yet returned to it again and again in search of the sweet, sad peace he had so often found in his fancied memories. But that was gone. The scenes he had created grew dull and lost their colour, he forgot the very points which had most pleased him once. And yet he was conscious of acute suffering. It was but a few hours since he had lifted that empty goblet to his lips, and had seen distinctly before him the shadow he loved so well. How was it possible? There was a chair—he had lifted his hand thus—and she had been there. Suddenly his arm was arrested in the very act of the gesture, he grew icy cold, and his stony eyes set themselves in a horrified stare. A cry of despair burst from his lips.
‘Great God in Heaven—I love Hilda!’
That was all, and there was silence in the lonely chamber for many hours.
CHAPTER XXVI
Day had dawned when Rex staggered to his feet, scarcely conscious of where he was, nor of what had happened, knowing only that he had spent many hours in utmost agony. The sight of the familiar objects in the room recalled the whole train of thought which had preceded the shock he had received. Slowly and painfully he began to walk up and down as he had done during the night. It was not possible for his strong nature to remain for any great length of time in a state of stupor, nor was there any danger of his being again affected as he had been at first. After a little while he grew calm and collected, and he realised that something must be done immediately.
He had found the key to all his vain imaginings, to all his varied moods, to the strange disturbance of his faculties in Hilda’s presence. He loved his brother’s wife, and he knew it. He sought for a remedy, as though he had been assailed by the plague.
There was a medicine close by, in the drawer of his desk, which would cure love or anything else. He knew that. It would be the affair of a moment, the pulling of a trigger, an explosion he should scarcely hear, and there would be no more Rex. The temptation was strong, and moreover there was a tendency in his nature towards suicide which he knew was inherited. It would be a fitting end to the useless life he had led, the son of such a father and of such a mother. No one would guess why he was dead, and it would be soon done. Then indeed there would be no trace left of the old times before the tragedy of Greifenstein. It would be the last page in the history, as he himself was the last survivor, except Greif, and Greif had a right to be happy.