He meditated a while, and then said,—
“I understand one thing now: life may be bad, for a man may order it foolishly; but existence is good.”
Pan Stanislav went away late in the night. Through the following week the health of the patient was wavering. The doctors were unable to foresee anything; they judged, however, that a journey was not dangerous in any case. Svirski and Vaskovski volunteered to go to Warsaw with the sick man, who was yearning for home more and more, and who mentioned Pani Emilia, the Sister of Charity, almost daily. But on the eve of the day on which he was to go he lost speech suddenly. Pan Stanislav’s heart was bleeding when he looked at his eyes, in which at moments a terrible alarm was depicted, and at moments a kind of great, silent prayer. He tried to write, but could not. In the evening came paralysis of the brain, and he died.
They buried him in the Campo Santo temporarily. Pan Stanislav thought that his looks uttered a prayer to be carried to his own country, and Svirski confirmed that thought.
Thus vanished that bubble which gleamed sometimes with the colors of the rainbow, but was as empty and evanescent as any bubble.
Pan Stanislav was sincerely afflicted by his death, and meditated afterward for whole hours on that strange life. He did not share these thoughts with Marynia, for somehow it had not become a custom with him yet to confide to her anything that took place in his mind. Finally, as happens often with people who are thinking of the dead, he drew from these thoughts various conclusions to his own advantage.
“Bukatski,” said he to himself, “was never able to come to harmony with his own mind: he lacked the understanding of life; he could not fix his position in that forest, and he travelled always according to the fancy of the moment. But if he had felt contented with that system, if he had squeezed something out of life, I should own that he had sense. But it was unpleasant for him. It is really a foolish thing to persuade one’s self, before death comes, that wine is vinegar. But I look at matters more clearly, and, besides, I have been far more sincere with myself. Happen what may, I am almost perfectly in order with God and with life.”
There was truth in this, but there was also illusion. Pan Stanislav was not in order with his own wife. He judged that if he gave her protection, bread, good treatment, and put kisses on her lips from time to time, he was discharging all possible duties assumed with regard to her. Meanwhile their relations began to be more definitely of this sort,—that he only deigned to love and receive love. In the course of his observations of life this strange phenomenon had struck him more than once,—that when, for example, a man well-known for honor does some noble deed, people wave their hands as if with a certain indifference, saying, “Oh, that is Pan X——; from him this is perfectly natural!” When, however, some rogue chanced to do something honorable, these same people said with great recognition, “But there is something in the man.” A hundred times Pan Stanislav observed that a copper from a miser made more impression than a ducat from a generous giver. He did not notice, however, that with Marynia he followed the same method of judgment and recognition. She gave him all her being, all her soul. “Ah, Marynia! that is natural!” and he waved his hand too. Had her love not been so generous, had it come to him with supreme difficulty, with the conviction that it was a treasure, and given as such, with the conviction that she was a divinity demanding a bowed head and honor, Pan Stanislav would have received it with a bowed head, and would have rendered the honor. Such is the general human heart; and only the choicest natures, woven from rays, have power to rise above this level. Marynia had given Pan Stanislav her love as his right. She considered his love as happiness, and he gave it as happiness; he felt himself the idol on the altar. One ray of his fell on the heart of the woman and illumined it: the divinity kept the rest of the rays for itself; taking all, it gave only a part. In his love there was not that fear which flows from honor, and there was not that which in every fondling says to the woman beloved, “at thy feet.”
But they did not understand this yet, either of them.