“Do you know what? May a thunderbolt burn that Pani Osnovski! Panna Helena said that it was not permitted to despair of a man while he was living; but as to that one, let a thunderbolt shake her!”
“There was not in the world, perhaps, a woman more worshipped than she,” said Pan Stanislav.
“There you have them,” answered Svirski, passionately. “Women, taking them in general—”
But all at once he struck his glove across his mouth.
“No!” cried he. “To the devil with my old fault! I have promised myself not to make any general conclusions about women.”
“I said that he worshipped her,” continued Pan Stanislav, “because now I simply do not understand how he can live without her.”
“But he must.”
Osnovski was forced really to live without his wife, but he was not able. In Prytulov and in Warsaw, which were full of reminiscences of her, life soon became for him unendurable; hence a month later he started on a journey. But, already out of health when he left Warsaw, he caught cold in an over-heated car, and in Vienna fell so ill that he had to take to his bed. The cold, which at first was considered influenza, turned into a violent typhus. After a few days the sick man lost consciousness, and lay in a hotel at the mercy of strange doctors and strange people, far from home and his friends. But afterward in the fever which heated his brain and confused his thoughts it seemed to him that he saw near his bedside the face dearest in life to him, beloved at all times, beloved in loneliness, in sickness, and in presence of death. It seemed to him that he saw it even when he had regained consciousness, but was so weak that he could not move yet, nor speak, nor even arrange his own thoughts.
Later the vision disappeared. But he began to inquire about it from the Sisters of Charity, who were sent, it was unknown by whom, and who surrounded him with the most tender care; and he began to yearn beyond measure.