"But if I chance to choose the harmless one," Langler next said, "I become the cause of the death of a most magnanimous man, Baron Kolár."
"Of a most rash and foolhardy man, sir," was Baron Kolár's answer; "but choose quickly, I charge you, sir."
"But, baron——" I heard Langler say.
"Do not delay! or I dash the cursed pills to the ground!" I now heard Baron Kolár cry out: "your chance to serve your sister and madman Church vanishes in two ticks of my watch!"
"Well, then, since you put it in that way, baron ... well, then, baron...." I heard Langler say, but what next went on I did not witness, for my face all this while was pressed against the wall. Indeed, I was sick, with a most mortal taste in my mouth, and there at the wall I waited in what seemed to me a month of stillness, until there reached me a sound of moaning which I understood to come from Baron Kolár. I dared then, for the first time, to turn and look at them. Langler was standing with his back against the wall, white, but smiling; Baron Kolár was sitting on the bedstead, holding his head with both his hands, his eye wandering wildly. When he caught my eye he said to me: "it is I who have swallowed the poison-pill, yes, it is I." And when I now moved to stand at his side he turned up at me a most haggard jowl, an all-gone gaze, his eyes hanging languishingly upon mine. On a sudden he started, saying with new alarm: "It is I who have taken the poison!" Then afresh he rocked himself from side to side, moving his palm to and fro along the length of his thigh, full of sighs and retchings and moans. I was crouched on my knees before his anguish, I sobbed aloud to him: "great, fatherly heart!" "Stay!" he said, with a new brusqueness, "I feel the stiffness coming on in the neck, I had better get up: it is brucine," and he now raised himself by my help, and stepped about, upheld on my shoulder, during which, "yes," he said to me in confidence, "I have gone a step too far, I have tempted God, and He has abandoned me"; and again he moaned, "it is brucine," pressing his reins ruefully, with groans. "But can I do nothing?" I cried to him, "let me do something for you!" To this he made no answer, but said to me: "I never thought to fail; I have always managed to come out prettily through everything, but now I perish miserably for a mere whim of my bile, a moment's noble wind, it is all your own doing, Gregor, you reap what you have sown. Recount to Miss Langler how a man like me died for her, tell the Misses Chambers and all your friends how I perished, let all their hearts pity me and bleed...." It was while he was saying this that I first noticed Langler, who now stepped out from the wall toward us, trying to smile, saying to Kolár, "no, baron, do not dismay yourself with such fancies, you have already over-much worked out ..." but his speech was broken short by a jerk of the neck, his mouth was drawn, he had an aspect of terror: death was in the face of my friend. Baron Kolár, staring at him, seemed to start from a dream, and like a man dropped aghast but glad from the gallows-rope the man's lips unwreathed in a kind of rictus, as he said with an opening of the arms: "well, I told you how it would be," whereupon at once he now turned in flight from the sight of Langler's face, but turned again to whisper to me, "you can go into another room or be here, just as you wish," and after waiting an instant for my answer, when I only gaped at him, he fled away.
I sat by the bedstead, upon which Langler had fallen, and must have remained there on the floor, I imagine, till five or six p.m. the next evening. Baron Kolár's prophecy that the bedstead would become a death-bed within one hour did not come true, for it must have been two, perhaps three, hours before Langler was freed from his anguish, though I am not sure, for after half-an-hour or so the light for some cause died out, and the darkness may have stifled out my consciousness of time. I think, however, that he lived three hours. The poison given him may have been over-little, or over-much, or poor in poignancy, so that at some times it was difficult to believe that he could be really dying; there were such intervals as that in which he repeated most of the Homeric hymn to Apollo, then there were spasms on spasms, and presently again his mind gave signs of wandering. All was in rayless darkness—it was well so. Thrice he cried to me: "Oh, that we knew where once more we might find Him, Arthur!" "We are like babes that are being weaned," he said, "but nothing is offered us in place of the Breast that has been withdrawn, we bawl in the dark...." After this he lay without saying anything for some time, until he said again: "yes, now in the hour of my voyage it is Jesus who to me is the most eminent, the best-beloved. Blessed name, blessed name. How abounding in beguilement are all his words, like lovers' sidelong glances, and honey of Hybla to the tongue! 'Consider the lilies of the field, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these'—surely, Arthur, the most literary words ever used—except in a quite literal sense—if you accept my definition of literature as 'chastity a-burn.' I know of nothing quite to match them for that demure rich indirectness which is the essence of literature, except perhaps '[Greek: asteras eisathreis],' and the 'path which no fowl knoweth.' How staid the statement, how rosy the aroma; how little is said, how much is felt and meant and suggested: for the puny men dissect and depict, the huge men sum up and suggest. And that big-mouthed 'swear not by Heaven'—you can't match me that God for downright bulk, the earth His footstool, His buttocks throned broad over the stars, His head up in the room beyond, huge Egyptian shadow——Oh, I must...." Upon this my friend was held up by one of the fits, in which he stretched like an arch on his head and feet; but there was no bed, his legs slipped between the laths, causing them to vibrate and jangle; I could not see, it was very well so. But in the interims he was easy enough, without much suffering, I think, and now he was unconscious of me, and maundered with a wandering mind, showing still his ruling passion, criticising still, arguing still of literature, till his passing. "Surely the light is good," says he, "and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun," being all gone by that time, I believe, and all gone, too, when he breathed to himself: "oh, a rough God! In what velocities does He mix and revel! The encounter of dark suns—how He slackens bridle and urges them like chargers, faster, faster, with laughter in His beard, and afterwards muses upon the silence of their tragedy when a new star psalms in the sky at night, and the star-masters watch it with awe." This was among his final utterances, and afterwards I had for some time a sense of being alone in the dark there without him; but then I heard my friend say in a thin and dying whine: "why art thou cast down, oh, my soul, and why art thou disquieted within me?" and at the last he panted out at me, "tell her, Arthur, tell her, in His will is our peace." Long I sat then, incaved in night, with nothing but the darkness and his death in my mind, but in the end God gave me tears, and a deep sleep.
CHAPTER XXVIII
END OF MISS LANGLER
When I opened my eyes I found myself lying alone half under the bedstead. The body of my friend, no longer there, must have been very quietly taken away. It was found in the river, high up about Wargrave.