The other only sighed. "God has taken him," said she to herself, "and I shall mourn him as long as I live." But she could not trust herself to say anything aloud. Her anguish was too keen.
"Weep for him, I tell you!" cried the beautiful fury, stamping her foot, while loose locks of her fair hair fluttered about her face.
At that moment the servant opened the door and announced, "Captain Richard Baradlay." There he stood, but no longer in the uniform of a captain of hussars. He wore plain citizen's clothes.
The tormented victim of the headache had employed the last hours of his tenure of office in causing one hundred and twenty of the chief prisoners under his care to be tried and sentenced with the utmost expedition. They were condemned to death, but he exercised his right of pardon, and set them all free, without exception. He thus, as he had vowed in his hour of torment, took ample revenge—not on the accused, but on the minister who was about to remove him from office. He issued a wholesale pardon. "Now let the minister, in his zeal for milder methods, outdo me if he can!" he exclaimed, as he threw down his pen.
Richard had been summoned before the judge-advocate immediately after receiving the unexpected announcement of his pardon.
"You are set free, it is true," said the high official; "yet for a time you are not allowed to live in Hungary, but are ordered to make your home in some city of the empire outside your own country. Let us say Vienna, for example. The governor, who has to-day given you your liberty, wishes you to call on the young Baroness Alfonsine Plankenhorst, upon your arrival at Vienna, and thank her for her good offices in securing your liberation. Without her intervention you would not so soon have left your prison cell. So give her your heartiest thanks."
"I shall not fail to do so," was the reply.
"And one thing more: your brother Eugen, or Ödön, as you call him, has paid the penalty of his treason with his life—"
"Yes, I know it," interrupted the other; "but I am puzzled how the German and the Hungarian names—"
Here he was sharply cut short. "In the first place," said the judge-advocate, sternly, "it was against all rules and regulations for you to hear anything about it, since you were a prisoner, and communication with a prisoner is treason. In the second place, I did not ask you for a lecture on philology; you are here to attend to what I have to say." Therewith he took a little pasteboard box out of a drawer. "Your brother left you a lock of his hair, which I now deliver to you."