Imré looked round at this noise. For an instant his face turned deadly pale; behind the backs of the soldiers he perceived the grinning face of his evil angel, the headsman's 'prentice. He felt that he was lost.
He glanced around him. Whither should he flee for refuge? Close beside him were two corpses with cold unsympathetic faces—and there was also a third, a living face, still colder, still more unsympathetic than the faces of the dead, living and yet not loving, the face of his own father who still stood there with the large heavy crucifix in his uplifted fist.
The corporal approached the youth and seized him by the collar. What did it matter to him that the culprit was standing beside two corpses covered with a funeral pall? what did he care about the painfulness of the scene? Naturally he only saw before him a deserter, a deserter whom it was his duty to arrest.
At this the youth grew absolutely desperate, and at the same time the instinct of self-preservation arose within him. In one magical moment there flashed through his mind all the horrors which the future had in store for him—the cold dungeon wall, the narrow barred windows, the heavy rattling chain, the court-martial, the reading of the sentence, the pillory, the gaping crowd, the white shirt worn by the condemned, the man of death, the executioner, with a Prayer Book in one hand and a cord in the other, the ignominious death, the black carrion crows——
"Ah!" he roared in despair, and with the iron strength of frenzy he tore himself loose from the grasp of the corporal who fell prone into the fireplace with a fearful crash.
"Whoever touches me is a dead man!" screamed Imré, with a voice full of fury and defiance, and tearing open his vest he drew forth with one hand a dagger and with the other a large hussar pistol. The broken-winged young eagle had turned upon its pursuers, hacking at them with its wounded beak and flapping its still uninjured pinion in their faces.
The soldiers began to fall back before the infuriated youth, who, with bloodshot eyes and foaming mouth, followed hard upon them, and either from fear or compassion opened a way before him.
Then the white-headed old man seized from behind the youth's murderous uplifted arms, and held him back.
When the young man felt the touch of those cold tremulous hands upon his arm, he let fall the weapons from both his own hands, his arms fell down benumbed by his side, his whole body collapsed; nerveless and swooning he sank in a heap upon the ground. The soldiers lifted him upon their shoulders, removed him from the room, put fetters upon his hands and feet, and carried him off.
The old man looked coldly after them. When they had gone, he again knelt down close to the two coffins, his white locks falling about his face, raised his clasped hands to his tremulous but impotent lips, and kept gazing, gazing fixedly first at one of his dear departed and then at the other.