Széphalmi sank back into the depths of his arm-chair and shivered as if with an ague fit.
"The rich man, however, abandoned the bride on the very day of the wedding, and in that same year the elder Hétfalusy suddenly grew grey. You see, sir, I am well informed. A doctor ought to know every little detail relating to a case if he is to cure the patient. The father was now ready to let his daughter marry her former lover, but you were no longer inclined for such a marriage. One day, however, the girl went to you of her own accord, with the face of a lunatic, and threatened..."
"Hush, sir! for Heaven's sake!"
"Ah! how much more rapidly his blood is circulating. His muscles are twitching, his lips are convulsed, his arteries begin to throb—the girl threatened to reveal the fact that she had killed her child and so mount the scaffold, unless you made her your wife."
The sick man began to throw about his arms, and cold drops of sweat, like transparent pearls, welled forth from his forehead. Széphalmi arose and walked about the room wringing his hands.
"Who told you that?" he asked the stranger, suddenly planting himself right in front of him.
"Softly, sir, you are disturbing me. The patient is about to take a favourable turn, look how he is sweating. His sufferings are violent, and I am glad to see them, it shows that his vital energy is returning. Repose is a symptom of death, pain is a sign of life. Let us go on with our magnetising. These long passes from the temples to the shoulders work wonders. The whole soul of the sick man now clings to the thought that just because he himself cast forth his first grandchild, which he hated, therefore God took from him the other two which he loved. Notice, sir! that heaving bosom, those fiery red eyes, those swelling lips—all of them are in their way the interpreters of that one thought. God has punished him and you, the father and the grandfather; He has removed from you the blessing which you rejected of your own accord, and now you stand by yourselves in the world, so lonely, so comfortless, joined to each other by nothing but the recollection of a terrible loss."
Széphalmi buried his head among the pillows of the speechless invalid and sobbed bitterly.
Then the youth arose and took the old man's hand in his hand, gazed steadily into his burning eyes with his eyes, and with a voice of exaltation thus addressed the unhappy wretch, who seemed to be bearing in his bosom all the torments of Hell:
"Suppose someone were to come here to you now and say, 'Behold! that outcast child, whom you wished to think of as dead, nay, or murdered! whose birth you cursed, and whose death you prayed for, I now give her back to you!'—how would you feel?"