'Why could he make them speak,' she said to herself, 'when everyone else always failed?'
[CHAPTER IV.]
Sabran, as he undressed himself and laid himself down under the great gold-fringed canopy of the stately bed, thought: 'Was I only a clever comedian to-night, or did my eyes really grow wet as I sang that old song and see her face through a mist as if she and I had met in the old centuries long ago?'
He stood and looked a moment at his own reflection in the great mirror with the wax candles burning in its sconces. He was very pale.
Où sont les neiges d'antan?
The burden of it ran through his mind.
Almost it seemed to him long ago—long ago—she had been his lady and he her knight, and she had stooped to him, and he had died for her. Then he laughed a little harshly.
'I grow that best of all actors,' he thought, 'an actor who believes in himself!'
Then he turned from the mirror and stretched himself on the great bed, with its carved warriors at its foot and its golden crown at its head, and its heavy amber tissues shining in the shadows. He was a sound sleeper at all times. He had slept peacefully on a wreck, in a hurricane, in a lonely hut on the Andes, as after a night of play in Paris, in Vienna, in Monaco. He had a nerve of steel, and that perfect natural constitution which even excess and dissipation cannot easily impair. But this night, under the roof of Hohenszalras, in the guest-chamber of Hohenszalras, he could not summon sleep at his will, and he lay long wide awake and restless, watching the firelight play on the figures upon the tapestried walls, where the lords and ladies of Tuscan Boccaccio and their sinful loves were portrayed in stately and sombre guise, and German costumes of the days of Maximilian.