An immense joy, unlooked for, undreamed of, sprang up in him, checked as it rose by incredulity.
'But you loved her!' he said, on an impulse which he regretted even as the exclamation escaped him. Vàsàrhely threw his head back with a gesture of fine anger.
'If I loved' her what is that to you?' he said, with a restrained violence vibrating in his words. 'It is, perhaps, because I once loved her that your foul secret is safe with me now. I shall not tell her. I waited to say this to you. I could not write it lest it should meet her eyes. You came to ask me this? Be satisfied and go.'
'I came to ask you this because, had you said otherwise, I would have shot myself ere she could have heard.'
Vàsàrhely said nothing; a great scorn was still set like the grimness of death upon his face. He looked far away at the dim figures on the tapestries; he shrunk from the sight of his boyhood's enemy as from some loathly unclean thing he must not kill.
'Suicide!' he thought, 'the Slav's courage, the serf's refuge!
Before the sight of Sabran the room went round, the lights grew dull, the figures on the walls became, fantastic and unreal. His heart beat with painful effort, yet his ears, his throat, his brain seemed full of blood. The nerves of his whole body seemed to shrink and thrill and quiver, but the force of habit kept him composed and erect before this man who was his foe, yet did for him what few friends would have done.
'I do not thank you,' he said at last. 'I understand; you spare me for her sake, not mine.'
'But for her, I would treat you so.'
As he spoke he broke in two a slender agate ruler which lay on the writing-table at his elbow.