'I go at once,' said the old man, without more words, 'though of course the lady will not be awake for some hours. I will ask to see her maids. I shall learn then when I can with any chance of success get admittance. You will not write a word by me? Would it not offend her less?'
'I desire to offend her,' said Sabran, with a vibration of intense passion in his voice. 'No; I will not write to her. She is a woman who has studied Talleyrand; she would hang you if she had a single line from your pen. If I wrote, God knows what evil she would not twist out of it. She hates me and she hates my wife. It must be war to the knife.'
Greswold bowed and went out, asking no more.
Sabran passed the next three hours in a state of almost uncontrollable impatience.
It was the pleasant custom at Hohenszalras for everyone to have their first meal in their own apartments at any hour that they chose, but he and Wanda usually breakfasted together by choice in the little Saxe room, when the weather was cold. The cold without made the fire-glow dancing on the embroidered roses, and the gay Watteau panels, and the carpet of lamb-skins, and the coquettish Meissen shepherds and shepherdesses, seem all the warmer and more cheerful by contrast. Here he had been received on the first morning of his visit to Hohenszalras; here they had breakfasted in the early days after their marriage; here they had a thousand happy memories.
Into that room he could not go this morning. He sent his valet with a message to his wife, saying that he would remain in his own room, being fatigued from the sport of the previous day. When they brought him his breakfast he could not touch it. He drank a little strong coffee and a great glass of iced water; he could take nothing else. He paced up and down his own chambers in almost unendurable suspense. If he had been wholly innocent he would have been less agitated; but he could not pardon himself the mad imprudences and follies with which he had pandered to the vanities and provoked the passions of this hateful woman. If she refused to go he almost resolved to tell all as it had passed to his wife, not sparing himself. The three or four hours that went by after Greswold had left him appeared to him like whole, long, tedious days.
The men came as usual to him for his orders as to horses, sport, or other matters, but he could not attend to them; he hardly even heard what they said, and dismissed them impatiently. When at last the heavy, slow tread of the old physician sounded in the corridor, he went eagerly to his door, and himself admitted Greswold.
The Professor spread out his hands with a deprecating gesture.
'I have done my best. But may I never pass such a quarter of an hour again! She will not go.'
'She will not?' Sabran's face flushed darkly, his eyes kindled with deep wrath. 'She defies me, then?'