'I dare not,' he answered, 'I dare not. If she die, it is I who shall have killed her.'
Greswold did not venture to ask what had happened; he knew it must be some disaster of which the Countess Brancka was the origin or the messenger.
'My lady has spoken a few words,' he said later to his master. 'She bade me tell you to send for Prince Vàsàrhely. She said he would betray no one. I could ask nothing, for her agony returned.'
Sabran was silent; the thought came to him for the first time that it might be possible Olga Brancka had used the name of her brother-in-law falsely.
'Send for him yourself,' he said wearily; 'What she wishes must be done. Nothing matters to me.'
'I think the Prince is in Vienna,' said Greswold; and he sent an urgent message thither, entreating Vàsàrhely's immediate presence at Hohenszalras, in the name of his cousin.
Olga Brancka remained in her own apartments, uncertain what to do.
'If Wanda die,' she thought, 'it will all have been of no use; he will be neither divorced nor disgraced. Perhaps one might plead the marriage invalid, and disinherit the children; but one would want so much proof, and I have none. If he had not been so stunned and taken off his guard, he might easily have defied me. Egon may know more, but if Wanda dies he will not move. He would care for nothing on earth. He will forget the children were Sabran's. He will only remember they were hers!'
No one who loved her could have been more anxious for Wanda von Szalras to live than was this cruellest of her enemies, who passed the time in a perpetual agitation, and, as her women brought her tidings from hour to hour, testified so much genuine alternation of hope and terror, that they were amazed to see so much feeling in one so indifferent usually to all woes not her own. She was miserably dull; she had no one to speak to; she had no lover, friend, rival, or foe to give her the stimulant to life that was indispensable to her. Even she did not dare to approach the man whose happiness she had ruined, any more than she would have dared to touch a lion wounded to the death. Yet she could not tear herself away from the scene of her vengeance.
The whole house was hushed like a grave; the servants were full of grief at the danger of a mistress they adored; even the young children, understanding that their mother was in peril, did not play or laugh; but sat unhappy and silent over their books, or wandered aimlessly along the leafless gardens. They knew that there was something terrible, though they knew not what.