He turned, revealing an aching void where there had been a coat-tail.
“Tell me one thing before you hurry back to your native Hungary, you yearning Magyar,” said Köhler brutally. “Who was it kiss-kissed the people of Widinitz on to break the windows of the inn of ‘The Three Crowns,’ frighten Madame de Roux into hysterics, provoke Monsieur the Colonel into a display of determination, duck both of us in one of the public fountains, and toss me in a horse-blanket? For all his mealy mouth, I say the Archbishop!”
Von Steyregg said, rolling a bloodshot eye in rapture:
“Undoubtedly, the Archbishop! Assuredly, the Archbishop!” He heaved an elephantine sigh. “With a confederate like that priest to back me, I could break the bank of every gambling-hell in Europe. What a waste that he should be an honest man! Au revoir, dear friend! You shall visit me at my baronial castle in beloved Hungary, as sure as I am a Magyar of the pure blood!”
“Farewell for ever, old comrade!” said Köhler, with emotion, as he hailed a passing cab.
LX
That wild night-ride through the beech-forest back to Widinitz, and the interview with his mother at the Convent of the Carmelites, was ever to Dunoisse the most unreal, the most strange of all those adventures that seemed as though woven upon the loom of Sleep.
He remembered his lost mother as so tall—yet, when the dark woolen curtains hanging behind the double grating that halved the Convent parlor had been drawn back, revealing the two brown-robed, black-veiled figures—the shape that had put its veil aside with a little, shrunken hand, and called him by his name—had appeared to be barely above the stature of a child.
Not in the haggard, ashen-gray face, closely framed in the conventual folds of white linen—its features pinched and drawn, its eyes almost extinguished as though with constant weeping—was there anything left that recalled in the remotest degree the lovely, beloved mother of the old, unforgotten days....
Only the voice, so soaked with tears, so changed from that of her son’s remembrance, retained tones that well-nigh wrought Dunoisse to a wild outbreak of weeping, though sometimes in the dim and sunken eyes there shone a transient ray of the dear light of old.