"Yes. I have watched them often. They are more real to me than actual people, because they are uglier. Beauty is a lie!"
A note of dreadful conviction crept into the hunchback's voice. Suvaroff looked at him intently, and said, quite simply:
"What a bitter truth you are, my friend!"
Minetti stared at Suvaroff, and he rose. "Perhaps I shall see you at your puppet show some evening," he said. And, without waiting for a reply, he left the room.
Suvaroff lay again all night upon his bed staring in a mute agony at the ceiling. Once or twice he fancied he heard the sounds of music from the next room. His heart leaped joyfully. But almost instantly his hopes sank back, like spent swimmers in a relentless sea. It seemed as if his brain were thirsting. He was in a pitiless desert of white-heated thought, and there was not a cloud of oblivion upon the horizon of his despair. Remembrance flamed like a molten sun, greedily withering every green, refreshing thing in its path. How long before this dreadful memory would consume him utterly?
"If I could only laugh!" he cried in his agony. "If I could only laugh!"
All next day Suvaroff was in a fever; not a physical fever, but a mental fever that burned with devastating insistence. He could not lie still upon his bed, so he rose and stumbled about the city's streets. But nothing diverted him. Before his eyes a sheet of fire burned, and a blinding light seemed to shut out everything else from his vision. Even his thoughts crackled like dry faggots in a flame.
"When evening comes," he said, "a breeze will spring up and I shall have some relief." But almost at once he thought: "A breeze will do no good. It will only make matters worse! I have heard that nothing puts out a fire so quickly as a shower. Let me see—It is now the middle of August.... It does not rain in this part of the world until October. Well, I must wait until October, then. No; a breeze at evening will do no good. I will go and watch the shadows again. Shadows are cool affairs if one sits in them, but how...."
And he began to wonder how he could contrive to sit in shadows that fell only on a wall.
How he got to the wine-shop he did not know, but at a late hour he found himself sitting at his accustomed seat. His bottle of brandy stood before him. To-night the shadows were blacker than ever, as if the fury of the flames within him were providing these dancing figures with a brighter background.