And Jozef resumes his reading—how Krimhelia approaches, cautiously, with the glittering dagger; how the Grey-Bearded Bandit, looking up, suddenly sees her standing behind him; how Krimhelia seizes him by the beard and drives the dagger into his heart; and how, at the same moment, the long grey beard comes off in her hand, and she looks with horror on the “pallid dying countenance” of Count Matatskai.
Now follows a dialogue between the dying bandit chief and the “almost fainting” Krimhelia, who is “filled with consternation”; in the course of which the tailor finally closes his eyes unobserved.
Now comes the closing scene; the other robbers come out from behind the fire, Krimhelia takes to flight, and climbs to the top of a steep dark rock on the edge of a “yawning abyss.”
As Jozef reads, he bends over his book, leans his head on his hands, and sees the whole thing taking place before his eyes. He sees Krimhelia standing on the top of the rock. The day is breaking in the east. The robbers are pursuing her, and begin to climb the rock....
Jozef reads on,—at a passionately accelerated pace, and with the most singular stops imaginable:—
“There she stood proudly—like a queen with her long, loose hair and her shining white face standing out sharply against the red sunrise-tinted sky with horror—she saw in the unfathomable depth at her feet the bandits approaching. Already the foremost was stretching out his hand to seize her and she saw, the morning-light falling on his horrible features when suddenly, her ear was struck by a sound of men’s voices singing beneath her in the valley she listens, it is the morning song of her brothers, she lifts her hands skywards and looks up to the paling moon and the stars ‘Ic-come’! she cries” (all in one word) “... and with a HOARSE shriek she flings herself down into the abyss at the same moment the Bandit Chief drew his last breath and the Count Matatskai was no more THE END.”
“That’s all!” said Jozef. “That’s fine, ain’t it? ... Oh! lor! ... they’re all asleep.”
Jozef cannot at once get over a slight feeling of indignation against an audience, capable of dropping-off “in the middle of a bit like that,”—but as it is not an isolated experience on his part, he soon makes up his mind to pay no further attention to it. He takes the lantern away, goes forward, and lies down on the deck with the oil-stained book under his head—looking up at the moon right above him, and beginning to see, in the air, all sorts of figures, which gradually acquire a likeness to Count Matatskai and the “young lady he thinks so much of.”
A. Werumeus Buning.