Towards four o’clock he heard some one knocking at his door, and a voice not unknown to him cried:
“Open, I beseech you!”
He was seized with an insupportable anguish; he felt like one paralyzed, and it was with great difficulty that he rose up in a sitting posture. He remembered that the bolt was drawn, and this reassured him. What was not his stupefied amazement to see the bolt glide back in its shaft! The door opened; some one entered, slowly approached Samuel, drew back the curtains of his bed, and bent towards him, fixing upon him great eager eyes that he recognised. They were singular eyes, these, at once full of sweetness and full of fire, of audacity and of candour; a child, a grand soul, an unbalanced weakling—all this in one was in this gaze.
Samuel Brohl quailed with horror. He tried to speak, but his tongue was powerless to move. He made desperate efforts to unloose it; he finally succeeded in moving his lips, and he murmured:
“Is it you, Abel? I believed you dead.”
Evidently Count Abel, the veritable Abel Larinski, was not dead. He was on his feet, his eyes were terribly wide open, and his face never had worn more life-like colouring. Nothing remained but to believe that he had been buried alive, and that he had been resuscitated. In coming forth from the tomb, he had carried with him a portion of its dust; his hair was covered with a singular powder of an earthy hue, and at intervals he shook himself as though to make it fall from him.
With the exception of this there was nothing alarming in his appearance; but a mocking, half-crafty smile played about his lips. After a long pause, he said to Samuel:
“Yes, it is indeed I. You did not expect me?”
“Are you sure that you are not dead?” rejoined Samuel.
“Perfectly sure,” he replied, once more shaking a mass of dust from his head. “Does my return incommode you, Samuel Brohl?” he added. “Your name is Samuel, I believe; it is a pretty name. Why have you taken mine? You must give it back to me.”