he
were a tense string responding to a touch. The week spent at Altara, the
subsequent five days at Vaza, the drives in the environs had tired him
out. During the day he could not find a moment's time to yield to this
fatigue, but at night, as he lay stretched for rest, it shattered him,
without being followed by a healthy sleep.

He was used to his little camp-bed, on which he slept in his austere
bedroom at the Imperial, the bed on which he had slept since childhood.
The state-beds, at the Episcopal, at Vaza and now here, made him feel
strange, laid-out and uncomfortable. His eyes again remained open,
following the folds of the tall curtains, seeking to penetrate the
shadows which the faint light of a silver lamp drove creeping into the
corners. He began to hear a loud buzzing in his ears.

And he thought it curious to be lying here on this bed on which his
ancestors had already lain before him. They all peered at him from the
eight panels in the walls. What was he? An atom of life, a little stuff
of sovereignty, born of them all; one of the last links of their long
chain, which wound through the ages and led back to that mysterious,
mystical origin, half-sacred, half-legendary, to St. Ladislas
himself.... Would that same thing come after him also, a second chain
which would wind into the future? Or...? And to what purpose was the
ever-returning, endless, eternal renascence of life? What would be the
end, the great end?...

Suddenly, like a vision, the night on the Therezia Square recurred to
his mind, the thundering salute from the fort, thrice repeated, and the
mighty, roaring onslaught of an approaching blackness, resembling a sea.
Was it only a humming in his ears, or ... or was it really roaring on
again? Did the black future come roaring on, in reply to his question as
to the end, the great end, with the same sound of threatening waters
which nothing could withstand? It burst through dykes; it dragged with
it all that was thrown up as a protection, inexorable, and--with its
grim, black, fateful frown and the sombre pleats of its inundations,
which resembled a shroud trailing over everything that was doomed--it
marched to where they stood, his kin, on their high station of majesty
by the grace of God and of St. Ladislas; to where his father sat, on
their age-old throne, crowned and sceptred and bearing the orb of empire
in his imperial palm; and it did not seem to know that they were divine
and sacred and inv