Edmund himself took the matter most lightly. He laughed and joked with his mother about her anxiety until it yielded beneath his cheery influence, protested strongly against being treated as a disabled man, and was with difficulty prevailed on to listen to the doctor, who prescribed absolute rest and quiet.
Evening closed in. Oswald was alone in his own room, which he had not left since his great discovery of the morning. The lamp burning on the table threw but a partial light over the apartment, which was large and rather sombre at night, with its heavy leather hangings and deep bay-window. The furniture was massive and good, as in every room throughout the house, but it had not been renewed for years, and was in strong contrast to the bright and handsome appointments of the main building, and especially of that part of it dedicated to the young Count's use. The nephew, the offshoot of a younger branch, had been banished to a distant wing. In this, as in all else, his inferiority to the heir must be well marked; he must stand back, yielding the precedence to the master of the house.
So the Countess had ordered it, and the temper of Oswald's mind was such that under no circumstances could he have brought himself to seek aid or protection from Edmund, or to complain to him of the constant mortifications to which he was subjected.
The side-table was strewn with letters and papers which Oswald had intended to set in order before leaving. Now he gave them not a thought. With restless steps he paced to and fro in the room, the excessive pallor of his countenance and his heaving breast telling of the terrible agitation that reigned within him. The dim tormenting doubt which had beset his soul for years, the vague presentiment which he had driven from him only by the full exercise of his powerful will, now stood revealed as truth. Though the actual course events had taken and the story of that portrait were as yet unknown to him, the always-recurring suspicions had resolved themselves into a certainty, calling up within him a perfect storm of contradictory emotions.
Oswald paused before the writing-table, and again took up the fatal portrait which lay there among the papers.