The Ghost Rider Read Online Free PDF Page B

sensed a sudden rift in the delicate relations between them. He had a mad desire to seize her by the shoulders and shout, “Why aren’t you telling me the truth?How could you have travelled for days and nights with a man you believed was your brother without ever looking at his face? Didn’t you want to see him again? To kiss him?”
    “How can that be?” he asked instead.
    “When he said that he was Kostandin and that he had come to get me I was so confused that a terrible dread seized me.”
    “You thought something bad had happened?”
    “Of course. The worst thing. Death.”
    “First that your mother was dead, then that it was one of your brothers?”
    “Yes, each of them in turn, including Kostandin.”
    “Is that why you asked him why he had mud in his hair and smelled of sodden earth?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    Poor woman, thought Stres. He imagined the horror she must have felt if she thought, even for an instant, that she was riding with a dead man. For it seemed she must have spent a good part of the journey haunted by just that fear.
    “There were times,” she went on, “when I drove the idea from my mind. I told myself that it really was my brother, and that he was alive. But …”
    She stopped.
    “But …” Stres repeated. “What were you going to say?”
    “Something stopped me from kissing him,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I don’t know what.”
    Stres stared at the curve of her eyelashes, which fell now to the ridge of her cheekbones.
    “I wanted so much to take him in my arms, yet I never had the courage, not even once.”
    “Not even once,” Stres repeated.
    “I feel such terrible remorse about that, especially now that I know he is no longer of this world.”
    Her voice was more animated now, her breathing more rapid.
    “If only I could make that journey again,” she sighed, “if only I could see him just once more!”
    She was absolutely convinced that she had travelled in the company of her dead brother. Stres wondered whether he ought to let her believe that or tell her his own suspicions.
    “So, you never saw his face,” he said. “Not even when you parted and he said, ‘Go on ahead, I have something to do at the church’?”
    “No, not even then,” she said. “It was very dark and I couldn’t see a thing. And throughout the journey I was always behind him.”
    “But didn’t you ever stop? Didn’t you stop to rest anywhere?”
    She shook her head.
    “I don’t remember.”
    Stres waited until she was once again looking him straight in the eyes.
    “But didn’t you wonder if he was hiding something from you?” Stres asked. “He didn’t want to set foot on the ground, even when he came to get you; he never so much as turned his head during the whole journey; and judging by what you’ve told me, he wanted to travel only by night. Wasn’t he hiding something?”
    “It did occur to me,” she replied. “But since he was dead, it was only natural for him to hide his face from me.”
    “Or maybe it wasn’t Kostandin,” he said suddenly.
    Doruntine looked at him a long while.
    “It amounts to the same thing,” she said calmly.
    “What do you mean, the same thing?”
    “If he was not alive, then it’s as if it wasn’t him.”
    “That’s not what I meant. Did it ever occur to you that this man may not have been your brother, alive or dead, but an impostor, a false Kostandin?”
    Doruntine gestured no.
    “Never,” she said.
    “Never?” Stres repeated. “Try to remember.”
    “I might think so now,” she said, “but that night I never had any such doubt, not for a moment.”
    “But now you might?”
    As she stared deeply into his eyes once more, he tried to decide just what the main ingredient in her expression was: grief, terror, doubt, or some painful longing. All these were present, but there was more; there was still room for something more, some unknown feeling, or seemingly unknowable, perhaps because it was a combination of all the