and said to you that my husband suspected something? You shrugged your shoulders. Do you forget the steps in the vestibule the night I went to your room? He had been spying on us. Well, do you want a more certain proof? Look at this letter, which I found, crumpled up and wet, in one of his vest pockets.”
She showed him the letter which Sauvresy had forcibly taken from Jenny, and he recognized it well.
“It is a fatality,” said he, overwhelmed. “But we can separate and break off with each other. Bertha, I can go away.”
“It’s too late. Believe me, Hector, we are to-day defending our lives. Ah, you don’t know Clement! You don’t know what the fury of a man like him can be, when he sees that his confidence has been outrageously abused, and his trust vilely betrayed. If he has said nothing to me, and has not let us see any traces of his implacable anger, it is because he is meditating some frightful vengeance.”
This was only too probable, and Hector saw it clearly.
“What shall we do?” he asked, in a hoarse voice; he was almost speechless.
“Find out what change he has made in his will.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know yet. I came to ask your advice, and I find you more cowardly than a woman. Let me act, then; don’t do anything yourself; I will do all.”
He essayed an objection.
“Enough,” said she. “He must not ruin us after all—I will see —I will think.”
Someone below called her. She went down, leaving Hector overcome with despair.
That evening, during which Bertha seemed happy and smiling, his face finally betrayed so distinctly the traces of his anguish, that Sauvresy tenderly asked him if he were not ill?
“You exhaust yourself tending on me, my good Hector,” said he. “How can I ever repay your devotion?”
Tremorel had not the strength to reply.
“And that man knows all,” thought he. “What courage! What fate can he be reserving for us?”
The scene which was passing before Hector’s eyes made his flesh creep. Every time that Bertha gave her husband his medicine, she took a hair-pin from her tresses, and plunged it into the little vial which she had shown him, taking up thus some small, white grains, which she dissolved in the potions prescribed by the doctor.
It might be supposed that Tremorel, enslaved by his horrid position, and harassed by increasing terror, would renounce forever his proposed marriage with Laurence. Not so. He clung to that project more desperately than ever. Bertha’s threats, the great obstacles now intervening, his anguish, crime, only augmented the violence of his love for her, and fed the flame of his ambition to secure her as his wife. A small and flickering ray of hope which lighted the darkness of his despair, consoled and revived him, and made the present more easy to bear. He said to himself that Bertha could not be thinking of marrying him the day after her husband’s death. Months, a whole year must pass, and thus he would gain time; then some day he would declare his will. What would she have to say? Would she divulge the crime, and try to hold him as her accomplice? Who would believe her? How could she prove that he, who loved and had married another woman, had any interest in Sauvresy’s death? People don’t kill their friends for the mere pleasure of it. Would she provoke the law to exhume her husband? She was now in a position, thought he, wherein she could, or would not exercise her reason. Later on, she would reflect, and then she would be arrested by the probability of those dangers, the certainty of which did not now terrify her.
He did not wish that she should ever be his wife at any price. He would have detested her had she possessed millions; he hated her now that she was poor, ruined, reduced to her own narrow means. And that she was so, there was no doubt, Sauvresy indeed knew all. He was content to wait; he knew that Laurence loved him enough to wait for him one, or three years, if necessary. He already had such absolute power over her, that she did not try to combat the thoughts of him, which gently forced themselves on her, penetrated to her soul, and filled her mind and heart. Hector said to himself that in the interest of his designs, perhaps it was well that Bertha was acting as she did. He forced himself to stifle his conscience in trying to prove that he was not guilty. Who thought of this crime? Bertha. Who was executing it? She alone. He could only be reproached with moral complicity in it, a complicity involuntary, forced upon him, imposed somehow by the care for his own life. Sometimes, however, a bitter remorse seized him. He could have understood a sudden, violent, rapid murder; could have explained to himself a knife-stroke; but this slow death, given drop by drop, horribly sweetened by tenderness, veiled under kisses, appeared to him unspeakably hideous. He was mortally afraid of Bertha, as of a reptile, and when she embraced him he shuddered from head to foot.
She was so calm, so engaging, so natural; her voice had the same soft and caressing tones, that he could not forget it. She plunged her hair-pin into the fatal vial without ceasing her conversation, and he did not surprise her in any shrinking or shuddering, nor even a trembling of the eyelids. She must have been made of brass. Yet he thought that she was not cautious enough; and that she put herself in danger of discovery; and he told her of these fears, and how she made him tremble every moment.
“Have confidence in me,” she answered. “I want to succeed—I am prudent.”
“But you may be suspected.”
“By whom?”
“Eh! How do I know? Everyone—the servants, the doctor.”
“No danger. And suppose they did suspect?”
“They would make examinations, Bertha; they would make a minute scrutiny.”
She gave a smile of the most perfect security.
“They might examine and experiment as much as they pleased, they would find nothing. Do you think I am such a fool as to use arsenic?”
“For Heaven’s sake, hush!”
“I have procured one of those poisons which are as yet unknown, and which defy all analysis; one of which many doctors—and learned ones, too—could not even tell the symptoms!”
“But where did you get this—this—”
He dared not say, “poison.”
“Who gave you that?” resumed he.
“What matters it? I have taken care that he who gave it to me should run the same danger as myself, and he knows it. There’s nothing to fear from that quarter. I’ve paid him enough to smother all his regrets.”
An objection came to his lips; he wanted to say, “It’s too slow;” but he had not the courage, though she read his thought in his eyes.
“It is slow, because that suits me,” said she. “Before all, I must know about the will—and that I am trying to find out.”
She occupied herself constantly about this will, and during the long hours that she passed at Sauvresy’s bedside, she gradually, with the greatest craft and delicacy, led her husband’s mind in the direction of his last testament, with such success that he himself mentioned the subject which so absorbed Bertha.
He said that he did not comprehend why people did not always have their worldly
