really stupefied by this boldness, which constantly grew more bold.
“What! you think that we, who are so dear to you, your friends, I, your—”
Her husband’s implacable look forced her to stop, and the words expired on her lips.
“Enough of these lies, Bertha,” resumed Sauvresy, “they are useless. No, I have not been dreaming, nor have I been delirious. The poison is only too real, and I could tell you what it is without your taking it out of your pocket.”
She recoiled as if she had seen her husband’s hand stretched out to snatch the blue vial.
“I guessed it and recognized it at the very first; for you have chosen one of those poisons which, it is true, leave scarcely any trace of themselves, but the symptoms of which are not deceptive. Do you remember the day when I complained of a morbid taste for pepper? The next day I was certain of it, and I was not the only one. Doctor R——, too, had a suspicion.”
Bertha tried to stammer something; her husband interrupted her.
“People ought to try their poisons,” pursued he, in an ironical tone, “before they use them. Didn’t you understand yours, or what its effects were? Why, your poison gives intolerable neuralgia, sleeplessness, and you saw me without surprise, sleeping soundly all night long! I complained of a devouring fire within me, while your poison freezes the blood and the entrails, and yet you are not astonished. You see all the symptoms change and disappear, and that does not enlighten you. You are fools, then. Now see what I had to do to divert Doctor R——’s suspicions. I hid the real pains which your poison caused, and complained of imaginary, ridiculous ones. I described sensations just the opposite of those which I felt. You were lost, then—and I saved you.”
Bertha’s malignant energy staggered beneath so many successive blows. She wondered whether she were not going mad; had she heard aright? Was it really true that her husband had perceived that he was being poisoned, and yet said nothing; nay, that he had even deceived the doctor? Why? What was his purpose?
Sauvresy paused several minutes, and then went on:
“I have held my tongue and so saved you, because the sacrifice of my life had already been made. Yes, I had been fatally wounded in the heart on the day that I learned that you were faithless to me.”
He spoke of his death without apparent emotion; but at the words, “You were faithless to me,” his voice faltered and trembled.
“I would not, could not believe it at first. I doubted the evidence of my senses, rather than doubt you. But I was forced to believe at last. I was no longer anything in my house but a laughing-stock. But I was in your way. You and your lover needed more room and liberty. You were tired of constraint and hypocrisy. Then it was that, believing that my death would make you free and rich, you brought in poison to rid yourselves of me.”
Bertha had at least the heroism of crime. All was discovered; well, she threw down the mask. She tried to defend her accomplice, who lay unconscious in a chair.
“It is I that have done it all,” cried she. “He is innocent.”
Sauvresy turned pale with rage.
“Ah, really,” said he, “my friend Hector is innocent! It wasn’t he, then, who, to pay me up—not for his life, for he was too cowardly to kill himself; but for his honor, which he owes to me—took my wife from me? Wretch! I hold out my hand to him when he is drowning, I welcome him like a brother, and in return, he desolates my hearth! . . . And you knew what you were doing, my friend Hector —for I told you a hundred times that my wife was my all here below, my present and my future, my dream and happiness and hope and very life! You knew that for me to lose her was to die. But if you had loved her—no, it was not that you loved her; you hated me. Envy devoured you, and you could not tell me to my face, ’You are too happy.’ Then, like a coward, you dishonored me in the dark. Bertha was only the instrument of your rancor; and she weighs upon you to-day—you despise and fear her. My friend, Hector, you have been in this house the vile lackey who thinks to avenge his baseness by spitting upon the meats which he puts on his master’s table!”
The count only responded by a shudder. The dying man’s terrible words fell more cruelly on his conscience than blows upon his cheek.
“See, Bertha,” continued Sauvresy, “that’s the man whom you have preferred to me, and for whom you have betrayed me. You never loved me—I see it now—your heart was never Mine. And I—I loved you so! From the day I first saw you, you were my only thought; as if your heart had beaten in place of Mine. Everything about you was dear and precious to me; I adored your whims, caprices, even your faults. There was nothing I would not do for a smile from you, so that you would say to me, Thank you, between two kisses. You don’t know that for years after our marriage it was my delight to wake up first so as to gaze upon you as you lay asleep, to admire and touch your lovely hair, lying dishevelled across the pillow. Bertha!”
He softened at the remembrance of these past joys, which would not come again. He forgot their presence, the infamous treachery, the poison; that he was about to die, murdered by this beloved wife; and his eyes filled with tears, his voice choked.
Bertha, more motionless and pallid than marble, listened to him breathlessly.
“It is true, then,” continued the sick man, “that these lovely eyes conceal a soul of filth! Ah, who would not have been deceived, as I was? Bertha, what did you dream of when you were sleeping in my arms? Tremorel came, and you thought you saw in him the ideal of your dreams. You admired the precocious wrinkles which betrayed an exhausted life, like the fatal seal which marks the fallen archangel’s forehead. Your love, without thought of mine, rushed toward him, though he did not think of you. You went to evil as if it were your nature. And yet I thought you more immaculate than the Alpine snows. You did not even have a struggle with yourself; you betrayed no confusion which would reveal your first fault to me. You brought me your forehead soiled with his kisses without blushing.”
Weariness overcame his energies; his voice became little by little feebler and less distinct.
“You had your happiness in your hands, Bertha, and you carelessly destroyed it, as the child breaks the toy of whose value he is ignorant. What did you expect from this wretch for whom you had the frightful courage to kill me, with a kiss upon your lips, slowly, hour by hour? You thought you loved him, but disgust ought to have come at last. Look at him, and judge between us. See which is the—man—I, extended on this bed where I shall soon die, or he shivering there in a corner. You have the energy of crime, but he has only the baseness of it. Ah, if my name was Hector de Tremorel, and a man had spoken as I have just done, that man should live no longer, even if he had ten revolvers like this I am holding to defend himself with!”
Hector, thus taunted, tried to get up and reply; but his legs would not support him, and his throat only gave hoarse, unintelligible sounds. Bertha, as she looked at the two men, recognized her error with rage and indignation. Her husband, at this moment, seemed to her sublime; his eyes gleamed, his face was radiant; while the other —the other! She felt sick with disgust when she but glanced toward him.
Thus all these deceptive chimeras after which she had run, love, passion, poetry, were already hers; she had held them in her hands and she had not been able to perceive it. But what was Sauvresy’s purpose?
He continued, painfully:
“This then, is our situation; you have killed me, you are going to be free, yet you hate and despise each other—”
He
