Chapter 17

"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 affairs in order, and their wishes fully written down, in case of accident. What difference did it make whether one were ill or well? At these words Bertha attempted to stop him. Such ideas, she said, pained her too much. She even shed real tears, which fell down her cheeks and made her more beautiful and irresistible than before; real tears which moistened her handkerchief.

"You dear silly creature," said Sauvresy, "do you think that makes one die?"

"No; but I do not wish it."

"But, dear, have we been any the less happy because, on the day after our marriage, I made a will bequeathing you all my fortune? And, stop; you have a copy of it, haven't you? If you were kind, you would go and fetch it for me."

She became very red, then very pale. Why did he ask for this copy? Did he want to tear it up? A sudden thought reassured her; people do not tear up a document which can be cancelled by a scratch of the pen on another sheet of paper. Still, she hesitated a moment.

"I don't know where it can be."

"But I do. It is in the left-hand drawer of the glass cupboard; come, please me by getting it."

While she was gone, Sauvresy said to Hector:

"Poor girl! Poor dear Bertha! If I died, she never would survive me!"

Tremorel thought of nothing to reply; his anxiety was intense and visible.

"And this man," thought he, "suspects something! No; it is not possible."

Bertha returned.

"I have found it," said she.

"Give it to me."

He took the copy of his will, and read it with evident satisfaction, nodding his head at certain passages in which he referred to his love for his wife. When he had finished reading, he said:

"Now give me a pen and some ink."

Hector and Bertha reminded him that it would fatigue him to write; but he insisted. The two guilty ones, seated at the foot of the bed and out of Sauvresy's sight, exchanged looks of alarm. What was he going to write? But he speedily finished it.

"Take this," said he to Tremorel, "and read aloud what I have just added."

Hector complied with his friend's request, with trembling voice:

"This day, being sound in mind, though much suffering, I declare that I do not wish to change a line of this will. Never have I loved my wife more--never have I so much desired to leave her the heiress of all I possess, should I die before her.

"CLEMENT SAUVRESY."

Mistress of herself as Bertha was, she succeeded in concealing the unspeakable satisfaction with which she was filled. All her wishes were accomplished, and yet she was able to veil her delight under an apparent sadness.

"Of what good is this?" said she, with a sigh.

She said this, but half an hour afterward, when she was alone with Hector, she gave herself up to the extravagance of her delight.

"Nothing more to fear," exclaimed she. "Nothing! Now we shall have liberty, fortune, love, pleasure, life! Why, Hector, we shall have at least three millions; you see, I've got this will myself, and I shall keep it. No more agents or notaries shall be admitted into this house henceforth. Now I must hasten!"

The count certainly felt a satisfaction in knowing her to be rich, for he could much more easily get rid of a millionnaire widow than of a poor penniless woman. Sauvresy's conduct thus calmed many sharp anxieties. Her restless gayety, however, her confident security, seemed monstrous to Hector. He would have wished for more solemnity in the execution of the crime; he thought that he ought at least to calm Bertha's delirium.

"You will think more than once of Sauvresy," said he, in a graver tone.

She answered with a "prrr," and added vivaciously:

"Of him? when and why? Oh, his memory will not weigh on me very heavily. I trust that we shall be able to live still at Valfeuillu, for the place pleases me; but we must also have a house at Paris--or we will buy yours back again. What happiness, Hector!"

The mere prospect of this anticipated felicity so shocked Hector, that his better self for the moment got the mastery; he essayed to move Bertha.

"For the last time," said he, "I implore you to renounce this terrible, dangerous project. You see that you were mistaken--that Sauvresy suspects nothing, but loves you as well as ever."

The expression of Bertha's face suddenly changed; she sat quite still, in a pensive revery.

"Don't let's talk any more of that," said she, at last. "Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps he only had doubts--perhaps, although he has discovered something, he hopes to win me back by his goodness. But you see--"

She stopped. Doubtless she did not wish to alarm him.

He was already much alarmed. The next day he went off to Melun without a word; being unable to bear the sight of this agony, and fearing to betray himself. But he left his address, and when she sent word that Sauvresy was always crying out for him, he hastily returned. Her letter was most imprudent and absurd, and made his hair stand on end. He had intended, on his arrival, to reproach her; but it was she who upbraided him.

"Why this flight?"

"I could not stay here--I suffered, trembled, felt as if I were dying."

"What a coward you are!"

He would have replied, but she put her finger on his mouth, and pointed with her other hand to the door of the next room.

"Sh! Three doctors have been in consultation there for the past hour, and I haven't been able to hear a word of what they said. Who knows what they are about? I shall not be easy till they go away."

Bertha's fears were not without foundation. When Sauvresy had his last relapse, and complained of a severe neuralgia in the face and an irresistible craving for pepper, Dr. R--- had uttered a significant exclamation. It was nothing, perhaps--yet Bertha had heard it, and she thought she surprised a sudden suspicion on the doctor's part; and this now disturbed her, for she thought that it might be the subject of the consultation. The suspicion, however, if there had ever been any, quickly vanished. The symptoms entirely changed twelve hours later, and the next day the sick man felt pains quite the opposite of those which had previously distressed him. This very inconstancy of the distemper served to puzzle the doctor's conclusions. Sauvresy, in these latter days, had scarcely suffered at all, he said, and had slept well at night; but he had, at times, strange and often distressing sensations. He was evidently failing hourly; he was dying--everyone perceived it. And now Dr. R--- asked for a consultation, the result of which had not been reached when Tremorel returned.

The drawing-room door at last swung open, and the calm faces of the physicians reassured the poisoner. Their conclusions were that the case was hopeless; everything had been tried and exhausted; no human resources had been neglected; the only hope was in Sauvresy's strong constitution.

Bertha, colder than marble, motionless, her eyes full of tears, seemed so full of grief on hearing this cruel decision, that all the doctors were touched.

"Is there no hope then? Oh, my God!" cried she, in agonizing tones.

Dr. R--- hardly dared to attempt to comfort her; he answered her questions evasively.

"We must never despair," said he, "when the invalid is of Sauvresy's age and constitution; nature often works miracles when least expected."

The doctor, however, lost no time in taking Hector apart and begging him to prepare the poor, devoted, loving young lady for the terrible blow about to ensue.

"For you see," added he, "I don't think Monsieur Sauvresy can live more than two days!"

Bertha, with her ear at the keyhole, had heard the doctor's prediction; and when Hector returned from conducting the physician to the door, he found her radiant. She rushed into his arms.

"Now" cried she, "the future truly belongs to us. Only one black point obscured our horizon, and it has cleared away. It is for me to realize Doctor R--- 's prediction." They dined together, as usual, in the dining-room, while one of the chambermaids remained beside the sick-bed. Bertha was full of spirits which she could scarcely control. The certainty of success and safety, the assurance of reaching the end, made her imprudently gay. She spoke aloud, even in the presence of the servants, of her approaching liberty. During the evening she was more reckless than ever. If any of the servants should have a suspicion, or a shadow of one she might be discovered and lost. Hector constantly nudged her under the table and frowned at her, to keep her quiet; he felt his blood run cold at her conduct; all in vain. There are times when the armor of hypocrisy becomes so burdensome that one is forced, cost what it may, to throw it off if only for an instant.

While Hector was smoking his cigar, Bertha was more freely pursuing her dream. She was thinking that she could spend the period of her mourning at Valfeuillu, and Hector, for the sake of appearances, would hire a pretty little house somewhere in the suburbs. The worst of it all was that she would be forced to seem to mourn for Sauvresy, as she had pretended to love him during his lifetime. But at last a day would come when, without scandal, she might throw off her mourning clothes, and then they would get married. Where? At Paris or Orcival?

Hector's thoughts ran in the same channel. He, too, wished to see his friend under the ground to end his own terrors, and to submit to Bertha's terrible yoke.

XX

Time passed. Hector and Bertha repaired to Sauvresy's room; he was asleep. They noiselessly took chairs beside the fire, as usual, and the maid retired. In order that the sick man might not be disturbed by the light of the lamp, curtains had been hung so that, when lying down, he could not see the fireplace and mantel. In order to see these, he must have raised himself on his pillow and leaned forward on his right arm. But now he was asleep, breathing painfully, feverish, and shuddering convulsively. Bertha and Hector did not speak; the solemn and sinister silence was only broken by the ticking of the clock, or by the leaves of the book which Hector was reading. Ten o'clock struck; soon after Sauvresy moved, turned over, and awoke. Bertha was at his side in an instant; she saw that his eyes were open.

"Do you feel a little better, dear Clement?" she asked.

"Neither better nor worse."

"Do you want anything?"

"I am thirsty."

Hector, who had raised his eyes when his friend spoke, suddenly resumed his reading.

Bertha, standing by the mantel, began to prepare with great care Dr. R--- 's last prescription; when it was ready, she took out the fatal little vial as usual, and thrust one of her hair-pins into it.

She had not time to draw it out before she felt a light touch upon her shoulder. A shudder shook her from head to foot; she suddenly turned and uttered a loud scream, a cry of terror and horror.

"Oh!"

The hand which had touched her was her husband's. While she was busied with the poison at the mantel, Sauvresy had softly raised himself; more softly still, he had pulled the curtain aside, and had stretched out his arm and touched her. His eyes glittered with hate and anger.

Bertha's cry was answered by another dull cry, or rather groan; Tremorel had seen and comprehended all; he was overwhelmed.

"All is discovered!" Their eyes spoke these three words to each other. They saw them everywhere, written in letters of fire. There was a moment of stupor, of silence so profound that Hector heard his temples beat. Sauvresy had got back under the bed-clothes again. He laughed loudly, wildly, just as a skeleton might have laughed whose jaws and teeth rattled together.

But Bertha was not one of those persons who are overcome by a single blow, terrible as it might be. She trembled like a leaf; her legs staggered; but her mind was already at work seeking a subterfuge. What had Sauvresy seen--anything? What did he know? For even had he seen the vial, this might be explained. It could only have been by simple chance that he had touched her at the moment when she was using the poison. All these thoughts flashed across her mind in a moment, as rapid as lightning shooting between the clouds. And then she dared to approach the bed, and, with a frightfully constrained smile, to say:

"How you frightened me then!"

He looked at her a moment, which seemed to her an age--and simply replied:

"I understand it."

There was no longer any uncertainty. Bertha saw only too well in her husband's eyes that he knew something. But what--how much? She nerved herself to go on:

"Are you still suffering?"

"No."

"Then why did you get up?"

He raised himself upon his pillow, and with a sudden strength, he continued:

"I got up to tell you that I have had enough of these tortures, that I have reached the limits of human energy, that I cannot endure one day longer the agony of seeing myself put to death slowly, drop by drop, by the hands of my wife and my best friend!"

He stopped. Hector and Bertha were thunderstruck. "I wanted to tell you also, that I have had enough of your cruel caution, and that I suffer. Ah, don't you see that I suffer horribly? Hurry, cut short my agony! Kill me, and kill me at a blow--poisoners!"

At the last word, the Count de Tremorel sprang up as if he had moved by a spring, his eyes haggard, his arms stretched out. Sauvresy, seeing this, quickly slipped his hand under the pillow, pulled out a revolver, and pointed the barrel at Hector, crying out:

"Don't advance a step!"

He thought that Tremorel, seeing that they were discovered, was going to rush upon him and strangle him; but he was mistaken. It seemed to Hector as though he were losing his mind. He fell down as heavily as if he were a log. Bertha was more self-possessed; she tried to resist the torpor of terror which she felt coming on.

"You are worse, my Clement," said she. "This is that dreadful fever which frightens me so. Delirium--"

"Have I really been delirious?" interrupted he, with a surprised air.

"Alas, yes, dear, that is what haunts you, and fills your poor sick head with horrid visions."

He looked at her curiously. He was 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 stopped, and seemed to be suffocating; he tried to raise himself on his pillow and to sit up in bed, but found himself too feeble.

"Bertha," said he, "help me get up."

She leaned over the bed, and taking her husband in her arms, succeeded in placing him as he wished. He appeared more at ease in his new position, and took two or three long breaths.

"Now," he said, "I should like something to drink. The doctor lets me take a little old wine, if I have a fancy for it; give me some."

She hastened to bring him a glass of wine, which he emptied and handed back to her.

"There wasn't any poison in it, was there?" he asked.

This ghastly question and the smile which accompanied it, melted Bertha's callousness; remorse had already taken possession of her, as her disgust of Tremorel increased.

"Poison?" she cried, eagerly, "never!"

"You must give me some, though, presently, so as to help me to die."