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!”