Just as I reached the gravel-walk, I felt an arm slipped within mine, and a light hand gently pressing my wrist.  In the same instant a strange intoxicating numbness passed over me, like the continuance or climax of the sensation I was still feeling from the gaze of Lucrezia Borgia.  The gardens, the summer sky, the consciousness of Bertha’s arm being within mine, all vanished, and I seemed to be suddenly in darkness, out of which there gradually broke a dim firelight, and I felt myself sitting in my father’s leather chair in the library at home.  I knew the fireplace—­the dogs for the wood-fire—­the black marble chimney-piece with the white marble medallion of the dying Cleopatra in the centre.  Intense and hopeless misery was pressing on my soul; the light became stronger, for Bertha was entering with a candle in her hand—­Bertha, my wife—­with cruel eyes, with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress; every hateful thought within her present to me . . .  “Madman, idiot! why don’t you kill yourself, then?” It was a moment of hell.  I saw into her pitiless soul—­saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate—­and felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe.  She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes.  I shuddered—­I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away.  She was my wife, and we hated each other.  Gradually the hearth, the dim library, the candle-light disappeared—­seemed to melt away into a background of light, the green serpent with the diamond eyes remaining a dark image on the retina.  Then I had a sense of my eyelids quivering, and the living daylight broke in upon me; I saw gardens, and heard voices; I was seated on the steps of the Belvedere Terrace, and my friends were round me.

The tumult of mind into which I was thrown by this hideous vision made me ill for several days, and prolonged our stay at Vienna.  I shuddered with horror as the scene recurred to me; and it recurred constantly, with all its minutiae, as if they had been burnt into my memory; and yet, such is the madness of the human heart under the influence of its immediate desires, I felt a wild hell-braving joy that Bertha was to be mine; for the fulfilment of my former prevision concerning her first appearance before me, left me little hope that this last hideous glimpse of the future was the mere diseased play of my own mind, and had no relation to external realities.  One thing alone I looked towards as a possible means of casting doubt on my terrible conviction—­the discovery that my vision of Prague had been false—­and Prague was the next city on our route.