Pierre had retired step by step as far as the fire-place, his mouth half open, his eyes glaring, a prey to one of those mad fits of passion in which a crime is committed.

He said again in a lower tone, gasping for breath:  “Hold your tongue—­for God’s sake hold your tongue!”

“No!  For a long time I have been wanting to give you my whole mind!  You have given me an opening—­so much the worse for you.  I love the woman; you know it, and laugh her to scorn in my presence—­so much the worse for you.  But I will break your viper’s fangs, I tell you.  I will make you treat me with respect.”

“With respect—­you?”

“Yes—­me.”

“Respect you?  You who have brought shame on us all by your greed.”

“You say—?  Say it again—­again.”

“I say that it does not do to accept one man’s fortune when another is reputed to be your father.”

Jean stood rigid, not understanding, dazed by the insinuation he scented.

“What?  Repeat that once more.”

“I say—­what everybody is muttering, what every gossip is blabbing—­that you are the son of the man who left you his fortune.  Well, then—­a decent man does not take the money which brings dishonour on his mother.”

“Pierre!  Pierre!  Pierre!  Think what you are saying.  You?  Is it you who give utterance to this infamous thing?”

“Yes, I. It is I. Have you not seen me crushed with woe this month past, spending my nights without sleep and my days in lurking out of sight like an animal?  I hardly know what I am doing or what will become of me, so miserable am I, so crazed with shame and grief; for first I guessed—­and now I know it.”

“Pierre!  Be silent.  Mother is in the next room.  Remember she may hear—­she must hear.”

But Pierre felt that he must unburden his heart.  He told Jean all his suspicions, his arguments, his struggles, his assurance, and the history of the portrait—­which had again disappeared.  He spoke in short broken sentences almost without coherence—­the language of a sleep-walker.

He seemed to have quite forgotten Jean, and his mother in the adjoining room.  He talked as if no one were listening, because he must talk, because he had suffered too much and smothered and closed the wound too tightly.  It had festered like an abscess and the abscess had burst, splashing every one.  He was pacing the room in the way he almost always did, his eyes fixed on vacancy, gesticulating in a frenzy of despair, his voice choked with tearless sobs and revulsions of self-loathing; he spoke as if he were making a confession of his own misery and that of his nearest kin, as though he were casting his woes to the deaf, invisible winds which bore away his words.

Jean, distracted and almost convinced on a sudden by his brother’s blind vehemence, was leaning against the door behind which, as he guessed, their mother had heard them.

She could not get out, she must come through his room.  She had not come; then it was because she dare not.