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