“Very good,” said Charles, dismissing the doctor with no sign of emotion.

That evening the duchess took a medicine ordered by the doctor; and when, half an hour later, she was assailed with violent pains, the duke was warned that perhaps other physicians ought to be consulted, as the prescription of the ordinary doctor, instead of bringing about an improvement in her state, had only made her worse.

Charles slowly went up to the duchess’s room, and sending away all the people who were standing round her bed, on the pretext that they were clumsy and made his mother worse, he shut the door, and they were alone.  Then poor Agnes, forgetting her internal agony when she saw her son, pressed his hand tenderly and smiled through her tears.

Charles, pale beneath his bronzed complexion, his forehead moist with a cold sweat, and his eyes horribly dilated, bent over the sick woman and asked her gloomily—­

“Are you a little better, mother?”

“Ah, I am in pain, in frightful pain, my poor Charles.  I feel as though I have molten lead in my veins.  O my son, call your brothers, so that I may give you all my blessing for the last time, for I cannot hold out long against this pain.  I am burning.  Mercy!  Call a doctor:  I know I have been poisoned.”

Charles did not stir from the bedside.

“Water!” cried the dying woman in a broken voice,—­“water!  A doctor, a confessor!  My children—­I want my children!”

And as the duke paid no heed, but stood moodily silent, the poor mother, prostrated by pain, fancied that grief had robbed her son of all power of speech or movement, and so, by a desperate effort, sat up, and seizing him by the arm, cried with all the strength she could muster—­

“Charles, my son, what is it?  My poor boy, courage; it is nothing, I hope.  But quick, call for help, call a doctor.  Ah, you have no idea of what I suffer.”

“Your doctor,” said Charles slowly and coldly, each word piercing his mother’s heart like a dagger,—­“your doctor cannot come.”

“Oh why?” asked Agnes, stupefied.

“Because no one ought to live who knows the secret of our shame.”

“Unhappy man!” she cried, overwhelmed with, pain and terror, “you have murdered him!  Perhaps you have poisoned your mother too!  Charles, Charles, have mercy on your own soul!”

“It is your doing,” said Charles, without show of emotion:  “you have driven me into crime and despair; you have caused my dishonour in this world and my damnation in the next.”

“What are you saying?  My own Charles, have mercy!  Do not let me die in this horrible uncertainty; what fatal delusion is blinding you?  Speak, my son, speak:  I am not feeling the poison now.  What have I done?  Of what have I been accused?”

She looked with haggard eyes at her son:  her maternal love still struggled against the awful thought of matricide; at last, seeing that Charles remained speechless in spite of her entreaties, she repeated, with a piercing cry—­