“But I am losing my senses. If you are innocent, who, then, could be the
guilty man?”
Jacques seized her hands almost madly, and pressing them painfully, and
bending over her so closely that she felt his hot breath like a flame
touching her face, he hissed into her ear,--
“You, wretched creature, you!”
And then pushing her from him with such violence that she fell into a
chair, he continued,--
“You, who wanted to be a widow in order to prevent me from breaking the
chains in which you held me. At our last meeting, when I thought you
were crushed by grief, and felt overcome by your hypocritical tears,
I was weak enough, I was stupid enough, to say that I married Dionysia
only because you were not free. Then you cried, ‘O God, how happy I
am that that idea did not occur to me before!’ What idea was that,
Genevieve? Come, answer me and confess, that it occurred to you too soon
after all, since you have carried it out?”
And repeating with crushing irony the words just uttered by the
countess, he said,--
“If you are innocent, who, then, would be the guilty man?”
Quite beside herself, she sprang up from her chair, and casting at
Jacques one of those glances which seem to enter through our eyes into
the very heart of our hearts, she asked,--
“Is it really possible that you have not committed this abominable
crime?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But then,” she repeated, almost panting, “is it true, can it really be
true, that you think I have committed it?”
“Perhaps you have only ordered it to be committed.”
With a wild gesture she raised her arms to heaven, and cried in a
heart-rending voice,--
“O God, O God! He believes it! he really believes it!”
There followed great silence, dismal, formidable silence, such as in
nature follows the crash of the thunderbolt.
Standing face to face, Jacques and the Countess Claudieuse looked at
each other madly, feeling that the fatal hour in their lives had come at
last.
Each felt a growing, a sure conviction of the other. There was no need
of explanations. They had been misled by appearances: they acknowledged
it; they were sure of it.
And this discovery was so fearful, so overwhelming, that neither thought
of who the real guilty one might be.
“What is to be done?” asked the countess.
“The truth must be told,” replied Jacques.
“Which?”
“That I have been your lover; that I went to Valpinson by appointment
with you; that the cartridge-case which was found there was used by
me to get fire; that my blackened hands were soiled by the half-burnt
fragment of our letters, which I had tried to scatter.”
“Never!” cried the countess.
Jacques’s face turned crimson, as he said with an accent of merciless
severity,--
“It shall be told! I will have it so, and it must be done!”
The countess seemed to be furious.
“Never!” she cried again, “never!”