A horrible thought came into my mind; the idea that posterity might blame me for this ruined career seemed to me no laughing matter, for I was defenceless and without a friend capable of stating the facts undisguised and unmisrepresented.
There remained the spending of her dowry.
I had once been made the subject of a paragraph entitled: "A squanderer of his wife's fortune." I also, on another occasion, had been charged with living on my wife's income, a charge which had made me put six cartridges into my revolver.
Let us examine this charge also, since an investigation has become desirable, and after due examination let us pronounce sentence.
My wife's dowry consisted of ten thousand crowns in doubtful shares; I had raised a mortgage on these shares with a bank of mortgages, amounting to fifty per cent of their face value. Like a bolt from the blue the general smash came. The shares were so much waste-paper, for we had omitted to sell them at the right moment. I was consequently compelled to pay the full amount of my mortgage: fifty per cent of the face value. Later on my wife received twenty-five per cent of her claim, this being the proportion which the creditors received after the bank's failure.
How much did I squander?
Not one penny, in my opinion. The holder of the shares received the actual value of her unsaleable investments which my personal guarantee had increased by twenty-five per cent.
Truly I was as innocent in this connection as in the other.
And the anguish, the despair which had more than once driven me to the verge of suicide! The suspicion, the old distrust, the cruel doubts, began to torture me afresh. The thought that I nearly died as a scoundrel almost drove me mad. Worn out with care, overwhelmed with work, I had never had time to pay much attention to the dark innuendoes, the veiled allusions. And while I, completely absorbed in my daily toil, lived unsuspectingly from day to day, slanderous rumours had been started, which became more and more insistent and definite, although they had no other foundation than the talk of the envious and the idle gossip of the cafés. And I, fool that I was, believed everybody, doubted no one but myself. Ah!...