“The purposes of Providence are seen in events, of which the ordering is sometimes so clear that none but an idiot can fail to see in them the threatening gesture of that awful arm. I do not fancy myself an inspired prophet. To foretell your punishment I only needed to know a fact of which you are ignorant. That is why I refuse to fight, that is why I leave your chastisement in the Hands of One who will inflict it more surely than I can. And that is why I say: ‘You will die!’”
“Die!” exclaimed Leon who, though he scorned his adversary, could not hear these words without a shock.
“Yes, you. You will die of rage!”
“That I think likely enough,” said Leon, thinking over the odious list of his wife’s family. “One may die too of a surfeit of relations; and when a man whose only object in life is domestic happiness, with its pure and honourable joys, finds nothing but a chamber of torture where he is martyred on the rack, it is probable that he will writhe and grow weary of it. There are poisonous herbs, and there are venomous families.”
“You will die of sheer rage,” Gustavo went on with brutal insistence. “I know it, I have seen it—I have it in my own keeping—in a sealed packet in my desk, of which every letter is a drop of the mortal poison which will be the death of you.”
“I do not understand,” said Leon, his curiosity roused at last. “What is it? A lawsuit? Do you think you can kill me with a lawsuit? You wretched law-mongers spend your lives in poisoning the human race, and you think that I shall swallow the bait of your sophistry.—I do not want to know what horrible intrigue you have been plotting against me.”
“I am plotting no intrigue—there is no intrigue in the matter.—There is nothing but justice; and even of that justice I am not the originator but the instrument. Under other circumstances I should have done nothing to abet it, but since your behaviour to my poor sister, aggravated too by the disgraceful facts that have lately come to my knowledge....”
“When?” asked Leon and his voice was like distant thunder.
“You do not know?”
“No. What are these disgraceful facts?”