"If you have nothing better to say than such idiotic nonsense," I return, calmly, "I think this interview may as well come to an end." As I utter this speech in fear and trembling, I once more go slowly in the direction of the bell.
"Oh! must you then see my marriage-lines?" says the woman with a sneer, drawing from her bosom a folded paper. "Is there too much of the stage about my little declaration? Come, then, behold them; but at a distance, carita, at a distance."
She spreads open the paper upon the table before me. Impelled by some hideous curiosity, I draw near. With one brown but shapely finger, she traces the characters, and I read—I read with dull eyes, the terrible words that seal my fate. No thought of a forgery comes to sooth me; I know in that one long awful moment that my eyes have seen the truth.
Mechanically I put out my hand to seize the paper, but she pushed me roughly back.
"No, no, ma belle," she laughs coolly; "not that!"
"It is a lie," I cry, fiercely; "a lie!"
Where now is all my nervousness, my childish terror? My blood flames into life. For the time I am actually mad with passion, as mad as I imagined her a little while ago. A cruel, uncontrollable longing to kill her—to silence forever the bitter, mocking tones, to shut the vindictive eyes that seem to draw great drops of blood from my heart—takes possession of me. I catch hold of a heavy ruler that lies on a Davenport near, and make a spring towards her.
But I am as an infant in the hands of my opponent; I feel myself flung violently to one side against a wall, while the ruler falls crashing into an opposite corner.
"Bah!" she cries through her teeth. "Can English blood get warm? I did not believe it until now. So you love the handsome husband, do you? That, after all, is not a husband, see you, but a lover. This is my house, Mees! I This is my room! Leave it, I command you!"
She laughs long and loudly; but all my fury has died out.