“I deny that!”
“Never mind! It is enough that poor Feverelli passed out of her life. She did not see him again until just before she died. He was a noble gentleman. He wrote but one letter to her after that wretched day in this house. I have it here in this packet.”
She drew a package of letters, tied with a white ribbon, from her bosom and laid it upon the table before him.
“But one letter from him,” she went on. “I have brought it here for you to read. But not now. There are other letters and documents here for you to consider. They are from the grave. Ah, I do not wonder that you shrink and draw back from them. They convict you, James.”
“Now I can see why you have taken up this fight against me. You—you knew she was innocent,” he said in a low, unsteady voice.
“And why I have hated you, aïe? But what you do not understand is how I could have brought myself to the point of loving you.”
“Loving me! Good Heaven, woman, what do you———”
“Loving you in spite of myself,” she cried, beating upon the table with her hands. “I have tried to convince myself that it was not I, but the spirit of Matilde that had come to lodge in my treacherous body. I hated you for myself and I loved you for Matilde. She loved you to the end. She never hated you. That was it. The pure, deathless love of Matilde was constantly fighting against the hatred I bore for you. I believe as firmly as I believe that I am alive that she has been near me all the time, battling against my insane desire for vengeance. You have only to recall to yourself the moments when you were so vividly reminded of Matilde Valeska. At those times I am sure that something of Matilde was in me. I was not myself. You have looked into my eyes a thousand times with a question in your own. Your soul was striving to reach the soul of Matilde. Ah, all these months I have known that you love Matilde, not me. You loved Matilde that was in me. You———”
“I have thought of her, always of her, when you were in my arms.”
“I know how well you loved her,” she declared slowly. “I know that you went to her tomb long after her death was revealed to you. I know that years ago you made an effort to find Feverelli. You found his grave, too, and you could not ask him, man to man, if you had wronged her. But in spite of all that you brought up her boy to be sacrificed as———”