We had been sitting thus for a full hour without stirring, when suddenly lifting his head, the Baron said to me:
"Monsieur, all this confounds me. Here is my mother,—for twenty-six years I thought I knew her, and now a whole world of mystery and horror opens itself before my eyes. You are a doctor; tell me if you have ever known anything like it before."
"Monsieur," I replied, "the Count of Nideck is afflicted with a malady that bears a striking resemblance to that of which your mother has been the victim. If you have confidence enough in me to relate to me the facts which you yourself must have witnessed, I will gladly tell you what I know of the matter, for this exchange may be the means of saving my patient."
As I began to speak the Baron started, and exclaimed:
"What? the Count of Nideck visited thus? This is more than a coincidence."
And without further parley he informed me that the Baroness Zimmer, belonging to one of the noblest families in Saxony, and being a blood relation of the Count of Nideck (to whom he should have made himself known had not circumstances required that he should maintain the strictest secrecy as to his identity), had been accustomed for many years to make a journey into Italy towards Christmas, accompanied by an old man servant, who alone possessed her entire confidence; that this man, being at the point of death, had desired a private interview with her son, and that at the last hour, tormented no doubt by remorse, he had told the young man that his mother's journey into Italy was only a pretext to furnish her a means of making an excursion into the Black Forest, of the object of which he himself was in ignorance, but which must have been of some fearful nature, since the Baroness invariably returned haggard, in rags, and almost dead, and that it required weeks of rest to repair the terrible fatigues of these few days.
This is what the old servant had related to the young Baron, thinking that in so doing he was only fulfilling his duty. The son, wishing to learn the truth of his story, whatever the cost to himself, had this very year verified the incomprehensible fact by following his mother first to Baden, and then pursuing her step by step into the gorges of the Black Forest. The tracks which Sebalt had discovered on the Altenberg were his.
When the Baron had finished his confidence, I thought that I ought no longer to conceal from him the singular influence which the advent of the old woman exercised upon the Count's health, nor indeed any of the attendant circumstances, and accordingly, I imparted to him even the slightest details.
The Baron was amazed by the coincidence of these facts; the mysterious attraction which these two beings exercised over one another without knowing it, the ghastly drama which they had enacted without consciousness, the acquaintance which the old woman had shown with the Castle and its most secret passages, without ever having seen them before; the costume which she had discovered in which to carry out the murder in pantomime, and which could only have been discovered in some mysterious retreat which magnetic clairvoyance had revealed to her.
When I had ended the recital of my experiences, the Baron relapsed into his former gloomy silence, nor did he again rouse from it while I remained near him. I fancied I could read in his face and attitude the one wish to distance himself forever from the scene of this bitter revelation.