But Silencieux spoke nothing at all.
Then Beatrice, watching in terror, seeing by his face that he would really kill himself, ran round to the door and broke in, crying, "O my poor Antony!" but already he had plunged the dagger amid the veins of his left wrist, and was watching the blood gush out with a strange delight.
As Beatrice burst in, he looked up at her, and mistook her for Silencieux.
"Ah!" he said, "you speak at last. You love me now, when it is too late—when I am dying."
As he said this his face grew white and he fainted away.
For many days Antony lay unconscious, racked by terrible delirium. The doctor called it brain fever. It was not the common form, he said, but a more dangerous form, to which only imaginative men were subject. It was a form of madness all the more malignant because the sufferer, and particularly his friends, might go for years without suspecting it. The doctor gave the disease no name.
During his illness Antony spoke to Beatrice all the time as Silencieux, but one day, when he was nearly well again, he suddenly turned upon her in enraged disappointment, with a curious harshness he had never shown before, as though the gentleness of his soul had died during his illness, and exclaimed:—"Why, you are not Silencieux, after all!"
"I am Beatrice," said his wife gently; "Beatrice, who loves you with her whole heart."
"But I love Silencieux—"
Beatrice hid her face and sobbed.