How long might this strange monologue have continued, in which the grandson of the illustrious soldier concealed the fever of a terrible indecision by thinking aloud before a witness whose cognizance of the facts he did not suspect? Would Alfred Boyer have given way to the passionate longing he felt to interrupt this half confession with his own complete confession by crying out to the Prince: "I have read the will!" Would he, on the other hand, have continued to listen to this discourse, seeking to solve an enigma of which the answer had not yet been given?
An incident he had not hoped for suddenly extricated him from his uncertainty, all at once giving frightful distinctness to what had until then been only a vague guess. The servant came to tell him that Monsieur de Contay was waiting to see him.
"I got some information, as I thought I would, from my cousin," said Raymond after the other had flown downstairs four steps at a time in his haste to know. "I was not able to bring it to you before, and I have only a minute." He pointed to the carriage which was waiting for him in the street. "Here it is. The present Duchesse d'Ivrea has never been received, either by the family or by any one else. She was a fast woman, who had formerly been on the stage. She was then called Leona d'Asti. After living a very gay life, she married an old swindler on his deathbed, a confessed thief named Audry, who left her a very large fortune. Once a widow, she married d'Ivrea, a poor devil, who, it seems, had eaten and drunk up everything he had—a most shameful union for one of his name. Now you know as much as I do."...
Next morning, when the Prince of Augsbourg awoke from a sleep broken by all the nightmares by which intense moral anguish pursues us even in our rest, his first glance was toward the ill-fated envelope that his fingers had not touched since he had placed it under the book. Had he been dreaming? Had all the internal tempest of which he had been the victim been a hallucination, a stroke of madness? The envelope was not there. He jumped out of bed and went to the mantel; he lifted up the book. Nothing! Immediately the whole series of events came back to him. No; he had not been mad. The scenes of the preceding day arose in his mind with a certainty that left no room for doubt; his visit to his sister-in-law, his return to his lodgings, Alfred Boyer handing to him the envelope and what had followed, his afternoon spent in struggling against temptation, Alfred's return, then his going out again, the note that the young man had afterward sent him and in which he said that he would dine out with a friend. The Prince had spent the evening alone, eating his heart out over the evil action that had such a horrible attraction for him. He had gone to bed early, without having been able to eat anything, in order to try to forget this ill-fated will, to forget himself. He had heard his neighbor come in about midnight—then all was a blank. He had fallen asleep, and now this mystery, this envelope missing. But how? Stolen—by whom?
He began to dress, a prey to the superstitious fear that sometimes lays hold of the most energetic men in face of an absolutely incomprehensible fact, and little by little his ideas began to coordinate in his mind. Of the two doors of his chamber, one, that which opened upon the stairs, was fastened with a bolt; he had neglected to turn the key on that which led to Alfred Boyer's room. The thief, then, must have come in by that door during his sleep. But he had remained awake until the young man had come in. Suddenly the Prince recalled the latter's face at the time of the discovery of the will; how he had flushed and avoided his eyes. He remembered also the expression on that transparent face while, late in the afternoon, he had been developing those projects, all of which presupposed a change in the condition of his fortune. As in a flash of lightning the whole thing was clear to him. He sank half dressed upon a chair. He sat there motionless, a prey to a tumult of so many contradictory and violent emotions that his whole body trembled; disillusionment as to this fortune, suddenly snatched away, if the young man had actually destroyed the will; shame at having been seen by him, tempted and giving way to the temptation, anger at Alfred's audacity in having interfered, and by what right? Through his veneration for the marshal's memory, remorse that this veneration had been stronger in an outsider than in himself, and, in spite of all, a sort of sorrowful joy at this deliverance, if the will no longer really existed, with its shameful conditions, which were, indeed, less shameful than the origin of ignoble money. Again the d'Ivrea house rose before his mind's eye; he saw the great door hung with black draperies, with his coat-of-arms, the bier upon which that miserable creature, that public woman enriched by a swindler, who had dishonored his brother, should lie, himself behind her conducting this sinister mourning; and the tomb, the tomb! Wildly, as the prisoner who escapes from his cell through broken bars stained with his blood, but sustained, intoxicated by the freedom of liberty, he burst into the room where Alfred sat at his table. His bed had not been disturbed. He had not slept, and his pale face, his burning eyes, betrayed in what agony he had spent the sleepless hours. Ever since he had glided into the Prince's bedroom to take the will and burn it he had been awaiting the terrible moment when his patron should awake, determined this time not to make any denial and to suffer the consequences of his act, whatever they might be.
"Boyer," said the Prince, "when you gave me that envelope yesterday, had you read the paper that it contained?"
"Yes," replied the young man.
"Did you know who the person was that wrote that paper?"
"I have learned since."
"And it was you who destroyed the will?"