I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then, returning to the old woman, "Yet how can I believe you?" I asked. "If you had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?"
She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. "Monsieur, it is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on the crucifix to keep that secret for ever."
"Yet not with me, in fact,—not with me!" And I, in turn, questioned her; my eyes upon hers. She hesitated: then stammered out, "True! not with you! because she believed, poor little soul! that..."
"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tell me!" Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. "Is it possible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything—the precise moment?" For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past.
Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's [238] crime—we must pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in the very act, and did not credit her explanation. "When I surprised her," she goes on:
"It may already have been too late—be sure it was not the first time she had been guilty—my first thought was to give you information. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly. 'You know very well,' she said, 'that my husband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death at his hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur, how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the little boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. She cast on me a terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards she was so ill that she thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said nothing but what is absolutely true." She paused. I could not answer her. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to my forehead, and wept like a child.
May 10.—She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible to me. I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet. "Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband is a murderer; what he is giving me is poison, and he knows it." She died with that thought in her mind—her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was not so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I am the most unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeed exist, you see what I suffer. Have pity on me!
Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] her and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But I find it impossible! impossible!
June.—That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never be undeceived.
All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its first elements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet in truth all is mystery,—miracle, around us, about us, within ourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's new birth from the womb of death—is it a mystery less comprehensible than his birth from the womb of his mother?