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.
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