“I need not tell you what I suffered. My suffering was great in proportion to my love. The shame, the disgrace, were nothing. But at one blow to be deprived of wife, child, friend; to have my love and my faith and my happiness shattered at one stroke: it was too much. Yet, let this be impressed upon you, that not for one instant did I blame your mother. I realized that she, like myself, was but the helpless victim of the family curse. It was my fault. I had defied the inevitable. The keenest agony of all was to lie there, unable to rise, and think of Nicholas. Ah, a thousand times in imagination I tore his heart bleeding from his breast! I hated him now, as much as I had formerly cherished him. And yet, I believe I could in the end have forgiven him, if—ah, but of what use to say, ‘If’. Listen to the truth. “It was a short four months afterward—four months that had seemed, however, a thousand years to me—and I still lay here dead in life, when the good Dr. Hirsch, (to whom now in my dying hours I commend you, my son), came to my bedside and said that he had seen your mother. He believed that if I would take her back, she would be glad. If I would take her back! ‘Bring her to me,’ I cried. And I thanked for this manifestation of his mercy. ‘You must prepare for a sad change in her,’ said Dr. Hirsch.—’Bring her, bring her,’ I cried impatiently. “Not even to you, my son, can I reveal the secret of that first hour, of that deep hour, when your mother sat again at my side and received my pardon—nay, not my pardon, for it was her place to pardon me. If before that it had been possible for me to forgive Nicholas, it was so no longer. For your mother’s face was deathly pale, her cheek hollow, her eye bright with fever. Nicholas had—what? Petted her for a month; for a month, ignored her; for another month, ill treated her; in the end, abandoned her, it might be to starve. Nicholas had done this Nicholas whom I had loved and trusted. As I saw your mother pine away, grow paler and more feeble beneath my sight, my hatred of that man intensified. On the day your mother died, I promised her that I would get well and live and force him to atone for his offense in blood. My great hatred seemed to endow me with strength. I believed that would not let me die until I had once again met Nicholas face to face. “But this delusion was short-lived. A second hemorrhage threw me back, weaker than ever, upon my bed. The physician told me that I had absolutely no ground for hope. It was evident that had willed that the chastisement of my enemy should not be wrought out by my hand. ‘But’ is just,’ I said. ‘He will not allow a crime like this to go unavenged.’