Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/165

 "Great God!" exclaimed Roderick, clasping his hands, "what a crime a moment of fear has made me commit! this man was a somnambulist, and the physicians, do they not say that it is sufficient to call a man by his name, when he is in his fits of hallucination, to kill him suddenly?"

"Baron," said the justice, gravely, "do not accuse yourself of the punishment of this man who has just died, for he was the murderer of your father!"

"Of my father?"

"Yes, my lord; it was the hand of God which struck him when you spoke; the terror which seized upon you, is the instinct of odious repulsion, which takes possession of us at the aspect, at the touch of a scoundrel. The words that you spoke to Daniel, and which killed him like a clap of thunder, are the last that your unfortunate father pronounced."

The justice, taking then from his pocket a writing carefully sealed, which was wholly from the hand of Hubert, brother of Wolfgang of R—sitten, he set himself about unveiling to the eyes of Roderick, the mysteries of hate and vengeance which had already drawn so many misfortunes upon the family of R—sitten. He read a kind of autograph confession, in which Hubert, (the one who had just died in Persia,) declared that his animosity against his brother Wolfgang, dated from the institution of the entail of R—sitten. This act of the will of their father which deprived him, Hubert, of the best part of his fortune for the advantage of his elder brother, had left in his heart the germs of a resentment which nothing could destroy. Since that epoch, Hubert, yielding to an irresistable [sic] desire for vengeance, had concerted with Daniel the most effectual means to create a misunderstanding between Wolfgang and the old baron Roderick. The old man wished to render more illustrious the new title of the alliance of his eldest son with one of the oldest families in the country. His astrological observations had even made him read in the starry heavens the certainty of this union; so that any choice that Wolfgang could have made against his 14*