Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/397

 fear that this terrible passion might be in her husband a fire smouldering beneath the ashes which the least spark could reanimate and kindle into a blaze; her sad forebodings were too soon changed into a painful certainty. Whatever terror the manner of death of old Francesco Vertua had occasioned in the mind of the chevalier, the effect of the spectacle was, notwithstanding, such as to awake in him the but too active thoughts of gambling; and, without his being able himself to account for his sensations, he saw himself every night in a dream seated at a bank, gathering again heaps of gold,—his evil star regaining its influence.

The meeting with a perverted man, an old attendant upon the chevalier's bank, ended in convincing him that his conduct was weak and ridiculous; he was astonished at having been able to sacrifice to his love for a woman the pleasures of an existence alone enviable.

Several months after, chevalier Menar's bank was reopened. His luck was true to him, gold rained down upon him; but Angela's happiness had vanished like a beautiful dream. The chevalier now only treated her with indifference, almost with scorn. Weeks, whole months elapsed, and she saw him not; an old servant took care of the house, and the under servants were constantly changed at the caprice of the chevalier; so that Angela, like a stranger in her own house, found no where the least consolation. Often when she heard during her wakeful nights the chevalier's carriage step before the house, and the chevalier's voice in rude tones ordering the heavy cash box to be brought in, and then the door of his distant chamber shut noisily, a torrent of bitter tears ran down her cheeks; a hundred times, in the anguish of her despair, the name of Duvernet escaped from her lips, and she supplicated Providence to put an end to her miserable existence thus poisoned by grief.

It happened that a young man of good family, after having lost all his fortune at the chevalier's bank, blew his brains out with a pistol at the very table on which they were playing.