words which I may hear without resentment."
He stared hard at me in astonishment, as though he had failed to
understand me. Then, fixing his eyes gloomily upon the floor, he threw
his arms behind his back, and again began to stride up and down the
room. He took down a rifle and put the ramrod down the barrel to see
whether it were loaded or not. My blood boiled in my veins; grasping my
knife, I stepped close up to him, so as to make it impossible for him
to take aim at me. "That's a handsome weapon," he said, replacing the
rifle in the corner. I retired a few paces, the Baron following me.
Slapping me on the shoulder, perhaps a little more violently than was
necessary, he said, "I daresay I seem to you, Theodore, to be excited
and irritable; and I really am so, owing to the anxieties of a
sleepless night. My wife's nervous attack was not in the least
dangerous; that I now see plainly. But here--here in this castle, which
is haunted by an evil spirit, I always dread something terrible
happening; and then it's the first time she has been ill here. And
you--you alone were to blame for it." "How that can possibly be I have
not the slightest conception," I replied calmly. "I wish," continued
the Baron, "I wish that damned piece of mischief, my steward's wife's
instrument, were chopped up into a thousand pieces, and that you--but
no, no; it was to be so, it was inevitably to be so, and I alone am to
blame for all. I ought to have told you, the moment you began to play
music in my wife's room, of the whole state of the case, and to have
informed you of my wife's temper of mind." I was about to speak; "Let
me go on," said the Baron, "I must prevent your forming any rash
judgment. You probably regard me as an uncultivated fellow, averse to
the arts; but I am not so by any means. There is a particular
consideration, however, based upon deep conviction, which constrains me
to forbid the introduction here as far as possible of such music as can
powerfully affect any person's mind, and to this I of course am no
exception. Know that my wife suffers from a morbid excitability, which
will finally destroy all the happiness of her life. Within these
strange walls she is never quit of that strained over-excited
condition, which at other times occurs but temporarily, and then
generally as the forerunner of a serious illness. You will ask me, and
quite reasonably too, why I do not spare my delicate wife the necessity
of coming to live in th