she didn't treat him the
way she'd treated the others; she was kind of humble and tender and
distracted all the time. The Baron saw it all, but she never noticed
that he was getting gloomier and gloomier. I sometimes wonder if things
might have been different if he'd been willing to confide in me some. It
does folks a sight of good if there's someone they can tell things to.
But the Baron was very reserved and never said a word. And at last she
burst out with a dreadful scene. You were with them; yes, it was that
summer at Felsenschloss; but you didn't know anything about it of
course. I was pretty much in the thick of it all, as far as Mercedes
went, and I tried to make her see reason and told her she was a sinful
woman to treat her husband so; but I couldn't hold her back. She broke
out at him one day and told him he was like a jailor to her, and that he
suffocated her talent and that he hung on her like a vampire and sucked
her youth, and that she loved the other man. I can see her now, rushing
up and down that long saloon on that afternoon, with the white blinds
drawn down and the sun filtering through them, snatching with her hands
at her dress and waving her arms up and down in the air. And the Baron
sat on a sofa leaning on his elbow with his hand up over his eyes and
watched her under it. And he didn't say one word. When she fell down on
another sofa and cried and cried, he got up and looked at her for a
moment; but it wasn't the scornful, loving look; it was a queer, dark,
dead way. And he just went out. And we never saw him alive again.

"You know the rest, Karen. You found him. But no one knows why he did
it, no one but you and me. He put an end to himself, because he couldn't
stand it any longer, and to set her free. They called it suicidal mania
and the doctors said he must have had melancholia for years. But I
shan't ever forget his face when he went out, and no more will Mercedes.
After he was gone she thought she'd never cared for anything in the
world but him. She never saw that young man again. She wrote him a
letter and laid the blame on him, and said he'd tried to take her from
her adored husband and that she'd never forgive him and loathed the
thought of him, and that he had made her the most wretched of women, and
he went and blew his brains out and that was the end of him. I had
considerable difficulty in getting hold of that letter. It was on him
when he killed himself. But I managed to talk over