Bourgonef's story has been narrated with some fullness, though in
less detail than he told it, in order that the reader may
understand its real bearings on MY story. Without it, the motives
which impelled the strange pertinacity of my pursuit would have
been unintelligible. I have said that a very disagreeable
impression remained on my mind respecting certain aspects of his
character, and I felt somewhat ashamed of my imperfect sagacity in
having up to this period been entirely blind to those aspects. The
truth is, every human being is a mystery, and remains so to the
last. We fancy we know a character; we form a distinct conception
of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly
the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new
circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly
contradictory of our previous conception. We judge of a man by the
angle he subtends to our eye--only thus CAN we judge of him; and
this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances
bear to our interests and sympathies. Bourgonef had charmed me
intellectually; morally I had never come closer to him than in the
sympathies of public questions and abstract theories. His story
had disclosed hidden depths.
My old suspicions reappeared, and a conversation we had two days
afterwards helped to strengthen them.
We had gone on a visit to Schwanthaler, the sculptor, at his tiny
little castle of Schwaneck, a few miles from Munich. The artist
was out for a walk, but we were invited to come in and await his
return, which would be shortly; and meanwhile Bourgonef undertook
to show me over the castle, interesting as a bit of modern Gothic,
realizing on a diminutive scale a youthful dream of the sculptor's.
When our survey was completed--and it did not take long--we sat at
one of the windows and enjoyed a magnificent prospect. "It is
curious," said Bourgonef, "to be shut up here in this imitation of
medieval masonry, where every detail speaks of the dead past, and
to think of the events now going on in Paris which must find
imitators all over Europe, and which open to the mind such vistas
of the future. What a grotesque anachronism is this Gothic castle,
built in the same age as that which sees a reforming pope!"
"Yes; but is not the reforming pope himself an anachronism?"
"As a Catholic," here he smiled, intimating that his orthodoxy was
not very stringent, "I cannot admit that; as a Protestant, you must
admit that if there must be a pope, he must in these days be a
reformer, or--give up his temporal power. Not that I look on Pio
Nono as more than a precursor; he may break ground, and point the
way, but he is not the man to lead Europe out of its present slough
of despond, and under the headship of the Church found a new and
lasting republic. We want a Hildebrand, one who will be to the
nineteenth century as Gregory was to the eleventh."
"Do you believe in such a possibility? Do you think the Roman
pontiff can ever again sway the destinies of Europe?"
"I can hardly say I believe it; yet I see the possibility of such
an opening if the right man were to arise. But I fear he will not
arise; or if he should, the Conclave will stifle him. Yet there is
but one alternative: either Europe must once more join in a crusade
with a pope at the head, or it must hoist the red flag. There is
no other issue."
"Heaven preserve us from both! And I think we shall be preserved
from the Pope by the rottenness of the Church; from the drapeau
rouge by the indignation and horror of all honest men. You see how
the Provisional Government has resisted the insane attempt of the
fanatics to make the red flag accepted as the national banner?"
"Yes; and it is the one thing which dashes my pleasure in the new
revolution. It is the one act of weakness which the Government has
exhibited; a concession which will be fatal unless it be happily
set aside by the energetic party of action."
"An act of weakness? say rather an act of strength. A concession?
say rather the repudiation of anarchy, the assertion of law and
justice."
"Not a bit. It was concession to the fears of the timid, and to
the vanity of the French people. The tricolor is a French flag--
not the banner of humanity. It is because the tricolor has been
identified with the victories of France that it appeals to the
vanity of the vainest of people. They forget that it is the flag
of a revolution which failed, and of an empire which was one
perpetual outrage to humanity. Whereas the red is new; it is the
symbol of an energetic, thorough-going creed. If it carries terror
with it, so much the better. The tyrants and the timid should be
made to tremble."
"I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty," said I, laughing at his
vehemence.
"I am not bloodthirsty at all; I am only logical and consistent.
There is a mass of sophistry current in the world which sickens me.
People talk of Robespierre and St. Just, two of the most virtuous
men that ever lived--and of Dominic and Torquemada, two of the most
single-minded--as if they were cruel and bloodthirsty, whereas they
were only convinced."
"Is it from love of paradox that you defend these tigers?"
"Tigers, again--how those beasts are calumniated!"
He said this with a seriousness which was irresistibly comic. I
shouted with laughter; but he continued gravely:
"You think I am joking. But let me ask you why you consider the
tiger more bloodthirsty than yourself? He springs upon his food--
you buy yours from the butcher. He cannot live without animal
food: it is a primal necessity, and he obeys the ordained instinct.
You can live on vegetables; yet you slaughter beasts of the field
and birds of the air (or buy them when slaughtered), and consider
yourself a model of virtue. The tiger only kills his food or his
enemies; you not only kill both, but you kill one animal to make
gravy for another! The tiger is less bloodthirsty than the
Christian!"
"I don't know how much of that tirade is meant to be serious; but
to waive the question of the tiger's morality, do you really--I
will not say sympathize,--but justify Robespierre, Dominic, St.
Just, and the rest of the fanatics who have waded to their ends
through blood."
"He who wills the END, wills the MEANS."
"A devil's maxim."
"But a truth. What the foolish world shrinks at as
bloodthirstiness and cruelty is very often mere force and constancy
of intellect. It is not that fanatics thirst for blood--far from
it,--but they thirst for the triumph of their cause. Whatever
obstacle lies on their path must be removed; if a torrent of blood
is the only thing that will sweep it away--the torrent must sweep."
"And sweep with it all the sentiments of pity, mercy, charity,
love?"
"No; these sentiments may give a sadness to the necessity; they
make the deed a sacrifice, but they cannot prevent the soul from
seeing the aim to which it tends."
"This is detestable doctrine! It is the sophism which has
destroyed families, devastated cities, and retarded the moral
progress of the world more than anything else. No single act of
injustice is ever done on this earth but it tends to perpetuate the
reign of iniquity. By the feelings it calls forth it keeps up the
native savagery of the heart. It breeds injustice, partly by
hardening the minds of those who assent, and partly by exciting the
passion of revenge in those who resist."
"You are wrong. The great drag-chain on the car of progress is the
faltering inconsistency of man. Weakness is more cruel than
sternness. Sentiment is more destructive than logic."
The arrival of Schwanthaler was timely, for my indignation was
rising. The sculptor received us with great cordiality, and in the
pleasure of the subsequent hour I got over to some extent the
irritation Bourgonef's talk had excited.
The next day I left Munich for the Tyrol. My parting with
Bourgonef was many degrees less friendly than it would have been a
week before. I had no wish to see him again, and therefore gave
him no address or invitation in case he should come to England. As
I rolled away in the Malleposte, my busy thoughts reviewed all the
details of our acquaintance, and the farther I was carried from his
presence, the more obtrusive became the suspicions which connected
him with the murder of Lieschen Lehfeldt. How, or upon what
motive, was indeed an utter mystery. He had not mentioned the name
of Lehfeldt. He had not mentioned having before been at Nuremberg.
At Heidelberg the tragedy occurred--or was Heidelberg only a mask?
It occurred to me that he had first ascertained that I had never
been at Heidelberg before he placed the scene of his story there.
Thoughts such as these tormented me. Imagine, then, the horror
with which I heard, soon after my arrival at Salzburg, that a
murder had been committed at Grosshesslohe--one of the pretty
environs of Munich much resorted to by holiday folk--corresponding
in all essential features with the murder at Nuremberg! In both
cases the victim was young and pretty. In both cases she was found
quietly lying on the ground, stabbed to the heart, without any
other traces of violence. In both cases she was a betrothed bride,
and the motive of the unknown assassin a mystery.
Such a correspondence in the essential features inevitably
suggested an appalling mystery of unity in these crimes,--either as
the crimes of one man, committed under some impulse of motiveless
malignity and thirst for innocent blood--or as the equally
appalling effect of IMITATION acting contagiously upon a criminal
imagination; of which contagion there have been, unfortunately, too
many examples--horrible crimes prompting certain weak and feverish
imaginations, by the very horror they inspire, first to dwell on,
and finally to realize their imitations.
It was this latter hypothesis which found general acceptance.
Indeed it was the only one which rested upon any ground of
experience. The disastrous influence of imitation, especially
under the fascination of horror, was well known. The idea of any
diabolical malice moving one man to pass from city to city, and
there quietly single out his victims--both of them, by the very
hypothesis, unrelated to him, both of them at the epoch of their
lives, when
"The bosom's lord sits lightly on its throne,"
when the peace of the heart is assured, and the future is radiantly
beckoning to them,--that any man should choose such victims for
such crimes was too preposterous an idea long to be entertained.
Unless the man were mad, the idea was inconceivable; and even a
monomaniac must betray himself in such a course, because he would
necessarily conceive himself to be accomplishing some supreme act
of justice.
It was thus I argued; and indeed I should much have preferred to
believe that one maniac were involved, rather than the contagion of
crime,--since one maniac must inevitably be soon detected; whereas
there were no assignable limits to the contagion of imitation. And
this it was which so profoundly agitated German society. In every
family in which there happened to be a bride, vague tremors could
not be allayed; and the absolute powerlessness which resulted from
the utter uncertainty as to the quarter in which this dreaded
phantom might next appear, justified and intensified those tremors.
Against such an apparition there was no conceivable safeguard.
From a city stricken with the plague, from a district so stricken,
flight is possible, and there are the resources of medical aid.
But from a moral plague like this, what escape was possible?
So passionate and profound became the terror, that I began to share
the opinion which I heard expressed, regretting the widespread
publicity of the modern press, since, with many undeniable
benefits, it carried also the fatal curse of distributing through
households, and keeping constantly under the excitement of
discussion, images of crime and horror which would tend to
perpetuate and extend the excesses of individual passion. The mere
dwelling long on such a topic as this was fraught with evil.
This and more I heard discussed as I hurried back to Munich. To
Munich? Yes; thither I was posting with all speed. Not a shadow
of doubt now remained in my mind. I knew the assassin, and was
resolved to track and convict him. Do not suppose that THIS time I
was led away by the vagrant activity of my constructive
imagination. I had something like positive proof. No sooner had I
learned that the murder had been committed at Grosshesslohe, than
my thoughts at once carried me to a now memorable visit I had made
there in company with Bourgonef and two young Bavarians. At the
hotel where we dined, we were waited on by the niece of the
landlord, a girl of remarkable beauty, who naturally excited the
attention of four young men, and furnished them with a topic of
conversation. One of the Bavarians had told us that she would one
day be perhaps one of the wealthiest women in the country, for she
was engaged to be married to a young farmer who had recently found
himself, by a rapid succession of deaths, sole heir to a great
brewer, whose wealth was known to be enormous.
At this moment Sophie entered bringing wine, and I saw Bourgonef
slowly turn his eyes upon her with a look which then was mysterious
to me, but which now spoke too plainly its dreadful meaning.
What is there in a look, you will say? Perhaps nothing; or it may
be everything. To my unsuspecting, unenlightened perception,
Bourgonef's gaze was simply the melancholy and half-curious gaze
which such a man might be supposed to cast upon a young woman who
had been made the topic of an interesting discourse. But to my
mind, enlightened as to his character, and instructed as to his
peculiar feelings arising from his own story, the gaze was charged
with horror. It marked a victim. The whole succession of events
rose before me in vivid distinctness; the separate details of
suspicion gathered into unity.
Great as was Bourgonef's command over his features, he could not
conceal uneasiness as well as surprise at my appearance at the
table d'hote in Munich. I shook hands with him, putting on as
friendly a mask as I could, and replied to his question about my
sudden return by attributing it to unexpected intelligence received
at Salzburg.
"Nothing serious, I hope?"
"Well, I'm afraid it will prove very serious," I said. "But we
shall see. Meanwhile my visit to the Tyrol must be given up or
postponed."
"Do you remain here, then?"
"I don't know what my movements will be."
Thus I had prepared him for any reserve or strangeness in my
manner; and I had concealed from him the course of my movements;
for at whatever cost, I was resolved to follow him and bring him to
justice.
But how? Evidence I had none that could satisfy any one else,
however convincing it might be to my own mind. Nor did there seem
any evidence forthcoming from Grosshesslohe. Sophie's body had
been found in the afternoon lying as if asleep in one of the by-
paths of the wood. No marks of a struggle; no traces of the
murderer. Her affianced lover, who was at Augsburg, on hearing of
her fate, hurried to Grosshesslohe, but could throw no light on the
murder, could give no hint as to a possible motive for the deed.
But this entire absence of evidence, or even ground of suspicion,
only made MY case the stronger. It was the motiveless malignity of
the deed which fastened it on Bourgonef; or rather, it was the
absence of any known motive elsewhere which assured me that I had
detected the motive in him.
Should I communicate my conviction to the police? It was possible
that I might impress them with at least sufficient suspicion to
warrant his examination--and in that case the truth might be
elicited; for among the many barbarities and iniquities of the
criminal procedure in Continental States which often press heavily
on the innocent, there is this compensating advantage, that the
pressure on the guilty is tenfold heavier. If the innocent are
often unjustly punished--imprisoned and maltreated before their
innocence can be established--the guilty seldom escape. In England
we give the criminal not only every chance of escape, but many
advantages. The love of fair-play is carried to excess. It seems
at times as if the whole arrangements of our procedure were
established with a view to giving a criminal not only the benefit
of every doubt, but of every loophole through which he can slip.
Instead of this, the Continental procedure goes on the principle of
closing up every loophole, and of inventing endless traps into
which the accused may fall. We warn the accused not to say
anything that may be prejudicial to him. They entangle him in
contradictions and confessions which disclose his guilt.
Knowing this, I thought it very likely that, however artful
Bourgonef might be, a severe examination might extort from him
sufficient confirmation of my suspicion to warrant further
procedure. But knowing also that THIS resort was open to me when
all others had failed, I resolved to wait and watch.