At three o'clock in the morning Julie came in to take my place, and
I retired to my room, which was on the same floor as my aunt's. A
boxroom divided the two. I threw myself on my bed, worn out with
fatigue, and nature triumphed over my grief. I fell into that
heavy sleep which follows the expenditure of nerve power, and from
which one awakes able to bear life again and to carry the load that
seemed unendurable. When I awoke it was day, and the wintry sky
was dull and dark like that of yesterday, but it also wore a
threatening aspect, from the great masses of black cloud that
covered it. I went to the window and looked out for a long time at
the gloomy landscape closed in by the edge of the forest. I note
these small details in order that I may more faithfully recall my
exact impression at the time. In turning away from the window and
going towards the fire which the maid had just lighted, my eye fell
upon the packet of letters stolen from my aunt. Yes, stolen--'tis
the word. It was in the place where I had put it last night, on
the mantel-shelf, with my purse, rings, and cigar-case. I took up
the little parcel with a beating heart. I had only to stretch out
my hand and those papers would fall into the flames and my aunt's
dying wish be accomplished. I sank into an easy-chair and watched
the yellow flame gaining on the logs, while I weighed the packet in
my hand. I thought there must be a good many letters in it. I
suffered from the physical uneasiness of indecision. I am not
trying to justify this second failure of my loyalty to my dear
aunt, I am trying to understand it.
Those letters were not mine, I never ought to have appropriated
them. I ought now to destroy them unopened; all the more that the
excitement of the first moment, the sudden rush of ideas which had
prevented me from obeying the agonized supplication of my poor
aunt, had subsided. I asked myself once more what was the cause of
her misery, while I gazed at the inscription upon the cover, in my
aunt's hand: "Justin's Letters, 1864." The very room which I
occupied was an evil counsellor to me in this strife between an
indisputable duty and my ardent desire to know; for it had formerly
been my father's room, and the furniture had not been changed since
his time. The color of the hangings was faded, that was all. He
had warmed himself by a fire which burned upon that self-same
hearth, and he had used the same low, wide chair in which I now
sat, thinking many somber thoughts. He had slept in the bed from
which I had just risen, he had written at the table on which I
rested my arms. No, that room deprived me of free will to act, it
made my father too living. It was as though the phantom of the
murdered man had come out of his grave to entreat me to keep the
oft-sworn vow of vengeance. Had these letters offered me no more
than one single chance, one against a thousand, of obtaining one
single indication of the secrets of my father's private life, I
could not have hesitated. With such sacrilegious reasoning as this
did I dispel the last scruples of pious respect; but I had no need
of arguments for yielding to the desire which increased with every
moment.
I had there before me those letters, the last his hand had traced;
those letters which would lay bare to me the recesses of his life,
and I was not to read them! What an absurdity! Enough of such
childish hesitation. I tore off the cover which hid the papers;
the yellow sheets with their faded characters shook in my hands. I
recognized the compact, square, clear writing, with spaces between
the words. The dates had been omitted by my father in several
instances, and then my aunt had repaired the omission by writing in
the day of the month herself. My poor aunt! this pious carefulness
was a fresh testimony to her constant tenderness; and yet, in my
wild excitement I no longer thought of her who lay dead within a
few yards of me.
Presently Julie came to consult me upon all the material details
which accompany death; but I told her I was too much overwhelmed,
that she must do as she thought fit, and leave me quite alone for
the whole of the morning. Then I plunged so deeply into the
reading of the letters, that I forgot the hour, the events taking
place around me, forgot to dress myself, to eat, even to go and
look upon her whom I had lost while yet I could behold her face.
Traitor and ingrate that I was! I had devoured only a few lines
before I understood only too well why she had been desirous to
prevent me from drinking the poison which entered with each
sentence into my heart, as it had entered into hers. Terrible,
terrible letters! Now it was as though the phantom had spoken, and
a hidden drama of which I had never dreamed unfolded itself before
me.
I was quite a child when the thousand little scenes which this
correspondence recorded in detail took place. I was too young then
to solve the enigma of the situation; and, since, the only person
who could have initiated me into that dark history was she who had
concealed the existence of the too-eloquent papers from me all her
life long, and on her deathbed had been more anxious for their
destruction than for her eternal salvation--she, who had no doubt
accused herself of having deferred the burning of them from day to
day as of a crime. When at last she had brought herself to do
this, it was too late.
The first letter, written in January, 1864, began with thanks to my
aunt for her New Year's gift to me--a fortress with tin soldiers--
with which I was delighted, said the letter, because the cavalry
were in two pieces, the man detaching himself from his horse.
Then, suddenly, the commonplace sentences changed into utterances
of mournful tenderness. An anxious mind, a heart longing for
affection, and discontent with the existing state of things, might
be discerned in the tone of regret with which the brother dwelt
upon his childhood, and the days when his own and his sister's life
were passed together. There was a repressed repining in that first
letter that immediately astonished and impressed me, for I had
always believed my father and mother to have been perfectly happy
with each other. Alas! that repining did but grow and also take
definite form as I read on. My father wrote to his sister every
Sunday, even when he had seen her in the course of the week. As it
frequently happens in cases of regular and constant correspondence,
the smallest events were recorded in minute detail, so that all our
former daily life was resuscitated in my thoughts as I perused the
lines, but accompanied by a commentary of melancholy which revealed
irreparable division between those whom I had believed to be so
closely united. Again I saw my father in his dressing-gown, as he
greeted me in the morning at seven o'clock, on coming out of his
room to breakfast with me before I started for school at eight. He
would go over my lessons with me briefly, and then we would seat
ourselves at the table (without a tablecloth) in the dining-room,
and Julie would bring us two cups of chocolate, deliciously
sweetened to my childish taste. My mother rose much later, and,
after my school days, my father occupied a separate room in order
to avoid waking her so early. How I enjoyed that morning meal,
during which I prattled at my ease, talking of my lessons, my
exercises, and my schoolmates! What a delightful recollection I
retained of those happy, careless, cordial hours! In his letters
my father also spoke of our early breakfasts, but in a way that
showed how often he was wounded by finding out from my talk that my
mother took too little care of me, according to his notions--that I
filled too small a place in her dreamy, wilfully frivolous life.
There were passages which the then future had since turned into
prophecies. "Were I to be taken from him, what would become of
him?" was one of these. At ten I came back from school; by that
time my father would be occupied with his business. I had lessons
to prepare, and I did not see him again until half-past eleven, at
the second breakfast. Then mamma would appear in one of those
tasteful morning costumes which suited her slender and supple
figure so well. From afar, and beyond the cold years of my
boyhood, that family table came before me like a mirage of warm
homelife; how often had it become a sort of nostalgia to me when I
sat between my mother and M. Termonde on my horrid half-holidays.
And now I found proof in my father's letters that a divorce of the
heart already existed between the two persons who, to my filial
tenderness, were but one. My father loved his wife passionately,
and he felt that his wife did not love him. This was the feeling
continually expressed in his letters--not in words so plain and
positive, indeed; but how should I, whose boyhood had been
strangely analogous with this drama of a man's life, have failed to
perceive the secret signification of all he wrote? My father was
taciturn, like me--even more so than I--and he allowed irreparable
misunderstandings to grow up between my mother and himself. Like
me afterwards, he was passionate, awkward, hopelessly timid in the
presence of that proud, aristocratic woman, so different from him,
the self-made man of almost peasant origin, who had risen to
professional prosperity by the force of his genius. Like me--ah!
not more than I--he had known the torture of false positions, which
cannot be explained except by words that one will never have
courage to utter. And, oh, the pity of it, that destiny should
thus repeat itself; the same tendencies of the mind developing
themselves in the son after they had developed themselves in the
father, so that the misery of both should be identical!
My father's letters breathed sighs that my mother had never
suspected--vain sighs for a complete blending of their two hearts;
tender sighs for the fond dream of fully-shared happiness;
despairing sighs for the ending of a moral separation, all the more
complete because its origin was not to be sought in their
respective faults (mutual love pardons everything), but in a
complete, almost animal, contrast between the two natures. Not one
of his qualities was pleasing to her; all his defects were
displeasing to her. And he adored her. I had seen enough of many
kinds of ill-assorted unions since I had been going about in
society, to understand in full what a silent hell that one must
have been, and the two figures rose up before me in perfect
distinctness. I saw my mother with her gestures--a little
affectation was, so to speak, natural to her--the delicacy of her
hands, her fair, pale complexion, the graceful turn of her head,
her studiously low-pitched voice, the something un-material that
pervaded her whole person, her eyes, whose glance could be so cold,
so disdainful; and, on the other hand, I saw my father with his
robust, workingman's frame, his hearty laugh when he allowed
himself to be merry, the professional, utilitarian, in fact,
plebeian, aspect of him, in his ideas and ways, his gestures and
his discourse. But the plebeian was so noble, so lofty in his
generosity, in his deep feeling. He did not know how to show that
feeling; therein lay his crime. On what wretched trifles, when we
think of it, does absolute felicity or irremediable misfortune
depend!
The name of M. Termonde occurred several times in the earlier
letters, and, when I came to the eleventh, I found it mentioned in
a way which brought tears to my eyes, set my hands shaking, and
made my heart leap as at the sound of a cry of sharp agony. In the
pages which he had written during the night--the writing showed how
deeply he was moved--the husband, hitherto so self-restrained,
acknowledged to his sister, his kind and faithful confidante, that
he was jealous. He was jealous, and of whom? Of that very man who
was destined to fill his place at our fireside, to give a new name
to her who had been Madame Cornelis; of the man with cat-like ways,
with pale eyes, whom my childish instinct had taught me to regard
with so precocious and so fixed a hate. He was jealous of Jacques
Termonde. In his sudden confession he related the growth of this
jealousy, with the bitterness of tone that relieves the heart of
misery too long suppressed. In that letter, the first of a series
which death only was destined to interrupt, he told how far back
was the date of his jealousy, and how it awoke to life with his
detection of one look cast at my mother by Termonde. He told how
he had at once suspected a dawning passion on the part of this man,
then that Termonde had gone away on a long journey, and that he, my
father, had attributed his absence to the loyalty of a sincere
friend, to a noble effort to fight from the first against a
criminal feeling. Termonde came back; his visits to us were soon
resumed, and they became more frequent than before. There was
every reason for this; my father had been his chum at the Ecole de
Droit, and would have chosen him to be his best man at his marriage
had not Termonde's diplomatic functions kept him out of France at
the time. In this letter and the following ones my father
acknowledged that he had been strongly attached to Termonde, so
much so, indeed, that he had considered his own jealousy as an
unworthy feeling and a sort of treachery. But it is all very well
to reproach one's self for a passion; it is there in our hearts all
the same, tearing and devouring them. After Termonde's return, my
father's jealousy increased, with the certainty that the man's love
for the wife of his friend was also growing; and yet, the unhappy
husband did not think himself entitled to forbid him the house.
Was not his wife the most pure and upright of women? Her very
inclination to mysticism and exaggerated devotion, although he
sometimes found fault with her for it, was a pledge that she would
never yield to anything by which her conscience could be stained.
Besides, Termonde's assiduity was accompanied by such evident, such
absolute respect, that it afforded no ground for reproach. What
was he to do? Have an explanation with his wife--he who could not
bring himself to enter upon the slightest discussion with her?
Require her to decline to receive his own friend? But, if she
yielded, he would have deprived her of a real pleasure, and for
that he should be unable to forgive himself. If she did not yield?
So, my poor father had preferred to toss about in that Gehenna of
weakness and indecision wherein dwell timid and taciturn souls.
All this misery he revealed to my aunt, dwelling upon the morbid
nature of his feelings, imploring advice and pity, deciding and
blaming the puerility of his jealousy, but jealous all the same,
unable to refrain from recurring again and again to the open wound
in his heart, and incapable of the energy and decision that would
have cured it.
The letters became more and more gloomy, as it always happens when
one has not at once put an end to a false position; my father
suffered from the consequences of his weakness, and allowed them to
develop without taking action, because he could not now have
checked them without painful scenes. After having tolerated the
increased frequency of his friend's visits, it was torture to him
to observe that his wife was sensibly influenced by this
encroaching intimacy. He perceived that she took Termonde's advice
on all little matters of daily life--upon a question of dress, the
purchase of a present, the choice of a book. He came upon the
traces of the man in the change of my mother's tastes, in music for
instance. When we were alone in the evenings, he liked her to go
to the piano and play to him, for hours together, at haphazard; now
she would play nothing but pieces selected by Termonde, who had
acquired an extensive knowledge of the German masters during his
residence abroad. My father, on the contrary, having been brought
up in the country with his sister, who was herself taught by a
provincial music-master, retained his old-fashioned taste for
Italian music.
My mother belonged, by her own family, to a totally different
sphere of society from that into which her marriage with my father
had introduced her. At first she did not feel any regret for her
former circle, because her extreme beauty secured her a triumphant
success in the new one; but it was another thing when her intimacy
with Termonde, who moved in the most worldly and elegant of the
Parisian "world," was perpetually reminding her of all its
pleasures and habits. My father saw that she was bored and weary
while doing the honors of her own salon with an absent mind. He
even found the political opinions of his friend echoed by his wife,
who laughed at him for what she called his Utopian liberalism. Her
mockery had no malice in it; but still it was mockery, and behind
it was Termonde, always Termonde. Nevertheless, he said nothing,
and the shyness, which he had always felt in my mother's presence
increased with his jealousy. The more unhappy he was, the more
incapable of expressing his pain he became. There are minds so
constituted that suffering paralzes them into inaction. And then
there was the ever-present question, what was he to do? How was he
to approach an explanation, when he had no positive accusation to
bring? He remained perfectly convinced of the fidelity of his
wife, and he again and again affirmed this, entreating my aunt not
to withdraw a particle of her esteem from his dear Marie, and
imploring her never to make an allusion to the sufferings of which
he was ashamed, before their innocent cause. And then he dwelt
upon his own faults; he accused himself of lack of tenderness, of
failing to win love, and would draw pictures of his sorrowful home,
in a few words, with heart-rending humility.
Rough, commonplace minds know nothing of the scruples that rent and
tortured my father's soul. They say, "I am jealous," without
troubling themselves as to whether the words convey an insult or
not. They forbid the house to the person to whom they object, and
shut their wives mouths with, "Am I master here?" taking heed of
their own feelings merely. Are they in the right? I know not; I
only know that such rough methods were impossible to my poor
father. He had sufficient strength to assume an icy mien towards
Termonde, to address him as seldom as possible, to give him his
hand with the insulting politeness that makes a gulf between two
sincere friends; but Termonde affected unconsciousness of all this.
My father, who did not want to have a scene with him, because the
immediate consequence would have been another scene with my mother,
multiplied these small affronts, and then Termonde simply changed
the time of his visits, and came during my father's business hours.
How vividly my father depicted his stormy rage at the idea that his
wife and the man of whom he was jealous were talking together,
undisturbed, in the flower-decked salon, while he was toiling to
procure all the luxury that money could purchase for that wife who
could never, never love him, although he believed her faithful.
But, oh, that cold fidelity was not what he longed for--he who
ended his letter by these words--how often have I repeated them to
myself:
"It is so sad to feel that one is in the way in one's own house,
that one possesses a woman by every right, that she gives one all
that her duty obliges her to give, all, except her heart, which is
another's unknown to herself, perhaps, unless, indeed, that-- My
sister, there are terrible hours in which I say to myself that I am
a fool, a coward, that they laugh together at me, at my blindness,
my stupid trust. Do not scold me, dear Louise. This idea is
infamous, and I drive it away by taking refuge with you, to whom,
at least, I am all the world."
"Unless, indeed, that--" This letter was written on the first
Sunday in June, 1864; and on the following Thursday, four days
later, he who had written it, and had suffered all it revealed,
went out to the appointment at which he met with his mysterious
death, that death by which his wife was set free to marry his felon
friend. What was the idea, as dreadful, as infamous as the idea of
which my father accused himself in his terrible last letter, that
flashed across me now? I placed the packet of papers upon the
mantelpiece, and pressed my two hands to my head, as though to
still the tempest of cruel fancies which made it throb with fever.
Ah, the hideous, nameless thing! My mind got a glimpse of it only
to reject it.
But, had not my aunt also been assailed by the same monstrous
suspicion? A number of small facts rose up in my memory, and
convinced me that my father's faithful sister had been a prey to
the same idea which had just laid hold of me so strongly. How many
strange things I now understood, all in a moment! On that day when
she told me of my mother's second marriage, and I spontaneously
uttered the accursed name of Termonde, why had she asked me, in a
trembling voice: "What do you know?"
What was it she feared that I had guessed? What dreaded
information did she expect to receive from my childish observation
of things?
Afterwards, and when she implored me to abandon the task of
avenging our beloved dead, when she quoted to me the sacred words,
"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord," who were the guilty ones whom
she foresaw I must meet on my path? When she entreated me to bear
with my stepfather, even to conciliate him, not to make an enemy of
him, had her advice any object except the greater ease of my daily
life, or did she think danger might come to me from that quarter?
When she became more afraid for me, owing to the weakening of her
brain by illness, and again and again enjoined upon me to beware of
going out alone in the evening, was the vision of terror that came
to her that of a hand which would fain strike me in the dark--the
same hand that had struck my father? When she summoned up all her
strength in her last moments, that she might destroy this
correspondence, what was the clue which she supposed the letters
would furnish? A terrific light shone upon me; what my aunt had
perceived beyond the plain purport of the letters, I too perceived.
Ah! I dared to entertain this idea, yet now I am ashamed to write
it down. But could I have escaped from the hard logic of the
situation? If my aunt had handed over those letters to the Judge
of Instruction in the matter, would he not have arrived at the same
conclusion that I drew from them? No, I could not. A man who has
no known enemies is assassinated; it is alleged that robbery is not
the motive of the murder; his wife has a lover, and shortly after
the death of her husband she marries that lover. "But it is they--
it is they who are guilty, they have killed the husband," the judge
would say, and so would the first-comer. Why did not my aunt place
those letters of my father's in the hands of justice? I understood
the reason too well; she would not have me think of my mother what
I was now in a fit of distraction thinking.
To conceive of this as merely possible was to be guilty of moral
parricide, to commit the inexpiable sin against her who had borne
me. I had always loved my mother so tenderly, so mournfully;
never, never had I judged her. How many times--happening to be
alone with her, and not knowing how to tell her what was weighing
on my heart--how many times I had dreamed that the barrier between
us would not for ever divide us. Some day I might, perhaps, become
her only support, then she should see how precious she still was to
me. My sufferings had not lessened my love for her; wretched as I
was because she refused me a certain sort of affection, I did not
condemn her for lavishing that affection upon another. As a matter
of fact, until those fatal letters had done their work of
disenchantment, of what was she guilty in my eyes? Of having
married again? Of having chosen, being left a widow at thirty, to
construct a new life for herself? What could be more legitimate?
Of having failed to understand the relations of the child who
remained to her with the man whom she had chosen? What was more
natural? She was more wife than mother, and besides, fanciful and
fragile beings such as she was recoil from daily contests; they
shrink from facing realities which would demand sustained courage
and energy on their part. I had admitted all these explanations of
my mother's attitude towards me, at first from instinct and
afterwards on reflection. But now, the inexhaustible spring of
indulgence for those who really hold our heart-strings was dried up
in a moment, and a flood of odious, abominable suspicion
overwhelmed me instead.
This sudden invasion of a horrible, torturing idea was not lasting.
I could not have borne it. Had it implanted itself in me then and
there, definite, overwhelming in evidence, impossible of rejection,
I must have taken a pistol and shot myself, to escape from agony
such as I endured in the few minutes which followed my reading of
the letters. But the tension was relaxed, I reflected, and my love
for my mother began to strive against the horrible suggestion. To
the onslaught of these execrable fancies I opposed the facts, in
their certainty and completeness. I recalled the smallest
particulars of that last occasion on which I saw my father and
mother in each other's presence. It was at the table from which he
rose to go forth and meet his murderer. But was not my mother
cheerful and smiling that morning, as usual? Was not Jacques
Termonde with us at breakfast, and did he not stay on, after my
father had gone out, talking with my mother while I played with my
toys in the room? It was at that very time, between one and two
o'clock, that the mysterious Rochdale committed the crime.
Termonde could not be, at one and the same moment, in our salon and
at the Imperial Hotel, any more than my mother, impressionable and
emotional as I knew her to be, could have gone on talking quietly
and happily, if she had known that her husband was being murdered
at that very hour. Why, I must have been mad to allow such a
notion to present its monstrous image before my eyes for a single
moment, and it was infamous of me to have gone so far beyond the
most insulting of my father's suspicions.
Already, and without any proof except the expression of jealousy
acknowledged by himself to be unreasonable, I had reached a point
to which the unhappy but still loving man had not dared to go, even
to the extreme outrage against my mother. What if, during the
lifetime of her first husband, she had inspired him whom she was
one day to marry with too strong a sentiment, did this prove that
she had shared it? If she had shared it, would that have proved
her to be a fallen woman? Why should she not have entertained an
affection for Termonde, which, while it in no wise interfered with
her fidelity to her wifely duties, made my father not unnaturally
jealous?
Thus did I justify her, not only from any participation in the
crime, but from any failure in her duty. And then again my ideas
changed; I remembered the cry that she had uttered in presence of
my father's dead body: "I am punished by God!" I was not
sufficiently charitable to her to admit that those words might be
merely the utterance of a refined and scrupulous mind which
reproached itself even with its thoughts. I also recalled the
gleaming eyes and shaking hands of Termonde, when he was talking
with my mother about my father's mysterious disappearance. If they
were accomplices, this was a piece of acting performed before me,
an innocent witness, so that they might invoke my childish
testimony on occasion. These recollections once more drove me upon
my fated way. The idea of a guilty tie between her and him now
took possession of me, and then came swiftly the thought that they
had profited by the murder, that they alone had an engrossing
interest in it. So violent was the assault of suspicion that it
overthrew all the barriers I had raised against it. I accumulated
all the objections founded upon a physical alibi and a moral
improbability, and thence I forced myself to say it was, strictly
speaking, impossible they could have anything to do with the
murder; impossible, impossible! I repeated this frantically; but
even as it passed my lips, the hallucination returned, and struck
me down. There are moments when the disordered mind is unable to
quell visions which it knows to be false, when the imaginary and
the real mingle in a nightmare-panic, and the judgment is powerless
to distinguish between them. Who is there that, having been
jealous, does not know this condition of mind? What did I not
suffer from it during the day after I had read those letters! I
wandered about the house, incapable of attending to any duty,
struck stupid by emotions which all around me attributed to grief
for my aunt's death. Several times I tried to sit for a while
beside her bed; but the sight of her pale face, with its pinched
nostrils, and its deepening expression of sadness, was unbearable
to me. It renewed my miserable doubts.
At four o'clock I received a telegram. It was from my mother, and
announced her arrival by evening train. When the slip of blue
paper was in my hand my wretchedness was for a moment relieved.
She was coming. She had thought of my trouble; she was coming.
That assurance [error in text--line missing] criminal thoughts in
my face?
But those absurd and infamous notions took possession of me once
more. Perhaps she thinks, so ran my thoughts, that the
correspondence between my father and my aunt had not been
destroyed, and she is coming in order to get hold of those letters
before I see them, and to find out what my aunt said to me when she
was dying. If she and Termonde are guilty, they must have lived in
constant dread of the old maid's penetration. Ah! I had been very
unhappy in my childhood, but how gladly would I have gone back to
be the school-boy, meditating during the dull and interminable
evening hours of study, and not the young man who walked to and fro
that night in the station at Compiegne, awaiting the arrival of a
mother, suspected as mine was. Just God! Did not I expiate
everything in anticipation by that one hour?