The night which followed that conversation with my mother remains
in my memory as the most wretched I had hitherto endured; and yet
how many sleepless nights had I passed, while all the world around
me slept, in bitter conflict with a thought which held mine eyes
waking and devoured my heart! I was like a prisoner who has
sounded every inch of his dungeon--the walls, the floor, the
ceiling--and who, on shaking the bars of his window for the
hundredth time, feels one of the iron rods loosen under the
pressure. He hardly dares to believe in his good fortune, and he
sits down upon the ground almost dazed by the vision of deliverance
that has dawned upon him. "I must be cool-headed now," said I to
myself, as I walked to and fro in the smoking-room, whither I had
retired without tasting the meal that was served on my return.
Evening came, then the black night; the dawn followed, and once
more the full day. Still I was there, striving to see clearly amid
the cloud of suppositions in which an event, simple in itself (only
that in my state of mind no event would have seemed simple), had
wrapped me.
I was too well used to these mental tempests not to know that the
only safety consisted in clinging to the positive facts, as though
to immovable rocks.
In the present instance, the positive facts reduced themselves to
two: first, I had just learned that a brother of M. Termonde, who
passed for dead, and of whom my stepfather never spoke, existed;
secondly, that this man, disgraced, proscribed, ruined, an outlaw
in fact, exercised a dictatorship of terror over his rich, honored,
and irreproachable brother. The first of these two facts explained
itself. It was quite natural that Jacques Termonde should not
dispel the legend of the suicide, which was of his own invention,
and had saved the other from the galleys. It is never pleasant to
have to own a thief, a forger, or a deserter, for one's nearest
relation; but this, after all, is only an excessively disagreeable
matter.
The second fact was of a different kind. The disproportion between
the cause assigned by my stepfather and its result in the terror
from which he was suffering was too great. The dominion which
Edmond Termonde exercised over his brother was not to be justified
by the threat of his return, if that return were not to have any
other consequence than a transient scandal. My mother, who
regarded her husband as a noble-minded, high-souled, great-hearted
man, might be satisfied with the alleged reason; but not I. It
occurred to me to consult the Code of Military Justice, and I
ascertained, by the 184th clause, that a deserter cannot claim
immunity from punishment until after he has attained his forty-
seventh year, so that it was most likely Edmond Termonde was still
within the reach of the law.
Was it possible that his desire to shield his brother from the
punishment of the offense of desertion should throw my stepfather
into such a state of illness and agitation? I discerned another
reason for this dominion--some dark and terrible bond of complicity
between the two men. What if Jacques Termonde had employed his
brother to kill my father, and proof of the transaction was still
in the murderer's possession? No doubt his hands would be tied so
far as the magistrates were concerned; he had it in his power to
enlighten my mother, and the mere threat of doing this would
suffice to make a loving husband tremble, and tame his fierce
pride.
"I must be cool," I repeated, "I must be cool;" and I put all my
strength to recalling the physical and moral particulars respecting
the crime which were in my possession. It was my business now to
try whether one single point remained obscure when tested by the
theory of the identity of Rochdale with Edmond Termonde. The
witnesses were agreed in representing Rochdale as tall and stout,
my mother had described Edmond Termonde as a big, heavy man.
Fifteen years lay between the assassin of 1864, and the elderly
rake of 1879; but nothing prevented the two from being identical.
My mother had dwelt upon the color of Edmond Termonde's eyes, pale
blue like those of his brother; the concierge of the Imperial Hotel
had mentioned the pale blue color and the brightness of Rochdale's
eyes in his deposition, which I knew by heart. He had noticed this
peculiarity on account of the contrast of the eyes with the man's
bronzed complexion. Edmond Termonde had taken refuge in America
after his alleged suicide, and what had M. Massol said? I could
hear him repeat, with his well-modulated voice, and methodical
movement of the hand: "A foreigner, American or English, or,
perhaps, a Frenchman settled in America." Physical impossibility
there existed none.
And moral impossibility? That was equally absent. In order to
convince myself more fully of this, I took up the history of the
crime from the moment at which my father's correspondence
concerning Jacques Termonde became explicit, that is to say, in
January, 1864.
So as to rid my judgment of every trace of personal enmity, I
suppressed the names in my thoughts, reducing the dreadful
occurrence by which I had suffered to the bareness of an abstract
narrative. A man is desperately in love with the wife of one of
his intimate friends, a woman whom he knows to be absolutely,
spotlessly virtuous; he knows, he feels, that if she were free she
would love him; but that, not being free, she will never, never be
his. This man is of the temperament which makes criminals, his
passions are violent in the extreme, he has no scruples and a
despotic will; he is accustomed to see everything give way to his
desires. He perceives that his friend is growing jealous; a little
later and the house will no longer be open to him.
Would not the thought come to him--if the husband could be got rid
of? And yet--?
This dream of the death of him, who forms the sole obstacle to his
happiness, troubles the man's head, it recurs once, twice, many
times, and he turns the fatal idea over and over again in his brain
until he becomes used to it. He arrives at the "If I dared," which
is the starting point of the blackest villainies. The idea takes a
precise form; he conceives that he might have the man whom he now
hates, and by whom he feels that he is hated, killed. Has he not,
far away, a wretch of a brother, whose actual existence, to say
nothing of his present abode, is absolutely unknown? What an
admirable instrument of murder he should find in this infamous,
depraved, and needy brother, whom he holds at his beck and call by
the aid in money that he sends him! And the temptation grows and
grows. An hour comes when it is stronger than all besides, and the
man, resolved to play this desperate game, summons his brother to
Paris. How? By one or two letters in which he excites the
rascal's hopes of a large sum of money to be gained, at the same
time that he imposes the condition of absolute secrecy as to his
voyage. The other accepts; he is a social failure, a bankrupt in
life, he has neither relations nor ties, he has been leading an
anonymous and haphazard existence for years. The two brothers are
face to face. Up to that point all is logical, all is in
conformity with the possible stages of a project of this order.
I arrived at the execution of it; and I continued to reason in the
same way, impersonally. The rich brother proposes the blood-
bargain to the poor brother. He offers him money; a hundred
thousand francs, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand.
From what motive should the scoundrel hesitate to accept the offer?
Moral ideas? What is the morality of a rake who has gone from
libertinism to theft? Under the influence of my vengeful thoughts
I had read the criminal news of the day in the journals, and the
reports of criminal trials, too assiduously for years past, not to
know how a man becomes a murderer. How many cases of stabbing,
shooting, and poisoning have there not been, in which the gain was
entirely uncertain, and the conditions of danger extreme, merely to
enable the perpetrators to go, presently, and expend the murder-
money in some low haunt of depravity?
Fear of the scaffold? Then nobody would kill. Besides,
debauchees, whether they stop short at vice or roll down the
descent into crime, have no foresight of the future. Present
sensation is too strong for them; its image abolishes all other
images, and absorbs all the vital forces of the temperament and the
soul. An old dying mother, children perishing of hunger, a
despairing wife; have these pictures of their deeds ever arrested
drunkards, gamblers, or profligates? No more have the tragic
phantoms of the tribunal, the prison, and the guillotine, when,
thirsting for gold, they kill to procure it. The scaffold is far
off, the brothel is at the street corner, and the being sunk in
vice kills a man, just as a butcher would kill a beast, that he may
go thither, or to the tavern, or to the low gaming-house, with a
pocket full of money. This is the daily mode of procedure in
crime.
Why should not the desire of a more elevated kind of debauch
possess the same wicked attraction for men who are indeed more
refined, but are quite as incapable of moral goodness as the
rascally frequenters of the lowest dens of iniquity?
Ah! the thought that my father's blood might have paid for suppers
in a New York night-house was too cruel and unendurable. I lost
courage to pursue my cold, calm, reasonable deductions, a kind of
hallucination came upon me--a mental picture of the hideous scene--
and I felt my reason reel. With a great effort I turned to the
portrait of my father, gazed at it long, and spoke to him as if he
could have heard me, aloud, in abject entreaty. "Help me, help
me!"
And then, I once more became strong enough to resume the dreadful
hypothesis, and to criticise it point by point. Against it was its
utter unlikelihood; it resembled nothing but the nightmare of a
diseased imagination. A brother who employs his brother as the
assassin of a man whose wife he wants to marry! Still, although
the conception of such a devilish plot belonged to the domain of
the wildest fantasies, I said to myself: "This may be so, but in
the way of crime, there is no such thing as unlikelihood. The
assassin ceases to move in the habitual grooves of social life by
the mere fact that he makes up his mind to murder." And then a
score of examples of crimes committed under circumstances as
strange and exceptional as those whose greater or less probability
I was then discussing with myself recurred to my memory.
One objection arose at once. Admitting this complicated crime to
be possible only, how came I to be the first to form a suspicion of
it? Why had not the keen, subtle, experienced old magistrate, M.
Massol, looked in that direction for an explanation of the mystery
in whose presence he confessed himself powerless? The answer came
ready. M. Massol did not think of it, that was all. The important
thing is to know, not whether the Judge of Instruction suspected
the fact, or did not suspect it; but whether the fact itself is, or
is not, real.
Again, what indications had reached M. Massol to put him on this
scent? If he had thoroughly studied my father's home and his
domestic life, he had acquired the certainty that my mother was a
faithful wife and a good woman. He had witnessed her sincere
grief, and he had not seen, as I had, letters written by my father
in which he acknowledged his jealousy, and revealed the passion of
his false friend.
But, even supposing the judge had from the first suspected the
villainy of my future stepfather, the discovery of his accomplices
would have been the first thing to be done, since, in any case, the
presence of M. Termonde in our house at the time of the murder was
an ascertained fact.
Supposing M. Massol had been led to think of the brother who had
disappeared, what then? Where were the traces of that brother to
be found? Where and how? If Edmond and Jacques had been
accomplices in the crime, would not their chief care be to contrive
a means of correspondence which should defy the vigilance of the
police? Did they not cease for a time to communicate with each
other by letters? What had they to communicate, indeed? Edmond
was in possession of the price of the murder, and Jacques was
occupied in completing his conquest of my mother's heart.
I resumed my argument; all this granted again, but, although M.
Massol was ignorant of the essential factor in the case, although
he was unaware of Jacques Termonde's passion for the wife of the
murdered man, my aunt knew it well, she had in her hands
indisputable proofs of my father's suspicions; how came she not to
have thought as I was now thinking. And how did I know that she
had NOT thought just as I was thinking? She had been tormented by
suspicions, even she, too; she had lived and died haunted by them.
The only difference was that she had included my mother in them,
being incapable of forgiving her the sufferings of the brother whom
she loved so deeply. To act against my mother was to act against
me, so she had forsworn that idea forever. But if she would have
acted against my mother, how could she have gone beyond the domain
of vague inductions, since she, no more than I, could have divined
my stepfather's alibi, or known of the actual existence of Edmond
Termonde? No; that I should be the first to explain the murder of
my father as I did, proved only that I had come into possession of
additional information respecting the surroundings of the crime,
and not that the conjectures drawn from it were baseless.
Other objections presented themselves. If my stepfather had
employed his brother to commit the murder, how came he to reveal
the existence of that brother to his wife? An answer to this
question was not far to seek. If the crime had been committed
under conditions of complicity, only one proof of the fact could
remain, namely, the letters written by Jacques Termonde to Edmond,
in which the former recalled the latter to Europe and gave him
instructions for his journey; these letters Edmond had of course
preserved, and it was through them, and by the threat of showing
them to my mother, that he kept a hold over his brother. To tell
his wife so much as he had told her was to forestall and neutralize
this threat, at least to a certain extent; for, if the doer of the
deed should ever resolve on revealing the common secret to the
victim's widow, now the wife of him who had inspired it, the latter
would be able to deny the authenticity of the letters, to plead the
former confidence reposed in her respecting his brother, and to
point out that the denunciation was an atrocious act of revenge
achieved by a forgery. And, besides, if indeed the crime had been
committed in the manner that I imagined, was not that revelation to
my mother justified by another reason?
The remorseful moods by which I believed my stepfather to be
tortured were not likely to escape the observant affection of his
wife; she could not fail to know that there was a dark shadow on
his life which even her love could not dispel. Who knows but she
had suffered from the worst of all jealousy, that which is inspired
by a constant thought not imparted, a strange emotion hidden from
one? And he had revealed a portion of the truth to her so as to
spare her uneasiness of that kind, and to protect himself from
questions which his conscience rendered intolerable to him. There
was then no contradiction between this half-revelation made to my
mother, and my own theory of the complicity of the two brothers.
It was also clear to me that in making that revelation he had been
unable to go beyond a certain point in urging upon her the
necessity of silence towards me--silence which would never have
been broken but for her unforeseen emotion, but for my affectionate
entreaties, but for the sudden arrival of Edmond Termonde, which
had literally bewildered the poor woman. But how was my
stepfather's imprudence in refusing money to this brother, who was
at bay and ready to dare any and every thing, to be explained?
This, too, I succeeded in explaining to myself. It had happened
before my aunt's death, at a period when my stepfather believed
himself to be guaranteed from all risk on my side. He believed
himself to be sheltered from justice by the statute of limitations.
He was ill. What, then, was more natural than that he should wish
to recover those papers which might become a means of levying
blackmail upon his widow after his death, and dishonoring his
memory in the heart of that woman whom he had loved--even to crime--
at any price? Such a negotiation could only be conducted in
person. My stepfather would have reflected that his brother would
not fulfil his threat without making a last attempt; he would come
to Paris, and the accomplices would again be face to face after all
these years. A fresh but final offer of money would have to be
made to Edmond, the price of the relinquishment of the sole proof
whereby the mystery of the Imperial Hotel could be cleared up. In
this calculation my stepfather had omitted to forecast the chance
that his brother might come to the hotel on the Boulevard de
Latour-Maubourg, that he would be ushered into my mother's
presence, and that the result of the shock to himself--his health
being already undermined by his prolonged mental anguish--would be
a fresh attack of his malady. In events, there is always the
unexpected to put to rout the skillful calculations of the most
astute and the most prudent, and when I reflected that so much
cunning, such continual watchfulness over himself and others had
all come to this--unless indeed these surmises of mine were but
fallacies of a brain disturbed by fever and the consuming desire
for vengeance--I once more felt the passage of the wind of destiny
over us all.
However, whether reality or fancy, there they were, and I could not
remain in ignorance or in doubt. At the end of all my various
arguments for and against the probability of my new explanation of
the mystery, I arrived at a positive fact: rightly or wrongly I had
conceived the possibility of a plot in which Edmond Termonde had
served as the instrument of murder in his brother's hand. Were
there only one single chance, one against a thousand, that my
father had been killed in this way, I was bound to follow up the
clew to the end, on pain of having to despise myself as the veriest
coward that lived. The time of sorrowful dreaming was over; it was
now necessary to act, and to act was to know.
Morning dawned upon these thoughts of mine. I opened my window, I
saw the faces of the lofty houses livid in the first light of day,
and I swore solemnly to myself, in the presence of re-awakening
life, that this day should see me begin to do what I ought, and the
morrow should see me continue, and the following days should see
the same, until I could say to myself: "I am certain."
I resolutely repressed the wild feelings which had taken hold of me
during the night, and I fixed my mind upon the problem: "Does there
exist any means of making sure whether Edmond Termonde is, or is
not, identical with the man who in 1864 called himself Rochdale?"
For the answer to this question I had only myself, the resources of
my own intelligence, and my personal will to rely upon. I must do
myself the justice to state that not for one minute, during all
those cruel hours, was I tempted to rid myself once for all of the
difficulties of my tragic task by appealing to justice, as I should
have done had I not taken my mother's sufferings into account. I
had resolved that the terrible blow of learning that for fifteen
years she had been the wife of an assassin should never be dealt to
her by me. In order that she might always remain in ignorance of
this story of crime, it was necessary for the struggle to be
strictly confined to my stepfather and myself.
And yet, I thought, what if I find that he is guilty?
At this idea, no longer vague and distant, but liable today, to-
morrow, at any time, to become an indisputable truth, a terrible
project presented itself to my mind. But I would not look in that
direction, I made answer to myself: "I will think of this later
on," and I forced myself to concentrate all my reflections upon the
actual day and its problem: How to verify the identity of Edmond
Termonde with the false Rochdale?
To tear the secret from my stepfather was impossible. I had vainly
endeavored for months to find the flaw in his armor of
dissimulation; I had but broken not one dagger, but twenty against
the plates of that cuirass. If I had had all the tormentors of the
Middle Ages at my service, I could not have forced his fast-shut
lips to open, or extorted an admission from his woebegone and yet
impenetrable face.
There remained the other; but in order to attack him, I must first
discover under what name he was hiding in Paris, and where. No
great effort of imagination was required to hit upon a certain
means of discovering these particulars. I had only to recall the
circumstances under which I had learned the fact of Edmond
Termonde's arrival in Paris. For some reason or other--remembrance
of a guilty complicity or fear of a scandal--my stepfather trembled
with fear at the mere idea of his brother's return. His brother
had returned, and my stepfather would undoubtedly make every effort
to induce him to go away again. He would see him, but not at the
house on the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg, on account of my mother
and the servants. I had, therefore, a sure means of finding out
where Edmond Termonde was living; I would have his brother
followed.
There were two alternatives: either he would arrange a meeting in
some lonely place, or he would go himself to Edmond Termonde's
abode. In the latter case, I should have the information I wanted
at once; in the former, it would be sufficient to give the
description of Edmond Termonde just as I had received it from my
mother, and to have him also followed on his return from the place
of meeting. The spy-system has always seemed to me to be infamous,
and even at that moment I felt all the ignominy of setting this
trap for my stepfather; but when one is fighting, one must use the
weapons that will avail. To attain my end, I would have trodden
everything under foot except my mother's grief.
And then? Supposing myself in possession of the false name of
Edmond Termonde and his address, WHAT WAS I TO DO? I could not, in
imitation of the police, lay my hand upon him and his papers, and
get off with profuse excuses for the action when the search was
finished. I remember to have turned over twenty plans in my mind,
all more or less ingenious, and rejected them all in succession,
concluding by again fixing my mind on the bare facts.
Supposing the man really had killed my father, it was impossible
that the scene of the murder should not be indelibly impressed upon
his memory. In his dark hours the face of the dead man, whom I
resembled so closely, must have been visible to his mind's eye.
Once more I studied the portrait at which my stepfather had hardly
dared to glance, and recalled my own words: "Do you think the
likeness is sufficiently strong for me to have the effect of a
specter upon the criminal?"
Why not utilize this resemblance? I had only to present myself
suddenly before Edmond Termonde, and call him by the name--
Rochdale--to his ears its syllables would have the sound of a
funeral bell. Yes! that was the way to do it; to go into the room
he now occupied, just as my father had gone into the room at the
Imperial Hotel, and to ask for him by the name under which my
father had asked for him, showing him the very face of his victim.
If he was not guilty, I should merely have to apologize for having
knocked at his door by mistake; if he was guilty, he would be so
terrified for some minutes that his fear would amount to an avowal.
It would then be for me to avail myself of that terror to wring the
whole of his secret from him.
What motives would inspire him? Two, manifestly--the fear of
punishment, and the love of money. It would then be necessary for
me to be provided with a large sum when taking him unawares, and to
let him choose between two alternatives, either that he should sell
me the letters which had enabled him to blackmail his brother for
years past, or that I should shoot him on the spot.
And what if he refused to give up the letters to me? Is it likely
that a ruffian of his kind would hesitate?
Well, then, he would accept the bargain, hand me over the papers by
which my stepfather is convicted of murder, and take himself off;
and I must let him go away just as he had gone away from the
Imperial Hotel, smoking a cigar, and paid for his treachery to his
brother, even as he had been paid for his treachery to my father!
Yes, I must let him go away thus, because to kill him with my own
hand would be to place myself under the necessity of revealing the
whole of the crime, which I am bound to conceal at all hazards.
"Ah, mother! what will you not cost me!" I murmured with tears.
Fixing my eyes again upon the portrait of the dead man, it seemed
to me that I read in its eyes and mouth an injunction never to
wound the heart of the woman he had so dearly loved--even for the
sake of avenging him. "I will obey you," I made answer to my
father, and bade adieu to that part of my vengeance.
It was very hard, very cruel to myself; nevertheless, it was
possible; for, after all, did I hate the wretch himself? He had
struck the blow, it is true, but only as a servile tool in the hand
of another.
Ah! that other, I would not let HIM escape, when he should be in my
grip; he who had conceived, meditated, arranged, and paid for the
deed; he who had stolen all from me, all, all, from my father's
life even to my mother's love; he, the real, the only culprit.
Yes, I would lay hold of him, and contrive and execute my
vengeance, while my mother should never suspect the existence of
that duel out of which I should come triumphant. I was intoxicated
beforehand with the idea of the punishment which I would find means
to inflict upon the man whom I execrated. It warmed my heart only
to think of how this would repay my long, cruel martyrdom.
"To work! to work!" I cried aloud.
I trembled lest this should be nothing but a delusion, lest Edmond
Termonde should have already left the country, my stepfather having
previously purchased his silence.
At nine o'clock I was in an abominable Private Inquiry Office--
merely to have passed its threshold would have seemed to me a
shameful action, only a few hours before. At ten I was with my
broker, giving him instructions to sell out 100,000 francs' worth
of shares for me. That day passed, and then a second. How I bore
the succession of the hours, I know not. I do know that I had not
courage to go to my mother's house, or to see her again. I feared
she might detect my wild hope in my eyes, and unconsciously
forewarn my stepfather by a sentence or a word, as she had
unconsciously informed me.
Towards noon, on the third day, I learned that my stepfather had
gone out that morning. It was a Wednesday, and on that day my
mother always attended a meeting for some charitable purpose in the
Grenelle quarter. M. Termonde had changed his cab twice, and had
alighted from the second vehicle at the Grand Hotel. There he had
paid a visit to a traveler who occupied a room on the second floor
(No. 353); this person's name was entered in the list of arrivals
as Stanbury. At noon I was in possession of these particulars, and
at two o'clock I ascended the staircase of the Grand Hotel, with a
loaded revolver and a note-case containing one hundred banknotes,
wherewith to purchase the letters, in my pocket.
Was I about to enter on a formidable scene in the drama of my life,
or was I about to be convinced that I had been once more made the
dupe of my own imagination?
At all events, I should have done my duty.