Then the former Judge of Instruction gave me some singular examples of

the resentment cherished against medical experts employed in legal

cases, Procureurs of the Republic, and Presidents of Assize. His theory

was, that in the course of his practice at the bar my father might have

excited resentment of a fierce and implacable kind; for he had won many

suits of importance, and no doubt had made enemies of those against whom

he employed his great powers. Supposing one of those persons, being

ruined by the result, had attributed that ruin to my father, there would

be an explanation of all the apparatus of this deadly vengeance. M.

Massol begged me to observe that the assassin, whether he were a

foreigner or not, was known in Paris. Why, if this were not so, should

the man have so carefully avoided being seen in the street? He had been

traced out during his first stay in Paris, when he bought the wig and

the beard, and that time he put up at a small hotel in the Rue d'Aboukir

under the name of Rochdale, and invariably went out in a cab. "Observe

also," said the Judge, "that he kept his room on the day before the

murder, and on the morning of the actual day. He breakfasted in his

apartment, having breakfasted and dined there the day before. But, when

he was in London, and when he lived at the hotel to which your father

addressed his first letters, he came and went without any precautions."

And this was all. The addresses of three hotels--such were the meagre

particulars that formed the whole of the information to which I listened

with passionate eagerness; the magistrate had no more to tell me. He had

small, twinkling, very light eyes, and his smooth face wore an

expression of extreme keenness. His language was measured, his general

demeanour was cold, obliging, and mild, he was always closely shaven,

and in him one recognised at once the well-balanced and methodical mind

which had given him great professional weight. He acknowledged that he

had been unable to discover anything, even after a close analysis of the

whole existing situation of my father, as well as his past.

"Ah, I have thought a great deal about this affair," said he, adding

that before he resigned his post as Judge of Instruction he had

carefully reperused the notes of the case. He had again questioned the

concierge of the Imperial Hotel and other persons. Since he had become

Counsellor to the Court, he had indicated to his successor what he

believed to be a clue; a robbery committed by a carefully made up

Englishman had led him to believe the thief to be identical with the

pretended Rochdale. Then there was nothing more. These steps had,

however, been of use inasmuch as they barred the rule of limitation, and

he laid stress on that fact. I consulted him then as to how much time

still remained for me to seek out the truth on my own account. The last

Act of Instruction dated from 1873, so that I had until 1883 to discover

the criminal and deliver him up to public justice. What madness! Ten

years had already elapsed since the crime, and I, all alone,

insignificant, not possessed of the vast resources at the disposal of

the police, I presumed to imagine that I should triumph, where so

skilful a ferret as he had failed! Folly! Yes; it was so. Nevertheless,

I tried.

I began a thorough and searching investigation of all the dead man's

papers. With that unbounded tenderness of hers for my stepfather, which

made me so miserable, my mother had placed all these papers in M.

Termonde's keeping. Alas! Why should she have understood those niceties

of feeling on my part, which rendered the fusion of her present with her

past so repugnant to me, any more clearly on this point than on any

other? M. Termonde had at least scrupulously respected the whole of

those papers, from plans of association and prospectuses to private

letters. Among the latter were several from M. Termonde himself, which

bore testimony to the friendship that had formerly subsisted between my

mother's first husband and her second. Had I not known this always? Why

should I suffer from the knowledge? And still there was nothing, no

indication whatever to put me on the track of a suspicion.

I evoked the image of my father as he lived, just as I had seen him for

the last time; I heard him replying to M. Termonde's question in the

dining-room of the Rue Tronchet, and speaking of the man who awaited him

to kill him: "A singular man whom I shall not be sorry to observe more

closely." And then he had gone out and was walking towards his death

while I was playing in the little salon, and my mother was talking to

the friend who was one day to be her master and mine. What a happy

home-picture, while in that hotel room---- Ah! was I never to find the

key of the terrible enigma? Where was I to go? What was I to do? At what

door was I to knock?

At the same time that a sense of the responsibility of my task

disheartened me, the novel facilities of my new way of life contributed

to relax the tension of my will. During my school days, the sufferings I

underwent from jealousy of my stepfather, the disappointment of my

repressed affections, the meanness and penury of my surroundings, many

grievous influences, had maintained the restless ardour of my feelings;

but this also had undergone a change. No doubt I still continued to love

my mother deeply and painfully, but I now no longer asked her for what I

knew she would not give me, my unshared place, a separate shrine in her

heart. I accepted her nature instead of rebelling against it. Neither

had I ceased to regard my stepfather with morose antipathy; but I no

longer hated him with the old vehemence. Mis conduct to me after I had

left school was irreproachable. Just as in my childhood, he had made it

a point of honour never to raise his voice in speaking to me, so he now

seemed to pique himself upon an entire absence of interference in my

life as a young man. When, having passed my baccalaureate, I announced

that I did not wish to adopt any profession, but without a reason--the

true one was my resolution to devote myself entirely to the fulfilment

of my task of justice--he had not a word to say against that strange

decision; nay, more, he brought my mother to consent to it. When my

fortune was handed over to me, I found that my mother, who had acted as

my guardian, and my stepfather, her co-trustee, had agreed not to touch

my funds during the whole period of my education; the interest had been

re-invested, and I came into possession, not of 750,000 francs, but of

more than a million. Painful as I felt the obligation of gratitude

towards the man whom I had for years regarded as my enemy, I was bound

to acknowledge that he had acted an honourable part towards me. I was

well aware that no real contradiction existed between these high-minded

actions and the harshness with which he had imprisoned me at school,

and, so to speak, relegated me to exile. Provided that I renounced all

attempts to form a third between him and his wife, he would have no

relations with me but those of perfect courtesy; but I must not be in my

mother's house. His will was to reign entirely alone over the heart and

life of the woman who bore his name. How could I have contended with

him? Why, too, should I have blamed him, since I knew so well that in

his place, jealous as I was, my own conduct would have been exactly

similar? I yielded, therefore, because I was powerless to contend with a

love which made my mother happy; because I was weary of keeping up the

daily constraint of my relations with her and him, and also because I

hoped that when once I was free I should be better fitted for my task as

a doer of justice. I myself asked to be permitted to leave the house, so

that at nineteen I possessed absolute independence, an apartment of my

own in the Avenue Montaigne, close to the round-point in the Champs

Élysées, a yearly income of 50,000 francs, the entrée to all the

salons frequented by my mother, and the entrée, too, to all the places

at which one may amuse one's self. How could I have resisted the

influences of such a position?

Yes, I had dreamed of being an avenger, a justiciary, and I allowed

myself to be caught up almost instantly into the whirlwind of that life

of pleasure whose destructive power those who see it only from the

outside cannot measure. It is a futile and exacting existence which

fritters away your hours as it fritters away your mind, ravelling out

the stuff of time thread by thread with irreparable loss, and also the

more precious stuff of mental and moral strength. With respect to that

task of mine, my task as an avenger, I was incapable of immediate

action--what and whom was I to attack? And so I availed myself of all

the opportunities that presented themselves of disguising my inaction by

movement, and soon the days began to hurry on, and press one upon the

other, amid those innumerable, amusements of which the idle rich made a

code of duties to be performed. What with the morning ride in the Bois,

afternoon calls, dinner parties, parties to the theatre and after

midnight, play at the club, or the pursuit of pleasure elsewhere--how

was I to find leisure for the carrying out of a project? I had horses,

intrigues, an absurd duel in which I acquitted myself well, because, as

I believe, the tragic ideas that were always at the bottom of my life

favoured me. A woman of forty persuaded me that I was her first love,

and I became her lover; then I persuaded myself that I was in love with

a Russian great lady, who was living in Paris. The latter was--indeed

she still is--one of those incomparable actresses in society, who, in

order to surround themselves with a sort of court, composed of admirers

who are more or less rewarded, employ all the allurements of luxury,

wit, and beauty; but who have not a particle of either imagination or

heart, although they fascinate by a display of the most refined fancies

and the most vivid emotions. I led the life of a slave to the caprices

of this soulless coquette for nearly six months, and learned that women

of "the world" and women of "the half-world" are very much alike in

point of worth. The former are intolerable on account of their lies,

their assumption, and their vanity; the others are equally odious by

reason of their vulgarity, their stupidity, and their sordid love of

lucre. I forgot all my absurd relations with women of both orders in the

excitement of play, and yet I was well aware of the meanness of that

diversion, which only ceases to be insipid when if becomes odious,

because it is a clever calculation upon money to be gained without

working for it. There was in me something at once wildly dissipated and

yet disgusted, which drove me to excess, and at the same time inspired

me with bitter self-contempt. In the innermost recesses of my being the

memory of my father dwelt, and poisoned my thoughts at their source. An

impression of dark fatalism invaded my sick mind; it was so strange that

I should live as I was living, nevertheless, I did live thus, and the

visible "I" had but little likeness to the real. Upon me, then, poor

creature that I was, as upon the whole universe, a fate rested. "Let it

drive me," I said, and yielded myself up to it. I went to sleep,

pondering upon ideas of the most sombre philosophy, and I awoke to

resume an existence without worth or dignity, in which I was losing not

only my power of carrying out my design of reparation towards the

phantom which haunted my dreams, but all self-esteem, and all

conscience. Who could have helped me reascend this fatal stream? My

mother? She saw nothing but the fashionable exterior of my life, and she

congratulated herself that I had "ceased to be a savage." My stepfather?

But he had been, voluntarily or not, favourable to my disorderly life.

Had he not made me master of my fortune at the most dangerous age? Had

he not procured me admission, at the earliest moment, to the clubs to

which he belonged, and in every way facilitated my entrance into

society? My aunt? Ah, yes, my aunt was grieved by my mode of life; and

yet, was she not glad that at any rate I had forgotten the dark

resolution of hate that had always frightened her? And, besides, I

hardly ever saw her now. My visits to Compiègne were few, for I was at

the age when one always finds time for one's pleasures, but never has

any for one's nearest duties. If, indeed, there was a voice that was

constantly lifted up against the waste of my life in vulgar pleasures,

it was that of the dead, who slept in the day, unavenged; that voice

rose, rose, rose unceasingly, from the depths of all my musings, but I

had accustomed myself to pay it no heed, to make it no answer. Was it my

fault that everything, from the most important to the smallest

circumstance, conspired to paralyse my will? And so I existed, in a sort

of torpor which was not dispelled even by the hurly-burly of my mock

passions and my mock pleasures.

The falling of a thunderbolt awoke me from this craven slumber of the

will. My aunt Louise was seized with paralysis, towards the end of that

sad year 1878, in the month of December. I had come in at night, or

rather in the morning, having won a large sum at play. Several letters

and also a telegram awaited me. I tore open the blue envelope, while I

hummed the air of a fashionable song, with a cigarette between my lips,

untroubled by an idea that I was about to be apprised of an event which

would become, after my father's death and my mother's second marriage,

the third great date in my life. The telegram was signed by Julie, my

former nurse, and it told me that my aunt had been taken ill quite

suddenly, also that I must come at once, although there was a hope of

her recovery. This bad news was the more terrible to me because I had

received a letter from my aunt just a week previously, and in it the

dear old lady complained, as usual, that I did not come to see her. My

answer to her letter was lying half-written upon my writing-table. I had

not finished it; God knows for what futile reason. It needs the advent

of that dread visitant, Death, to make us understand that we ought to

make good haste and love well those whom we do love, if we would not

have them pass away from us for ever, before we have loved them enough.

Bitter remorse, in that I had not proved to her sufficiently how dear

she was to me, increased my anxiety about my aunt's state. It was two

o'clock A.M., the first train for Compiègne did not start until six; in

the interval she might die. Those were very long hours of waiting, which

I killed by turning over in my mind all my shortcomings towards my

father's only sister, my sole kinswoman. The possibility of an

irrevocable parting made me regard myself as utterly ungrateful! My

mental pain grew keener when I was in the train speeding through the

cold dawn of a winter's day, along the road I knew so well. As I

recognised each familiar feature of the way, I became once more the

schoolboy whose heart was full of unuttered tenderness, and whose brain

was laden with the weight of a terrible mission. My thoughts outstripped

the engine, moving too slowly, to my impatient fancy, which summoned up

that beloved face, so frank and so simple, the mouth with its thickish

lips and its perfect kindliness, the eyes out of which goodness looked,

with their wrinkled, tear-worn lids, the flat bands of grizzled hair. In

what state should I find her? Perhaps, if on that night of repentance,

wretchedness, and mental disturbance, my nerves had not been strained to

the utmost--yes, perhaps I should not have experienced those wild

impulses when by the side of my aunt's death-bed, which rendered me

capable of disobeying the dying woman. But how can I regret my

disobedience, since it was the one thing that set me on the track of the

truth? No, I do not regret anything, I am better pleased to have done

what I have done.

VIII

My good old Julie was waiting for me at the station. Her eyes had failed

her of late, for she was seventy years old, nevertheless she recognised

me as I stepped out of the train, and began to talk to me in her usual

interminable fashion so soon as we were seated in the hired coupé,

which my aunt had sent to meet me whenever I came to Compiègne, from

the days of my earliest childhood. How well I knew the heavy old

vehicle, with its worn cushions of yellow leather, and the driver, who

had been in the service of the livery stable keeper as long as I could

remember. He was a little man with a merry roguish face, and eyes

twinkling with fun; but he tried to give a melancholy tone to his

salutation that morning.

"It took her yesterday," said Julie, while the vehicle rumbled heavily

through the streets, "but you see it had to happen. Our poor demoiselle

had been changing for weeks past. She was so trustful, so gentle, so

just; she scolded, she ferreted about, she suspected--there, then, her

head was all astray. She talked of nothing but thieves and assassins;

she thought everybody wanted to do her some harm, the tradespeople,

Jean, Mariette, myself--yes, I too. She went into the cellar every day

to count the bottles of wine, and wrote the number down on a paper. The

next day she found the same number, and she would maintain the paper was

not the same, she disowned her own handwriting. I wanted to tell you

this the last time you came here, but I did not venture to say anything;

I was afraid it would worry you, and then I thought these were only

freaks, that she was a little crazy, and it would pass off. Well, then,

I came down yesterday to keep her company at her dinner, as she always

liked me to do, because, you know, she was fond of me in reality,

whether she was ill or well. I could not find her. Mariette, Jean, and I

searched everywhere, and at last Jean bethought him of letting the dog

loose; the animal brought us straight to the wood-stack, and there we

found her lying at full length upon the ground. No doubt she had gone to

the stack to count the logs. We lifted her up, our poor dear demoiselle!

Her mouth was crooked, and one side of her could not move. She began to

talk. Then we thought she was mad, for she said senseless words which we

could not understand; but the doctor assures us that she is perfectly

clear in her head, only that she utters one word when she means another.

She gets angry if we do not obey her on the instant. Last night when I

was sitting up with her she asked for some pins, I brought them and she

was angry. Would you believe that it was the time of night she wanted to

know? At length, by dint of questioning her, and by her yeses and noes,

which she expresses with her sound hand, I have come to make out her

meaning. If you only knew how troubled she was all night about you; I

saw it, and when I uttered your name her eyes brightened. She repeats

words, you would think she raves; she calls for you. Now look here, M.

André, it was the ideas she had about your poor father that brought on

her illness. All these last weeks she talked of nothing else. She would

say: 'If only they do not kill André also. As for me, I am old, but he

is so young, so good, so gentle.' And she cried--yes, she cried

incessantly. 'Who is it that you think wants to harm M. André?' I asked

her. Then she turned away from me with a look of distrust that cut me to

the heart, although I knew that her head was astray. The doctor says

that she believes herself persecuted, and that it is a mania; he also

says that she may recover, but will never have her speech again."

I listened to Julie's talk in silence; I made no answer. I was not

surprised that my aunt Louise had begun to be attacked by a mental

malady, the trials of her life sufficiently explained this, and I could

also account for several singularities that I had observed in her

attitude towards me of late. She had surprised me much by asking me to

bring back a book of my father's which I had never thought of taking

away. "Return it to me," she said, insisting upon it so strongly, that I

instituted a search for the book, and at last unearthed it from the

bottom of a cupboard where it had been placed, as if on purpose, under a

heap of other books. Julie's prolix narrative only enlightened me as to

the sad cause of what I had taken for the oddity of a fidgety and lonely

old maid. On the other hand, I could not take the ideas of my aunt upon

my father's death so philosophically as Julie accepted them. What were

those ideas? Many a time, in the course of conversation with her, I had

vaguely felt that she was not opening her heart quite freely to me. Her

determined opposition to my plans of a personal inquiry might proceed

from her piety, which would naturally cause her to disapprove of any

thought or project of vengeance, but was there nothing else, nothing

besides that piety in question? Her strange solicitude for my personal

safety, which even led her to entreat me not to go out unarmed in the

evening, or get into an empty compartment in a train, with other

counsels of the same kind, was no doubt caused by morbid excitement;

still her constant and distressing dread might possibly rest upon a less

vague foundation than I imagined. I also recalled, with a certain

apprehension, that so soon as she ceased to be able completely to

control her mind these strange fears took stronger possession of her

than before. "What!" said I to myself, "am I becoming like her, that I

let such things occur to me? Are not these fixed ideas quite natural in

a person whose brain is racked by the mania of persecution, and who has

lost a beloved brother under circumstances equally mysterious and

tragical?"

Thus reasoning with myself, almost in spite of myself, and listening to

Julie, I arrived at my aunt's house. A gloomy place it looked on that

bitter cold morning, sunk in the grimmest kind of silence, that of the

country in winter. The dog, a big black-and-white Newfoundland, whom I

had named Don Juan, whereat my aunt had been scandalised, jumped upon me

when I got out of the old coupé; but I pushed him away almost roughly,

so sore was my heart at the thought of what I was about to see in my

aunt's room, whither I proceeded at once.

When I entered, the maid-servant, who was seated at the bed's foot,

stopped me with a gesture at the threshold; my aunt was sleeping. I

stole softly over the carpet to an easy-chair beside the fire, and

looked at the invalid from that distance. She lay, with her face turned

towards the wall, in the middle of the old bed with four carved posts,

which had belonged to my grandmother. The curtains, of thick red stuff

brocaded with black velvet, half hid her from my sight. I watched her

sleeping; now listening to her short breathing, and again looking about

the room, which was as familiar to me as the salon below stairs, where I

had written my letter of congratulation to my stepfather on his

marriage. Those red curtains were of an old-fashioned shade, which

harmornised with the antiquated shape of the furniture, the faded paper

of the screen before the window, the white ground of the carpet, the

discoloured reps with which the chairs were covered; in short, with all

the waifs from the wreck of our family life, that had been piously

preserved by the dear old maid. She was so exact and orderly; her

black-mittened hands were so skilful in pouncing upon any dust

overlooked by Jean, who combined the functions of gardener and

house-servant, that these old worn things, owing to the deep shining

brown of the bedstead, the chairs, and the brass-handled chest of

drawers, lent a homely aspect to the room such as the primitive painters

loved to give to their pictures of the Nativity. The contrast between my

apartment--the typical fashionable young man's rooms--and this peaceful

retreat was striking indeed. I had passed from the one to the other too

suddenly not to feel that contrast, and also the mute reproach that was

conveyed to me by the sick room, with its atmosphere tainted by a

medicinal odour instead of the fresh scent of lavender which I had

always recognised there. How bitterly I reproached myself in that half

hour, during which I listened to her breathing as she slept, and

meditated upon her lonely life. What resolutions I formed! I would come

here for long weeks together, when she should be better--for I would not

admit that she was in danger of death--and I eagerly awaited the moment

of her awakening, to beg her forgiveness, to tell her how much I loved

her. All of a sudden she heaved a deep sigh, and I saw her raise the

free arm and move it up and down several times with a gesture that had

something of despair in it.

"She is awake," said Julie, who had taken the maid's place at the foot

of the bed. I approached my aunt and called her by her name. I then

clearly saw her poor face distorted by paralysis. She recognised me, and

as I bent down to kiss her, she stroked my cheek with her sound hand.

This caress, which was habitual with her, she repeated slowly several

times. I placed her, with Julie's assistance, on her back, so that she

could see me distinctly; she looked at me for a long time, and two heavy

tears fell from the eyes in which I read boundless tenderness, supreme

anguish, and inexpressible pity. I answered them by my own tears, which

she dried with the back of her hand; then she strove to speak to me, but

could only pronounce an incoherent sentence that struck me to the heart.

She saw, by the expression of my face, that I had not understood her,

and she made a desperate effort to find words in which to render the

thought evidently precise and lucid in her mind. Once more she uttered

an unintelligible phrase, and began again to make the feeble gesture of

despairing helplessness which had so shocked me at her waking. She

appeared, however, to take courage when I put the question to her: "What

do you want of me, dear aunt?" She made a sign that Julie was to leave

the room, and no sooner were we alone than her face changed. With my

help she was able to slip her hand under her pillow, and withdraw her

bunch of keys; then separating one key from the others she imitated the

opening of a lock. I immediately remembered her groundless fears of

being robbed, and asked her whether she wanted the box to which that key

belonged. It was a small key of a kind that is specially made for safety

locks. I saw that I had guessed aright; she was able to get out the word

"yes," and her eyes brightened.

"But where is this box?" I asked. Once more she replied by a sentence of

which I could make nothing; and, seeing that she was relapsing into a

state of agitation, with the former heart-rending movement, I begged her

to allow me to question her and to answer by gestures only. After some

minutes, I succeeded in discovering that the box in question was locked

up in one of the two large cupboards below stairs, and that the key of

the cupboard was on the ring with the others. I went downstairs, leaving

her alone, as she had desired me by signs to do. I had no difficulty in

finding the casket to which the little key adapted itself; although it

was carefully placed behind a bonnet-box and a case of silver forks. The

casket was of sweet-scented wood, and the initials J.C. were inlaid

upon the lid in gold and platinum. J.C., Justin Cornélis--so, it had

belonged to my father. I tried the key in the lock, to make quite sure

that I was not mistaken. I then raised the lid, and glanced at the

contents almost mechanically, supposing that I was about to find a roll

of business papers, probably shares, a few trinket-cases, and rouleaux

of napoleons, a small treasure in fact, hidden away from motives of

fear. Instead of this, I beheld several small packets carefully wrapped

in paper, each being endorsed with the words, "Justin's Letters," and

the year in which they were written. My aunt had preserved these letters

with the same pious care that had kept her from allowing anything

whatever belonging to him in whom the deepest affection of her life had

centred, to be lost, parted with, or injured. But why had she never

spoken to me of this treasure, which was more precious to me than to any

one else in the world? I asked myself that question as I closed the box;

then I reflected that no doubt she desired to retain the letters to the

last hour of her life; and, satisfied with this explanation, I went

upstairs again. From the doorway my eyes met hers, and I could not

mistake their look of impatience and intense anxiety. I placed the

little coffer on her bed and she instantly opened it, took out a packet

of letters, then another, finally kept only one out, replaced those she

had removed at first, locked the box, and signed to me to place it on

the chest of drawers. While I was clearing away the things on the top of

the drawers, to make a clear space for the box, I caught sight, in the

glass opposite to me, of the sick woman. By a great effort she had

turned herself partly on her side, and she was trying to throw the

packet of letters which she had retained into the fireplace; it was on

the right of her bed, and only about a yard away from the foot. But she

could hardly raise herself at all, the movement of her hand was too

weak, and the little parcel fell on the floor. I hastened to her, to

replace her head on the pillows and her body in the middle of the bed,

and then with her powerless arm she again began to make that terrible

gesture of despair, clutching the sheet with her thin fingers, while

tears streamed from her poor eyes.

Ah! how bitterly ashamed I am of what I am going to write in this place!

I will write it, however, for I have sworn to myself that I will be

true, even to the avowal of that fault, even to the avowal of a worse

still. I had no difficulty in understanding what was passing in my

aunt's mind; the little packet--it had fallen on the carpet close to the

fender--evidently contained letters which she wished to destroy, so that

I should not read them. She might have burned them, dreading as she did

their fatal influence upon me, long since; yet I understood why she had

shrunk from doing this, year after year, I, who knew with what idolatry

she worshipped the smallest objects that had belonged to my father. Had

I not seen her put away the blotting-book which he used when he came to

Compiègne, with the paper and envelopes that were in it at his last

visit? Yes, she had gone on waiting, still waiting, before she could

bring herself to part for ever with those dear and dangerous letters,

and then her sudden illness came, and with it the terrible thought that

these papers would come into my possession. I could also take into

account that the unreasonable distrust which she had yielded to of late

had prevented her from asking Jean or Julie for the little coffer. This

was the secret--I understood it on the instant--of the poor thing's

impatience for my arrival, the secret also of the trouble I had

witnessed. And now her strength had betrayed her. She had vainly

endeavoured to throw the letters into the fire, that fire which she

could hear crackling, without being able to raise her head so as to see

the flame. All these notions which presented themselves suddenly to my

thoughts took form afterwards; at the moment they melted into pity for

the suffering of the helpless creature before me.

"Do not disturb yourself, dear aunt," said I, as I drew the coverlet up

to her shoulders, "I am going to burn those letters."

She raised her eyes, full of eager supplication, I closed the lids with

my lips and stooped to pick up the little packet. On the paper in which

it was folded, I distinctly read this date: "1864--Justin's Letters."

1864! that was the last year of my father's life. I know it, I feel it,

that which I did was infamous; the last wishes of the dying are sacred.

I ought pot, no, I ought not to have deceived her who was on the point

of leaving me for ever. I heard her breathing quicken at that very

moment. Then came a whirlwind of thought too strong for me. If my aunt

Louise was so wildly, passionately eager that those letters should be

burned, it was because they could put me on the right track of

vengeance. Letters written in the last year of my father's life, and she

had never spoken of them to me! I did not reason, I did not hesitate, in

a lightning-flash I perceived the possibility of learning--what? I knew

not; but--of learning. Instead of throwing the packet of letters into

the fire, I flung it to one side, under a chair, returned to the bedside

and told her in a voice which I endeavoured to keep steady and calm,

that her directions had been obeyed, that the letters were burning. She

took my hand and kissed it. Oh, what a stab that gentle caress inflicted

upon me! I knelt down by her bedside, and hid my head in the sheets, so

that her eyes should not meet mine. Alas! it was not for long that I had

to dread her glance. At ten she fell asleep, but at noon her

restlessness recurred. At two the priest came, and administered the last

sacraments to her. She had a second stroke towards evening, never

recovered consciousness, and died in the night.

Will you pardon me that falsehood which I told you in your last hours, O

my beloved dead? Your desire that I should never read those fatal

letters, which have begun to shed so terrible a light upon the past,

arose from your solicitude to spare me the suspicions that had tortured

yourself. On your death-bed your sole thought was for my happiness. Will

you forgive me for having frustrated that foresight of the dying? I must

speak to you, although I know not whether you can see me this day, or

hear me, or even feel the emotion which goes out to you, beloved one,

from my inmost soul. But, I am ashamed of having lied to you, when you

thought only of being good to me, so good, so good that no human

creature was ever better to another; and I am forced to tell you this.

You, at least, I have never doubted; there is only one touch of

bitterness in my thoughts of you; it is that I did not cherish you

sufficiently while you were here with me, that I betrayed you in the

matter of the last earthly desire of your pure soul.

I see you now, and those eyes which revealed your stainless but sorely

wounded heart. You come to me, and you pardon me; your hand strokes my

check with that sad, sad caress which you gave me before you went away

into the darkness, where hands may no more be clasped or tears mingled.

If death had not come to you too quickly, if I had obeyed your last

desire, you would have carried the secret of your most painful doubts to

the grave. You do not blame me now for having wanted to know? You no

longer blame me for having suffered? A destiny exists, and weighs upon

us, which requires that light shall be cast upon the darkness of that

crime, that justice shall resume its rights, and the avenger come. By

what road? That power knows, and uses strange weapons for its task of

reparation. It was decreed, dear and pious sister of my murdered father,

that your faithful cherishing of his dear memory should at last arouse

my slumbering will. Reproach me not, O tender, unquiet spirit, with the

torments which I have inflicted upon myself, with the tragic purpose to

which I have sacrificed my youth. Rest, I say, rest! May peace descend

upon the grave in which you sleep beside my father, in the cemetery at

Compiègne, where I too shall find repose one day. And to think that

to-morrow might be that day!

IX

My aunt died at nine o'clock in the evening. I closed her eyes, and sat

by her side until eleven, when Julie came to me and persuaded me to go

downstairs and eat something. I had taken nothing but a cup of coffee at

noon. What a mournful meal was that in the dining-room, with its walls

adorned with old china plates, where I had so often sat opposite to my

dear aunt! A lamp stood on the table and threw a light upon the

table-cloth just in front of me, but did not dispel the shadows in the

room, which was warmed by a big earthenware stove, cracked by the heat.

I listened to the noise of this stove, and it brought back the evenings

in my childhood, when I used to roast chestnuts in the ashes of just

such a fire, after I had split them, lest they should burst. I looked at

Julie, who insisted on waiting upon me herself, and found her drying the

big tears that rolled down her wrinkled cheeks with the corner of her

blue apron. I have passed hours that were more cruel, but have never

known any more poignant; and I may do myself the justice to record that

grief absorbed every other feeling in me at first. During the whole of

that dismal night I never for an instant thought of opening the packet

of letters which I had obtained by so shameful a falsehood. I had

forgotten its existence, although I had taken care to pick it up and

take it to my own room. Where was now my curiosity to learn the secrets

of those letters? I knew that I had just lost for ever the only being

who had loved me entirely, and that knowledge crushed me. I wished to

keep the watch by the side of the dead for part of the night, and I

could not turn my gaze from that motionless face which had looked upon

me for so many years with absolute and unbounded tenderness, but now lay

before me with rigid features, closed lips, shut eyelids, and wearing an

expression of profound sorrow such as I have never seen upon any other

dead face. All the melancholy thoughts which had distilled their slow

poison into her heart while she lived, were revealed by that countenance

now restored to its truth. Ah! that expression of infinite sadness ought

to have driven me on the instant to seek for its mysterious cause in the

letters which had occupied her mind to the very brink of the grave, but

how could I have had strength to reason while gazing on that mournful

face? I could only feel that the lips which had never spoken any words

but those of tenderness to me would utter them no more, that the hands

which had caressed me so tenderly would clasp mine no more for ever. The

nun who was watching the dead repeated the appointed prayers, and I

found myself uttering the old forms in which I no longer believed. As I

recited the Paternoster and the Ave, I thought of all the prayers which

she, who lay at rest before me, had put up to God for my peace and

welfare.

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 box-room

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 mantelshelf, 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 agonised 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: "1864--Justin's

Letters." 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 colour 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 my sombre 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 recognised 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 death-bed 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

table-cloth) 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 school-mates! 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, working-man'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

Cornélis; 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 École 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, deriding

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 the 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 quite another thing when her intimacy with Termonde, who moved in

the most worldly and elegant of Parisian "worlds," was perpetually

reminding her of all its pleasures and habits. My father saw that she

was bored and weary while doing the honours 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 paralyses 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 he is her lover, she is his mistress, 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 dreadful 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 had me think of my mother what I was now in a fit of

distraction thinking--that she had deceived my father, that she had been

Termonde's mistress, that therein lay the secret of the murder. 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 excerpt 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, of believing that she had been Termonde's mistress.

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 they 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 dispelled my suspicions.

What if she were to read my 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 Compiègne, awaiting the arrival of a mother,

suspected as mine was. Just God! Did not I expiate everything in

anticipation by that one hour?

X

The train from Paris approached, and stopped. The railway officials

called out the name of the station, as they opened the doors of the

carriage one after another, very slowly it seemed to me. I went from

carriage to carriage seeking my mother. Had she at the last moment

decided not to come! What a trial to me if it were so! What a night I

should have to pass in all the torment of suspicions which, I knew too

well, her mere presence would dispel. A voice called me. It was hers.

Then I saw her, dressed in black, and never in my life did I clasp her

in my arms as I did then, utterly forgetting that we were in a public

place, and why she had come, in the joy of feeling my horrible

imaginations vanish, melt away at the mere touch of the being whom I

loved so profoundly, the only one who was dear to me, notwithstanding

our differences, in the very depths of my heart, now that I had lost my

aunt Louise. After that first movement, which resembled the grasp in

which a drowning man seizes the swimmer who dives for him, I looked at

my mother without speaking, holding both her hands. She had thrown back

her veil, and in the flickering light of the station I saw that she was

very pale and had been weeping. I had only to meet her eyes, which were

still wet with tears, to know that I had been mad. I felt this, with the

first words she uttered, telling me so tenderly of her grief, and that

she had resolved to come at once, although my stepfather was ill. M.

Termonde had suffered of late from frequent attacks of illness. But

neither her grief nor her anxiety about her husband had prevented my

poor mother from providing herself, for this little excursion of a few

hours, with all her customary appliances of comfort and elegance. Her

maid stood behind her, accompanied by a porter, and both were laden with

three or four bags of different sizes, carefully buttoned up in their

waterproof covers; a dressing-case, writing-case, an elegant wallet to

hold the traveller's purse, handkerchief, book, and second veil; a

hot-water bottle for the feet, two cushions for her head, and a little

clock.

"You see," said she, while I was pointing out the carriage to the maid,

so that she might get rid of her impedimenta, "I shall not have my right

mourning until to-morrow "--and now I perceived that her gown was dark

brown and only braided with black--"they could not have the things ready

in time, but will send them as early as possible." Then, as I placed her

in the carriage, she added: "There is still a trunk and a bonnet-box."

She half smiled in saying this, to make me smile too, for the mass of

luggage and the number of small parcels with which she encumbered

herself had been of old a subject of mild quarrel between us. In any

other state of mind I should have been pained to find the unfailing

evidence of her frivolity side by side with the mark of affection she

had given me by coming. Was not this one of the small causes of my great

misery? True, but her frivolity was delightful to me at that moment.

This then was the woman whom I had been picturing to myself as coming to

the house of death, with the sinister purpose of searching my dead

aunt's papers and stealing or destroying any accusing pages which she

might find among them! This was the woman whom I had misrepresented to

myself, that morning, as a criminal steeped in the guilt of a cowardly

murder! Yes! I had been mad! I had been like a runaway horse galloping

after its own shadow. But what a relief to make sure that it was

madness, what a blessed relief! It almost made me forget the dear dead

woman. I was very sad at heart in reality, and yet I was happy, while we

were rattling through the town in the old coupé, past the long lines of

lighted windows. I held my mother's hand; I longed to beg her pardon, to

kiss the hem of her dress, to tell her again and again that I loved and

revered her. She perceived my emotion very plainly; but she attributed

it to the affliction that had just befallen me, and she condoled with

me. She said, "My André," several times. How rare it was for me to have

her thus, all my own, and just in that mood of feeling for which my sick

heart pined!

I had had the room on the ground floor, next to the salon, prepared for

my mother. I remembered that she had occupied it, when she came to

Compiègne with my father, a few days after her marriage, and I felt

sure that the impression which would be produced upon her by the sight

of the house in the first instance, and then by the sight of this room,

would help me to get rid of my dreadful suspicions. I was determined to

note minutely the slightest signs of agitation which she might betray at

the contact of a resuscitated past, rendered more striking by the aspect

of things that do not change so quickly as the heart of a woman. And

now, I blushed for that idea, worthy of a detective; for I felt it a

shameful thing to judge one's mother: one ought to make an Act of Faith

in her which would resist any evidence. I felt this, alas! all the more,

because the innocent woman was quite off her guard, as was perfectly

natural. She entered the room with a thoughtful look, seated herself

before the fire, and held her slender feet towards the flames, which

touched her pale cheeks with red; and, with her jet black hair, her

elegant figure, which still retained its youthful grace, she shed upon

the dim twilight of the old-fashioned room that refined and aristocratic

charm of which my father spoke in his letters. She looked slowly all

around her, recognising most of the things which my aunt's pious care

had preserved in their former place, and said, sorrowfully: "What

recollections!" But there was no bitterness in the emotion depicted on

her face. Ah! no; a woman who is brought, after twenty years, into the

room which she had occupied, as a bride, with the husband whose murder

she has contrived after having betrayed him, has not such eyes, such a

brow, such a mouth as hers.

Every detail of all that passed that evening served to prove to me how

basely my puerile and disgraceful fancies had calumniated her who ought

to have been sacred in my sight. Julie had prepared a sort of supper,

and wished to attend at table herself. I observed the former mistress

and the old servant brought thus face to face, and, although I knew that

they had not got on well together in past days, I saw that they were

well pleased to meet again. Poor Julie especially, who was a simple

creature, incapable of deceit or dissimulation, was so glad that she

took me aside a few minutes before the meal, to tell me what a

consolation it was to her in her grief to see my mother so kind and

affectionate to me, and to wait on us both at the same table, as in the

bygone time. Had there been in my mother's past life any of those guilty

secrets which faithful servants are more quick than any others to

divine, the honest and true-hearted woman who had tended both my father

and myself would neither have been ignorant of it nor capable of

condoning it. I should have detected the trace of it in her wrinkled

face with the drawn-in lips, for its every wrinkle spoke eloquently to

me. Nor would my mother have been pleased and easy in the presence of

this witness of a sin of the past; her manner would have betrayed a

secret disturbance, were it only by the haughtiness with which, as it

were, one repels the silent censure of an inferior by anticipation.

Julie's face made one among the many things which recalled her first

marriage to my mother's mind; and, either because the almost sudden

death of my aunt had deeply moved her, or because this sentimental

recurrence to the past was an indulgence of her taste for the romantic,

far from avoiding such recollections, she yielded to them fully, while I

silently blessed her for thus destroying the last vestiges of my mute

calumny. How fervent was my mental thanksgiving, when, later in the

night, she asked to see my dear dead aunt, so that she might take a last

farewell of her! We entered the room where the dying woman had striven

with the last earthly solicitude from which I had drawn such black

conclusions. Death had strengthened the resemblance that existed in her

lifetime between my aunt and my father. The motionless face forcibly

recalled that other face still living in my sad memory, and in whose

presence my mother had clasped me in so warm an embrace; and the

resemblance was made more striking by the chin-cloth which kept the

mouth closed. Once more we stood side by side before a funereal

spectacle; but I was no longer a child, and my mother was no longer a

young woman.

How many years lay between those two deaths--and what years! The

comparison struck my mother too; she did not speak for a while--then she

whispered: "How like him she is!" She bent over the bed, pressed a kiss

on the ice-cold brow, and kneeling at the foot of the bed, she prayed.

This trying ordeal, of which I had hardly ventured to dream, she herself

had sought in so natural, so simple a way. . . . Since then I have had

many other tokens of the absolute blamelessness of my mother, I have

heard words uttered by him who had contrived and arranged the whole

crime, which fully exonerated the noble woman; but there was no need of

them. The sight of her kneeling beside the dead sister of my dear father

had sufficed to exorcise the phantom.

After her prayer, she expressed a wish to remain in the room; but I

objected, fearing that the trial would be too severe for her strength,

and induced her to go downstairs with me. She was too much affected to

sleep, and she begged of me to stay with her for a while. I complied

with joy, so afraid was I that when out of her sight I might be

revisited by the hallucinations that had been so completely banished by

her demeanour. I felt myself once more so entirely her child for this

night, that I was in delight with her least actions, her slightest

gestures, just as I used to be in my real childhood. I admired the skill

with which she instantly transformed the chimney corner of the salon

into a quiet little retreat, just the place for a comfortable long talk.

She made me arrange the screen so as to shut in the sofa, and place a

little table within its shelter; on this she set out her travelling

cloak, her smelling-bottle, and my cigarettes. She put on a white

dressing-gown, wrapped round her head and shoulders a black-lace

mantilla, and when she was settled snugly on the sofa she tucked round

her a soft covering of pink wool decked with ribbons. She leaned her

cheek on one of the two little red silk cushions that she used in the

railway carriage, and inhaled some wood violets which Julie had placed

in a little vase. The scent of the flowers mingled with the perfume of

her garments and her hair, and I liked to see her thus, to revive my

earliest impressions of her by the aid of her refined luxuriousness.

Above all I liked her to talk as she now talked, showing her mind to me,

and letting so many recollections escape from it. She had begun by

questioning me about my aunt's illness, and then she went on to speak of

my father. This was very rare with her; it was also rare for her and me

to be so familiar and so united. It was a strange sensation to hear her

tell the story of her marriage in that salon, filled with the relics of

the dead, and with the ever present remembrance of the letters which I

had read that day in my mind.

She told me--but this I already knew--how her marriage was brought

about. She met my father at a ball given by a great lawyer, who was

intimate with her family; their name was De Slane. She described her own

dress at this ball, and then sketched my father for me, in his black

coat, with an ill-tied white cravat and ill-fitting gloves. "A young

girl is always so foolish," she said. "He had himself introduced to us,

and he proposed for me twice over. I refused him each time, just because

I had those ill-fitting gloves in my mind. The third time he asked to

see me in private. Mamma wished very much for the marriage,

notwithstanding certain differences in station and education. Your

father was such a good man, so clever and hard-working, and then he

adored my mother with frank simplicity, just as if she were an idol.

Well, she consented to the interview. I received your father with the

firm intention of saying 'No' to him, and he spoke to me so nicely, with

so much eloquence and such perfect tact, I saw so plainly how much he

loved me, that I said 'Yes.' . . . ."

What a commentary upon the whole of my father's correspondence was this

entry into marriage, what a symbol of the years that were to follow!

Yes, even until their last breakfast together before the murder, they

had lived thus; she allowing herself to be loved, with the indulgent

pride of a woman who knows herself to be the superior in refinement and

distinction, and he--the hard-working man of business, only a little

above the people--loving that refined and charming woman with an

idolatrous sense of her superiority, and a single-hearted

unconsciousness of his own. A fatal poison of the heart is silence; I

had already learned this too well, and I felt it on that of my father,

whose sombre and reserved nature I had inherited. And my mother

continued--how heart-rending it was to hear her--dwelling on my father's

qualities, on his uprightness, his perseverance, and also certain points

in his character which had always puzzled her. "Since he died so sadly,"

she resumed, "I have often asked myself whether I made him as happy as

he might have been. I was very young then, and we had no tastes in

common. I have always liked society--that was born with me--and he did

not care about it, he did not feel at ease in it. I was very pious, and

he was of the school of Voltaire. He believed other men to be as good as

himself, and thought we could do without religion. . . . We have seen

since his time what that brings us to. He was not jealous, he never once

made a remark to me upon the few men friends I had, but there was a

restless tendency in him. When he was obliged to leave Paris for a short

time, if I chanced to send my daily letter to the post too late, there

would surely come a telegram urgently requesting news of my health. If,

in the evening, I came home a little later than usual, I would find him

in great anxiety, full of the notion that an accident had happened. And

then, he was subject to causeless fits of depression, prolonged spells

of silence. I did not venture to question him. You take after him in

this, my poor André."

She continued to speak of his mysterious death:

"I wept so much for it," she said, "and I have since thought so much of

it. Your father had not an enemy; his life was too upright for that. My

conviction is that the assassin reckoned on his taking a large sum of

money with him; bear in mind that we do not know what your father had in

his note-case. Ah, my André, you little know what I went through. That

was the time when I learned who were my true friends." She spoke of M.

Termonde, and the proofs of friendship he had given her. I was not angry

with her, because she did not understand that she could not say his name

at that moment without inflicting a wound upon me. Once set going upon

the road of reminiscence, what should check her? Why should she scruple

to speak to me of her second marriage and the consolation it had brought

her? Of course it was terribly sad for me to listen to these

confidences, which formed the cruel counterpart of those contained in my

father's letters to my aunt. But, sorrowful as it was to sound the

depths of the gulf which had separated those two beloved beings, what

was this in comparison with the tragic idea that had assailed me?

Throughout the long winter's evening I listened to my mother as she

talked to me, with the sweet, blessed certainty that never again could

my monstrous suspicions recur to my mind. My father's letters were fully

explained; he had been profoundly jealous of his wife, and he had never

dared to avow that jealousy. It arose from a moral influence of which

the person over whom it was exercised was probably ignorant. No, the

gentle creature who related all this past history to me with such frank

clear eyes, so sweet a voice, such ingenuousness in the acknowledgment

of her mistakes, such evident, all-pervading sincerity, must either have

been entirely innocent of the suffering she inflicted, or else she must

now be a monster of hypocrisy. At all events, I never thought that of

you, O my mother! weak but good woman as you were, capable indeed of

passing by pain unnoticed, but quite incapable of wilfully inflicting

it, and since that evening my faith in you has never been assailed. No

impious doubt crossed my mind from thenceforth, during the night which

followed this interview, or the day after, which was that of the

funeral, or when my mother had left me.

It was, however, quite another thing with regard to my stepfather. When

suspicion is awakened upon a point of such tragic interest as the murder

of a father, that suspicion cannot be lulled to sleep again, without

having touched, handled, grasped a certainty. I had grasped this

certainty, at the moment when I clasped my mother in my arms, and heard

her speak; but, did my mother's innocence prove that of my stepfather

also? No sooner was I alone, and free to study the fatal letters, in

minute detail this time, than the new aspect of the problem presented

itself to my mind. Except in those moments when he was driven into

injustice by excess of pain, my father had always distinguished between

the responsibility of his wife and that of his friend, in the relation

that excited his jealousy. In his thoughts he had always acquitted my

mother; but, on the other hand, he had never treated Termonde's passion

for her as doubtful. There, then, was the positive, undeniable fact, of

which I had been ignorant until I read the letters--this man had an

immense interest in the "suppression" of my father. Before I read the

letters I was free to believe that his feelings towards my mother were

not awakened until she was free to marry him. Notwithstanding my

jealousy, I had never denied that it was most natural for a young,

beautiful, and grief-stricken woman to inspire a passionate desire to

console her, easily transformed into love, in even the most intimate

friend of her dead husband. Things now appeared to me in a different

light. In the solitude of the house at Compiègne, where I lingered on

instead of returning to Paris, professedly in order to regulate some

affairs, but in reality because I was like the wounded animals who creep

away to endure their pain, I read those letters over and over again. One

relic in particular, among all those in the house, aroused the desire

for vengeance and for justice that had been so strong in my childhood.

This was a calendar, one of those from which one tears off a leaf daily,

that lay beside the blotting-book formerly belonging to my father and

already mentioned, on a small bureau in his old room, now mine. The

calendar was for the year 1864, and my aunt had kept it, untouched, at

the date of the day that had brought her the terrible news of the

murder. Saturday, the 11th of June, was the day marked by the leaf which

lay uppermost upon the bulk of the others, and those others marked the

days of that year, days which my father never saw. The 11th of June,

1864! It was then, on Thursday, the 9th, that he had been killed. I was

nine years old at that time, I was now twenty-four, and his death was

still unavenged. Why? Because chance had not furnished me with any

indication; because I had not been able to form any hypothesis resting

upon a fact that was observed, verified, certain. Now that I had laid

hold of one of those indications, however doubtful, one of those

hypotheses, however improbable, I had no right to draw back, I was bound

to push my suspicions to their extreme. "If I were to go to M. Massol,"

I reflected, "to place this correspondence in his hands and to consult

him, would he regard that revelation of our life, of the feelings of the

victim and of those of my mother's second husband, as a document to be

neglected?" No--a thousand times no--so strongly was I convinced of

this, that I would not have dared to take the letters to him. I should

have been afraid to set the bloodhounds of justice on this track. He and

I had pondered and studied so long that crucial question--who could

possibly have had an interest in the crime? If he had thought of my

stepfather, he had never spoken of him. What indication did he possess

which could have authorised him for a moment to raise so great a

disturbance in my mind? None; but I could now furnish him with such an

indication, and my instinct told me that it was very grave, and of

formidable significance. How could I have prevented myself from

fastening upon it, turning it over and over in my mind, and abandoning

myself completely to its absorbing suggestions?

A strange contrast existed between the tempest within my breast and the

profound quiet of the house of the dead. My life glided on in apparent

monotony; but in reality it was one of torment and perplexity. I rose

late and took my breakfast alone, always waited on by Julie. I had,

however, as companions in the silent room, Don Juan, the watch-dog, and

two half-bred Angora cats, given by me to my aunt long ago, and named

respectively, Boule-de-Poil and Pierrot. I fed these creatures, each in

its turn, reminding myself of Robinson Crusoe, the beloved hero of my

childhood, and the scenes in which the solitary man is described as

sitting at his table surrounded by his private menagerie. The cats

hissed when Don Juan came near them, and if I neglected them they put

out their claws and tore the table-cloth, poking their prying little

noses up at me. The old clock ticked solemnly, as it had done for more

years than I knew of, and there I sat, amid these homely surroundings,

discussing with myself the arguments for and against my stepfather's

guilt. I put the matter to myself thus: "The great objection to be made

to an inquiry is the established alibi; the alibi attaches to the

physical data of the crime, and in every analysis of this kind the

series of moral data exists alongside of the series of physical data. If

these do not coincide, there is room for doubt, and the chief care of a

clever assassin is to create that doubt. If the appearance of material

impossibility were to prevent investigation, how many 'instructions'

would be abandoned?" When these thoughts pressed upon me too heavily, I

rose and walked towards the wood. Around me spread the vast silence of

the afternoon in winter. The dry leaves crackled under my feet, while my

mind still toiled over the argument for and against. Granted that M.

Termonde is guilty. He was, he is still passionate to the point of

violence; that is the first fact. He was madly in love with my mother;

that is a second fact. My father was painfully jealous of him; that was

a third fact. Here begins the uncertainty! Was M. Termonde aware of that

jealousy? Had he and my father had some of those silent scenes, after

which a man of the world is aware that the house of his friend, to whose

wife he is making love, is about to be closed to him? This supposition

would, I thought, be admitted without any difficulty. It was less easy

to understand the transition from that point to the fierce longing to be

rid of an obstacle which is felt to be for ever invincible; but yet the

thing is possible. At this stage of my analysis, I came in contact with

what I called the physical data of the crime. The false Rochdale

existed; this again was a fact. He had been seen by certain persons, who

had also heard him speak. He was waiting in a room at the Imperial

Hotel, while M. Termonde was at our table talking with us. For M.

Termonde to be guilty of the crime, it would be necessary to establish a

complicity between the two men; one of them, the false Rochdale, must

needs have been an instrument, a bravo hired to kill, for the advantage

of the other.

The exceptional character of this fresh hypothesis was too evident for

me to yield to it immediately; indeed, the first time the idea occurred

to me, I ridiculed myself mercilessly. I remembered my childish terror

and the many proofs I had had of my readiness and ingenuity in

confounding the imaginary with the real. How like my former self I still

was, how incapable of chasing away the phantoms which suddenly appeared

before me! In vain did I urge this upon myself, because it was no more

than an improbability that the false Rochdale should be bribed by M.

Termonde to murder my father; it was not an absolute impossibility. The

least reflection shows that in the matter of crime everything happens. I

then set to work to recall all the extraordinary stories of the Cour

d'Assises which I could remember. My imagination turned blood-colour,

like the horizon where the sun was setting. I reentered the house, I

dined, as I had breakfasted, all alone, and then I passed the evening in

the salon, silting where my mother had sat. So afraid was I of thought

that I asked Julie to rejoin me after her supper. The old woman settled

herself on a low Breton chair, in a corner of the hearth, and went on

with her knitting. Her needles flashed as they moved in and out amid the

brown wool of which she was fabricating a stocking, and her spectacles

gleamed in the firelight. Sometimes she worked on the whole evening

without uttering a word, with Boule-de-Poil, her favourite, purring at

her feet, and Pierrot, who was of a jealous disposition, rubbing his

head against her, and standing on his hind paws. At other times she

talked, answering my questions about my aunt. She repeated what I

already knew so well; the solicitude of the dear old woman for me, her

dread of possible danger to me, her terrible anxiety on her death-bed.

She dwelt upon my aunt's inconsolable regret for my mother's second

marriage, and her unconquerable dislike to M. Termonde.

"Each time that she made up her mind to go to your mother's house," said

Julie, "for your sake, André, she was ill from agitation beforehand,

and sunk in melancholy for a full week after she came back." These

particulars were not new to me, I had known them long before, but in my

present mood they threw me back upon my cruel suspicions. I resumed the

analysis of my thoughts concerning M. Termonde from another point of

view. Granted that he is guilty, I argued, is there a single fact since

the event which is not made clear by his culpability? My aunt's horror

is, moreover, an indication that I am not a madman, for she entertained

suspicions similar to my own. But she also suspected my mother,

otherwise she would have stedfastly opposed a marriage which she must

have regarded as a frightful sacrilege. Yes; but she may have been

mistaken about my mother, and right with respect to my stepfather. Is

not M. Termonde's antipathy to me also a sign? Has there not always been

something more in this than the not-uncommon antagonism between

stepfather and stepson? Is not that "something more" bitter detestation

of one who recalls his victim at every turn, sickening aversion to the

presence of the son of the murdered man? Again, I considered the

capricious humours of the man, his alternate craving for excitement and

for solitude, and the fits of silence and brooding to which my mother

told me he was subject. Hitherto I had explained these freaks by

attributing them to the liver complaint which had hollowed out his

cheeks, darkened his eyelids, and from time to time stretched hint on

his bed in such paroxysms of pain that the strong man cried aloud. But

these oddities, this malady itself, might not they be the effect of that

obscure but undeniable phenomenon which assumes such strange and various

shapes--remorse? Did I not know by experience the close relation between

the moral and the physical in man, the ravages which a fixed idea makes

in one's health, the killing and irresistible power of thought. I, who

could not go through strong emotion of any kind without being attacked

by neuralgia? Once more, suspicion took hold of me. How wretched is he

whom such dreadful doubts assail! Tossed upon a troubled sea, the sick

and weary mind knows no repose.

XI