Yes, all was finished and stupidly finished, without the decisive
explanation, in which I should find strength to escape from a hateful
yoke, and to repudiate the woman who had allured me with false caresses,
and who no longer ought to bear my name.
It was either that, or else, who knows, the happiness, the peace, the
love which was not troubled by any evil afterthoughts, that absolute
love that I dreamt of between Elaine and myself when I asked for her
hand, and which I was still continually dreaming of with the despair of
a condemned soul far from Paradise, and from which I was suffering, and
which would kill me.
She prevented me from speaking; with her trembling hand she checked
that flow of frenzied words which were about to come from my pained
heart, those terrible accusations which an imperious, resistless force
incited me to utter, and those terrified words which escaped from her
pale lips, froze me again, and penetrated to my marrow as if they had
been some piercing wind.
In spite of it all, I was in full possession of my reason, I was not in
a passion, and I could not have looked like a fool.
What could she have seen unusual in my eyes that frightened her, what
inflections were there in my voice for such an idea suddenly to arise in
her brain? Suppose she had not make a mistake, suppose I no longer knew
what I was saying nor what I was doing, and really had that terrible
malady that she had mentioned, and which I cannot repeat!
It seems to me now as if I could see myself in a mirror of anguish,
altogether changed, as if my head were a complete void at times and
became something sonorous, and then was struck violent, prolonged blows
from a heavy clapper, as if it had been a bell, which fills it with
tumultuous deafening vibrations, from a kind of loud tocsin and from
monotonous peals, that were succeeded by the silence of the grave.
And the voice of recollection, a voice which tells me Elaine's
mysterious history, which speaks to me only of her, which recalls that
initial night, that strange night of happiness and of grief, when I
doubted her fidelity, when I doubted her heart as well as I did herself,
passes slowly through this silence all at once, like the voice of
distant music.
Alas! Suppose she had not made a mistake!