Chapter IV: Part 4

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

There was one remedy to be applied to this unbearable malady--that remedy which had already been successful in the case of my suspicions of my mother. I must proceed to place the realities in opposition to the suggestions of imagination. I must seek the presence of the man whom I suspected, look him straight in the face, and see him as he was, not as my fancy, growing more feverish day by day, represented him. Then I should discern whether I had or had not been the sport of a delusion; and the sooner I resorted to this test the better, for my sufferings were terribly increased by solitude. My head became confused; at last I ceased even to doubt. That which ought to have been only a faint indication, assumed to my mind the importance of an overwhelming proof. In the interest of my inquiry itself it was full time to resist this, if I were ever to pursue that inquiry farther, or else I should fall into the nervous state which I knew so well, which rendered any kind of action in cold blood impossible to me. I made up my mind to leave Compiègne, see my stepfather, and form my judgment of whether there was, or was not, anything in my suspicions, upon the first effect produced on him by my sudden and unexpected appearance before him. I founded this hope on an argument which I had already used in the case of my mother, namely, that if M. Termonde had really been concerned in the assassination of my father, he had dreaded my aunt's penetration beyond all things. Their relations had been formal, with an undercurrent of enmity on her part which had assuredly not escaped a man so astute as he. If he were guilty, would he not have feared that my aunt would have confided her thoughts to me on her death-bed? The attitude that he should assume towards me, at and after our first interview, would be a proof, complete in proportion to its suddenness, and he must have no time for preparation.

I returned to Paris, therefore, without having informed even my valet of my intention, and proceeded almost immediately to my mother's hotel. I arrived there at two o'clock in the afternoon--an hour at which I was pretty sure of finding M. Termonde at home, and smoking his cigar in the hall after the second breakfast. A little later he and my mother would go their separate ways until dinner-time, which was seven o'clock. I had come on foot in order to steady my nerves by exercise, and all the way along I had been pouring contempt upon myself, for, as I drew near to the reality, the phantoms which I had summoned up in my solitude seemed like the dreams of a sick child.

I remembered how the humiliating and the ridiculous were mingled in the arrival of my mother at Compiègne. I went to meet her, as Orestes might have gone to meet Clytemnestra, and I found a woman wholly occupied with her mourning, her travelling bag, and her little cushions. Would the same ironical contrast present itself in this first interview with my stepfather? Very likely, and I should be convinced once more of my readiness to be intoxicated with my own ideas. It was always painful to me to be convicted of that weakness, and also of my abiding inability to form clear, precise, and definite views. I mentally compared myself with the bulls which I had seen in the bull-ring at San Sebastian--stupid animals; they foamed and stamped at a red rag instead of rushing straight upon the alert toreador, who mocked their rage. In this disheartened mood I rang the bell. The door was opened, and the narrow court, the glass porch, the red carpet of the staircase, were before me. The concierge, who saluted me, was not he by whom I had fancied myself slighted in my childhood; but the old valet-de-chambre who opened the door to me was the same. His close-shaven face wore its former impassive expression, the look that used to convey to me such an impression of insult and insolence when I came home from school. What childish absurdity! To my question the man replied that my mother was in, also M. Termonde, and Madame Bernard, a friend of theirs. The latter name brought me back at once to the reality of the situation. Madame Bernard was a rather pretty woman, very slight and dark, with a tip-tilted nose, hair worn low upon her forehead, very white teeth which were continually shown by a constant smile, a short upper lip, and all the manners and ways of a woman of society well up in its latest gossip.

I fell at once from my fancied height as an imaginary Grand Justiciary into the shallows of Parisian frivolity. I was about to hear chatter upon the last play, the latest suit for separation, the latest love affairs, and the newest bonnet. It was for this that I had eaten my heart out all these days! The servant preceded me to the hall I knew so well, with its Oriental divan, its green plants, its strange furniture, its slightly faded carpet, its Meissonier on a draped easel, in the place formerly occupied by my father's portrait, its crowd of ornamental trifles, and the wide-spreading Japanese parasol open in the middle of the ceiling. The walls were hung with large pieces of Chinese stuff embroidered in black and white silk. My mother was half-reclining in an American rocking-chair, and shading her face from the fire with a hand-screen; Madame Bernard, who sat opposite to her, was holding her muff with one hand and gesticulating with the other; M. Termonde, in walking-dress, was standing with his back to the chimney, smoking a cigar, and warming the sole of one of his boots. On my appearance, my mother uttered a little cry of glad surprise, and rose to welcome me. Madame Bernard instantly assumed the air with which a well-bred woman prepares to condole with a person of her acquaintance upon a bereavement. All these little details I perceived in a moment, and also the shrug of M. Termonde's shoulders, the quick flutter of his eyelids, the rapidly dismissed expression of disagreeable surprise which my sudden appearance called forth. But what then? Was it not the same with myself? I could have sworn that at the same moment he experienced sensations exactly similar to those which were catching me at the chest and by the throat. What did this prove but that a current of antipathy existed between him and me? Was it a reason for the man's being a murderer? He was simply my stepfather, and a stepfather who did not like his stepson. . . .