Chapter VI: Part 6

Was he sincere in proposing this tête-à-tête drive which was so contrary to our habits? What was his motive: the wish to show me that he had not even understood my attack, or the yearning of the sick man who dreads to be alone? I accepted the offer at all hazards, in order to continue my observation of him, and a quarter of an hour afterwards we were speeding towards the Arc de Triomphe in that same carriage in which I had seen him pass by me, beaten, broken, almost killed, after our first interview. This time, he looked like another man. Warmly wrapped in an overcoat lined with seal fur, smoking a cigar, waving his hand to this person or that through the open window, he talked on and on, telling me anecdotes of all sorts, which I had either heard or not heard previously, about people whose carriages crossed ours. He seemed to be talking before me and not with me, so little heed did he take of whether he was telling what I might know, or apprising me of what I did not know. I concluded from this--for, in certain states of mind, every mood is significant--that he was talking thus in order to ward off some fresh attempt on my part. But I had not the courage to recommence my efforts to open the wound in his heart and set it bleeding afresh so soon. I merely listened to him, and once again I remarked the strange contrast between his private thoughts and the rigid doctrines which he generally professed. One would have said that in his eyes the high society, whose principles he habitually defended, was a brigand's cave. It was the hour at which women of fashion go out for their shopping and their calls, and he related all the scandals of their conduct, false or true. According to him, one of these great ladies was the mistress of her husband's brother, another was notoriously under the protection of an old diplomatist who had enriched himself by a disgraceful marriage, a third had married an imbecile widower, and, in order that she might inherit the whole of his fortune, had incited the man's son to so vicious a life that it had killed him at nineteen. He dwelt on all these stories and calumnies with a horrid pleasure, as though he rejoiced in the vileness of humanity. Did this mean the facile misanthropy of a profligate, accustomed to such conversations at the club, or in sporting circles, during which each man lays bare his brutal egotism, and voluntarily exaggerates the depth of his own disenchantment that he may boast more largely of his experience? Was this the cynicism of a villain, guilty of the most hideous of crimes, and glad to demonstrate that others were less worthy than he? To hear him laugh and talk thus threw me into a singular state of dejection. We had passed the last houses in the Avenue de Bois, and were driving along an alley on the right in which there were but few carriages. On the bare hedgerows a beautiful light shone, coming from that lofty, pale blue sky which is seen only over Paris. He continued to sneer and chuckle, and I reflected that perhaps he was right, that the seamy side of the world was what he depicted it. Why not? Was not I there, in the same carriage with this man, and I suspected him of having had my father murdered! All the bitterness of life filled my heart with a rush. Did my stepfather perceive, by my silence and my face, that his gay talk was torturing me? Was he weary of his own effort? He suddenly left off talking, and as we had reached a forsaken corner of the Bois, we got out of the carriage to walk a little. How strongly present to my mind is that by-path, a gray line between the poor spare grass and the bare trees, the cold winter sky, the wide road at a little distance with the carriage advancing slowly, drawn by the bay horse, shaking its head and its bit, and driven by a wooden-faced coachman--then, the man. He walked by my side, a tall figure in a long overcoat. The collar of dark brown fur brought out the premature whiteness of his hair. He held a cane in his gloved hand, and struck away the pebbles with it impatiently. Why does his image return to me at this hour with an unendurable exactness? It is because, as I observed him walking along the wintry road, with his head bent forward, I was struck as I had never been before with the sense of his absolute unremitting wretchedness. Was this due to the influence of our conversation of that afternoon, to the dejection which his sneering, sniggering talk had produced in me, or to the death of nature all around us? For the first time since I knew him, a pang of pity mingled with my hatred of him, while he walked by my side, trying to warm himself in the pale sunshine, a shrunken, weary, lamentable creature. Suddenly he turned his face, which was contracted with pain, to me, and said:

"I do not feel well. Let us go home." When we were in the carriage, he said, putting his sudden seizure upon the pretext of his health:

"I have not long to live, and I suffer so much that I should have made an end of it all years ago, had it not been for your mother." Then he went on talking of her with the blindness that I had already remarked in him. Never, in my most hostile hours, had I doubted that his worship of his wife was perfectly sincere, and once again I listened to him, as we drove rapidly into Paris in the gathering twilight, and all that he said proved how much he loved her. Alas! his passion rated her more highly than my tenderness. He praised the exquisite tact with which my mother discerned the things of the heart, to me, who knew so well her want of feeling! He lauded the keenness of her intelligence to me, whom she had so little understood! And he added, he who had so largely contributed to our separation:

"Love her dearly, you will soon be the only one to love her."

If he were the criminal I believed him to be, he was certainly aware that in thus placing my mother between himself and me, he was putting in my way the only barrier which I could never, never break down, and I on my side understood clearly, and with bitterness of soul, that the obstacles so placed would be stronger than even the most fatal certainty. What, then, was the good of seeking any further? Why not renounce my useless quest at once? But it was already too late.

XIII

Have I been a coward? When I think of what I have accomplished with the same hand that holds my pen, I am forced to answer: "No." How then shall I explain that these first scenes, that in which I had tried to torture my stepfather by talking to him of crimes committed by confederates, and the danger of complicity; that in which I said to him as I sat by his bedside and looked him full in the face: "No, M. Massol has not forgotten you;" that in my room, when I placed the accusing letters in his hands;--yes, how shall I explain that these three scenes were succeeded by so many days of inaction? The proof that lies to one's hand, that stares one in the face like a living thing, was furnished to me by chance. It was not I who dragged it out of the darkness where it lurked into the light. But was this my fault? From the moment when my stepfather had the courage to resist my first attack, the most sudden and unexpected of the three, what was there for me to do beyond watching for the slightest indications, and probing the deepest recesses of his character? I recurred to my first course of reasoning: since material proofs were not to be had, let me at least collect all the moral reasons that existed for believing more or believing less in the probability of the complicated crime of which I accused the man in my thoughts. To do this I had to depart from my usual custom, and live much at my mother's house. Our association was necessarily an intolerable torment to M. Termonde and to myself. How did he endure me, feeling himself suspected in this way? How did I bear his presence, suspecting him as I did? Ah, well, it was like a serpent's tooth at my heart when I saw him by my mother's side, in all the security of love and luxury, loving his wife, beloved by her, respected by all, and when I said to myself:

"And yet, this man is an assassin, a base, cowardly assassin."

Then I saw him, in my mind's eye, as he ought to have been, approaching the scaffold in the dawn, livid, with cropped hair, and bound hands, with the agony of expiation in his eyes, and in front of him the guillotine, black against the pale sky. Instead of this, it was: "Are you in any pain, dearest? At what hour do you want the carriage, Jacques? Mind you wrap yourself up well. Whom shall we ask to dinner on Wednesday?" It was on Wednesday they received their friends that winter and until the spring. Thus spoke the soft voice of my mother, and the evidence of their perfect union tortured me; but the thirst to know was stronger and fiercer than that pain. My suspicions rose to fever heat, and produced in me an irresistible craving to keep him always under my eyes, to inflict the torment of my constant presence upon him. He yielded to this with a facility which always surprised me. Had he sensations analogous to mine? Now, when the whole mystery is unveiled, and I know the part he took in the horrible plot, I understand the torturing kind of attraction which I had for him. He was wholly possessed by the fixed idea of his accomplished crime, and I formed a living portion of that fixed idea, just as he formed a living portion of my dark and continuous reflections. Henceforth he could think only of me, just as I could think of none but him. Our mutual hate drew us together like a mutual love. When we were apart the tempest of wild fancies broke out with too great fury. At least, this was so in my case; and although his presence was painful to me, it stilled at the same time the kind of internal hurricane which hurled me from one extremity of the possible to the other, when he was out of my sight. No sooner was I alone than the wildest projects suggested themselves to me. I had a vision of myself, seizing him by the throat, with the cry of "Assassin! assassin!" and forcing him to confession by violence. I fancied myself inducing M. Massol to resume the abandoned _Instruction_ on my account, and pictured his coming to my mother's house with the new data supplied by me. I fancied myself bribing two or three rascals, carrying off my stepfather and shutting him up in some lonely house in the suburbs of Paris, until he should have confessed the crime. My reason staggered under these vagaries into which the excess of my desire, still further stimulated by the sense of my powerlessness, drove me. And he too must have lived through hours like these; when I was not there, he must have formed and renounced a hundred plans. He asked of himself, "What does he know?" he answered, according to the hours, "He knows all--he knows nothing. What will he do?" and concluded, by turns, either that I would do all, or that I would do nothing. But, when we were together, face to face, the reality asserted itself, and put fancy to flight. We remained together, studying each other, like two animals about to attack each other presently; but each of us was perfectly aware of how it was with the other. He could not fully manifest his distrust, nor I my suspicions, we merely made it evident to one another that we had not advanced one step since our first conversation on my return from Compiègne. And, on my part, the evidence of this, while it discouraged me, somewhat tranquillised; it eased my conscience of the reproach of inaction. I did nothing, true; but what could I do?

Until the month of May of that year, 1879, I lived this strange life, seeing my stepfather almost every day; a prey, when he was not there, to the torments of my fancy, and when he was there suffering agonies from his presence. My field of action was restricted to the closest study of his character, and I devoted myself to the anatomy of his moral being with ardent curiosity, which was sometimes gratified and sometimes defeated, in proportion as I caught certain significant points, or failed to catch them. I observed the least of these, purposely, for they were more involuntary, less likely to deceive, and more useful in aiding my search into the innermost recesses of his nature. We rode in the Bois, in the morning, several times a week, and, contrary to our usual custom, together. He came for me, or met me, without having made any appointment: we were drawn towards each other by the force of our common obsession. While we were riding side by side, talking of indifferent matters, I observed him handling his horse so roughly that several times he narrowly escaped being thrown, although he was a good horseman. He preferred restive horses, and displayed a cold ferocity in his treatment of the animals. What he did with his horses, unjust, despotic, and implacable as he was, I thought within myself he had done with life, bending all things and all persons about him to his will. He was excessively vindictive, to the point indeed of asserting that he did not attach any meaning to the word "forgiveness," and he had made for himself a place apart in the world, being little liked, much feared, and yet received by the most exclusive section of society. Under the perfect elegance and correct style of his exterior, he hid the daring courage which had been proved during the war, when he had fought with great gallantry under the walls of Paris. From his bearing on horseback, I arrived at far other conclusions; his innate violence convinced me that he was capable of anything to gratify his passions. In the courage which he displayed in 1870, I thought I could discern a kind of bargain made with himself, a rehabilitation of himself in his own eyes, if indeed he had committed the crime. Again, I wondered whether it was merely an outcome of his innate ferocity, only a vent for the pent-up despair in which he lived, for all his outside show of happiness. But whence this despair? Was it only the moral effect of his bad health? Then, as I rode by his side, I set myself to examine the physiology of the man, searching for a correspondence between the construction of his frame, and the signs and tokens given in specialist books upon the subject, as those which indicate criminals; the upper part of his body was too heavy for his legs, his arms were too strongly developed, the expression of the lower jaw was hard, and his thumb too long. The latter peculiarity assumed additional importance to my mind from the fact that my stepfather had a habit of closing his hand with the thumb inwards as though to hide it. I was well aware that I must not set any real store by observations of this kind; I rejected them as puerile, but I returned to them again, in order to supplement them by others which gave value and importance to the former.

I reflected deeply upon the hereditary probabilities of M. Termonde's character, during our rides in the Bois. His maternal grandfather had shot himself with a pistol; his own brother had drowned himself, after having dissipated hip fortune, taken service in the army, and deserted under disgraceful circumstances. There were tragic elements in the family history. How often as we rode together, boot almost touching boot, have I turned those mad, sad, bad fancies in my head, and worse ones still!

We would return, and sometimes I would go in to breakfast with my mother, or call at her hotel after my solitary meal taken in my little dining-room in the Avenue Montaigne. M. Termonde and I were very rarely alone together during my visits to the hotel on the Boulevard Latour-Marbourg. What did it matter to me now? If he was the criminal whom I was bent on running down, he was forewarned; I had no longer any chance of wresting his secret from him by surprise. I much preferred to study him while he was talking, and in the course of his conversation with one person or another, in my presence, I learned how perfect was his self-control. In my childhood and my early youth, I had hated that power of mastering himself completely, which he possessed to a supreme degree, while I was so foolish, so helpless a victim to my nervous sensibility, so incapable of the cold-bloodedness that hides violent emotion with the mask of calmness. Now, it gave me a sort of pleasure to contemplate the depth of his hypocrisy. He had such an inveterate habit of dissimulation, such a mania for it, indeed, that he kept silence respecting the smallest events of his life, even to his wife. He never spoke of the visits he made, the people he met, the plans he formed, or the books he read. He had evidently trained himself to forecast the most remote consequences of every sentence that he uttered. This unremitting watch kept upon himself in a life apparently so easy, prosperous, and happy, could not fail to impress even the least observant people with an idea that the man was an enigmatical personage. On putting together the various pieces of his strange character and connecting his dissimulation with the passionate frenzy which I had observed in him, he appeared to me in the light of an infinitely dangerous being. He asked a great many questions, and he spoke very deliberately, very temperately, unless he were in a certain singular mood like that in which he had intoxicated himself with his own words, on the occasion of our drive in his coupé. Then he would talk on and on, with a nervous, sneering laugh, and give utterance to theories so cynical, and to ideas and conceits so peculiar that the whole thing made me shudder. He had, for instance, an extraordinary knowledge of all questions relating to medical jurisprudence. A case, which made a great sensation, was tried during that winter, and in the course of an animated discussion in which several persons took part, my stepfather chanced to mention the date of the arrest of the notorious criminal Conty de la Pommerais. I verified the statement; it was correct. How strangely full of things connected with crime his mind must have been, and how strongly this bore upon certain data, for which I was indebted to my interviews with M. Massol! For, was it not an instance of the all-absorbing, single thought which the old judge declared he had discerned in the great majority of murderers, that which leads them to return to the scene of murder, to approach the body of their victim when it is exposed in a public place, to read every line of the newspapers, in which details of their crimes are to be found, to follow the record of deeds similar to their own with eager attention? At other times, my stepfather fell into a deep silence from which it was impossible to rouse him, and he smoked cigar after cigar while the silent mood was upon him, notwithstanding the reiterated prohibition of the doctors. Tobacco by day, morphine by night--what suffering was it he tried to baffle by such an abuse of narcotics? Was it the pain of his malady, or torture of another kind, such as I imagined when I gave myself up to my tragic conjectures? Again, he had intervals of lassitude so great that even my presence could not rouse him--the lassitude of a man who has reached the limit of what he can suffer, and who can feel no more, because he has felt too much. I found him in this condition two or three times, alone in the twilight, so utterly sunk in weariness that he took no notice of me when I seated myself opposite to him and gazed at him, also in silence. I was tempted to cry out to him: "Confess, confess, confess at once!" And I should not have been surprised had he surrendered, allowed his secret to escape him, and answered: "It is true." On these occasions I felt the inanity of the small facts I had so carefully collected. What if he were not guilty? I kept silence, a prey to the fever of doubt which had been devouring me for weeks, and at last he emerged from his taciturnity to talk to me of my mother. Why? Was he thinking of her so intently just then because he was very ill and believed that he was on the eve of an eternal parting? Or was he merely striving to defend himself against me with that buckler before which I always must retreat? Was this a supplication to me to spare her a supreme grief? Yes; the latter was the true explanation. With his inborn courage and his natural violence, he would not have endured the outrage of my steady immovable gaze, the menacing allusions I frequently made, the continuous threat of my presence, but for his desire to spare my mother a scene between us, at any cost, although he might be ever so sure that no solidly certain proof could spring up accidentally in the course of it. But--rather than be accused of this thing in her presence--he preferred to suffer as he was suffering. For he loved her. However intolerable that sentiment might appear to me, it was indispensable that I should admit it, even in the hypothesis of the crime, in that case above all indeed. And then I knew that notwithstanding our mutual enmity we felt ourselves obliged to act in common so as not to endanger the happiness of the being who was so dear to both of us. Nevertheless, the difference between us was great. He might have a feeling of sullen jealousy because of my attachment to my mother, but it could not give him the shudder of horror that passed over me with the thought that he loved her as much as I did, and was beloved by her, and yet had my father's blood upon his conscience!

He loved her! It was for her that he had bought the assassin's hand, and caused that blood to be shed, and it was she who brought him to destruction at last, she who moved about between us with the same look of happy tenderness she had cast upon us both, on the evening when she found me by her ailing husband's bedside, and when her smile had beamed so softly upon him and me--the very same smile! The efforts he made to preserve the tranquillity of that woman's heart of hers were destined to destroy him. Yes, all the precautions he had taken with a view to warding off eventualities which he thought possible, were the cause of his ultimate ruin, from the cunning disclosures he made to the gentle unsuspecting creature, even to the false affection which he pretended for me in her presence. If he and I had not made a pretence of mutual regard, she would never have spoken to me as she did speak, I should never have learned from her what I did learn, with the result that the silent duel in which my useless energies were being exhausted was brought to a sudden end. Is there then an overruling fate, as certain men have believed, ay, even those who, like Bonaparte, have striven most vigorously with stern realities? What I gather from the contemplation of my life, from beyond the accomplished events of it, is that there is a logical law of situation and character, which develops all the consequences of our actions even to their end, so inexorably that the very success of our criminal projects contains that which will crush us some day. When I think this out for a little while, remembering how it was she, the woman whom he so loved, who put the effectual clue for which I had ceased to hope into my hand, and that it led to the certainty from which there was no drawing back, a vertigo of terror seizes upon me, as though the awful breath of destiny swept over my brow. Yes, I am terrified, because I too have blood upon my hands; but at the same time it comforts me because I can say to myself that I have but been the instrument of an inevitable deed, the necessary slave of an invisible master. Poor mother! If you had known? You also were the deadly weapon in the hand of fate, blind, like the knife that kills and knows it not. Whereas I--I have seen, I have known, I have willed. Ah! Until now I have been strong enough to keep the compact made with myself, that I would confess my story simply, detail by detail, passing no judgment on myself. And now, as the scene approaches which determined the new and last period of the drama of my life, my spirit shrinks. Coward! Once more I yield to a kind of stupefaction at the thought that it is really my own story I am setting down, that thus I acted, that there is in my memory----No, I have pledged my word; I will go on. Yes, with this hand that holds my pen I have done the deed. Yes, I have blood, blood, an indelible stain upon these fingers. They falter, but they must needs obey me and write out the story to its end.

XIV

At the beginning of the summer, six months after my aunt's death, I was in exactly the same position with respect to my stepfather as on that already distant day when, maddened with suspicion by my father's letters, I entered his study, to play the part of the physician who examines a man's body, searching with his finger for the tender spot that is probably a symptom of a hidden abscess. I was full of intuitions now, just as I was at the moment when he passed me in his carriage with his terrible face, but I did not grasp a single certainty. Would I have persisted in a struggle in which I felt beforehand that I must be beaten? I cannot tell; for, when I no longer expected any solution to the problem set before me for my grief, a grief, too, that was both sterile and mortal, a day came on which I had a conversation with my mother so startling and appalling that to this hour my heart stands still when I think of it. I have spoken of never-to-be-forgotten dates; among them is the 25th of May, 1879.

My stepfather, who was on the eve of his departure for Vichy, had just had a severe attack of liver complaint, the first since his illness after our terrible conversation in the month of January. I know that I counted for nothing--at least in any direct or positive way--in this acute revival of his malady. The fight between us, which went on without the utterance of a word on either side, and with no witnesses except ourselves, had not been marked by any fresh episode; I therefore attributed this complication to the natural development of the disease under which he laboured. I can exactly recall what I was thinking of on the 25th of May, at five o'clock in the evening, as I walked up the stairs in the hotel on the Boulevard de Latour-Marbourg. I hoped to learn that my stepfather was better, because I had been witnessing my mother's distress for a whole week, and also--I must tell all--because to know he was going to this watering-place was a great relief to me, on account of the separation it would bring about. I was so tired of my unprofitable pain! My wretched nerves were in such a state of tension that the slightest disagreeable impression became a torment. I could not sleep without the aid of narcotics, and such sleep as these procured was full of cruel dreams in which I walked by my father's side, while knowing and feeling that he was dead. One particular nightmare used to recur so regularly that it rendered my dread of the night almost unbearable. I stood in a street crowded with people, and was looking into a shop window; on a sudden I heard a man's step approaching, that of M. Termonde. I did not see him, and yet I was certain it was he. I tried to move on, but my feet were leaden; to turn my head, but my neck was immovable. The step drew nearer, my enemy was behind me, I heard his breathing, and knew that he was about to strike me. He passed his arm over my shoulder. I saw his hand, it grasped a knife, and sought for the spot where my heart lay; then it drove the blade in, slowly, slowly, and I awoke in unspeakable agony. So often had this nightmare recurred within a few weeks, that I had taken to counting the days until my stepfather's departure, which had been at first fixed for the 21st, and then put off until he should be stronger. I hoped that when he was absent I should be at rest at least for a time. I had not the courage to go away myself, attracted as I was every day by that presence which I hated, and yet sought with feverish eagerness; but I secretly rejoiced that the obstacle was of his raising, that his absence gave me breathing-time, without my being obliged to reproach myself with weakness. Such were my reflections as I mounted the wooden staircase, covered with a red carpet, and lighted by stained-glass windows, that led to my mother's favourite hall. The servant who opened the door informed me in answer to my question that my stepfather was better, and I entered the room with which my saddest recollections were connected, more cheerfully than usual. Little did I think that the dial hung upon one of the walls was ticking off in minutes one of the most solemn hours of my life! My mother was seated before a small writing-table, placed in a corner of the deep glazed projection which formed the garden-end of the hall. Her left hand supported her head, and in the right, instead of going on with the letter she had begun to write, she held her idle pen, in a golden holder with a fine pearl set in the top of it (the latter small detail was itself a revelation of her luxurious habits). She was so lost in reverie that she did not hear me enter the room, and I looked at her for some time without moving, startled by the expression of misery in her refined and lovely face. What dark thought was it that closed her mouth, furrowed her brow, and transformed her features? The alteration in her looks and the evident absorption of her mind contrasted so strongly with the habitual serenity of her countenance that it at once alarmed me. But, what was the matter? Her husband was better; why, then, should the anxiety of the last few days have developed into this acute trouble? Did she suspect what had been going on close to her, in her own house, for months past? Had M. Termonde made up his mind to complain to her, in order to procure the cessation of the torture inflicted upon him by my assiduity? No. If he had divined my meaning from the very first day, as I thought he had, unless he were sure he could not have said to her: "André suspects me of having had his father killed." Or had the doctor discerned dangerous symptoms behind this seeming improvement in the invalid? Was my stepfather in danger of death? At the idea, my first feeling was joy, my second was rage--joy that he should disappear from my life, and for ever; rage that being guilty he should die without having felt my full vengeance. Beneath all my hesitation, my scruples, my doubts, there lurked that savage appetite for revenge which I had allowed to grow up in me, revenge that is not satisfied with the death of the hated object unless it be caused by one's self. I thirsted for revenge as a dog thirsts for water after running in the sun on a summer day. I wanted to roll myself in it, as the dog in question rolls himself in the water when he comes to it, were it the sludge of a swamp. I continued to gaze at my mother without moving. Presently she heaved a deep sigh and said aloud: "Oh, me, oh, me! what misery it is!" Then lifting up her tear-stained face, she saw me, and uttered a cry of surprise. I hastened towards her.

"You are in trouble, mother," I said. "What ails you?"

Dread of her answer made my voice falter; I knelt down before her as I used to do when a child, and, taking both her hands, I covered them with kisses. Again, at this solemn hour, my lips were met by that golden wedding-ring which I hated like a living person; yet the feeling did not hinder me from speaking to her almost childishly. "Ah," I said, "you have troubles, and to whom should you tell them if not to me? Where will you find any one to love you more? Be good to me," I went on; "do you not feel how dear you are to me?" She bent her head twice, made a sign that she could not speak, and burst into painful sobs.

"Has your trouble anything to do with me?" I asked.

She shook her head as an emphatic negative, and then said in a half stifled voice, while she smoothed my hair with her hands, as she used to do in the old times:

"You are very nice to me, my André."

How simple those few words were, and yet they caught my heart and gripped it as a hand might do. How had I longed for some of those little words which she had never uttered, some of those gracious phrases which are like the gestures of the mind, some of her involuntary tender caresses. Now I had what I had so earnestly desired, but at what a moment and by what means! It was, nevertheless, very sweet to feel that she loved me. I told her so, employing words which scorched my lips, so that I might be kind to her.

"Is our dear invalid worse?"

"No, he is better. He is resting now," she answered, pointing in the direction of my stepfather's room.

"Mother, speak to me," I urged, "trust yourself to me; let me grieve with you, perhaps I may help you. It is so cruel for me that I must take you by surprise in order to see your tears."

I went on, pressing her by my questions and my complaining. What then did I hope to tear from those lips which quivered but yet kept silence? At any price I would know; I was in no state to endure fresh mysteries, and I was certain that my stepfather was somehow concerned in this inexplicable trouble, for it was only he and I who so deeply moved that woman's heart of hers. She was not thus troubled on account of me, she had just told me so; the cause of her grief must have reference to him, and it was not his health. Had she too made any discovery? Had the terrible suspicion crossed her mind also? At the mere idea a burning fever seized upon me; I insisted and insisted again. I felt that she was yielding, if it were only by the leaning of her head towards me, the passing of her trembling hand over my hair, and the quickening of her breath.

"If I were sure," said she at length, "that this secret would die with you and me."

"Oh! mother!" I exclaimed, in so reproachful a tone that the blood flew to her cheeks. Perhaps this little betrayal of shame decided her, she pressed a lingering kiss on my forehead, as though she would have effaced the frown which her unjust distrust had set there.

"Forgive me, my André," she said, "I was wrong. In whom should I trust, to whom confide this thing, except to you? From whom ask counsel?" And then she went on as though she were speaking to herself, "If he were ever to apply to him?"

"He! Whom?"

"André, will you swear to me by your love for me, that you will never, you understand me, never, make the least allusion to what I am going to tell you?"

"Mother!" I replied, in the same tone of reproach, and then added at once, to draw her on, "I give you my word of honour!"

"Nor----" she did not pronounce a name, but she pointed anew to the door of the sick man's room.

"Never."

"You have heard of Edmond Termonde, his brother?" Her voice was lowered, as though she were afraid of the words she uttered, and now her eyes only were turned towards the closed door, indicating that she meant the brother of her husband. I had a vague knowledge of the story; it was of this brother I had thought when I was reviewing the mental history of my stepfather's family. I knew that Edmond Termonde had dissipated his share of the family fortune, no less than 1,200,000 francs, in a few years; that he had then enlisted, that he had gone on leading a debauched life in his regiment; that, having no money to come into from any quarter, and after a heavy loss at cards, he had been tempted into committing both theft and forgery. Then, finding himself on the brink of being detected, he had deserted. The end was that he did justice on himself by drowning himself in the Seine, after he had implored his brother's forgiveness in terms which proved that some sense of moral decency still lingered in him. The stolen money was made good by my stepfather; the scandal was hushed up, thanks to the scoundrel's disappearance. I had reconstructed the whole story in my mind from the gossip of my good old nurse, and also from certain traces of it which I had found in some passages of my father's correspondence. Thus, when my mother put her question to me in so agitated a way, I supposed she was about to tell me of family grievances on the part of her husband which were totally indifferent to me, and it was with a feeling of disappointment that I asked her:

"Edmond Termonde? The man who killed himself?"

She bent her head to answer, yes, to the first part of my question; then, in a still lower voice, she said:

"He did not kill himself, he is still alive."

"He is still alive," I repeated, mechanically, and without a notion of what could be the relation between the existence of this brother and the tears which I had seen her shed.

"Now you know the secret of my sorrow," she resumed, in a firmer, almost a relieved tone. "This infamous brother is the tormentor of my Jacques; he puts him to death daily by the agonies which he inflicts upon him. No; the suicide never took place. Such men as he have not the courage to kill themselves. Jacques dictated that letter to save him from penal servitude after he had arranged everything for his flight, and given him the wherewithal to lead a new life, if he would have done so. My poor love, he hoped at least to save the integrity of his name out of all the terrible wreck. Edmond had, of course, to renounce the name of Termonde, to escape pursuit, and he went to America. There he lived--as he had lived here. The money he took with him was soon exhausted, and again he had recourse to his brother. Ah! the wretch knew well that Jacques had made all these sacrifices to the honour of his name, and when my husband refused him the money he demanded, he made use of the weapon which he knew would avail. Then began the vilest persecution, the most atrocious levying of blackmail. Edmond threatened to return to France; between going to the galleys here or starving in America, he said, he preferred the galleys here, and Jacques yielded the first time--he loved him, after all, he was his only brother. You know when you have once shown weakness in dealing with people of this sort you are lost. The threat to return had succeeded, and the other has since used it to extort sums of which you have no idea. This abominable persecution has been going on for years, but I have only been aware of it since the war. I saw that my husband was utterly miserable about something; I knew that a hidden trouble was preying on him, and then, one day, he told me all. Would you believe it? It was for me that he was afraid. 'What can he possibly do to me?' I asked my Jacques. 'Ah,' he said, 'he is capable of anything for the sake of revenge.' And then he saw me so overwhelmed by distress at his fits of melancholy, and I so earnestly entreated him, that at length he made a stand. He positively refused to give any more money. We have not heard of the wretch for some time--he has kept his word--André, he is in Paris!"

I had listened to my mother with growing attention. At any period of my life, I, who had not the same notions of my stepfather's sensitiveness of feeling which my dear mother entertained, would have been astonished at the influence exercised by this disgraced brother. There are similar pests in so many families, that it is plainly to the interest of society to separate the various representatives of the same name from each other. At any time I should have doubted whether M. Termonde, a bold and violent man as I knew him to be, had yielded under the menace of a scandal whose real importance he would have estimated quite correctly. Then I would have explained this weakness by the recollections of his childhood, by a promise made to his dying parents; but now, in the actual state of my mind, full as I was of the suspicions which had been occupying my thoughts for weeks, it was inevitable that another idea should occur to me. And that idea grew, and grew, taking form as my mother went on speaking. No doubt my face betrayed the dread with which the notion inspired me, for she interrupted her narrative to ask me:

"Are you feeling ill, André?"

I found strength to answer, "No; I am upset by having found you in tears. It is nothing."

She believed me; she had just seen me overcome by her emotion; she kissed me tenderly, and I begged her to continue. She then told me that one day in the previous week a stranger, coming ostensibly from one of their friends in London, had asked to see my stepfather. He was ushered into the hall, and into her presence, and she guessed at once by the extraordinary agitation which M. Termonde displayed that the man was Edmond. The two brothers went into my stepfather's private room, while my mother remained in the hall, half dead with anxiety and suspense, every now and then hearing the angry tones of their voices, but unable to distinguish any words. At length the brother came out, through the hall, and looked at her as he passed by with eyes that transfixed her with fear.

"And the same evening," she went on, "Jacques took to his bed. Now, do you understand my despair? Ah, it is not our name that I care for. I wear myself out with repeating, 'What has this to do with us? How can we be spattered by this mud?' It is his health, his precious health! The doctor says that every violent emotion is a dose of poison to him. Ah!" she cried, with a gesture of despair, "this man will kill him." To hear that cry, which once again revealed to me the depth of her passion for my stepfather, to hear it at this moment, and to think what I was thinking!

"You saw him?" I asked, hardly knowing what I said.

"Have I not told you that he passed by me, there?" and, with terror depicted in her face, she showed me the place on the carpet.

"And you are sure that the man was his brother?"

"Jacques told me so in the evening; but I did not require that; I should have recognised him by the eyes. How strange it is! Those two brothers, so different; Jacques so refined, so distinguished, so noble-minded, and the other, a big, heavy, vulgar lout, common-looking, and a rascal--well, they have the same look in their eyes."

"And under what name is he in Paris?"

"I do not know. I dare not speak of him any more. If he knew that I have told you this, with his ideas! But then, dear, you would have heard it at some time or other; and besides," she added with firmness, "I would have told you long ago about this wretched secret if I had dared! You are a man now, and you are not bound by this excessively scrupulous fraternal affection. Advise me, André, what is to be done?"

"I do not understand you."

"Yes, yes. There must be some means of informing the police and having this man arrested without its being talked of in the newspapers or elsewhere. Jacques would not do this, because the man is his brother; but if we were to act, you and I, on our own side? I have heard you say that you visit M. Massol, whom we knew at the time of our great misfortune; suppose I were to go to him and ask his advice? Ah t I must keep my husband alive--he must be saved! I love him too much!"

Why was I seized with a panic at the idea that she might carry out this project, and apply to the former Judge of Instruction--I, who had not ventured to go to his house since my aunt's death for fear he should divine my suspicions merely by looking at me? What was it that I saw so clearly, that made me implore her to abandon her idea in the very name of the love she bore her husband.

"You will not do this," I said; "you have no right to do it. He would never forgive you, and he would have just cause; it would be betraying him."

"Betraying him! It would be saving him!"

"And if his brother's arrest were to strike him a fresh blow? If you were to see him ill, more ill than ever, on account of what you had done?"

I had used the only argument that could have convinced her. Strange irony of fate! I calmed her, I persuaded her not to act--I, who had suddenly conceived the monstrous notion that the doer of the murderous deed, the docile instrument in my stepfather's hands, was this infamous brother--that Edmond Termonde and Rochdale were one and the same man!

XV

The night which followed that conversation with my mother remains in my memory as the most wretched I had hitherto endured; and yet how many sleepless nights had I passed, while all the world around me slept, in bitter conflict with a thought which held mine eyes waking and devoured my heart! I was like a prisoner who has sounded every inch of his dungeon--the walls, the floor, the ceiling--and who, on shaking the bars of his window for the hundredth time, feels one of the iron rods loosen under the pressure. He hardly dares to believe in his good fortune, and he sits down upon the ground almost dazed by the vision of deliverance that has dawned upon him. "I must be cool-headed now," said I to myself, as I walked to and fro in the smoking-room, whither I had retired without tasting the meal that was served on my return. Evening came, then the black night; the dawn followed, and once more the full day. Still I was there, striving to see clearly amid the cloud of suppositions in which an event, simple in itself (only that in my state of mind no event would have seemed simple), had wrapped me. I was too well used to these mental tempests not to know that the only safety consisted in clinging to the positive facts, as though to immovable rocks. In the present instance, the positive facts reduced themselves to two: first, I had just learned that a brother of M. Termonde, who passed for dead, and of whom my stepfather never spoke, existed; secondly, that this man, disgraced, proscribed, ruined, an outlaw in fact, exercised a dictatorship of terror over his rich, honoured, and irreproachable brother. The first of these two facts explained itself. It was quite natural that Jacques Termonde should not dispel the legend of the suicide, which was of his own invention, and had saved the other from the galleys. It is never pleasant to have to own a thief, a forger, or a deserter, for one's nearest relation; but this, after all, is only an excessively disagreeable matter. The second fact was of a different kind. The disproportion between the cause assigned by my stepfather and its result in the terror from which he was suffering was too great. The dominion which Edmond Termonde exercised over his brother was not to be justified by the threat of his return, if that return were not to have any other consequence than a transient scandal. My mother, who regarded her husband as a noble-minded, high-souled, great-hearted man, might be satisfied with the alleged reason; but not I. It occurred to me to consult the Code of Military Justice, and I ascertained, by the 184th clause, that a deserter cannot claim immunity from punishment until after he has attained his forty-seventh year, so that it was most likely Edmond Termonde was still within the reach of the law. Was it possible that his desire to shield his brother from the punishment of the offence of desertion should throw my stepfather into such a state of illness and agitation? I discerned another reason for this dominion--some dark and terrible bond of complicity between the two men. What if Jacques Termonde had employed his brother to kill my father, and proof of the transaction was still in the murderer's possession? No doubt his hands would be tied so far as the magistrates were concerned; but he had it in his power to enlighten my mother, and the mere threat of doing this would suffice to make a loving husband tremble, and tame his fierce pride.