第101章

This impression of dread kept hold of me during the whole of that evening, and for several days afterwards.There is an infinite distance between our fancies, however precise they may be, and the least bit of reality.

My father's letters had stirred my being to its utmost depths, had summoned up tragic pictures before my eyes; but the simple fact of my having seen the agonized look in my stepfather's face, after my interview with him, gave me a shock of an entirely different kind.

Even after I had read the letters repeatedly, I had cherished a secret hope that I was mistaken, that some slight proof would arise and dispel suspicions which I denounced as senseless, perhaps because I had a foreknowledge of the dreadful duty that would devolve upon me when the hour of certainty had come.Then I should be obliged to act on a resolution, and I dared not look the necessity in the face.No, I had not so regarded it, previous to my meeting with my enemy, when I saw him cowering in anguish upon the cushions of his carriage.Now I would force myself to contemplate it.What should my course be, if he were guilty? Iput this question to myself plainly, and I perceived all the horror of the situation.On whatever side I turned I was confronted with intolerable misery.

That things should remain as they were I could not endure.I saw my mother approach M.Termonde, as she often did, and touch his forehead caressingly with her hand or her lips.That she should do this to the murderer of my father! My very bones burned at the mere thought of it, and I felt as though an arrow pierced my breast.So be it! I would act; I would find strength to go to my mother and say: "This man is an assassin," and prove it to her--and lo! I was already shrinking from the pain that my words must inflict on her.It seemed to me that while I was speaking I should see her eyes open wide, and, through the distended pupils, discern the rending asunder of her being, even to her heart, and that she would go mad or fall down dead on the spot, before my eyes.No, Iwould speak to her myself.If I held the convincing proof in my hands I would appeal to justice.

But then a new scene arose before me.I pictured my mother at the moment of her husband's arrest.She would be there, in the room, close to him."Of what crime is he accused?" she would ask, and she would have to hear the inevitable answer.And I should be the voluntary cause of this, I, who, since my childhood, and to spare her a pang, had stifled all my complaints at the time when my heart was laden with so many sighs, so many tears, so much sorrow, that it would have been a supreme relief to have poured them out to her.

I had not done so then, because I knew that she was happy in her life, and that it was her happiness only that blinded her to my pain.I preferred that she should be blind and happy.And now?

Ah! how could I strike her such a cruel blow, dear and fragile being that she was?

The first glimpse of the double prospect of misery which my future offered if my suspicions proved just was too terrible for endurance, and I summoned all my strength of will to shut out a vision which must bring about such consequences.Contrary to my habit, I persuaded myself into a happy solution.My stepfather looked sad when he passed me in his coupe; true, but what did this prove? Had he not many causes of care and trouble, beginning with his health, which was failing from day to day?

One fact only would have furnished me with absolute, indisputable proof; if he had been shaken by a nervous convulsion while we were talking, if I had seen him (as Hamlet, my brother in anguish, saw his uncle) start up with distorted face, before the suddenly-evoked specter of his crime.Not a muscle of his face had moved, not an eyelash had quivered;--why, then, should I set down this untroubled calm to amazing hypocrisy, and take the discomposure of his countenance half an hour later for a revelation of the truth? This was just reasoning, or at least it appears so to me, now that I am writing down my recollections in cold blood.They did not prevail against the sort of fatal instinct which forced me to follow this trail.Yes, it was absurd, it was mad, gratuitously to imagine that M.Termonde had employed another person to murder my father;yet I could not prevent myself constantly admitting that this most unlikely suggestion of my fancy was possible, and sometimes that it was certain.

When a man has given place in his mind to ideas of this kind he is no longer his own master; either he is a coward, or the thing must be fought out.It was due to my father, my mother, and myself that I should KNOW.

I walked about my rooms for hours, revolving these thoughts, and more than once I took up a pistol, saying to myself: "Just a touch, a slight movement like this"--I made the gesture--"and I am cured forever of my mortal pain." But the very handling of the weapon, the touch of the smooth barrel, reminded me of the mysterious scene of my father's death.It called up before me the sitting-room in the Imperial Hotel, the disguised man waiting, my father coming in, taking a seat at the table, turning over the papers laid before him, while a pistol, like this one in my hand, was levelled at him, close to the back of his neck; and then the fatal crack of the weapon, the head dropping down upon the table, the murderer wrapping the bleeding neck in towels and washing his hands, coolly, leisurely, as though he had just completed some ordinary task.The picture roused in me a raging thirst for vengeance.I approached the portrait of the dead man, which looked at me with its motionless eyes.What! I had my suspicions of the instigator of this murder, and I would leave them unverified because I was afraid of what I should have to do afterwards! No, no; at any price, Imust in the first place know!