第84章

I evoked the image of my father as he lived, just as I had seen him for the last time; I heard him replying to M.Termonde's question in the dining-room of the Rue Tronchet, and speaking of the man who awaited him to kill him: "A singular man whom I shall not be sorry to observe more closely." And then he had gone out and was walking towards his death while I was playing in the little salon, and my mother was talking to the friend who was one day to be her master and mine.What a happy home-picture, while in that hotel room--Ah! was I never to find the key of the terrible enigma? Where was I to go? What was I to do? At what door was I to knock?

At the same time that a sense of the responsibility of my task disheartened me, the novel facilities of my new way of life contributed to relax the tension of my will.During my school days, the sufferings I underwent from jealousy of my stepfather, the disappointment of my repressed affections, the meanness and penury of my surroundings, many grievous influences, had maintained the restless ardor of my feelings; but this also had undergone a change.No doubt I still continued to love my mother deeply and painfully, but I now no longer asked her for what I knew she would not give me, my unshared place, a separate shrine in her heart.Iaccepted her nature instead of rebelling against it.

Neither had I ceased to regard my stepfather with morose antipathy;but I no longer hated him with the old vehemence.His conduct to me after I had left school was irreproachable.Just as in my childhood, he had made it a point of honor never to raise his voice in speaking to me, so he now seemed to pique himself upon an entire absence of interference in my life as a young man.When, having passed my baccalaureate, I announced that I did not wish to adopt any profession, but without a reason--the true one was my resolution to devote myself entirely to the fulfillment of my task of justice--he had not a word to say against that strange decision;nay, more, he brought my mother to consent to it.

When my fortune was handed over to me, I found that my mother, who had acted as my guardian, and my stepfather, her co-trustee, had agreed not to touch my funds during the whole period of my education; the interest had been re-invested, and I came into possession, not of 750,000 francs, but of more than a million.

Painful as I felt the obligation of gratitude towards the man whom I had for years regarded as my enemy, I was bound to acknowledge that he had acted an honorable part towards me.I was well aware that no real contradiction existed between these high-minded actions and the harshness with which he had imprisoned me at school, and, so to speak, relegated me to exile.Provided that Irenounced all attempts to form a third between him and his wife, he would have no relations with me but those of perfect courtesy; but I must not be in my mother's house.His will was to reign entirely alone over the heart and life of the woman who bore his name.

How could I have contended with him? Why, too, should I have blamed him, since I knew so well that in his place, jealous as Iwas, my own conduct would have been exactly similar?

I yielded, therefore, because I was powerless to contend with a love which made my mother happy; because I was weary of keeping up the daily constraint of my relations with her and him, and also because I hoped that when once I was free I should be better fitted for my task as a doer of justice.I myself asked to be permitted to leave the house, so that at nineteen I possessed absolute independence, an apartment of my own in the Avenue Montaigne, close to the round-point in the Champs Elysees, a yearly income of 50,000francs, the entree to all the salons frequented by my mother, and the entree, too, to all the places at which one may amuse one's self.How could I have resisted the influences of such a position?

Yes, I had dreamed of being an avenger, a justiciary, and I allowed myself to be caught up almost instantly into the whirlwind of that life of pleasure whose destructive power those who see it only from the outside cannot measure.It is a futile and exacting existence which fritters away your hours as it fritters away your mind, raveling out the stuff of time thread by thread with irreparable loss, and also the more precious stuff of mental and moral strength.

With respect to that task of mine, my task as an avenger, I was incapable of immediate action--what and whom was I to attack?

And so I availed myself of all the opportunities that presented themselves of disguising my inaction by movement, and soon the days began to hurry on, and press one upon the other, amid those innumerable amusements of which the idle rich make a code of duties to be performed.What with the morning ride in the Bois, afternoon calls, dinner parties, parties to the theater and after midnight, play at the club, or the pursuit of pleasure elsewhere--how was Ito find leisure for the carrying out of a project? I had horses, intrigues, an absurd duel in which I acquitted myself well, because, as I believe, the tragic ideas that were always at the bottom of my life favored me.