PAUL BOURGET (continued 3)

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. . . .

Matters had stood thus for years, and yet, after the week of miserable suspicion I had lived through, the quick look and shrug struck me strangely, even while I took his hand after I had kissed my mother, and saluted Madame Bernard. His hand? No, only his finger tips as usual, and they trembled a little as I touched them. How often had my own hand shrunk with unconquerable repugnance from that contact! I listened while he repeated the same phrases of sympathy with my sorrow which he had already written to me while I was at Compiègne. I listened while Madame Bernard uttered other phrases to the same effect; and then the conversation resumed its course, and, during the half-hour that ensued, I looked on, speaking hardly at all, but mentally comparing the physiognomy of my stepfather with that of the visitor, and that of my mother. The contemplation of those three faces produced a curious impression upon me; it was that of their difference, not only of age, but of intensity, of depth. There was no mystery in my mother's face, it was as easy to read as a page in clear handwriting! The mind of Madame Bernard, a worldly, trumpery mind, but harmless enough, was readily to be discerned in her features, which were at once refined and commonplace. How little there was of reflection, of decision, of exercise of will, in short of individuality, behind the poetic grace of the one and the pretty affectations of the other! What a face, on the contrary, was that of my stepfather, with its strong individuality and its vivid expression! In this man of the world, as he stood there talking with two women of the world, in his blue, furtive eyes, too wide apart, and always seeming to shun observation, in his prematurely gray hair, his mouth set round with deep wrinkles, in his dark, blotched complexion, there seemed to be a creature of another race. What passions had worn those furrows? what vigils had hollowed those eyeballs? Was this the face of a happy man, with whom everything had succeeded, who, having been born to wealth and of an excellent family, had married the woman he loved; who had known neither the wearing cares of ambition, the toil of money-getting, nor the stings of wounded self-love? It is true, he suffered from some complaint; but why was it that, although I had hitherto been satisfied with this answer, it now appeared to me childish and even foolish? Why did all these marks of trouble and exhaustion suddenly strike me as effects of a secret cause, and why was I astonished that I had not sooner sought for it? Why was it that in his presence, contrary to my expectations, contrary to what had happened about my mother, I was wrong to think thus, and harbour suspicion from which I had hoped to emerge with a free mind? Why, when our eyes met for just one second, was I afraid that he might read my thoughts in my glance, and why did I shift them with a pang of shame and terror? Ah! coward that I was, triple coward! Either I was wrong to think thus, and at any price I must know that I was wrong; or, I was right and I must know that too. The sole resource henceforth remaining to me for the preservation of my self-respect was ardent and ceaseless search after certainty.

That such a search was beset with difficulty I was well aware. Mow was I to get at facts? The very position of the problem which I had before me forbade all hope of discovering anything whatsoever by a formal inquiry. What, in fact, was the matter in question? It was to make myself certain whether M. Termonde was or was not the accomplice of the man who had led my father into the trap in which he had lost his life. But I did not know that man himself; I had no data to go upon except the particulars of his disguise and the vague speculations of a Judge of Instruction. If I could only have consulted that Judge, and availed myself of his experience? How often since have I taken out the packet containing the denunciatory letters, with the intention of showing them to him and imploring advice, support, suggestions, from him. But I have always stopped short before the door of his house; the thought of my mother barred its entrance against me. What if he, the Judge of Instruction in the case, were to suspect her as my aunt had done? Then I would go back to my own abode, and shut myself up for hours, lying on the divan in my smoking-room and drugging my senses with tobacco. During that time I read and re-read the fatal letters, although I knew them by heart, in order to verify my first impression with the hope of dispelling it. It was, on the contrary, deepened. The only gain I obtained from my repeated perusals was the knowledge that this certainty, of which I had made a point of honour to myself, could only be psychological. In short, all my fancies started from the moral data of the crime, apart from physical data which I could not obtain. I was therefore obliged to rely entirely, absolutely, upon those moral data, and I began again to reason as I had done at Compiègne. "Supposing," said I to myself, "that M. Termonde is guilty, what state of mind must he be in? This state of mind being once ascertained, how can I act so as to wrest some sign of his guilt from him?" As to his state of mind I had no doubt. Ill and depressed as I knew him to be, his mind troubled to the point of torment, if that suffering, that gloom, that misery were accompanied by the recollection of a murder committed in the past, the man was the victim of secret remorse. The point was then to invent a plan which should give, as it were, a form to his remorse, to raise the spectre of the deed he had done roughly and suddenly before him. If guilty, it was impossible but that he would tremble; if innocent, he would not even be aware of the experiment. But how was this sudden summoning-up of his crime before the man whom I suspected to be accomplished? On the stage and in novels one confronts an assassin with the spectacle of his crime, and keeps watch upon his face for the one second during which he loses his self-possession; but in reality there is no instrument except unwieldy, unmanageable speech wherewith to probe a human conscience. I could not, however, go straight to M. Termonde and say to his face: "You had my father killed!" Innocent or guilty, he would have had me turned from the door as a madman!

After several hours of reflection, I came to the conclusion that only one plan was reasonable, and available: this was to have a private talk with my stepfather at a moment when he would least expect it, an interview in which all should be hints, shades, double meanings, in which each word should be like the laying of a finger upon the sorest spots in his breast, if indeed his reflections were those of a murderer. Every sentence of mine must be so contrived as to force him to ask himself: "Why does he say this to me if he knows nothing? He does know something. How much does he know?" So well acquainted was I with every physical trait of his, the slightest variations of his countenance, his simplest gestures, that no sign of disturbance on his part, however slight, could escape me. If I did not succeed in discovering the seat of the malady by this process, I should be convinced of the baselessness of those suspicions which were constantly springing up afresh in my mind since the death of my aunt. I would then admit the simple and probable explanation—nothing in my father's letters discredited it—that M. Termonde had loved my mother without hope in the lifetime of her first husband, and had then profited by her widowhood, of which he had not even ventured to think. If, on the contrary, I observed during our interview, that he was alive to my suspicions, that he divined them, and anxiously followed my words; if I surprised that swift gleam in his eye which reveals the instinctive terror of an animal, attacked at the moment of its fancied security, if the experiment succeeded, then—then—I dared not think of what then? The mere possibility was too overwhelming. But should I have the strength to carry on such a conversation? At the mere thought of it, my heart-beats were quickened, and my nerves thrilled. What! this was the first opportunity that had been offered to me of action, of devoting myself to the task of vengeance, so coveted, so fully accepted during all my early years, and I could hesitate? Happily, or unhappily, I had near me a counsellor stronger than my doubts, my father's portrait, which was hung in my smoking-room. When I awoke in the night and plunged into these thoughts, I would light my candle and go to look at the picture. How like we were to each other, my father and I, although I was more slightly built! How exactly the same we were! How near to me I felt him, and how dearly I loved him! With what emotion I studied those features, the lofty forehead, the brown eyes, the rather large mouth, the rather long chin, the mouth especially, half-hidden by a black moustache cut like my own; it had no need to open, and cry out: "André, André, remember me!" Ah, no, my dear dead father, I could not leave you thus, without having done my utmost to avenge you, and it was only an interview to be faced, only an interview!

My nervousness gave way to determination at once feverish and fixed—yes, it was both—and it was in a mood of perfect self-mastery, that, after a long period of mental conflict, I repaired to the hotel on the boulevard, with the plan of my discourse clearly laid out. I felt almost sure of finding my stepfather alone; for my mother was to breakfast on that day with Madame Bernard. M. Termonde was at home, and, as I expected, alone in his study. When I entered the room, he was sitting in a low chair, close to the fire, looking chilly, and smoking. Like myself in my dark hours, he drugged himself with tobacco. The room was a large one, and both luxurious and ordinary. A handsome bookcase lined one of the walls. Its contents were various, ranging from grave works on history and political economy to the lightest novels of the day. A large, flat writing-table, on which every kind of writing-material was carefully arranged, occupied the middle of the room, and was adorned with photographs in leather cases. These were portraits of my mother and M. Termonde's father and mother. At least one prominent trait of its owner's character, his scrupulous attention to order and correctness of detail, was revealed by the aspect of my stepfather's study; but this quality, which is common to so many persons of his position in the world, may belong to the most commonplace character as well as to the most refined hypocrite. It was not only in the external order and bearing of his life that my stepfather was impenetrable, none could tell whether profound thoughts were or were not hidden behind his politeness and elegance of manner. I had often reflected on this, at a period when as yet I had no stronger motive for examining into the recesses of the man's character than curiosity, and the impression came to me with extreme intensity at the moment when I entered his presence with a firm resolve to read in the book of his past life.

We shook hands, I took a seat opposite to his on the other side of the hearth, lighted a cigar, and said, as if to explain my unaccustomed presence:

"Mamma is not here?"

"Did she not tell you, the other day, that she was to breakfast with Madame Bernard? There's an expedition to Lozano's studio,"—Lozano was a Spanish painter much in vogue just then—"to see a portrait he is painting of Madame Bernard. Is there anything you want to have told to your mother?" he added, simply.

These few words were sufficient to show me that he had remarked the singularity of my visit. Ought I to regret or to rejoice at this? He was, then, already aware that I had some particular motive for coming; but this very fact would give all their intended weight to my words. I began by turning the conversation on an indifferent matter, talking of the painter Lozano and a good picture of his which I knew, "A Gipsy-dance in a Tavern-yard at Grenada." I described the bold attitudes, the pale complexions, the Moorish faces of the gitanas, and the red carnations stuck into the heavy braids of their black hair, and I questioned him about Spain. He answered me, but evidently out of mere politeness. While continuing to smoke his cigar, he raked the fire with the tongs, and taking up one small piece of charred wood after another between their points. By the quivering of his fingers, the only sign of his nervous sensitiveness which he was unable entirely to keep down, I could observe that my presence was then, as it always was, disagreeable to him. Nevertheless he talked on with his habitual courtesy, in his low voice, almost without tone or accent, as though he had trained himself to talk thus. His eyes were fixed on the flame, and his face, which I saw in profile, wore the expression of infinite weariness that I knew well, an indescribable sadness, with long deep lines, and the mouth was contracted as though by some bitter thought ever present. Suddenly, I looked straight at that detested profile, concentrating all the attention I had in me upon it, and, passing from one subject to another without transition, I said:

"I paid a very interesting visit this morning."

"In that you are agreeably distinguished from me," was his reply, made in a tone of utter indifference, "for I wasted my morning in putting my correspondence in order."

"Yes," I continued, "very interesting. I passed two hours with M. Massol."

I had reckoned a good deal on the effect of this name, which must have instantly recalled the inquiry into the mystery of the Imperial Hotel to his memory. The muscles of his face did not move. He laid down the tongs, leaned back in his chair, and said in an absent manner:

"The former Judge of Instruction? What is he doing now?"

Was it possible that he really did not know where the man, whom, if he were guilty, he ought to have dreaded most of all men, was then living? How was I to know whether this indifference was feigned? The trap I had set appeared to me all at once a childish notion. Admitting that my stepfather's pulses were even now throbbing with fever, and that he was saying to himself with dread: "What is he coming to? What does he mean?" why, this was a reason why he should conceal his emotion all the more carefully. No matter. I had begun; I was bound to go on, and to hit hard—or cease to hit at all.

"M. Massol is Counsellor to the Court," I replied, and I added—although this was not true—"I see him often. We were talking this morning of criminals who have escaped punishment. Only fancy his being convinced that Troppmann had an accomplice. He founds his belief on the details of the crime, which presupposes two men, he says. If this be true it must be admitted that 'Messieurs The Assassins' have a kind of honour of their own, however odd that may appear, since the child-killing monster let his own head be cut off without denouncing the other. Nevertheless, the accomplice must have had some bad times before him, after the discovery of the bodies and the arrest of his comrade. I, for my part, would not trust to that honour, and if the humour took me to commit a crime, I should do it by myself. Would you?" I asked jestingly.

These two little words meant nothing, were merely an insignificant jest, if the man to whom I put my odd question was innocent. But, if he were guilty, those two little words were enough to freeze the marrow in his bones. He surrounded himself with smoke while listening to me, his eyelids half veiled his eyes; I could no longer see his left hand, which hung over the far side of his chair, and he had put the right into the pocket of his morning-coat. There was a short pause before he answered me—very short—but the interval, perhaps a minute, that divided his reply from my question was a burning one for me. But what of this? It was not his way to speak in a hurry; and besides, my question had nothing interesting in it if he were not guilty, and if he were, would he not have to calculate the bearing of the phrase which he was about to utter with the quickness of thought? He closed his eyes completely—his constant habit—and said, in the unconcerned tone of a man who is talking generalities:

"It is a fact that scraps of conscience do remain intact in very depraved individuals. One sees instances of this especially in countries where habits and morals are more genuine and true to nature than ours. There's Spain, for instance, the country that interests you so much; when I lived in Spain, it was still infested by brigands. One had to make treaties with them in order to cross the Sierras in safety; there was no case known in which they broke the contract. The history of celebrated criminal cases swarms with scoundrels who have been excellent friends, devoted sons, and constant lovers. But I am of your opinion, and I think it is best not to count too much upon them."

He smiled as he uttered the last words, and now he looked full at me with those light blue eyes which were so mysterious and impassible. No, I was not of a stature to cope with him, to read his heart by force. It needed capacity of another kind than mine to play in the case of this personage the part of the magnate of police who magnetises a criminal. And yet, why did my suspicions gather force as I felt the masked, dissimulating, guarded nature of the man in all its strength? Are there not natures so constituted that they shut themselves up without cause, just as others reveal themselves; are there not souls that love darkness as others love daylight? Courage, then, let me strike again.

"M. Massol and I," I resumed, "have been talking about what kind of life Troppmann's accomplice must be leading, and also Rochdale's, for neither of us has relinquished the intention of finding him. Before M. Massol's retirement he took the precaution to bar the limitation by a formal notice, and we have several years before us in which to search for the man. Do these criminals sleep in peace? Are they punished by remorse, or by the apprehension of danger, even in their momentary security? It would be strange if they were both at this moment good, quiet citizens, smoking their cigars like you and me, loved and loving. Do you believe in remorse?"

"Yes, I do believe in remorse," he answered. Was it the contrast between the affected levity of my speech, and the seriousness with which he had spoken, that caused his voice to sound grave and deep to my ears? No, no; I was deceiving myself, for without a thrill he had heard the news that the limitation had been barred, that the case might be re-opened any day—terrible news for him if he were mixed up with the murder—and he added, calmly, referring to the philosophic side of my question only:

"And does M. Massol believe in remorse?" "M. Massol," said I, "is a cynic. He has seen too much wickedness, known too many terrible stories. He says that remorse is ay question of stomach and religious education, and that a man with a sound digestion, who had never heard anything about hell in his childhood, might rob and kill from morning to night without feeling any other remorse than fear of the police. He also maintains, being a sceptic, that we do not know what part that question of the other life plays in solitude; and I think he is right, for I often begin to think of death, at night, and I am afraid;—yes, I, who don't believe in anything very much, am afraid. And you," I continued, "do you believe in another world?"

"Yes." This time I was sure that there was an alteration in his voice.

"And in the justice of God?"

"In His justice and His mercy," he answered, in a strange tone.

"Singular justice," I said vehemently, "which is able to do everything, and yet delays to punish! My poor aunt used always to say to me when I talked to her about avenging my father: 'I leave it to God to punish,' but, for my part, if I had got hold of the murderer, and he was there before me—if I were sure—no, I would not wait for the hour of that tardy justice of God."

I had risen while uttering these words, carried away by involuntary excitement which I knew to be unwise. M. Termonde had bent over the fire again, and once more taken up the tongs. He made no answer to my outburst. Had he really felt some slight disturbance, as I believed for an instant, at hearing me speak of that inevitable and dreadful morrow of the grave which fills myself with such fear now that there is blood upon my hands? I could not tell. His profile was, as usual, calm and sad. The restlessness of his hands—recalling to my mind the gesture with which he turned and returned his cane while my mother was telling him of the disappearance of my father—yes, the restlessness of his hands was extreme; but he had been working at the fire with the same feverish eagerness just before. Silence had fallen between us suddenly; but how often had the same thing happened? Did it ever fail to happen when he and I were in each other's company? And then, what could he have to say against the outburst of my grief and wrath, orphan that I was? Guilty, or innocent, it was for him to be silent, and he held his peace. My heart sank; but, at the same time, a senseless rage seized upon me. At that moment I would have given my remaining life for the power of forcing their secret from those shut lips, by any mode of torture.

My stepfather looked at the clock—he, too, had risen now—and said: "Shall I put you down anywhere? I have ordered the carriage for three o'clock, as I have to be at the club at half-past. There's a ballot coming off to-morrow." Instead of the down-stricken criminal I had dreamed of, there stood before me a man of society thinking about the affairs of his club. He came with me so far as the hall, and took leave of me with a smile.

Why, then, a quarter of an hour afterwards, when we passed each other on the quay, I, going homewards on foot, he in his coupé—yes—why was his face so transformed, so dark and tragic? He did not see me. He was sitting back in the corner, and his clay-coloured face was thrown out by the green leather behind his head. His eyes were looking—where, and at what? The vision of distress that passed before me was so different from the smiling countenance of a while ago that it shook me from head to foot with an extraordinary emotion.

XII

This impression of dread kept hold of me during the whole of that evening, and for several days afterwards. There is 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 agonised 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? I put this question to myself plainly t 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, I would 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 coupé; 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 spectre 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 from 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, thinking these thoughts, and more than once I took up a pistol, saying to myself: "Just a touch, a slight movement like this and I am cured for ever of mortal pain." But the 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, I must in the first place know!

Three days passed. I was suffering tortures of irresolution, mingled with incoherent projects no sooner formed than they were rejected as impracticable. To know?—this was easily said, but I, who was so eager, nervous, and excitable, so little able to restrain my quickly-varying emotions, would never be able to extort his secret from so resolute a man, one so completely master of himself as my stepfather. My consciousness of his strength and my weakness made me dread his presence as much as I desired it. I was like a novice in arms who was about to fight a duel with a very skilful adversary; he desires to defend himself and to be victorious, but he is doubtful of his own coolness. What was I to do now, when I had struck a first blow and it had not been decisive? If our interview had really told upon his conscience, how was I to proceed to the redoubling of the first effect, to the final reduction of that proud spirit? My reflections had arrived and stopped at this point, I was forming and re-forming plans only to abandon them, when a note reached me from my mother, complaining; that I had not gone to her house since the day on which I had missed seeing her, and telling me that my stepfather had been very ill indeed two days previously with his customary liver complaint. Two days previously, that was on the day after my conversation with him. Here again it might be said that fate was making sport of me, redoubling the ambiguity of the signs, the chief cause of my despair. Was the imminence of this attack explanatory of the agonised expression of my stepfather's face when he passed me in his carriage? Was it a cause, or merely the effect of the terror by which he had been assailed, if he was guilty, under his mask of indifference, while I flung my menacing words in his face? Oh, how intolerable was this uncertainty, and my mother increased it, when I went to her, by her first words.

"This," she said, "is the second attack he has had in two months; they have never come so near together until now. What alarms me most is the strength of the doses of morphine he takes to lull the pain. He has never been a sound sleeper, and for some years he has not slept one single night without having recourse to narcotics; but he used to be moderate—whereas, now——"

She shook her head dejectedly, poor woman, and I, instead of compassionating her sorrow, was conjecturing whether this, too, was not a sign, whether the man's sleeplessness did not arise from terrible, invincible remorse, or whether it also could be merely the result of illness.

"Would you like to see him?" asked my mother, almost timidly, and as I hesitated she added, under the impression that I was afraid of fatiguing him, whereas I was much surprised by the proposal, "he asked to see you himself; he wants to hear the news from you about yesterday's ballot at the club." Was this the real motive of a desire to see me, which I could not but regard as singular, or did he want to prove that our interview had left him wholly unmoved? Was I to interpret the message which he had sent me by my mother as an additional sign of the extreme importance that he attached to the details of "society" life, or was he, apprehending my suspicions, forestalling them? Or, yet again, was he, too, tortured by the desire to know, by the urgent need of satisfying his curiosity by the sight of my face, whereon he might decipher my thoughts?

I entered the room—it was the same that had been mine when I was a child, but I had not been inside its door for years—in a state of mind similar to that in which I had gone to my former interview with him. I had, however, no hope now that M. Termonde would be brought to his knees by my direct allusion to the hideous crime of which I imagined him to be guilty. My stepfather occupied the room as a sleeping-apartment when he was ill, ordinarily he only dressed there. The walls, hung with dark green damask, ill-lighted by one lamp, with a pink shade, placed upon a pedestal at some distance from the bed, to avoid fatigue to the sick man's eyes, had for their only ornament a likeness of my mother by Bonnat, one of his first female portraits. The picture was hung between the two windows, facing the bed, so that M. Termonde, when he slept in that room, might turn his last look at night and his first look in the morning upon the face whose long-descended beauty the painter had very finely rendered. No less finely had he conveyed the something half-theatrical which characterised that face, the slightly affected set of the mouth, the far-off look in the eyes, the elaborate arrangement of the hair. First, I looked at this portrait; it confronted me on entering the room; then my glance fell on my stepfather in the bed. His head, with its white hair, and his thin yellow face were supported by the large pillows, round his neck was tied a handkerchief of pale blue silk which I recognised, for I had seen it on my mother's neck, and I also recognised the red woollen coverlet that she had knitted for him; it was exactly the same as one she had made for me; a pretty bit of woman's work on which I had seen her occupied for hours, ornamented with ribbons and lined with silk. Ever and always the smallest details were destined to renew that impression of a shared interest in my mother's life from which I suffered so much, and more cruelly than ever now, by reason of my suspicion. I felt that my looks must betray the tumult of such feelings, and, while I seated myself by the side of the bed, and asked my stepfather how he was, in a voice that sounded to me like that of another person, I avoided meeting his eyes. My mother had gone out immediately after announcing me, to attend to some small matters relative to the well-being of her dear invalid. My stepfather questioned me upon the ballot at the club which he had assigned as a pretext for his wish to see me. I sat with my elbow on the marble top of the table and my forehead resting in my hand; although I did not catch his eye I felt that he was studying my face, and I persisted in looking fixedly into the half-open drawer where a small pocket-pistol, of English make, lay side by side with his watch, and a brown silk purse, also made for him by my mother. What were the dark misgivings revealed by the presence of this weapon placed within reach of his hand and probably habitually placed there? Did he interpret my thoughts from my steady observation? Or had he, too, let his glance fall by chance upon the pistol, and was he pursuing the ideas that it suggested in order to keep up the talk it was always so difficult to maintain between us? The fact is that he said, as though replying to the question in my mind: "You are looking at that pistol, it is a pretty thing, is it not?" He took it up, turned it about in his hand, and then replaced it in the drawer, which he closed. "I have a strange fancy, quite a mania; I could not sleep unless I had a loaded pistol, there, quite close to me. After all it is a habit which does no harm to any one, and might have its advantages. If your poor father had carried a weapon like that upon him when he went to the Imperial Hotel, things would not have gone so easily with the assassin."

This time I could not refrain from raising my eyes and seeking his. How, if he were guilty, did he dare to recall this remembrance? Why, if he were not, did his glance sink before mine? Was it merely in following out an association of ideas that he referred thus to the death of my father; was it for the purpose of displaying his entire unconcern respecting the subject-matter of our last interview; or was he using a probe to discover the depth of my suspicion? After this allusion to the mysterious murder which had made me fatherless, he went on to say:

"And, by-the-bye, have you seen M. Massol again?"

"No," said I, "not since the other day."

"He is a very intelligent man. At the time of that terrible affair, I had a great deal of talk with him, in my capacity as the intimate friend of both your father and mother. If I had known that you were in the habit of seeing him latterly, I should have asked you to convey my kind regards."

"He has not forgotten you," I answered. In this I lied; for M. Massol had never spoken of my stepfather to me; but that frenzy which had made me attack him almost madly in the conversation of the other evening had seized upon me again. Should I never find the vulnerable spot in that dark soul for which I was always looking? This time his eyes did not falter, and whatever there was of the enigmatical in what I had said, did not lead him to question me farther. On the contrary, he put his finger on his lips. Used as he was to all the sounds of the house, he had heard a step approaching, and knew it was my mother's. Did I deceive myself, or was there an entreaty that I would respect the unsuspecting security of an innocent woman in the gesture by which he enjoined silence? Was I to translate the look that accompanied the sign into: "Do not awaken suspicion in your mother's mind, she would suffer too much;" and was his motive merely the solicitude of a man who desires to save his wife from the revival of a sad remembrance? She came in; with the same glance she saw us both, lighted by the same ray from the lamp, and she gave us a smile, meant for both of us in common, and fraught with the same tenderness for each. It had been the dream of her life that we should be together thus, and both of us with her, and, as she had told me at Compiègne, she imputed the obstacles which had hindered the realisation of her dream to my moody disposition. She came towards us, smiling, and carrying a silver tray with a glass of Vichy water upon it; this she held out to my stepfather, who drank the water eagerly, and, returning the glass to her, kissed her hand.

"Let us leave him to rest," she said, "his head is burning." Indeed, in merely touching the tips of his fingers, which he placed in mine, I could feel that he was highly feverish; but how was I to interpret this symptom, which was ambiguous like all the others, and might, like them, signify either moral or physical distress? I had sworn to myself that I would know; but how?—how?

I had been surprised by my stepfather's having expressed a wish to see me during his illness; but I was far more surprised when, a fortnight later, my servant announced M. Termonde in person, at my abode. I was in my study, and occupied in arranging some papers of my father's which I had brought up from Compiègne. I had passed these two weeks at my poor aunt's house, making a pretext of a final settlement of affairs, but in reality because I needed to reflect at leisure upon the course to be taken with respect to M. Termonde, and my reflections had increased my doubts. At my request, my mother had written to me three times, giving me news of the patient, so that I was aware he was now better and able to go out. On my return, the day before, I had selected a time at which I was almost sure not to see any one for my visit to my mother's house. And now, here was my stepfather, who had not been inside my door ten times since I had been installed in an apartment of my own, paying me a visit without the loss of an hour. My mother, he said, had sent him with a message to me. She had lent me two numbers of a review, and she now wanted them back as she was sending the yearly volume to be bound; so, as he was passing the door, he had stepped in to ask me for them. I examined him closely while he was giving this simple explanation of his visit, without being able to decide whether the pretext did or did not conceal his real motive. His complexion was more sallow than usual, the look in his eyes was more glittering, he handled his hat nervously.

"The reviews are not there," I answered; "we shall probably find them in the smoking-room."

It was not true that the two numbers were not there; I knew their exact place on the table in my study; but my father's portrait hung in the smoking-room, and the notion of bringing M. Termonde face to face with the picture, to see how he would bear the confrontation, had occurred to me. At first he did not observe the portrait at all; but I went to the side of the room on which the easel supporting it stood, and his eyes, following all my movements, encountered it. His eyelids opened and closed rapidly, and a sort of dark thrill passed over his face; then he turned his eyes carelessly upon another little picture hanging upon the wall. I did not give him time to recover from the shock; but, in pursuance of the almost brutal method from which I had hitherto gained so little, I persisted:

"Do you not think," said I, "that my father's portrait is strikingly like me? A friend of mine was saying the other day that if I had my hair arranged in the same way, my head would be exactly like——"

He looked first at me, and then at the picture, in the most leisurely way, like an expert in painting examining a work of art, without any other motive than that of establishing its authenticity. If this man had procured the death of him whose portrait he studied thus, his power over himself was indeed wonderful. But—was not the experiment a crucial one for him? To betray his trouble would be to avow all? How ardently I longed to place my hand upon his heart at that moment and to count its beats.

"You do resemble him," he said at length, "but not to that degree. The lower part of the chin especially, the nose and the mouth, are alike, but you have not the same look in the eyes, and the brows, forehead, and cheeks are not of the same shape."

"Do you think," said I, "that the resemblance is strong enough for me to startle the murderer if he were to meet me suddenly here, and thus?"—I advanced upon him, looking into the depths of his eyes as though I were imitating a dramatic scene. "Yes," I continued, "would the likeness of feature enable me to produce the effect of a spectre, on saying to the man, 'Do you recognise the son of him whom you killed?'"

"Now we are returning to our former discussion," he replied, without any farther alteration of his countenance; "that would depend upon the man's remorse, if he had any, and on his nervous system."

Again we were silent. His pale and sickly but motionless face exasperated me by its complete absence of expression. In those minutes—and how many such scenes have we not acted together since my suspicion was first conceived—I felt myself as bold and resolute as I was the reverse when alone with my own thoughts. His impassive manner drove me wild again; I did not limit myself to this second experiment, but immediately devised a third, which ought to make him suffer as much as the two others, if he were guilty. I was like a man who strikes his enemy with a broken-handled knife, holding it by the blade in his shut hand; the blow draws his own blood also. But no, no; I was not exactly that man; I could not doubt or deny the harm that I was doing to myself by these cruel experiments, while he, my adversary, hid his wound so well that I saw it not. No matter, the mad desire to know overcame my pain.

"How strange those resemblances are," I said, "my father's handwriting and mine are exactly the same. Look here."

I opened an iron safe built into the wall, in which I kept papers which I especially valued, and took out first the letters from my father to my aunt which I had selected and placed on top of the packet. These were the latest in date, and I held them out to him, just as I had arranged them in their envelopes. The letters were addressed to "Mademoiselle Louise Cornélis, Compiègne;" they bore the post-mark and the quite legible stamp of the days on which they were posted in the April and May of 1864. It was the former process over again. If M. Termonde were guilty, he would be conscious that the sudden change of my attitude towards himself, the boldness of my allusions, the vigour of my attacks were all explained by these letters, and also that I had found the documents among my dead aunt's papers. It was impossible that he should not seek with intense anxiety to ascertain what was contained in those letters that had aroused such suspicions in me? When he had the envelopes in his hands I saw him bend his brows, and I had a momentary hope that I had shattered the mask that hid his true face, that face in which the inner workings of the soul are reflected. The bent brow was, however, merely a contraction of the muscles of the eye, caused by regarding an object closely, and it cleared immediately. He handed me back the letters without any question as to their contents.

"This time," said he, simply, "there really is an astonishing resemblance." Then, returning to the ostensible object of his visit—"And the reviews?" he asked.

I could have shed tears of rage. Once more I was conscious that I was a nervous youth engaged in a struggle with a resolutely self-possessed man. I locked up the letters in the safe, and I now rummaged the small bookcase in the smoking-room, then the large one in my study, and finally pretended to be greatly astonished at finding the two reviews under a heap of newspapers on my table. What a silly farce! Was my stepfather taken in by it? When I had handed him the two numbers, he rose from the chair that he had sat in during my pretended search in the chimney-corner of the smoking-room, with his back to my father's portrait. But, again, what did this attitude prove? Why should he care to contemplate an image which could not be anything but painful to him, even if he were innocent?

"I am going to take advantage of the sunshine to have a turn in the Bois," said he. "I have my coupé; will you come with me?"

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.