第19章
The letters became more and more gloomy,as it always happens when one has not at once put an end to a false position;my father suffered from the consequences of his weakness,and allowed them to develop without taking action,because he could not now have checked them without painful scenes.After having tolerated the increased frequency of his friend's visits,it was torture to him to observe that his wife was sensibly influenced by this encroaching intimacy.He perceived that she took Termonde's advice on all little matters of daily life--upon a question of dress,the purchase of a present,the choice of a book.He came upon the traces of the man in the change of my mother's tastes,in music for instance.When we were alone in the evenings,he liked her to go to the piano and play to him,for hours together,at haphazard;now she would play nothing but pieces selected by Termonde,who had acquired an extensive knowledge of the German masters during his residence abroad.My father,on the contrary,having been brought up in the country with his sister,who was herself taught by a provincial music-master,retained his old-fashioned taste for Italian music.
My mother belonged,by her own family,to a totally different sphere of society from that into which her marriage with my father had introduced her.At first she did not feel any regret for her former circle,because her extreme beauty secured her a triumphant success in the new one;but it was another thing when her intimacy with Termonde,who moved in the most worldly and elegant of the Parisian "world,"was perpetually reminding her of all its pleasures and habits.My father saw that she was bored and weary while doing the honors of her own salon with an absent mind.He even found the political opinions of his friend echoed by his wife,who laughed at him for what she called his Utopian liberalism.Her mockery had no malice in it;but still it was mockery,and behind it was Termonde,always Termonde.Nevertheless,he said nothing,and the shyness,which he had always felt in my mother's presence increased with his jealousy.The more unhappy he was,the more incapable of expressing his pain he became.There are minds so constituted that suffering paralzes them into inaction.And then there was the ever-present question,what was he to do?How was he to approach an explanation,when he had no positive accusation to bring?He remained perfectly convinced of the fidelity of his wife,and he again and again affirmed this,entreating my aunt not to withdraw a particle of her esteem from his dear Marie,and imploring her never to make an allusion to the sufferings of which he was ashamed,before their innocent cause.And then he dwelt upon his own faults;he accused himself of lack of tenderness,of failing to win love,and would draw pictures of his sorrowful home,in a few words,with heart-rending humility.
Rough,commonplace minds know nothing of the scruples that rent and tortured my father's soul.They say,"I am jealous,"without troubling themselves as to whether the words convey an insult or not.They forbid the house to the person to whom they object,and shut their wives mouths with,"Am I master here?"taking heed of their own feelings merely.Are they in the right?I know not;Ionly know that such rough methods were impossible to my poor father.He had sufficient strength to assume an icy mien towards Termonde,to address him as seldom as possible,to give him his hand with the insulting politeness that makes a gulf between two sincere friends;but Termonde affected unconsciousness of all this.
My father,who did not want to have a scene with him,because the immediate consequence would have been another scene with my mother,multiplied these small affronts,and then Termonde simply changed the time of his visits,and came during my father's business hours.
How vividly my father depicted his stormy rage at the idea that his wife and the man of whom he was jealous were talking together,undisturbed,in the flower-decked salon,while he was toiling to procure all the luxury that money could purchase for that wife who could never,never love him,although he believed her faithful.
But,oh,that cold fidelity was not what he longed for--he who ended his letter by these words--how often have I repeated them to myself:
"It is so sad to feel that one is in the way in one's own house,that one possesses a woman by every right,that she gives one all that her duty obliges her to give,all,except her heart,which is another's unknown to herself,perhaps,unless,indeed,that--My sister,there are terrible hours in which I say to myself that I am a fool,a coward,that they laugh together at me,at my blindness,my stupid trust.Do not scold me,dear Louise.This idea is infamous,and I drive it away by taking refuge with you,to whom,at least,I am all the world.""Unless,indeed,that--"This letter was written on the first Sunday in June,1864;and on the following Thursday,four days later,he who had written it,and had suffered all it revealed,went out to the appointment at which he met with his mysterious death,that death by which his wife was set free to marry his felon friend.What was the idea,as dreadful,as infamous as the idea of which my father accused himself in his terrible last letter,that flashed across me now?I placed the packet of papers upon the mantelpiece,and pressed my two hands to my head,as though to still the tempest of cruel fancies which made it throb with fever.
Ah,the hideous,nameless thing!My mind got a glimpse of it only to reject it.
But,had not my aunt also been assailed by the same monstrous suspicion?A number of small facts rose up in my memory,and convinced me that my father's faithful sister had been a prey to the same idea which had just laid hold of me so strongly.How many strange things I now understood,all in a moment!On that day when she told me of my mother's second marriage,and I spontaneously uttered the accursed name of Termonde,why had she asked me,in a trembling voice:"What do you know?"What was it she feared that I had guessed?What dreaded information did she expect to receive from my childish observation of things?
Afterwards,and when she implored me to abandon the task of avenging our beloved dead,when she quoted to me the sacred words,"Vengeance is mine,saith the Lord,"who were the guilty ones whom she foresaw I must meet on my path?When she entreated me to bear with my stepfather,even to conciliate him,not to make an enemy of him,had her advice any object except the greater ease of my daily life,or did she think danger might come to me from that quarter?
When she became more afraid for me,owing to the weakening of her brain by illness,and again and again enjoined upon me to beware of going out alone in the evening,was the vision of terror that came to her that of a hand which would fain strike me in the dark--the same hand that had struck my father?When she summoned up all her strength in her last moments,that she might destroy this correspondence,what was the clue which she supposed the letters would furnish?A terrific light shone upon me;what my aunt had perceived beyond the plain purport of the letters,I too perceived.
Ah!I dared to entertain this idea,yet now I am ashamed to write it down.But could I have escaped from the hard logic of the situation?If my aunt had handed over those letters to the Judge of Instruction in the matter,would he not have arrived at the same conclusion that I drew from them?No,I could not.A man who has no known enemies is assassinated;it is alleged that robbery is not the motive of the murder;his wife has a lover,and shortly after the death of her husband she marries that lover."But it is they--it is they who are guilty,they have killed the husband,"the judge would say,and so would the first-comer.Why did not my aunt place those letters of my father's in the hands of justice?I understood the reason too well;she would not have me think of my mother what I was now in a fit of distraction thinking.
To conceive of this as merely possible was to be guilty of moral parricide,to commit the inexpiable sin against her who had borne me.I had always loved my mother so tenderly,so mournfully;never,never had I judged her.How many times--happening to be alone with her,and not knowing how to tell her what was weighing on my heart--how many times I had dreamed that the barrier between us would not for ever divide us.Some day I might,perhaps,become her only support,then she should see how precious she still was to me.My sufferings had not lessened my love for her;wretched as Iwas because she refused me a certain sort of affection,I did not condemn her for lavishing that affection upon another.As a matter of fact,until those fatal letters had done their work of disenchantment,of what was she guilty in my eyes?Of having married again?Of having chosen,being left a widow at thirty,to construct a new life for herself?What could be more legitimate?
Of having failed to understand the relations of the child who remained to her with the man whom she had chosen?What was more natural?She was more wife than mother,and besides,fanciful and fragile beings such as she was recoil from daily contests;they shrink from facing realities which would demand sustained courage and energy on their part.I had admitted all these explanations of my mother's attitude towards me,at first from instinct and afterwards on reflection.But now,the inexhaustible spring of indulgence for those who really hold our heart-strings was dried up in a moment,and a flood of odious,abominable suspicion overwhelmed me instead.
This sudden invasion of a horrible,torturing idea was not lasting.
I could not have borne it.Had it implanted itself in me then and there,definite,overwhelming in evidence,impossible of rejection,I must have taken a pistol and shot myself,to escape from agony such as I endured in the few minutes which followed my reading of the letters.But the tension was relaxed,I reflected,and my love for my mother began to strive against the horrible suggestion.To the onslaught of these execrable fancies I opposed the facts,in their certainty and completeness.I recalled the smallest particulars of that last occasion on which I saw my father and mother in each other's presence.It was at the table from which he rose to go forth and meet his murderer.But was not my mother cheerful and smiling that morning,as usual?Was not Jacques Termonde with us at breakfast,and did he not stay on,after my father had gone out,talking with my mother while I played with my toys in the room?It was at that very time,between one and two o'clock,that the mysterious Rochdale committed the crime.
Termonde could not be,at one and the same moment,in our salon and at the Imperial Hotel,any more than my mother,impressionable and emotional as I knew her to be,could have gone on talking quietly and happily,if she had known that her husband was being murdered at that very hour.Why,I must have been mad to allow such a notion to present its monstrous image before my eyes for a single moment,and it was infamous of me to have gone so far beyond the most insulting of my father's suspicions.
Already,and without any proof except the expression of jealousy acknowledged by himself to be unreasonable,I had reached a point to which the unhappy but still loving man had not dared to go,even to the extreme outrage against my mother.What if,during the lifetime of her first husband,she had inspired him whom she was one day to marry with too strong a sentiment,did this prove that she had shared it?If she had shared it,would that have proved her to be a fallen woman?Why should she not have entertained an affection for Termonde,which,while it in no wise interfered with her fidelity to her wifely duties,made my father not unnaturally jealous?
Thus did I justify her,not only from any participation in the crime,but from any failure in her duty.And then again my ideas changed;I remembered the cry that she had uttered in presence of my father's dead body:"I am punished by God!"I was not sufficiently charitable to her to admit that those words might be merely the utterance of a refined and scrupulous mind which reproached itself even with its thoughts.I also recalled the gleaming eyes and shaking hands of Termonde,when he was talking with my mother about my father's mysterious disappearance.If they were accomplices,this was a piece of acting performed before me,an innocent witness,so that they might invoke my childish testimony on occasion.These recollections once more drove me upon my fated way.The idea of a guilty tie between her and him now took possession of me,and then came swiftly the thought that they had profited by the murder,that they alone had an engrossing interest in it.So violent was the assault of suspicion that it overthrew all the barriers I had raised against it.I accumulated all the objections founded upon a physical alibi and a moral improbability,and thence I forced myself to say it was,strictly speaking,impossible they could have anything to do with the murder;impossible,impossible!I repeated this frantically;but even as it passed my lips,the hallucination returned,and struck me down.There are moments when the disordered mind is unable to quell visions which it knows to be false,when the imaginary and the real mingle in a nightmare-panic,and the judgment is powerless to distinguish between them.Who is there that,having been jealous,does not know this condition of mind?What did I not suffer from it during the day after I had read those letters!Iwandered about the house,incapable of attending to any duty,struck stupid by emotions which all around me attributed to grief for my aunt's death.Several times I tried to sit for a while beside her bed;but the sight of her pale face,with its pinched nostrils,and its deepening expression of sadness,was unbearable to me.It renewed my miserable doubts.
At four o'clock I received a telegram.It was from my mother,and announced her arrival by evening train.When the slip of blue paper was in my hand my wretchedness was for a moment relieved.
She was coming.She had thought of my trouble;she was coming.
That assurance [error in text--line missing]criminal thoughts in my face?
But those absurd and infamous notions took possession of me once more.Perhaps she thinks,so ran my thoughts,that the correspondence between my father and my aunt had not been destroyed,and she is coming in order to get hold of those letters before I see them,and to find out what my aunt said to me when she was dying.If she and Termonde are guilty,they must have lived in constant dread of the old maid's penetration.Ah!I had been very unhappy in my childhood,but how gladly would I have gone back to be the school-boy,meditating during the dull and interminable evening hours of study,and not the young man who walked to and fro that night in the station at Compiegne,awaiting the arrival of a mother,suspected as mine was.Just God!Did not I expiate everything in anticipation by that one hour?
VII
The train from Paris approached,and stopped.The railway officials called out the name of the station,as they opened the doors of the carriages one after another,very slowly as it seemed to me.I went from carriage to carriage seeking my mother.Had she at the last moment decided not to come!What a trial to me if it were so!What a night I should have to pass in all the torment of suspicions which,I knew too well,her mere presence would dispel.
A voice called me.It was hers.Then I saw her,dressed in black,and never in my life did I clasp her in my arms as I did then,utterly forgetting that we were in a public place,and why she had come,in the joy of feeling my horrible imaginations vanish,melt away at the mere touch of the being whom I loved so profoundly,the only one who was dear to me,notwithstanding our differences,in the very depths of my heart,now that I had lost my Aunt Louise.
After that first movement,which resembled the grasp in which a drowning man seizes the swimmer who dives for him,I looked at my mother without speaking,holding both her hands.She had thrown back her veil,and in the flickering light of the station I saw that she was very pale and had been weeping.I had only to meet her eyes,which were still wet with tears,to know that I had been mad.I felt this,with the first words she uttered,telling me so tenderly of her grief,and that she had resolved to come at once,although my stepfather was ill.M.Termonde had suffered of late from frequent attacks of liver-complaint.
But neither her grief nor her anxiety about her husband had prevented my poor mother from providing herself,for this little excursion of a few hours,with all her customary appliances of comfort and elegance.Her maid stood behind her,accompanied by a porter,and both were laden with three or four bags of different sizes,of the best English make,carefully buttoned up in their waterproof covers;a dressing-case,a writing-case,an elegant wallet to hold the traveler's purse,handkerchief,book,and second veil;a hot-water bottle for her feet,two cushions for her head,and a little clock suspended from a swinging disc.
"You see,"said she,while I was pointing out the carriage to the maid,so that she might get rid of her impedimenta,"I shall not have my right mourning until to-morrow"--and now I perceived that her gown was dark brown and only braided with black--"they could not have the things ready in time,but will send them as early as possible."Then,as I placed her in the carriage,she added:
"There is still a trunk and a bonnet-box."She half smiled in saying this,to make me smile too,for the mass of luggage and the number of small parcels with which she encumbered herself had been of old a subject of mild quarrel between us.
In any other state of mind I should have been pained to find the unfailing evidence of her frivolity side by side with the mark of affection she had given me by coming.Was not this one of the small causes of my great misery?True,but her frivolity was delightful to me at that moment.This then was the woman whom Ihad been picturing to myself as coming to the house of death,with the sinister purpose of searching my dead aunt's papers and stealing or destroying any accusing pages which she might find among them!This was the woman whom I had represented to myself,that morning,as a criminal steeped in the guilt of a cowardly murder!Yes!I had been mad!had been like a runaway horse galloping after its own shadow.But what a relief to make sure that it was madness,what a blessed relief!It almost made me forget the dear dead woman.
I was very sad at heart in reality,and yet I was happy,while we were rattling through the town in the old coupe,past the long lines of lighted windows.I held my mother's hand;I longed to beg her pardon,to kiss the hem of her dress,to tell her again and again that I loved and revered her.She perceived my emotion very plainly;but she attributed it to the affliction that had just befallen me,and she condoled with me.She said,"My Andre,"several times.How rare it was for me to have her thus,all my own,and just in that mood of feeling for which my sick heart pined!
I had had the room on the ground floor,next to the salon,prepared for my mother.I remembered that she had occupied it,when she came to Compiegne with my father,a few days after her marriage,and I felt sure that the impression which would be produced upon her by the sight of the house in the first instance,and then by the sight of the room,would help me to get rid of my dreadful suspicions.I was determined to note minutely the slightest signs of agitation which she might betray at the contact of a resuscitated past,rendered more striking by the aspect of things that do not change so quickly as the heart of a woman.And now,Iblushed for that idea,worthy of a detective;for I felt it a shameful thing to judge one's mother:one ought to make an Act of Faith in her which would resist any evidence.I felt this,alas!
all the more,because the innocent woman was quite off her guard,as was perfectly natural.
She entered the room with a thoughtful look,seated herself before the fire,and held her slender feet towards the flames,which touched her pale cheeks with red;and,with her jet black hair,her elegant figure,which still retained its youthful grace,she shed upon the dim twilight of the old-fashioned room that refined and aristocratic charm of which my father spoke in his letters.She looked slowly all around her,recognizing most of the things which my aunt's pious care had preserved in their former place,and said,sorrowfully:"What recollections!"But there was no bitterness in the emotion depicted on her face.Ah!no;a woman who is brought,after twenty years,into the room which she had occupied,as a bride,with the husband whose murder she had contrived after having betrayed him,has not such eyes,such a brow,such a mouth as hers.
VIII
There was but one remedy to be applied to my unbearable malady--that remedy which had already been successful in the case of my suspicions of my mother.I must at once proceed to place the real 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 my inquiry farther,or else I should fall into the nervous state which I knew so well,and which rendered any kind of action in cold blood impossible to me.
I made up my mind to leave Compiegne,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 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 H.
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 prettyish woman,very slight and very dark,with a "tip-tilted"nose,frizzy 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 to its latest gossip.I fell at once from my fancied height as an imaginary Grand Judiciary into the shallows of Parisian frivolity.I felt about to hear chatter upon the last new 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 Iperceived 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?Icould 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.