"Still I persisted—I persisted in my hopeless love. Then followed that unnamed malady which in vain you are seeking to cure, a malady which was accompanied by innumerable and terrifying phenomena. The malady was one of the mind; it robbed me of the desire to live. More than that, it made life intolerable. At last I surrendered. I believe I am a brave man, but it is the privilege of the brave man to surrender without losing honor to an adversary who has proved his superiority. Yes, I surrendered. I cast out love in order that I might live for my art.
"But I was too late. I had pushed too far the enmity of this spectral and unrelenting foe, and it would not accept my surrender. I have dashed the image of Rosa from my heart, and I have done it to no purpose. I am dying. And so I write this for you, lest you should go unwarned to the same doom.
"The love of Rosa is worth dying for, if you can win it. (I could not even win it.) You will have to choose between Love and Life. I do not counsel you either way. But I urge you to choose. I urge you either to defy your foe utterly and to the death, or to submit before submission is useless.
"Alresca."
I sat staring at the paper long after I had finished reading it, thinking about poor Alresca. There was a date to it, and this date showed that it was written a few days before his mysterious disease took a turn for the better.
The communication accordingly needs some explanation. It seems to me that Alresca was mistaken. His foe was not so implacable as Alresca imagined. Alresca having surrendered in the struggle between them, the ghost of Lord Clarenceux hesitated, and then ultimately withdrew its hateful influence, and Alresca recovered. Then Rosa came again into his existence that evening at Bruges. Alresca, scornful of consequences, let his passion burst once more into flame, and the ghost instantly, in a flash of anger, worked its retribution.
Day came, and during the whole of that day I pondered upon a phrase in Alresca's letter, "You will have to choose between love and life." But I could not choose. Love is the greatest thing in life; one may, however, question whether it should be counted greater than life itself. I tried to argue the question calmly, dispassionately. As if such questions may be argued! I could not give up my love; I could not give up my life; that was how all my calm, dispassionate arguments ended. At one moment I was repeating, "The love of Rosa is worth dying for;" at the next I was busy with the high and dear ambitions of which I had so often dreamed. Were these to be sacrificed? Moreover, what use would Rosa's love be to me when I was dead? And what use would my life be to me without my love for her?
A hundred times I tried to laugh, and said to myself that I was the victim of fancy, that I should see nothing further of this prodigious apparition; that, in short, my brain had been overtaxed by recent events, and I had suffered from delusions. Vain and conventional self-deceptions! At the bottom of my soul lay always the secret and profound conviction that I was doomed, cursed, caught in the toils of a relentless foe who was armed with all the strange terrors of the unknown; a foe whose onslaughts it was absolutely impossible for me to parry.
As the hours passed a yearning to see Rosa, to be near her, came upon me. I fought against it, fearing I know not what as the immediate consequence. I wished to temporize, or, at any rate, to decide upon a definite course of conduct before I saw her again. But towards evening I felt that I should yield to the impulse to behold her. I said to myself, as though I needed some excuse, that she would have a great deal of trouble with the arrangements for Sir Cyril's funeral, and that I ought to offer my assistance; that, indeed, I ought to have offered my assistance early in the day.
I presented myself after dinner. She was dressed in black, and her manner was nervous, flurried, ill at ease. We shook hands very formally, and then could find nothing to say to each other. Had she, with a woman's instinct, guessed, from that instant's view of the thing in the chair last night, all that was involved for me in our love? If not all, she had guessed most of it. She had guessed that the powerful spirit of Lord Clarenceux was inimical, fatally inimical, to me. None knew better than herself the terrible strength of his jealousy. I wondered what were her thoughts, her secret desires.