"I repeat to you, this is frightful. All that man predicted is realized. He told me: 'You have abused your strength: you shall be the plaything of the weakest.' This has been. He told me: 'Henceforth, separated from the exterior world, face to face with the eternal remembrance of your crimes, one day you will repent them.' That day has arrived; solitude has confirmed it. I could not have thought it possible. Another proof that I am, perhaps, less wicked than formerly, is, that I experience an indescribable joy in holding you there, monster, not to avenge myself, but to avenge our victims. Yes, I shall have accomplished a duty, when, with my own hand, I shall have punished my accomplice. A voice tells me, that if you had fallen sooner into my power, much blood might have been spared. I feel now a horror of my past murders, and yet, strange! it is without fear, it is with security that I intend to execute on you a frightful murder, with horrible refinement of cruelty. Speak, speak! can you realize this?"
"Bravo, bravo! well played, first old man. You warm up," cried
Tortillard, applauding. "This is only a joke, though?"
"Only a joke?" answered the Schoolmaster, in a hollow voice. "Be still, La Chouette; I must finish explaining to you how, little by little, I came to repent. This revelation will be odious to you, heart of iron, and it will also prove to you how merciless I ought to be in the vengeance I wish to exercise on you in the name of our victims. I must hurry on. The joy of having you thus makes my blood run wild, my head throb with violence, as when I think of my dream. My mind wanders; perhaps one of my attacks is coming on; but I shall have time to render the approaches of death more frightful, in forcing you to hear me."
"Bold, La Chouette!" cried Tortillard; "be bold with your answer. Don't you know your part? Come, tell the devil to prompt you, my old dear."
"Oh! you do well to struggle and bite," said the Schoolmaster, after a pause; "you shall not escape; you have cut my ringers to the bone, but I will tear your tongue out if you stir. Let us continue to converse.
"On finding myself alone—constantly alone in obscurity and silence—I began to have fits of furious rage; powerless, for the first time I lost my senses, my head wandered. Yes, although awake, I have dreamed the dream you know: the dream of the old man in the Rue de Roule—the woman drowned—the drover—all murdered! and you, soaring above all these phantoms! I tell you, it is frightful. I am blind; yet my thoughts assume a form, a body, and represent continually to me in a visible manner, almost palpable, the features of my victims.
"I should not have this fearful dream, but that my mind, continually absorbed by the recollection of my past crimes, is troubled with the same visions.
"Doubtless, when one is deprived of sight, besetting ideas trace themselves almost materially on the brain. Yet, sometimes, by force of contemplating them with resigned alarm, it seems to me that these menacing specters have pity on me; they grow dim, fade away, and disappear. Then I think I awake from a vivid dream; but I feel myself weak, exhausted, broken, and will you believe it—oh! how you will laugh, La Chouette—I weep—do you hear? I weep. You do not laugh? But laugh! I say, laugh!" La Chouette uttered a stifled groan.
"Louder," cried Tortillard; "we can't hear."
"Yes," continued the Schoolmaster, "I wept, for I suffered, and rage is fruitless. I say to myself, to-morrow, and to-morrow, forever I shall be a prey to the same delirium, the same mournful desolation. What a life! oh, what a life! Better I had chosen death, than to be interred alive in this abyss, which incessantly racks my thoughts! Blind, solitary, and a prisoner! what can distract my thoughts? Nothing—nothing.