“It is always so! My night will not have been lost, if—”
Then he took a piece of charcoal, and made several black crosses on the tapestry. From time to time he paused, as if to collect his thoughts. He had just traced a black cross when he said to himself:
“That Baron des Anbiez was killed! I think so, and I hope so. From the hollow vibration of the handle of the battle-axe in my hand, I thought I felt his skull broken. But the baron wore a helmet, his death is not certain. We will not make a false estimate of victims.” After this lugubrious pleasantry, he erased the cross, and began to count the white crosses.
“Eleven,” said he, “eleven chevaliers of Malta, slain by my hand. Oh! they are surely dead, for I would have killed myself a thousand times on their bodies, rather than have left in them one breath of life.”
He then sank into a gloomy silence. Suddenly, standing up, his arms crossed on his breast, his head bowed, he said, with a deep sigh:
“For more than twenty years I have pursued my vengeance,—my work of destruction. For twenty years has my sorrow diminished? Are my regrets less desperate? I do not know. Without doubt I feel a horrible joy in saying to man: ‘Suffer—die.’ But after—after! Always regret—always! And yet I have no remorse, no! It seems to me that I am the blind instrument of an all-powerful will. Yes, that must be. It is not the love of gain which guides me. It is an imperious necessity, an insatiable need of vengeance. Where am I going? What will be the awakening from this bloody life which sometimes seems to me a horrible dream? When I think upon what was formerly my life, on what I was myself, it is something to drive me mad,—as I am. Yes, I must be mad, for sometimes there are moments when I ask myself: ‘Why so many cruel deeds?’ To-night, for instance, how much blood—how much blood! That old man! Those women! Oh, I am mad, furiously mad! Oh, it is terrible! What had they done to me?”
He hid his face in his hands. After a few moments of sullen reflection, he cried, in an agonising voice:
“Oh, what had I done to him,—to the one who hurled me from heaven to hell? I never did him a wrong! What had I done to her,—to his accomplice? I surrounded her with all the adoration, all the idolatry that man could feel here below for a creature. And, yet! Oh!—this sorrow,—will it always be bleeding? Will this memory always be so dreadful,—always burning like a hot iron? Oh, rage! Oh, misery! Oh, to forget! to forget! I only ask to forget!”
As he uttered these words, Pog fell with his face on the bed, tore the tiger-skin in his convulsed hands, and groaned with a sort of hollow, stifled roar.
The paroxysm lasted some time, and was succeeded by a heavy stupor.