He suddenly paused in his uneasy walk, looked round on all sides with visible anxiety, then, seized by I know not what impulse, darted toward the pavilion. I was overwhelmed. What ought I to do? Warn my friend, my childhood’s companion? Yes, no doubt, but I felt ashamed to pour despair into the mind of this good fellow and to cause a horrible exposure. “If he can be kept in ignorance,” I said to myself, “and then perhaps I am wrong—who knows? Perhaps this rendezvous is due to the most natural motive possible.”
I was seeking to deceive myself, to veil the evidence of my own eyes, when suddenly one of the house doors opened noisily, and Oscar—Oscar himself, in all the disorder of night attire, his hair rumpled, and his dressing-gown floating loosely, passed before my window. He ran rather than walked; but the anguish of his heart was too plainly revealed in the strangeness of his movements. He knew all. I felt that a mishap was inevitable. “Behold the outcome of all his happiness, behold the bitter poison enclosed in so fair a vessel!” All these thoughts shot through my mind like arrows. It was necessary above all to delay the explosion, were it only for a moment, a second, and, beside myself, without giving myself time to think of what I was going to say to him, I cried in a sharp imperative tone:
“Oscar, come here; I want to speak to you.”
He stopped as if petrified. He was ghastly pale, and, with an infernal smile, replied, “I have no time-later on.”
“Oscar, you must, I beg of you—you are mistaken.”
At these words he broke into a fearful laugh.
“Mistaken—mistaken!”
And he ran toward the pavilion.
Seizing the skirt of his dressing-gown, I held him tightly, exclaiming:
“Don’t go, my dear fellow, don’t go; I beg of you on my knees not to go.”