The workmen had gone, and they had locked the door!
Not for a few moments did my position realise itself to me.
Every door I knew to be barred and locked; every window was also barred on the ground floor, except those that were too narrow for a man's entry or exit. No one would come till the morning. Madame Ancelot would think I had returned to Paris by train, and send the carriage back. I was trapped in the château of Saluce; and at seven o'clock to-morrow I had to meet Von Lichtenberg, or be dishonoured for life!
A nice situation, truly!
I laughed out loud from pure rage and vexation, and the echo above returned my laughter mockingly.
In my despair I tried all the doors, uselessly; they were solid as the doors of the Bastille.
Then I remembered a window that was not barred—the stained-glass window of the banqueting-room. It was fifteen feet from the ground, but had it been more I would have risked it.
I went to the banqueting-room, and stood before the window, my only way to freedom and honour. It was a lovely creation of stained glass. The arms of the Saluces and the arms of the noble families with whom they were connected stood there, the Lichtenbergs amidst the rest. The evening light, shining through the stained glass, repeated the colours vaguely upon the polished parquet of the floor. The light, shining through the tender colours of the glass, brought with it an indefinable sadness. To break this thing would be like striking the dead, dishonouring the past. An act of vandalism beyond name.
This window was more than a window: it was a barrier between me and my fate. The arms of the Lichtenbergs, the Saluces, the Montmorencies, had drawn themselves up before me; it was as if they would stand between me and the encounter of the morrow, but only as a menace. They could offer no real opposition to my physical acts; they could only say, "Take warning!"
Then, with the brutality of your kind-hearted man, who, condemned to kill an animal, and loathing the business, strikes fiercely and blindly, causing more destruction than necessary, I seized a heavy bronze bar from the fireplace and attacked the window. The blows echoed from the roof—smash! smash!—and the chattering of falling glass came from the garden-walk outside; the leadwork which had held the glass fragments together bulged out, and had to be broken out by incessant blows, which brought down shower after shower of glass fragments from that part of the window which lay above the line of my attack; and lo! when I had once entered on the business, all remorse fled, and a fury for destruction rose in my heart that I had never felt before, nor had I even suspected my own capacity for the feeling. So, perhaps, Philippe de Saluce felt when he destroyed his lover in a sudden accession of fury. I do not know, but I know that from behind some veil in my mind a new man stepped out, as Monsieur Hyde stepped from the soul of Monsieur Jekyll, and that I smashed and smashed for the pure pleasure, and from the vicious lust of destruction.