"Franzius," said I, stopping and facing him, "there was no one in the gallery but myself. Of that I am positive."
There we stood facing each other in the glare of a café, with the roar of the Boul' Miche around us, each equally astonished.
Then Franzius laughed at the absurdity of the notion that he was wrong.
"With these two eyes I saw him," said he. "And, more: once, when you made a movement as if to go, he plucked you by the sleeve of your little nightshirt—so—"—and he plucked my coat—"as if to hold you back, to keep you there listening to the music."
"He did that?"
"Mais oui."
"Ah, well," I said, with a laugh that was rather forced, "I suppose I was so taken up with the music that I did not see him. Let us walk on."
We walked on. I was perturbed. This, and the occurrence that day when I had seen little Carl in the forest of Sénart, my father's death and all that had gone before, made me feel that there was something working in my life that I but dimly understood.
For the first time, fully, Von Lichtenberg's mad attempt at my destruction rose before me, and demanded an explanation on another basis than that of madness. He had brought up his daughter as a boy, for it had been prophesied that she would be slain as a girl—slain by a Saluce; and I was the last descendant of that family. Then the picture of Margaret von Lichtenberg rose before me, and its likeness to little Carl, and the fact of my own likeness to Philippe de Saluce, who had murdered Margaret so many years ago; and it was just then, walking down the Boulevard St. Michel, amidst the crush and turmoil, jostled by students and grisettes, beggars and thieves, that the question came before me: "Can the dead return? Has Margaret von Lichtenberg come back to this sad old world again as little Carl? Am I Philippe de Saluce?" And then like a pang through my heart came the recollection, the fact, that I had recognised the park of Lichtenberg as a thing I had seen once before. I had not recognised the Schloss, but even that fact was an indirect confirmation of my fantastic idea, for the Schloss had been rebuilt in 1703, and the murder of Margaret had occurred many years before that.
All these questions and ideas assailing my mind at once brought terror to my heart for a moment. Only for a moment. "Well?" said I to myself, "suppose this is true, what then? What is the world around me, dull and commonplace and sordid, even under its gold and glitter? I have seen the highest pleasures that life can give men in exchange for gold to-day in the Amber Salon of the Café de Paris. I have seen an Emperor who has attained his ambition, and the futility and weariness of it all in his face. I have lost and left behind the only country where dreams are real and life worth living—childhood. I love the past; and should it come to me and surround me with its romance, should some mysterious fate call it up to me, should the end be tragedy even, then welcome, for one can only die; and what care I about death if I am given one draught from the water of romance in this arid desert of commonplace things which they call the world?"