Yet he did not give in all at once. Like a person persisting in some disagreeable medicine, hoping to become accustomed to it, he continued his conversation with Tirard.
After luncheon, he sat down to a game of écarté in the card-room with an old acquaintance, but after half an hour’s play he left the table on the plea of indisposition and left the club, taking his way homeward on foot.
Near the Madeleine occurred one of those incidents which, in tragic lives, appear less incidents than occurrences prepared by Fate, as though she would say, “Look and deny me if you dare.”
Toward Berselius was approaching a victoria drawn by two magnificent horses, and in the victoria lolled a man. An old man with a gray beard, who lolled on the cushions of the carriage, and looked about him with the languid indifference of a king and the arrogance of a megalomaniac.
It was Leopold, King of the Belgians.
When Berselius’s eyes fell upon that face, when he saw before him that man whom all thinking men abhor, a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as though in that person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams by night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the murderer, who, by consent, had murdered the people of the Silent Pools; the murderer, by consent, who had crushed millions of wretched creatures to death for the sake of gold; the villain of Europe, who had spent that gold in nameless debauchery; the man whose crimes ought to have been expiated on the scaffold, and whose life ought to have been cut short by the executioner of justice, many, many years ago.
It was thus at one stroke that Berselius saw his other self, the self that haunted him in his dreams, saw it clearly, and in the light of day.
The terrible old man in the carriage passed on his way and Berselius on his.
When he reached home, in the hall, just as he was handing his hat to a servant, Maxine appeared at the door of the library. Her beauty, innocence, and sweetness formed a strange vision contrasted with that other vision he had seen near the Madeleine. Was it possible that God’s world could hold two such creatures, and that God’s air should give them breath? For a week or ten days after this, Berselius remained in his own suite of apartments without leaving the house.
It was as if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive, had shown him fully his own change and his weakness had demonstrated to him clearly that he was but the wraith of what he had been.