He forbade them to awake him, locked and bolted his door, and slept for twenty-four hours. When he had dressed and breakfasted, all he thought of was mounting his bicycle and returning to the Nonchalante. The struggle against love had begun.
He was very unhappy, and having never suffered, having always followed his whims, he raged against a despair to which it would have been so easy for him to put an end.
“Why not yield?” he said to himself. “I can get there in two hours. And what is there to prevent me going off again a few days later when I shall have hardened myself against the parting?”
But he could not do so. The vision of that mutilated hand was a veritable obsession and ruled his actions. It obliged him to recall those other barbarous and hateful deeds which enabled him to see this one as their natural sequel.
Josephine had done this; then Josephine had murdered; Josephine did not shrink from murderous acts and found it quite simple and natural to kill and kill again when murder helped her enterprises. From murder Ralph shrank, with a physical repulsion, a revolt of every instinct. The idea that he might be drawn, in some access of madness, to shed blood, filled him with horror. And with this horror the most tragic of realities associated indissolubly the image of the woman he loved.
He stayed away, but at the cost of what efforts! In what groans did his impotent revolt die away! Josephine stretched out her lovely arms to him and offered her mouth to his kisses. How resist the appeal of that voluptuous creature?
Moved to the lowest depths of his egotism, for the first time he became aware of the immense suffering he must have inflicted on Clarice d’Etigues. Now he could imagine her tears, the overwhelming distress of her shattered life. Shaken by remorse, he addressed to her discourses full of tenderness in which he recalled the moving hours of their love.
He did more. Knowing that the young girl received her letters direct, he dared to write to her:
Forgive me, dear Clarice. I have treated you like a scoundrel. Let us hope for a brighter future and think of me with all the indulgence of your generous heart. Once more, forgive me—forgive.
Ralph.