With these words he went off to his electrical machines.
Emma showed no astonishment at anything. Trustful and simpleminded, she had accepted my uncle’s speech with a clapping of hands.
I, knowing him to be an actor, might have told myself that he was feigning kindness, in order to keep me in the house; that either he was afraid of what I might reveal or that he was hatching some new project; but the two Circeean operations had rather troubled my memory and my reasoning powers.
“Why,” said I to myself, “why doubt this man, who has, of his own free will, rescued me from the most awful position? He perseveres in the good way, and all is for the best.”
At the sight of my laborious and domesticated Professor, who could have believed in his victims, and in a trap which he had laid for me, in the assassination of Klotz, in the distress of Nell? She never ceased her howlings to the stars, suffering from the troubles which I had endured; for she was still there, and it puzzled me that Lerne should continue the punishment of a fault which must appear much less now that Emma no longer interested him.
I resolved to confide in my uncle.
“Nicolas,” he said, “you have put your finger on my greatest anxiety, but what is to be done? In order to reëstablish the right order of things in this affair, it is absolutely necessary that the body of Macbeth should come back here. By what stratagem are we to persuade his father to send him back? Try to find one. Help me. I promise to act without delay as soon as one or the other of us has found a solution.”
This reply had dissipated my last feelings of dislike. I did not ask myself why Lerne had metamorphosed himself so as to give in so easily and quickly.
My belief was that the Professor had at last been restored to wisdom; and in default of the other virtues, which would no doubt appear in due order, his rectitude of long ago seemed to me to be born again, rectitude which was as great as the erudition which had never abandoned him, and as evident as it was.
And Lerne’s erudition was almost inexhaustible. Each day I was more and more convinced of it.