Meanwhile, Lerne gradually recovered. I pretended to have observed nothing except his fainting, and I told him that he should look after himself—that those repeated fits would end by killing him. Did he know what caused them?
My uncle gave a sign that he did. Emma came near his chair.... “I know,” said he, at last, “cardiac syncope. I am treating myself.”
That was not true. The Professor was not treating himself. He was using up his life in the pursuit of his chimera, without more heed for his skin than it if had been an old work-jacket, to be thrown away as soon as the task was over.
Emma advised him to go out.
“The air will do you good,” she said.
He went out. We saw him going towards the poplar, smoking his pipe. The blows of the ax fell faster and faster. The tree bent over and fell. Its fall made the sound like an earthquake. The branches hit my uncle but he did not step aside.
And now, robbed of its only campanile, Fonval seemed to have sunk lower than ever into the depths of the valley, and I sought, in the forlorn sky, to fix the place of the tree, which one had already forgotten, and its tall form, which was already legendary.
Lerne came back. He did not seem to know that he had been imprudent. His carelessness made one tremble when one realized that he might be as reckless in the most hazardous experiments—for example, those transfusions of soul about which the note-book spoke.
Was it one of those attempts which I had just witnessed? I meditated about it, with that strange feeling which I had already experienced at Fonval, like that caused by groping about in mysterious darkness.
Were Lerne’s fainting-fit and the tragedy of the tree some mysterious coincidence, or had some strange bond united them at the moment of the ax’s blow?