Certainly the arrival of the woodcutters at the foot of the poplar would have been enough to cause the flight of the birds, and as for the shuddering, why should the cutter not have produced it by climbing up the other side of the trunk in order to fix the traditional rope?
Once more, the crossways of probability offered me a choice of solutions, like so many roads, but my mind was not acute at the time.
I was often with Emma, but as much as I loved those meetings, I had to make up my mind to stop them, for the following unanswerable reason—but for the note-book I might have attributed it to my nervous condition; I should then have called it a pathological consequence of the operations, and Lerne would have fooled me to the end—fortunately I guessed his tactics at the first.
He had confided to me that he was thinking of assuming my shape, in order to be loved in my place. His eagerness to save my mutilated body; the method he had explained in the note-book, and the business of the poplar—all coordinated themselves in my mind. His fainting-fits assumed all the appearance of experiments, in which Lerne, through a sort of hypnotism, flung his soul into other beings.
So now with his eye to the keyhole he watched every move I made, transfusing his ego into my brain, using the power which his unfinished discovery procured him, to put in practice the most astounding substitution of personalities. I shall be told that this very appearance of unlikeliness ought to have weakened the value of my reasoning; but at Fonval, incoherence being the rule, the more absurd an explanation was, the more likely it was to be the right one.
Ah! that eye at the keyhole. It pursued me like that of Jehovah blasting Cain from the top of its triangular peephole! I was never free of it. Emma felt my distress, but she was far from understanding the real cause of it.
Although I am joking now, I had perceived my danger, and my one thought was how to avert it. After long deliberation, I determined to take the only reasonable course—one which I should have taken long before, viz., departure. Departure with Emma, of course, for now nothing in the world would have made me leave to my uncle what I had won.
But Emma was not one of those women whom one can carry off against her will. Would she consent to leave Lerne, and the promised wealth? Assuredly not!
The poor girl did not see this modernized form of fairy-tale going on around her. The glories to come completely occupied her mind. She was both silly and avaricious. To make her follow me I should have to make her believe that she would not be worse off by a penny, and it was only Lerne who could reassure her effectively on that score.