He ought sooner to blow his brains out, and leave a written confession for her.
The hoarse sound of the sea surging amongst the rocks at the base of the tower was all that stirred the stillness; evening was spreading over all the monotonous inland country; a west wind was blowing and rustling amidst the gorse; a woman led a cow between the dolmen, stopping for it to crop grass here and there; the fishing-boats were far out to sea, hidden under the vapours and the shadows. It was all melancholy, sad-coloured, chill, lonesome. As he leaned against the embrasure of the window and looked down, other familiar scenes, long lost, rose up to his memory. He saw a wide green rolling river, long lines of willows and of larches bending under a steel-hued sky, a vast dim plain stretching away to touch blue mountains, a great solitude, a silence filled at intervals with the pathetic song of the swans, chanting sorrowfully because the nights grew cold, the ice began to gather, the food became scanty, and they were many in number.
'I must not go!' he said to himself; 'I must never see Hohenszalras.'
And he lit his study lamp, and held her letter to it and burnt it. It was his best way to do it honour, to keep it holy. He had the letters of so many worthless women locked in his drawers and caskets in his rooms in Paris. He held himself unworthy to retain hers. He had burned each written by her as it had come to him, in that sort of exaggeration of respect with which it seemed to him she was most fittingly treated by him. There are less worthy offerings than the first scruple of an unscrupulous life. It is like the first pure drops that fall from a long turbid and dust-choked fountain.
As he walked the next day upon the windblown, rock-strewn strip of sand that parted the old oak wood from the sea, he thought restlessly of her in those days of stately ceremony which suited her so well. What did he do here, what chance had he to be remembered by her? He chafed at his absence, yet it seemed to him impossible that he could ever go to her. What had been at first keen calculation with him had now become a finer instinct, was now due to a more delicate sentiment, a truer and loftier emotion. What could he ever look to her if he sought her but a mere base fortune-seeker, a mere liar, with no pride and no manhood in him? And what else was he? he thought, with bitterness, as he paced to and fro the rough strip of beach, with the dusky heaving waves trembling under a cloudy sky, where a red glow told the place of the setting sun.
There were few bolder men living than He, and he was cynical and reckless before many things that most men reverence; but at the thought of her possible scorn he felt himself tremble like a child. He thought he would rather never see her face again than risk her disdain; there was in him a vague romantic wishfulness rather to die, so that she might think well of his memory, than live in her love through any baseness that would be unworthy of her.
Sin had always seemed a mere superstitious name to him, and if he had abstained from its coarser forms it had been rather from the revolt of the fine taste of a man of culture than from any principle or persuasion of duty. Men he believed were but ephemera, sporting their small hours, weaving their frail webs, and swept away by the great broom of destiny as spiders by the housewife. In the spineless doctrine of altruism he had had too robust a temperament, too clear a reason, to seek a guide for conduct. He had lived for himself, and had seen no cause to do otherwise. That he had not been more criminal had been due partly to indolence, partly to pride. In his love for Wanda von Szalras, a love with which considerable acrimony had mingled at the first, he yet, through all the envy and the impatience which alloyed it, reached a moral height which he had never touched before. Between her and him a great gulf yawned. He abstained from any effort to pass it. It was the sole act of self-denial of a selfish life, the sole obedience to conscience in a character which obeyed no moral laws, but was ruled by a divided tyranny of natural instinct and conventional honour.
The long silent hours of thought in the willow-shaded cloisters of the Holy Isle had not been wholly without fruit. He desired, with passion and sincerity, that she should think well of him, but he did not dare to wish for more; love offered from him to her seemed to him as if it would be a kind of blasphemy. He remembered in his far-off childhood, which at times still seemed so near to him, nearer than all that was around him, the vague, awed, wistful reverence with which he had kneeled in solitary hours before the old dim picture of the Madonna with the lamp burning above it, a little golden flame in the midst of the gloom; he remembered so well how his fierce young soul and his ignorant yearning child's heart had gone out in a half-conscious supplication, how it had seemed to him that if he only knelt long enough, prayed well enough, she would come down to him and lay her hands on him. It was all so long ago, yet, when he thought of Wanda von Szalras, something of that same emotion rose up in him, something of the old instinctive worship awoke in him. In thought he prostrated himself once more whenever the memory of her came to him. He had no religion; she became one to him.
Meanwhile, he was constantly thinking restlessly to himself, 'Did I do ill not to go?'
His bodily life was at Romaris, but his mental life was at Hohenszalras. He was always thinking of her as she would look in those days of the Imperial visit; he could see the stately ceremonies of welcome, the long magnificence of the banquets, the great Rittersaal with cressets of light blazing on its pointed emblazoned roofs; he could see her as she would move down the first quadrille which she would dance with her Kaiser: she would wear her favourite ivory-white velvet most probably, and her wonderful old jewels, and all her orders. She would look as if she had stepped down off a canvas of Velasquez or Vandyck, and she would be a little tired, a little contemptuous, a little indifferent, despite her loyalty; she would be glad, he knew, when the brilliant gathering was broken up, and the old house, and the yew terrace, and the green lake were all once more quiet beneath the rays of the watery moon. She was so unlike other women. She would not care about a greatness, a compliment, a success more or less. Such triumphs were for the people risen yesterday, not for a Countess von Szalras.