The disciple

by Paul Bourget

Immediately this idea imposed itself upon the brother, who was mad with grief, that destiny offered him this vengeance, the only object of his thought since he had read the confession of the dead and the detail of her misery, of her errors, her resistances her atrocious deception, of her fatal resolution.

He had only not to hide the letter, and the cowardly moral assassin of the young girl would be accused, imprisoned, no doubt condemned. The honor of Charlotte would be saved, for Robert Greslon could not prove his relations with the girl. The marquis and the marquise, the father and the mother, so confiding so penetrated by the truest love for the memory of their poor child, would at least be ignorant of the fault of this dear one which would be to them a new despair greater than the girl’s tragic death.

And Count André was silent. Not, however, without a violent effort over himself. This courageous man who possessed by nature and by will the true virtues of a soldier, detested perfidy, compromises of conscience, all expedients and all dastardliness.

He had felt that it was his duty to speak, not to allow an innocent person to be accused. He had in vain said to himself that this Greslon was the moral assassin of Charlotte, and that this assassination merited a punishment as well as the other; this sophism of his hate had not quite controlled the other voice, that which forbids us to become accomplices in an iniquity, and the condemnation of Greslon as a poisoner was certainly iniquitous.

An unexpected and to him an almost monstrous circumstance had completely overwhelmed André de Jussat; the silence of the accused.

If Greslon had spoken, recounted his amours, defending his life at the price of the honor of his victim, the count could not have despised him enough. By a contrast of character which must appear still more inexplicable to a simple mind, this infamous man suddenly displayed the generosity of a gentleman in not speaking a word which could soil the memory of one whom he had drawn into so detestable an ambuscade.

This scoundrel was brave in the presence of justice, almost heroic in his way. In any case he ceased to be worthy of disgust only. André said to himself that this might be the tactics of the court of assizes, a proceeding to obtain an acquittal in the absence of proofs. But, on the other hand, he knew by the letter of his sister of the existence of the journal in which the details of the scientific experiment had been consigned hour by hour. This journal singularly diminished the chances of conviction, and Greslon did not produce it.

The officer could not have explained why this dignity of attitude on the part of his enemy so angered him, that he had a frantic desire to rush to the magistrate, in order that the truth might be brought to light, and the dead should owe nothing, not an atom of her posthumous honor to this scoundrel who had won her love.

When he thought of his sister, the sweet creature whom he had loved, with so virile and noble an affection, that of an elder brother for a frail refined child, in the possession of this clown, this chance preceptor, him who had inflicted on his race an outrage so abject he could have roared with fury, as when, during the war, it had been necessary to assist at the capitulation of Metz and to give up his arms.

He felt then a solace in thinking that the bench of infamy on which were seated burglars, swindlers, and murderers was waiting for this man, and then the scaffold or the galleys. And he stifled the voice which said: “You ought to speak.”