If he were the criminal I believed him to be, he was certainly aware that in thus placing my mother between himself and me, he was putting in my way the only barrier which I could never, never break down, and I on my side understood clearly, and with bitterness of soul, that the obstacles so placed would be stronger than even the most fatal certainty. What, then, was the good of seeking any further? Why not renounce my useless quest at once? But it was already too late.
[XIII]
Have I been a coward? When I think of what I have accomplished with the same hand that holds my pen, I am forced to answer: "No." How then shall I explain that these first scenes, that in which I had tried to torture my stepfather by talking to him of crimes committed by confederates, and the danger of complicity; that in which I said to him as I sat by his bedside and looked him full in the face: "No, M. Massol has not forgotten you;" that in my room, when I placed the accusing letters in his hands;—yes, how shall I explain that these three scenes were succeeded by so many days of inaction? The proof that lies to one's hand, that stares one in the face like a living thing, was furnished to me by chance. It was not I who dragged it out of the darkness where it lurked into the light. But was this my fault? From the moment when my stepfather had the courage to resist my first attack, the most sudden and unexpected of the three, what was there for me to do beyond watching for the slightest indications, and probing the deepest recesses of his character? I recurred to my first course of reasoning: since material proofs were not to be had, let me at least collect all the moral reasons that existed for believing more or believing less in the probability of the complicated crime of which I accused the man in my thoughts. To do this I had to depart from my usual custom, and live much at my mother's house. Our association was necessarily an intolerable torment to M. Termonde and to myself. How did he endure me, feeling himself suspected in this way? How did I bear his presence, suspecting him as I did? Ah, well, it was like a serpent's tooth at my heart when I saw him by my mother's side, in all the security of love and luxury, loving his wife, beloved by her, respected by all, and when I said to myself:
"And yet, this man is an assassin, a base, cowardly assassin."
Then I saw him, in my mind's eye, as he ought to have been, approaching the scaffold in the dawn, livid, with cropped hair, and bound hands, with the agony of expiation in his eyes, and in front of him the guillotine, black against the pale sky. Instead of this, it was: "Are you in any pain, dearest? At what hour do you want the carriage, Jacques? Mind you wrap yourself up well. Whom shall we ask to dinner on Wednesday?" It was on Wednesday they received their friends that winter and until the spring. Thus spoke the soft voice of my mother, and the evidence of their perfect union tortured me; but the thirst to know was stronger and fiercer than that pain. My suspicions rose to fever heat, and produced in me an irresistible craving to keep him always under my eyes, to inflict the torment of my constant presence upon him. He yielded to this with a facility which always surprised me. Had he sensations analogous to mine? Now, when the whole mystery is unveiled, and I know the part he took in the horrible plot, I understand the torturing kind of attraction which I had for him. He was wholly possessed by the fixed idea of his accomplished crime, and I formed a living portion of that fixed idea, just as he formed a living portion of my dark and continuous reflections. Henceforth he could think only of me, just as I could think of none but him. Our mutual hate drew us together like a mutual love. When we were apart the tempest of wild fancies broke out with too great fury. At least, this was so in my case; and although his presence was painful to me, it stilled at the same time the kind of internal hurricane which hurled me from one extremity of the possible to the other, when he was out of my sight. No sooner was I alone than the wildest projects suggested themselves to me. I had a vision of myself, seizing him by the throat, with the cry of "Assassin! assassin!" and forcing him to confession by violence. I fancied myself inducing M. Massol to resume the abandoned Instruction on my account, and pictured his coming to my mother's house with the new data supplied by me. I fancied myself bribing two or three rascals, carrying off my stepfather and shutting him up in some lonely house in the suburbs of Paris, until he should have confessed the crime. My reason staggered under these vagaries into which the excess of my desire, still further stimulated by the sense of my powerlessness, drove me. And he too must have lived through hours like these; when I was not there, he must have formed and renounced a hundred plans. He asked of himself, "What does he know?" he answered, according to the hours, "He knows all—he knows nothing. What will he do?" and concluded, by turns, either that I would do all, or that I would do nothing. But, when we were together, face to face, the reality asserted itself, and put fancy to flight. We remained together, studying each other, like two animals about to attack each other presently; but each of us was perfectly aware of how it was with the other. He could not fully manifest his distrust, nor I my suspicions, we merely made it evident to one another that we had not advanced one step since our first conversation on my return from Compiègne. And, on my part, the evidence of this, while it discouraged me, somewhat tranquillised; it eased my conscience of the reproach of inaction. I did nothing, true; but what could I do?
Until the month of May of that year, 1879, I lived this strange life, seeing my stepfather almost every day; a prey, when he was not there, to the torments of my fancy, and when he was there suffering agonies from his presence. My field of action was restricted to the closest study of his character, and I devoted myself to the anatomy of his moral being with ardent curiosity, which was sometimes gratified and sometimes defeated, in proportion as I caught certain significant points, or failed to catch them. I observed the least of these, purposely, for they were more involuntary, less likely to deceive, and more useful in aiding my search into the innermost recesses of his nature. We rode in the Bois, in the morning, several times a week, and, contrary to our usual custom, together. He came for me, or met me, without having made any appointment: we were drawn towards each other by the force of our common obsession. While we were riding side by side, talking of indifferent matters, I observed him handling his horse so roughly that several times he narrowly escaped being thrown, although he was a good horseman. He preferred restive horses, and displayed a cold ferocity in his treatment of the animals. What he did with his horses, unjust, despotic, and implacable as he was, I thought within myself he had done with life, bending all things and all persons about him to his will. He was excessively vindictive, to the point indeed of asserting that he did not attach any meaning to the word "forgiveness," and he had made for himself a place apart in the world, being little liked, much feared, and yet received by the most exclusive section of society. Under the perfect elegance and correct style of his exterior, he hid the daring courage which had been proved during the war, when he had fought with great gallantry under the walls of Paris. From his bearing on horseback, I arrived at far other conclusions; his innate violence convinced me that he was capable of anything to gratify his passions. In the courage which he displayed in 1870, I thought I could discern a kind of bargain made with himself, a rehabilitation of himself in his own eyes, if indeed he had committed the crime. Again, I wondered whether it was merely an outcome of his innate ferocity, only a vent for the pent-up despair in which he lived, for all his outside show of happiness. But whence this despair? Was it only the moral effect of his bad health? Then, as I rode by his side, I set myself to examine the physiology of the man, searching for a correspondence between the construction of his frame, and the signs and tokens given in specialist books upon the subject, as those which indicate criminals; the upper part of his body was too heavy for his legs, his arms were too strongly developed, the expression of the lower jaw was hard, and his thumb too long. The latter peculiarity assumed additional importance to my mind from the fact that my stepfather had a habit of closing his hand with the thumb inwards as though to hide it. I was well aware that I must not set any real store by observations of this kind; I rejected them as puerile, but I returned to them again, in order to supplement them by others which gave value and importance to the former.
I reflected deeply upon the hereditary probabilities of M. Termonde's character, during our rides in the Bois. His maternal grandfather had shot himself with a pistol; his own brother had drowned himself, after having dissipated hip fortune, taken service in the army, and deserted under disgraceful circumstances. There were tragic elements in the family history. How often as we rode together, boot almost touching boot, have I turned those mad, sad, bad fancies in my head, and worse ones still!
We would return, and sometimes I would go in to breakfast with my mother, or call at her hotel after my solitary meal taken in my little dining-room in the Avenue Montaigne. M. Termonde and I were very rarely alone together during my visits to the hotel on the Boulevard Latour-Marbourg. What did it matter to me now? If he was the criminal whom I was bent on running down, he was forewarned; I had no longer any chance of wresting his secret from him by surprise. I much preferred to study him while he was talking, and in the course of his conversation with one person or another, in my presence, I learned how perfect was his self-control. In my childhood and my early youth, I had hated that power of mastering himself completely, which he possessed to a supreme degree, while I was so foolish, so helpless a victim to my nervous sensibility, so incapable of the cold-bloodedness that hides violent emotion with the mask of calmness. Now, it gave me a sort of pleasure to contemplate the depth of his hypocrisy. He had such an inveterate habit of dissimulation, such a mania for it, indeed, that he kept silence respecting the smallest events of his life, even to his wife. He never spoke of the visits he made, the people he met, the plans he formed, or the books he read. He had evidently trained himself to forecast the most remote consequences of every sentence that he uttered. This unremitting watch kept upon himself in a life apparently so easy, prosperous, and happy, could not fail to impress even the least observant people with an idea that the man was an enigmatical personage. On putting together the various pieces of his strange character and connecting his dissimulation with the passionate frenzy which I had observed in him, he appeared to me in the light of an infinitely dangerous being. He asked a great many questions, and he spoke very deliberately, very temperately, unless he were in a certain singular mood like that in which he had intoxicated himself with his own words, on the occasion of our drive in his coupé. Then he would talk on and on, with a nervous, sneering laugh, and give utterance to theories so cynical, and to ideas and conceits so peculiar that the whole thing made me shudder. He had, for instance, an extraordinary knowledge of all questions relating to medical jurisprudence. A case, which made a great sensation, was tried during that winter, and in the course of an animated discussion in which several persons took part, my stepfather chanced to mention the date of the arrest of the notorious criminal Conty de la Pommerais. I verified the statement; it was correct. How strangely full of things connected with crime his mind must have been, and how strongly this bore upon certain data, for which I was indebted to my interviews with M. Massol! For, was it not an instance of the all-absorbing, single thought which the old judge declared he had discerned in the great majority of murderers, that which leads them to return to the scene of murder, to approach the body of their victim when it is exposed in a public place, to read every line of the newspapers, in which details of their crimes are to be found, to follow the record of deeds similar to their own with eager attention? At other times, my stepfather fell into a deep silence from which it was impossible to rouse him, and he smoked cigar after cigar while the silent mood was upon him, notwithstanding the reiterated prohibition of the doctors. Tobacco by day, morphine by night—what suffering was it he tried to baffle by such an abuse of narcotics? Was it the pain of his malady, or torture of another kind, such as I imagined when I gave myself up to my tragic conjectures? Again, he had intervals of lassitude so great that even my presence could not rouse him—the lassitude of a man who has reached the limit of what he can suffer, and who can feel no more, because he has felt too much. I found him in this condition two or three times, alone in the twilight, so utterly sunk in weariness that he took no notice of me when I seated myself opposite to him and gazed at him, also in silence. I was tempted to cry out to him: "Confess, confess, confess at once!" And I should not have been surprised had he surrendered, allowed his secret to escape him, and answered: "It is true." On these occasions I felt the inanity of the small facts I had so carefully collected. What if he were not guilty? I kept silence, a prey to the fever of doubt which had been devouring me for weeks, and at last he emerged from his taciturnity to talk to me of my mother. Why? Was he thinking of her so intently just then because he was very ill and believed that he was on the eve of an eternal parting? Or was he merely striving to defend himself against me with that buckler before which I always must retreat? Was this a supplication to me to spare her a supreme grief? Yes; the latter was the true explanation. With his inborn courage and his natural violence, he would not have endured the outrage of my steady immovable gaze, the menacing allusions I frequently made, the continuous threat of my presence, but for his desire to spare my mother a scene between us, at any cost, although he might be ever so sure that no solidly certain proof could spring up accidentally in the course of it. But—rather than be accused of this thing in her presence—he preferred to suffer as he was suffering. For he loved her. However intolerable that sentiment might appear to me, it was indispensable that I should admit it, even in the hypothesis of the crime, in that case above all indeed. And then I knew that notwithstanding our mutual enmity we felt ourselves obliged to act in common so as not to endanger the happiness of the being who was so dear to both of us. Nevertheless, the difference between us was great. He might have a feeling of sullen jealousy because of my attachment to my mother, but it could not give him the shudder of horror that passed over me with the thought that he loved her as much as I did, and was beloved by her, and yet had my father's blood upon his conscience!
He loved her! It was for her that he had bought the assassin's hand, and caused that blood to be shed, and it was she who brought him to destruction at last, she who moved about between us with the same look of happy tenderness she had cast upon us both, on the evening when she found me by her ailing husband's bedside, and when her smile had beamed so softly upon him and me—the very same smile! The efforts he made to preserve the tranquillity of that woman's heart of hers were destined to destroy him. Yes, all the precautions he had taken with a view to warding off eventualities which he thought possible, were the cause of his ultimate ruin, from the cunning disclosures he made to the gentle unsuspecting creature, even to the false affection which he pretended for me in her presence. If he and I had not made a pretence of mutual regard, she would never have spoken to me as she did speak, I should never have learned from her what I did learn, with the result that the silent duel in which my useless energies were being exhausted was brought to a sudden end. Is there then an overruling fate, as certain men have believed, ay, even those who, like Bonaparte, have striven most vigorously with stern realities? What I gather from the contemplation of my life, from beyond the accomplished events of it, is that there is a logical law of situation and character, which develops all the consequences of our actions even to their end, so inexorably that the very success of our criminal projects contains that which will crush us some day. When I think this out for a little while, remembering how it was she, the woman whom he so loved, who put the effectual clue for which I had ceased to hope into my hand, and that it led to the certainty from which there was no drawing back, a vertigo of terror seizes upon me, as though the awful breath of destiny swept over my brow. Yes, I am terrified, because I too have blood upon my hands; but at the same time it comforts me because I can say to myself that I have but been the instrument of an inevitable deed, the necessary slave of an invisible master. Poor mother! If you had known? You also were the deadly weapon in the hand of fate, blind, like the knife that kills and knows it not. Whereas I—I have seen, I have known, I have willed. Ah! Until now I have been strong enough to keep the compact made with myself, that I would confess my story simply, detail by detail, passing no judgment on myself. And now, as the scene approaches which determined the new and last period of the drama of my life, my spirit shrinks. Coward! Once more I yield to a kind of stupefaction at the thought that it is really my own story I am setting down, that thus I acted, that there is in my memory——No, I have pledged my word; I will go on. Yes, with this hand that holds my pen I have done the deed. Yes, I have blood, blood, an indelible stain upon these fingers. They falter, but they must needs obey me and write out the story to its end.