From the door I cast a glance at the statue all running with water, and I went upstairs to my room without returning to the drawing-room. I went to bed; but sleep was long of coming. All the scenes of the day presented themselves to my mind. I thought of that young girl, so lovely and so pure, left to the mercy of a brutal drunkard. “What an odious thing,” I said to myself, “a marriage of convenience is! A mayor puts on a tricolour scarf, a parson a stole, and there, the most respectable girl in the world is handed over to the Minotaur! what can two beings who do not love each other have to say to each other at a moment such as this, a moment which two lovers would purchase at the price of their lives? Can a woman ever love a man whom she has once seen coarse? First impressions are never effaced, and I am sure of this, that that M. Alphonse will richly deserve to be hated....”
During my monologue, which I have shortened considerably, I had heard a great deal of coming and going in the house, doors opening and shutting, carriages driving away; then I seemed to have heard the light steps of a number of women on the stair, making for the end of the corridor opposite to my room. It was probably the bride’s attendants taking her to bed. In course of time they had gone downstairs again. Madame de Peyrehorade’s door was shut. How anxious and uneasy that poor girl must be, I thought! I turned about on my bed in a bad temper. A bachelor cuts a foolish figure in a house where a marriage is being held.
Silence reigned for some time; then it was broken by heavy steps climbing up the stair. The wooden treads cracked loudly.
“The brute!” I exclaimed. “I’ll wager he’s going to fall on the stairs.”
All became quiet again. I took a book to change the course of my thoughts. It was a statistical account of the department, graced with a memorandum by M. de Peyrehorade on the druidical monuments of the Prades hundred. I fell over at the third page.
I slept badly, and woke several times. It might be about five o’clock in the morning, and I had been awake twenty minutes or more, when the cock crew. Day was about to dawn. Just then I heard distinctly the same heavy steps, the same cracking of the stair, that I had heard before falling asleep. It struck me as strange. I yawned and tried to think why M. Alphonse was rising so early in the morning. I could imagine no likely reason. I was about to close my eyes again, when my attention was excited anew by a strange trampling, with which the ringing of bells and the sound of doors being noisily opened soon mingled; then I made out confused cries.
“My drunk friend has set the house afire somewhere!” I thought, as I jumped down out of bed.
I dressed in a hurry and went out into the corridor. From the opposite end came cries and lamentations, and one heart-rending voice dominated all the others—” My son! My son!” It was evident that some calamity had happened to M. Alphonse. I ran to the nuptial chamber: it was full of people. The first thing that met my view was the young man half-clad, stretched across the bed, the frame of which was broken. He was livid and motionless. His mother was weeping and crying at his side. M. de Peyrehorade was busy, rubbing his temples with eau-de-Cologne, or holding smelling-salts to his nose. Alas! his son had been dead for a long time. On a sofa at the other end of the room was the bride, writhing in horrible convulsions. She was uttering inarticulate cries, and two strong servants had the utmost difficulty in holding her.
“Good God!” I exclaimed, “whatever has happened?”
I went up to the bed and raised the unfortunate young man’s body; it was already stiff and cold. His clenched teeth and his blackened face gave evidence of the most frightful agony. It was only too plain that his end had been violent and his death-struggles terrible. Yet there was no trace of blood on his clothes. I opened his shirt, and on his chest I saw a livid mark, which was continued round his ribs and back. One would have thought that he had been crushed in a band of iron.