The night which followed that conversation with my mother remains in my memory as the most wretched I had hitherto endured; and yet how many sleepless nights had I passed, while all the world around me slept, in bitter conflict with a thought which held mine eyes waking and devoured my heart! I was like a prisoner who has sounded every inch of his dungeon--the walls, the floor, the ceiling--and who, on shaking the bars of his window for the hundredth time, feels one of the iron rods loosen under the pressure.He hardly dares to believe in his good fortune, and he sits down upon the ground almost dazed by the vision of deliverance that has dawned upon him."I must be cool-headed now," said I to myself, as I walked to and fro in the smoking-room, whither I had retired without tasting the meal that was served on my return.
Evening came, then the black night; the dawn followed, and once more the full day.Still I was there, striving to see clearly amid the cloud of suppositions in which an event, simple in itself (only that in my state of mind no event would have seemed simple), had wrapped me.
I was too well used to these mental tempests not to know that the only safety consisted in clinging to the positive facts, as though to immovable rocks.
In the present instance, the positive facts reduced themselves to two: first, I had just learned that a brother of M.Termonde, who passed for dead, and of whom my stepfather never spoke, existed;secondly, that this man, disgraced, proscribed, ruined, an outlaw in fact, exercised a dictatorship of terror over his rich, honored, and irreproachable brother.The first of these two facts explained itself.It was quite natural that Jacques Termonde should not dispel the legend of the suicide, which was of his own invention, and had saved the other from the galleys.It is never pleasant to have to own a thief, a forger, or a deserter, for one's nearest relation; but this, after all, is only an excessively disagreeable matter.
The second fact was of a different kind.The disproportion between the cause assigned by my stepfather and its result in the terror from which he was suffering was too great.The dominion which Edmond Termonde exercised over his brother was not to be justified by the threat of his return, if that return were not to have any other consequence than a transient scandal.My mother, who regarded her husband as a noble-minded, high-souled, great-hearted man, might be satisfied with the alleged reason; but not I.It occurred to me to consult the Code of Military Justice, and Iascertained, by the 184th clause, that a deserter cannot claim immunity from punishment until after he has attained his forty-seventh year, so that it was most likely Edmond Termonde was still within the reach of the law.
Was it possible that his desire to shield his brother from the punishment of the offense of desertion should throw my stepfather into such a state of illness and agitation? I discerned another reason for this dominion--some dark and terrible bond of complicity between the two men.What if Jacques Termonde had employed his brother to kill my father, and proof of the transaction was still in the murderer's possession? No doubt his hands would be tied so far as the magistrates were concerned; he had it in his power to enlighten my mother, and the mere threat of doing this would suffice to make a loving husband tremble, and tame his fierce pride.
"I must be cool," I repeated, "I must be cool;" and I put all my strength to recalling the physical and moral particulars respecting the crime which were in my possession.It was my business now to try whether one single point remained obscure when tested by the theory of the identity of Rochdale with Edmond Termonde.The witnesses were agreed in representing Rochdale as tall and stout, my mother had described Edmond Termonde as a big, heavy man.
Fifteen years lay between the assassin of 1864, and the elderly rake of 1879; but nothing prevented the two from being identical.
My mother had dwelt upon the color of Edmond Termonde's eyes, pale blue like those of his brother; the concierge of the Imperial Hotel had mentioned the pale blue color and the brightness of Rochdale's eyes in his deposition, which I knew by heart.He had noticed this peculiarity on account of the contrast of the eyes with the man's bronzed complexion.Edmond Termonde had taken refuge in America after his alleged suicide, and what had M.Massol said? I could hear him repeat, with his well-modulated voice, and methodical movement of the hand: "A foreigner, American or English, or, perhaps, a Frenchman settled in America." Physical impossibility there existed none.
And moral impossibility? That was equally absent.In order to convince myself more fully of this, I took up the history of the crime from the moment at which my father's correspondence concerning Jacques Termonde became explicit, that is to say, in January, 1864.
So as to rid my judgment of every trace of personal enmity, Isuppressed the names in my thoughts, reducing the dreadful occurrence by which I had suffered to the bareness of an abstract narrative.A man is desperately in love with the wife of one of his intimate friends, a woman whom he knows to be absolutely, spotlessly virtuous; he knows, he feels, that if she were free she would love him; but that, not being free, she will never, never be his.This man is of the temperament which makes criminals, his passions are violent in the extreme, he has no scruples and a despotic will; he is accustomed to see everything give way to his desires.He perceives that his friend is growing jealous; a little later and the house will no longer be open to him.
Would not the thought come to him--if the husband could be got rid of? And yet--?
