Part 16

Charlotte had placed her head on my breast and she fell asleep, exhausted by the excess of her emotions. I looked at her and I felt, without knowing how, that I fell back from my state before this happiness, to the reflective, philosophic, and lucid one which had been mine, and which a sorcery had metamorphosed into another.

I looked at Charlotte, and thought that in a few hours this adorable body, animated at this moment by all the ardors of life, would be immovable, cold, dead--dead this mouth which trembled still with my kiss, dead these beautiful eyes shaded under their trembling lids, dead this mind filled with me, intoxicated of me!

I repeated mentally several times this word: “Dead, dead, dead,” and what it represents of a sudden falling into the night, of an irreparable fall into the darkness, the cold, the emptiness, oppressed my heart.

This entrance into the gulf without bottom of annihilation which had seemed, not only easy, but profoundly desirable when the fury of unfortunate love dominated me--suddenly, and this fury once appeased, appeared to me the most formidable of actions, the most foolish, the most impossible of execution. Charlotte continued to keep her eyes closed. The emaciation of her poor face, rendered more perceptible by the way in which the softened light revealed her features, told too plainly what she had felt for days. And I was going to kill her, or at least, to assist her to destroy herself. We were about to kill ourselves.

A shudder ran through me at the thought, and I was afraid. For her? For myself? For both? I do not know. I was afraid, afraid of feeling to grow numb in my most secret being, the soul of my soul, the indefinable center of all our energy. And suddenly by a sudden facing about of ideas like to that of the dying who throw a last look upon their existence, and who perceive, in the mirage of a secret regret, the joys known or coveted, the vision was evoked of that life, all thought of which I had turn by turn desired and abjured.

I saw you in your little cell, my dear master, in meditation, and the universe of intelligence developed before me the splendor of its horizons. My personal works, this brain of which I had been so proud, this Self cultivated so complaisantly, I was about to sacrifice all these treasures.

“To your pledged word,” ought I to have responded? “To a caprice of excitement,” I did respond. Strictly, this suicide had a signification, when to be forever separated from Charlotte filled me with despair. But now? We love each other, we belong to each other. Who can prevent us, young and free, from fleeing together, if on the next day we cannot endure separation? This hypothesis of an elopement brought before my mind the image of Count André. Why not make a note of this also? An exhilarating titillation of self-love ran through my heart at this souvenir.

I looked at Charlotte again, and I felt filled with the most ferocious pride. The rivalry instituted by my secret envy between her brother and myself awoke again in a start of triumph. There is a celebrated proverb which says that all animals are sad after pleasure: “_Omne animal_.” It was not sadness that I felt then, but an absolute drying up of my tenderness, a rapid return--rapid as the action of a chemical precipitation--to a state of mind anterior.

I do not believe that this displacement of sensibility could have taken more than half an hour. I continued to regard Charlotte, while abandoning myself to these passage of ideas, with the delight of a reconquered liberty.

The fullness of the voluntary and reflective life flowed in me now, as the water of a river whose dam has been raised. The passion for this absent child had raised up a barrier against which the flood of my old sentiment was dammed up. This barrier thrown down, I became myself again. She was sleeping. I heard her light, equal breath, then suddenly a great sob, and she awoke:

“Ah!” said she, pressing me to her in a convulsive fashion, “you are here, you are here. I had lost consciousness. I dreamed. Ah! what a dream! I saw my brother come toward you. Oh! the horrible dream!”

She kissed me again, and, as her mouth was pressed to mine, the clock struck. She listened and counted the strokes.

“Four o’clock,” said she, “it is time--farewell, my love, farewell.”

She embraced me again. Her face had become calm in her exaltation, almost smiling.

“Give me the poison,” said she in a firm voice.

I remained immovable without answering.

“You are afraid for me,” she resumed; “I shall know how to die. Give it to me.” I rose, still without replying. She sat up and clasped her hands without looking at me. Was she praying? Was this the last effort of this soul to extract the love of life which pushes its roots so deeply in a creature of twenty years?

My resolution to prevent this double suicide was now absolute. I had the coolness to seize the brown vial from the table and carry it to a wardrobe and lock it. These preparations of which she took no notice no doubt seemed long to Charlotte, for she turned toward me:

“I am ready,” said she.

She saw my empty hands. The ecstatic expression changed to one of extreme anguish, and her voice grew harsh as she said:

“The poison! Give me the poison!” Then as if responding to a thought which suddenly came to her mind, she added feverishly: “No, it is not possible.”

“No,” cried I, falling on my knees before her, and seizing her hands. “No, you are right, it is not possible. I cannot let you die before me, for I should be your assassin. I pray you, Charlotte, do not ask me to realize this fatal project. When I bought the poison I was mad, I thought that you did not love me. I wished to kill myself. Oh! how sincerely! But now that you do love me, that I know it, that you have given yourself to me, no I cannot, I will not. Let us live, my love, let us live, consent to live. We will go away together, if you will. And if you will not, if you repent of this confession of your regard, well! I will suffer the martyrdom; but, I swear to you, this shall be as if it had never been--I will not trouble your life. But to help you to die, to kill yourself, you so young, so fair, oh no, no, do not ask me to do it.”

How many times I spoke thus to her, I do not know. I saw on her face a sweet emotion, a woman’s feebleness, the “yes” of the look which gives the lie to the “no” of the mouth. She was silent, then she fixed her eyes on me, and now they were bright with a tragic fire. She had withdrawn her hands from mine, crossed her arms upon her breast, and with her hair falling all around her, as if withdrawn from me by an invincible horror, she said, when I had ceased to supplicate her:

“So you will not keep your word?”

“No,” I stammered, “I cannot. I cannot. I did not know what I said.”

“Ah!” said she with a cruel disdain on her beautiful lips, “but tell me then that you are afraid! Give me the poison. I will give you back your word. I will die alone. But to have drawn me thus into the snare, you coward! coward! coward!”

Why did I not spring up under this outrage, why did I not take the bottle of poison, why did I not put it to my lips there before her and say: “See if I am a coward?” I do not understand why I did not when I think of it, when I remember the implacable contempt printed on her face. It must be that I was afraid, I who would now go to the scaffold without trembling, I who have had the courage to be silent for three months, thus risking my life. But now an idea sustains me, coldly, intellectually conceived while during that frightful scene there was a confusion of all the forces of my mind, between my surcharged sensations of the last months and those of the present hour, and, sitting down on the carpet, as if I had no longer energy enough to hold myself up, I shook my head, and said: “No, no.”

This time it was she who did not respond. I saw her mass her beautiful hair and twist it into a knot; put her feet into her slippers, and wrap her white robe around her. She sought with her eyes for the dark flask with the red label, and, seeing it no longer on the table, she walked toward the door, then, without even turning her head, she disappeared after darting at me the terrible word:

“Coward! coward!”

I remained there a long time. Suddenly a frightful uneasiness seized my heart. If Charlotte, exasperated as she was, should attempt her life! A prey to the terrors of this new anguish, I dared to cross the corridors and go down the stairs to her room, and then, putting my ear against the door, I heard a noise, a moaning, a sign of what drama was being acted behind this thin rampart of wood which I could have burst open with my shoulder quickly enough to bring help.

The first noises of the château were rising from the basement. The servants were getting up. I must go back to my room. At six o’clock I was in the garden under the young girl’s window.

My imagination had shown me Charlotte, throwing herself from the window, and lying dead on the ground with her limbs broken. I saw her shutters closed, and below, the plat-band in order with its line of rose bushes on which bloomed the last roses of the autumn.

She had told me, this night, of the charm which she tasted, in her hours of distress, when she loved me in silence, in leaning above this bed of roses and inhaling the aroma of these sweet flowers, spread on the breeze.

I picked one, and its perfume almost made me faint.

To deceive an anxiety which each moment made more intense, I walked straight on, into the country bathed in vapor, in this gray morning of November. I went very far, since I passed the village of Saulzet-le-Froid, and yet, at eight o’clock, I was back taking my breakfast, or seeming to do so, in the dining-room of the château.

This was the time, I knew, for the maid to go into Mlle. de Jussat’s room. If anything had happened this girl would call out immediately. With what inexpressible comfort I saw her come down and go toward the kitchen with the salver prepared for the tea!

Charlotte had not taken her life.

Hope returned to me then. Upon reflection, and her first feeling of anger passed, perhaps she would interpret as a proof of love my refusal to die and to let her die. I should know that also. It would be sufficient to wait for her in her brother’s room. The little invalid was at the end of his convalescence, and, though deprived of walks, he displayed the gayety of a child about to be born again into life.

He received me with all sorts of pretty ways, and his gracious humor redoubled my hope. He would break the ice between his sister and me. The hands of a young man and of a young girl join so easily when they touch around an innocent and curly head. But when Charlotte appeared, so white in a dress which brought out her paleness still more, pretending a headache to avoid the pranks of Lucien, the eyes burning with fever, I understood that I had believed too readily in a possible reconciliation.

I saluted her. She found a way to not even respond to my salutation. I had known three persons in her already; the creature tender, delicate, compassionate, the young girl easily startled, the lover impassioned almost to ecstasy. I saw now upon this noble visage the coldest, the most impenetrable mark of contempt.

Ah! the old and banal formula: the patrician pride--I was able to account for it and that certain silences kill as surely as the headman’s ax. This impression was so bitter that I could not resign myself to it. This very day I watched to have a word with her, and, at the moment when she was going to her room toward the close of the afternoon, to dress herself for dinner, I went to her on the stairs. She put me by with a gesture so haughty, with so cruel a “Monsieur, I do not know you any longer!” upon her trembling lips, a look so indignant in her eyes that I could not find a word to say to her.

She had judged me and I was condemned. Yes, condemned. She despised me for my fear of death; and it was true, I had felt that cowardly chill before the black hole, while she dared face the worst. I certainly had the right to say to myself that this alone would not have arrested me before the suicide of both, if pity for her had not been joined with it and my ambition as a thinker. No matter. She had given herself to me under one condition, and to this tragic condition I had responded “yes” before, and “no” after. Ah, well. She scorned me, but she had been mine. I had held her in my arms, these arms, and I was the first to kiss those lips.

Yes, I suffered cruelly between this night and my definite departure from the house. However, it was not the arid and conquered despair of the summer, the total abdication in distress.

I retained at the bottom of my heart, I cannot say a happiness, but a something of satisfaction which sustained me in this crisis. When Charlotte passed me without noticing me any more than some object forgotten there by a servant, I contemplated her response to my declaration of love. For another experience of that happiness, perhaps, I would have accepted anew the fatal compact, with the cold resolve to keep it. But this happiness had none the less been true.

And was this love really, irremediably ended? In doing as she had done Mlle, de Jussat had proved a very deep passion. Was it possible that nothing remained of it in this romantic heart?

To-day and in the light of the tragedy which ended this lamentable adventure, I comprehend that it was precisely this romantic character which prevented any return of love into this heart. She had loved in me a mirage, a being absolutely different from myself, and the sudden vision of my true nature having at a blow dispelled her illusions, she hated me with all the power of her old love.

Alas! with all my pretensions to the learned psychologist, I did not see the evolution of this mind, then! I did not even suspect that she would seek at any price the means of knowing me better, and that she would go, in the distraction of her actual disgust, so far as to treat me as judges treat the accused; in fine that she would read my papers and would not recoil before any scruple.

I did not even know enough to guess that she was not the girl to survive such a shock as the revelation of my cold-blooded resolutions written in my notebook brought upon her, and I did not think to destroy the bottle of poison which I had refused to give her.

I believed myself to be a great observer because I reflected a great deal. The quibbles of my analysis concealed from me its falsity. It was not necessary to reflect at this period, but to observe. Instead, deceived by this reasoning which I have just gone over to you, and persuaded that Charlotte loved me still in spite of her contempt, I tried to recall this love by the most simple means, the most ineffective at that moment.

I wrote to her.

I found my letter on my bureau the same day, unopened. I went to her door at night and called to her. This door was locked and no one replied. I tried to stop her again. She waved me off with more authority than the first time, without looking at me.

Finally, the heartbreak of this continuous insult was stronger than the ardors of passion which had begun to kindle in me. On the evening of the day in which she had thus repulsed me, I wept much, then I resolved upon a definite course. A little of my old energy had returned, for it was needed for this part which I had undertaken.

The next week M. de Plane and Count André were coming. This would have decided me if I had still hesitated. Their presence, in this double and sinister disaster of my love and of my pride, no, I would not, I could not endure it.

This, then, is what I had decided: The marquis had asked me to prolong my stay until the 15th of November. It was now the 3d. I announced, on the morning of this fatal 3d of November, that I had just received from my mother a letter which made me a little uneasy; then in the forenoon, I said that a dispatch had still further increased my anxiety. I asked then of M. de Jussat permission to go to Clermont early the next day, adding that if I did not return, would he be so good as to box the articles I had left and send them to me. I held this conversation in the presence of Charlotte, assured that she would interpret it in its true significance: “He is going away not to return.” I expected that the news of this separation would move her, and, wishing to profit by this emotion, I had the audacity to write to her another note, these two lines only:

“On the point of leaving you forever, I have the right to ask a last interview. I will come to you at eleven o’clock.”

It was necessary that she should not return this note without reading it. I placed it open upon her table, at the risk of losing all if the chambermaid should see it. Ah! how my heart beat, when at five minutes to eleven o’clock, I took my way to her room and tried the door.

It was not bolted. She was waiting for me. I saw at the first glance that the struggle would be hard. Her somber countenance showed too plainly that she had not permitted me to come that she might forgive me. She wore a dark silk dress, and never had her eyes been more fixed, more implacably fixed and cold.

“Monsieur,” said she as soon as I had shut the door, “I am ignorant of what you intend to say to me--I am ignorant of it and I do not wish to know. It is not to listen to you that I have allowed you to come. I swear to you, and I know how to keep my word--if you take a step toward me and if you try to speak to me without my permission, I will call and you shall be thrown from the window like a thief.”

While speaking she had put her finger on the button of the electric bell. Her brow, her mouth, her gestures, her voice showed such resolution that I did not dare to speak. She continued: “You have, monsieur, caused me to commit very unworthy actions. The first has for excuse that I did not believe you capable of the infamy you have employed. Beside I should have known how to expiate it,” she added, as if speaking to herself. “The second. I do not look for any excuse.” And her face became purple with shame. “It was too insupportable to think that you had acted thus. I wished to be sure of what you are. I wished to know. You had told me that you kept a journal. I desired to read it and I have done so. I went into your room when you were not there, and forced the lock of your notebook. Yes, yes, I did that! I have been punished, since I have read your infamous plans. The third. In telling you I acquit the debt which I have contracted with you by the second. The third,” and she hesitated, in my indignation, “I wrote to my brother. He knows everything!”

“Ah!” cried I, “then you are lost.”

“You know what I have sworn,” she interrupted; and she put her finger again on the bell. “Be quiet. Nothing worse can befall me than has already happened,” she continued, “and no one will do anything more for or against me. My brother will know that also, and what I have resolved. The letter will reach him to-morrow morning. I ought to warn you since you hold your life so dear. And now, go away.”

“Charlotte,” I implored.

“If in one minute you have not gone out,” said she, looking at the clock, “I will call.”

§ VII. CONCLUSION.

And I obeyed!

The next day, at six o’clock I left the château, a prey to the most sinister presentiments, trying in vain to persuade myself that this scene would not be followed by some terrible effect; that Count André would arrive soon enough to save her from a desperate resolution; that she would hesitate at the last moment; that some unexpected thing would happen.

As to fleeing from the possible vengeance of the brother, I did not for a moment think of it. This time, I had resumed my character because I had an idea to sustain me, that of allowing no person to humiliate me any further. Yes, although I had faltered before a loving girl and in the weakness of happy love, I would not do so before the threat of a man.

I arrived at Clermont, devoured by an anxiety which did not last very long, for I learned of the suicide of Mlle. de Jussat and was arrested at the same moment.

From the first words of the Judge of Instruction I reconstructed all the details of the suicide: Charlotte had taken from the flask which I had bought as much as she thought sufficient to cause her death. She had done that on the very day she had read my journal, whose lock I found had been forced. I had not noticed it because my mind was so filled with other things than these sterile notes.

She had been careful, in order to turn away my suspicions, to replace with water the quantity of nux vomica thus taken. She had thrown the flask out of the window because she did not wish her father and mother to learn of her suicide excepting through her brother. And I, who know the whole truth of this horrible drama, who could at least give my journal as a presumption of my innocence, destroyed this journal after my first examination; I have refused to speak, to defend myself--because of this brother! I have told you, I have drained to the bottom the cup of humiliation and I will do no more.

This man whom I so much envied from the first day, this man who represents death to me now, and who, knowing the whole truth, must consider me the lowest of the low. I do not wish that he should have the right to quite despise me, and he has not the right. He does not because we both are silent. But this for me, is to risk my life in order to save the honor of the dead, and for him to sacrifice an innocent person to this honor.

Of us two, of me who will not defend myself by taking shelter behind the dead body of Charlotte, and of him who, having the letter which proves her suicide, keeps it, to avenge himself on the lover of his sister by allowing him to be condemned as an assassin, which is the brave man? Which is the gentleman? All the shame of my weakness--if there be any shame, I wipe out by not defending myself, and I feel a proud pleasure, as a revenge for those terrible last days, at not having killed myself, at not asking of death the oblivion of so many tortures.

Count André must also reach the bottom of his infamy. If I am condemned, he knowing me to be innocent, he having the proof of it, he keeping silent, ah well! the Jussat-Randons will have nothing with which to reproach me--we will be quits.

However, I have told all to you, my venerated, my dear master; I have opened my soul to you, and in confiding this secret to your honor, I know too well whom I am addressing even to insist upon the promise I have taken the liberty to exact on the first page of this memoir.

But, you see, I am stifled by this silence; I stifle with the weight which is always, always upon me. To say all in a word, and applied to my sensation, it is legitimate, I stifle with remorse. I want to be understood, consoled, loved; I want some one to pity me and say words to me which shall dissipate the phantoms, the evil spirits, the torturing phantoms.

I made out, when I began these pages, a list of questions which I wished to ask you at the end. I flattered myself that I could recount to you my history as you state your problems in psychology in your books which I have read so much, and now I find nothing to say to you only the word of despair: “_De profundis_!”

Write to me, my dear master, direct me. Strengthen me in the doctrine which was, which is still mine, in the conviction of universal necessity which wills that even our most detestable actions, even this cold enterprise in which I embarked in the interest of science, even my weakness before the compact of death, are a part of the laws of this immense universe.