Part 19

In a quarter of an hour he was dressed and left the hotel. One detail made the brave Pourat shiver. He stated that the officer took his revolver with him which had been placed for two nights on the nightstand. The soldier communicated his fears to his companion.

“If this Greslon is acquitted,” said he, “the captain is the man to blow his brains out on the spot.”

“We ought to follow him, perhaps?” responded the _valet-de-chambre_.

While the two servants were deliberating, the count followed the main street which led to the Palais de Justice. He knew it, for he had often been to Riom in his childhood. This old parliamentary city, with its large hotels with the high windows, built in black Volvic stone, seemed more empty, more silent, more dead than usual as the brother of Charlotte walked toward the court.

Near the approaches to Palais there was a dense crowd which filled the narrow Rue Saint-Louis by which one reaches the hall of assize. The Greslon case had attracted all who had an hour to spare. André could scarcely force his way through the mass of people, composed of countrymen and small shopkeepers who were conversing with passionate animation.

He arrived at the steps which lead to the vestibule. Two soldiers guarded the door, charged to keep back the crowd. The count seemed to hesitate, then, instead of entering, he pushed on to the end of the street. He reached a terrace, which, situated between the sinister walls of the central building and the dark mass of the Palais, gave a view of the immense plain of the Limagne.

A fountain charmed the silence of this spot, and the sound of its murmuring could be heard even above the noise of the crowd in the neighboring street. André sat down on a bench near the fountain. He was never able to tell why he remained there more than half an hour, nor the exact reason why he arose, walked toward the Palais, wrote his name and some words on a card, and gave this card to a soldier to be carried by the bailiff to the president.

He had the very distinct feeling that he must act, almost in spite of himself, and as in a dream. His resolution nevertheless was taken and he felt that he should not weaken again, although he apprehended with horrible anguish the meeting with his father, who was over there, beyond those people whose heads were bent forward, their shoulders curved.

He felt in his agony the only solace he could experience when the bailiff came for him. For, instead of introducing him at once into the hall, this man led him through a passage to a small room which was, without doubt, the office of the president. Some packets were lying on the table. An overcoat and a hat hung on a peg. Arrived there, his guide said to him:

“Monsieur the president will come to you as soon as the attorney-general has finished.” What unexpected consolation in his pain! The punishment of deposing in public and before his father would be spared him! This hope was of short duration. The officer had not been ten minutes in the office of the president when the latter entered: a large old man, with a face yellow from bile and with gray hair, whom the contrast of his red robe made look greenish. After the first words and before the affirmation of the count that he brought proof of the innocence of the accused:

“On these conditions, monsieur,” said the president, “I cannot receive your confidences. The audience is to be resumed and you will be heard as a witness, provided neither the prosecution nor the defense object.”

Thus none of the stations toward his Calvary could the brother of Charlotte avoid. He was about to come in contact with this impassible machinery of justice, which does not stop, which cannot stop on account of human sensibility. He must seat himself in the witness chamber, and recall the scene which had passed there between his father and the mother of Greslon, then enter the hall of assize. He could see the bare wall with the image of the crucified which overlooked this hall, the heads turned toward him in supreme attention, the president among his judges, and the attorney-general, all in their red robes; the jurors on the left of the court. Robert Greslon was on the right on the prisoner’s bench, his arms folded, livid but impassible, and everybody crowded everywhere, behind the magistrates, in the tribunes.

On the witness bench André recognized his father and his white hairs. Ah! how this sight cut him to the heart--the heart which did not falter however, when the president, after asking the counsel and attorney-general if they did not object to hearing the witness, asked him to state his name and title and take oath according to the formula. The magistrates who assisted at this scene are unanimous in declaring that they never experienced an emotion in court at all comparable to that which seized the audience and themselves when this man, whose heroic past all were acquainted with through the articles published in the journals, began in a firm voice, but one which betrayed excruciating grief:

“Gentlemen of the jury: I have only a few words to say. My sister was not assassinated, she killed herself. The night before her death she wrote me a letter in which she announced her resolution to die, and why. Gentlemen, I believe that I had the right to conceal this suicide, I burned this letter. If the man whom you have before you,” and he indicated Greslon with his left hand--“did not give the poison, he has done worse. But this is not for your justice to consider, and he ought not to be convicted as an assassin. He is innocent. In default of material proof which I can no longer give, I bring you my word.”

These sentences fell one by one, amid the anguish of the whole audience. There was a cry followed by groans.

“He is mad,” said a voice, “he is mad, do not listen to him.”

“No, my Father,” replied Count André, who recognized the voice of the marquis, and who turned toward the old man, who lay back, crushed, on his bench. “I am not mad. I have done what honor compelled. I hope, monsieur the president, that I may be spared from saying any more.”

There was entreaty in his voice, the voice of this proud man, as he uttered this last sentence, and it so affected the hearers that a murmur ran through the crowd when the president replied:

“To my great regret, monsieur, I cannot grant what you ask. The extreme importance of the deposition which you have just made does not permit justice to rest upon the information which is our duty--a very painful duty--to ask you to state precisely.”

“That is well, monsieur, I also will do my duty to the end.”

There was in the accent with which the witness uttered this sentence such resolution that the murmur of the crowd gave way suddenly to silence, and the president was heard saying:

“You spoke of a letter, monsieur, which your sister had written to you. Permit me to say that it is at least extraordinary that your first idea was not to enlighten justice by communicating it at once.”

“It contained,” said the count, “a secret which I would have been willing to conceal at the price of my blood.”

He has since told the friend who remained so true to the end of this drama, Maxime de Plane, that this was the most terrible moment of his sacrifice--but his emotion was suppressed by its very excess. He was obliged to give all the details of the letter--and recount his own sensations, and confess all his agonies. As to what followed, he has declared that he could recall only a few material details--and those the most unexpected--the coldness to his hand of an iron column against which he was leaning when he ought to have been sitting on the witness bench from which some one came to take him to his father who had fainted at the last words of his deposition. He noticed also the drawling Lorraine accent of the procureur-général who had risen to abandon the prosecution.

How much time elapsed between the speeches of the procureur and of Greslon’s counsel, the retiring of the jury and its re-entrance with a negative verdict, he never knew. He has never known how he employed his evening, after the doorkeeper had invited him to leave. He remembers to have walked a great distance. Some citizens of Combronde met him on the road to this village. He went to an inn where he wrote some letters, addressed, one to his father, one to his mother and a third to his colonel, and a last to Maxime de Plane. At nine o’clock he knocked at the door of the Hôtel du Commerce, where his father had told him the mother of Greslon had gone, and he asked the _concierge_ if M. Greslon was there. This fellow had heard of the dramatic scene. He guessed from the uniform of the captain who he was, and had the good sense to reply that M. Robert Greslon had not appeared. Unfortunately he thought it right to inform the young man, who was at that moment with his mother and M. Adrien Sixte. This last could not resist the supplications of the widow who, having met him in the corridor of the hotel, had conjured him to aid her in comforting her son.

“Monsieur,” said the _concierge_ to Robert after having asked permission to speak to him apart, “be careful, M. de Jussat is looking for you.”

“Where is he?” asked Greslon feverishly.

“He cannot have left the street,” responded the _concierge_, “but I told him that you were not here.”

“You did wrong,” replied Greslon. And taking his hat, he rushed toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?” implored his mother. The young man did not answer. Perhaps he did not even hear this cry, he was in such haste to go down the stairs. The idea that Count André believed him cowardly enough to hide himself maddened him. He had not long to look for his enemy. The count was on the opposite side of the street, watching the door. Robert saw him and walked straight up to him.

“You have something to say to me, monsieur?” he asked proudly.

“Yes,” said the count.

“I am at your service,” continued Greslon, “for whatever reparation that it may please you to exact. I will not leave Riom, I give you my word.”

“No, monsieur,” responded André de Jussat, “one does not fight with such men as you, one executes them.”

He drew his revolver from his pocket, and as the other, instead of fleeing, remained standing before him and seemed to say: “I dare you,” he lodged a bullet in his head. The noise of the report, and a cry of agony were heard at the same time at the hotel, and when they ran to see the cause, they found Count André standing against the wall, who, throwing down his pistol and, folding his arms said simply, pointing to the body of his sister’s lover at his feet:

“I have executed justice.”

And he allowed himself to be arrested without any resistance.

During the night which followed this tragic scene, the admirers of the “Psychology of God” of the “Theory of the Passions” and of the “Anatomy of the Will,” would have been astonished if they could have seen what was passing in room No. 3 of the Hôtel du Commerce, and in the mind of their implacable and powerful master. At the foot of the bed on which lay the dead man, with his brow bandaged, knelt the mother of Robert Greslon.

The great negator, seated on a chair, looked at this woman praying, and at the dead man who had been his disciple, sleeping the sleep which Charlotte de Jussat was also sleeping; and, for the first time, feeling his mind powerless to sustain him, this analyst, almost inhuman by force of logic, bowed before the impenetrable mystery of destiny. The words of the only prayer he remembered: “Our Father who art in heaven,” came to his mind. Surely he did not pronounce them. Perhaps he never will pronounce them. But if he exist, then the only father toward whom they could turn in their hours of distress and in whom was their only resource, was their heavenly father. And voices of prayer the most touching went up. And if this heavenly father did only exist, should we have this hunger and not insist for him in such hours as this? “Thou wouldst not sent me if thou hadst not found me!” At that very moment, thanks to the lucidity of mind which accompanies the scholar into all crises, Adrien Sixte recalled this admirable sentence of Pascal in his “Mystère de Jésus”, and when the mother arose from her knees the philosopher was also weeping.

THE END.