第93章

When she became more afraid for me, owing to the weakening of her brain by illness, and again and again enjoined upon me to beware of going out alone in the evening, was the vision of terror that came to her that of a hand which would fain strike me in the dark--the same hand that had struck my father? When she summoned up all her strength in her last moments, that she might destroy this correspondence, what was the clue which she supposed the letters would furnish? A terrific light shone upon me; what my aunt had perceived beyond the plain purport of the letters, I too perceived.

Ah! I dared to entertain this idea, yet now I am ashamed to write it down.But could I have escaped from the hard logic of the situation? If my aunt had handed over those letters to the Judge of Instruction in the matter, would he not have arrived at the same conclusion that I drew from them? No, I could not.A man who has no known enemies is assassinated; it is alleged that robbery is not the motive of the murder; his wife has a lover, and shortly after the death of her husband she marries that lover."But it is they--it is they who are guilty, they have killed the husband," the judge would say, and so would the first-comer.Why did not my aunt place those letters of my father's in the hands of justice? I understood the reason too well; she would not have me think of my mother what I was now in a fit of distraction thinking.

To conceive of this as merely possible was to be guilty of moral parricide, to commit the inexpiable sin against her who had borne me.I had always loved my mother so tenderly, so mournfully;never, never had I judged her.How many times--happening to be alone with her, and not knowing how to tell her what was weighing on my heart--how many times I had dreamed that the barrier between us would not for ever divide us.Some day I might, perhaps, become her only support, then she should see how precious she still was to me.My sufferings had not lessened my love for her; wretched as Iwas because she refused me a certain sort of affection, I did not condemn her for lavishing that affection upon another.As a matter of fact, until those fatal letters had done their work of disenchantment, of what was she guilty in my eyes? Of having married again? Of having chosen, being left a widow at thirty, to construct a new life for herself? What could be more legitimate?

Of having failed to understand the relations of the child who remained to her with the man whom she had chosen? What was more natural? She was more wife than mother, and besides, fanciful and fragile beings such as she was recoil from daily contests; they shrink from facing realities which would demand sustained courage and energy on their part.I had admitted all these explanations of my mother's attitude towards me, at first from instinct and afterwards on reflection.But now, the inexhaustible spring of indulgence for those who really hold our heart-strings was dried up in a moment, and a flood of odious, abominable suspicion overwhelmed me instead.

This sudden invasion of a horrible, torturing idea was not lasting.

I could not have borne it.Had it implanted itself in me then and there, definite, overwhelming in evidence, impossible of rejection, I must have taken a pistol and shot myself, to escape from agony such as I endured in the few minutes which followed my reading of the letters.But the tension was relaxed, I reflected, and my love for my mother began to strive against the horrible suggestion.To the onslaught of these execrable fancies I opposed the facts, in their certainty and completeness.I recalled the smallest particulars of that last occasion on which I saw my father and mother in each other's presence.It was at the table from which he rose to go forth and meet his murderer.But was not my mother cheerful and smiling that morning, as usual? Was not Jacques Termonde with us at breakfast, and did he not stay on, after my father had gone out, talking with my mother while I played with my toys in the room? It was at that very time, between one and two o'clock, that the mysterious Rochdale committed the crime.