I
touched her as though to assure myself that it was not a dream. My face,
as I saw it in the glass, regarded me with astonishment. Who was that
creature who appeared before me bearing my features? Who was that
pitiless man who blasphemed with my mouth and tortured with my hands? Was
it he whom my mother called Octave? Was it he who, at fifteen, leaning
over the crystal waters of a fountain, had a heart not less pure than
they? I closed my eyes and thought of my childhood days. As a ray of
light pierces a cloud, a gleam from the past pierced my heart.
"No," I mused, "I did not do that. These things are but an absurd dream."
I recalled the time when I was ignorant of life, when I was taking my
first steps in experience. I remembered an old beggar who used to sit on
a stone bench before the farm gate, to whom I was sometimes sent with the
remains of our morning meal. Holding out his feeble, wrinkled hands he
would bless me as he smiled upon me. I felt the morning wind blowing on
my brow and a freshness as of the rose descending from heaven into my
soul. Then I opened my eyes and, by the light of the lamp, saw the
reality before me.
"And you do not believe yourself guilty?" I demanded with horror. "O
novice of yesterday, how corrupt to-day! Because you weep, you fondly
imagine yourself innocent? What you consider the evidence of your
conscience is only remorse; and what murderer does not experience it? If
your virtue cries out, is it not because it feels the approach of death?
O wretch! those far off voices that you hear groaning in your heart, do
you think they are sobs? They are, perhaps, only the cry of the sea-mew,
that funereal bird of the tempest, whose presence portends shipwreck.
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