An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; that is the primitive law, and all the rest is a lie."Evening had come while this strife was raging in my soul.I was laboring under excitement which contrasted strangely with the calmness I had felt a few hours previously, when ascending the stairs in the Grand Hotel.The situation also had undergone a change; then I was preparing for a struggle, a kind of duel; I was about to confront a man whom I had to conquer, to attack him face to face without any treachery, and I had not flinched.It was the mean hypocrisy of clandestine murder that had made me shrink from the idea of killing my stepfather, by luring him into a snare.Ihad controlled this trembling the first time; but I was afraid of its coming again, and that I should have a sleepless night, and be unfit to act next day with the cool calmness I desired.
I felt that I could not bear suspense; on the morrow I must act.
The plan on which I should decide, be it what it might, must be executed within the twenty-four hours.
The best means of calming my nerves was by making a beginning now, at once; by doing something beforehand to guard against suspicion.
I determined upon letting myself be seen by persons who could bear witness, if necessary, that they had seen me, careless, easy, almost gay.I dressed and went out, intending to dine at a place where I was known, and to pass the most of the night at the club.
When I was in the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, crowded with carriages and people on foot--the May evening was delicious--I shared the physical sensation of the joy of living, which was abroad in the air.The sky quivered with the innumerable throbs of the stars, and the young leaves shook at the touch of a slow and gentle breeze.Garlands of light illumined the various pleasure-gardens.
I passed in front of a restaurant where the tables extended to the edge of the footpath, and young men and women were finishing their dinner gaily.
The contrast between the spring-festival aspect of Paris and the tragedy of my own destiny came home to me too strongly.What had Idone to Fate to deserve that I should be the one only person, amid all this crowd, condemned to such an experience? Why had my path been crossed by a man capable of pushing passion to the point of crime, in a society in which passion is ordinarily so mild, so harmless, and so lukewarm? Probably there did not exist in all the "good" society of Paris four persons with daring enough to conceive such a plan as that which Jacques Termonde had executed with such cool deliberation under the influence of his passion.And this villain, who could love so intensely, was my stepfather!
Once more the breath of fatality, which had already thrilled me with a kind of mysterious horror, passed over me, and I felt that Icould no longer bear the sight of the human face.Turning my back upon the lit-up, noisy quarter of the Champs Elysees, I walked on towards the Arc de Triomphe.Without thinking about it I took the road to the Bois, bore to the right to avoid the vehicles, and turned into one of the loneliest paths.Had I unconsciously obeyed one of those almost animal impulses of memory, which bring us back to ways that we have already trodden? By the soft, bluish light of the spring moon I recognized the place where I had walked with my stepfather in the winter, on the occasion of our first drive to the Bois.It was on that day I obliged him to look the portrait of his victim in the face, on that day he came to me on the pretext of asking for the Review which my mother had lent me.In my thoughts I beheld him, as he then was, and recalled the strange pity which had stirred my heart at the sight of him, so sad, broken-down, and, so to speak, conquered.He stood before me, in the light of that remembrance, as living and real as if he had been there, close beside me, and the acute sensation of his existence made me feel at the same time all the signification of those fearful and mysterious words: to kill.To kill? I was going to kill him, in a few hours it might be, at the latest in a few days.
I heard voices, and I withdrew into the shade.Two forms passed me, a young man and a girl, lovers, who did not see me.The moonlight fell upon them, as they went on their way, hand in hand.
I burst into tears, and wept long, unrestrainedly; for I too was young; in my heart there was a flood of pent-up tenderness, and here I was, on this perfumed, moonlit, starlit night, crouching in a dark corner, meditating murder!
No, not murder, an execution.Has my stepfather deserved death?
