第111章

This dream of the death of him, who forms the sole obstacle to his happiness, troubles the man's head, it recurs once, twice, many times, and he turns the fatal idea over and over again in his brain until he becomes used to it.He arrives at the "If I dared," which is the starting point of the blackest villainies.The idea takes a precise form; he conceives that he might have the man whom he now hates, and by whom he feels that he is hated, killed.Has he not, far away, a wretch of a brother, whose actual existence, to say nothing of his present abode, is absolutely unknown? What an admirable instrument of murder he should find in this infamous, depraved, and needy brother, whom he holds at his beck and call by the aid in money that he sends him! And the temptation grows and grows.An hour comes when it is stronger than all besides, and the man, resolved to play this desperate game, summons his brother to Paris.How? By one or two letters in which he excites the rascal's hopes of a large sum of money to be gained, at the same time that he imposes the condition of absolute secrecy as to his voyage.The other accepts; he is a social failure, a bankrupt in life, he has neither relations nor ties, he has been leading an anonymous and haphazard existence for years.The two brothers are face to face.Up to that point all is logical, all is in conformity with the possible stages of a project of this order.

I arrived at the execution of it; and I continued to reason in the same way, impersonally.The rich brother proposes the blood-bargain to the poor brother.He offers him money; a hundred thousand francs, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand.

From what motive should the scoundrel hesitate to accept the offer?

Moral ideas? What is the morality of a rake who has gone from libertinism to theft? Under the influence of my vengeful thoughts I had read the criminal news of the day in the journals, and the reports of criminal trials, too assiduously for years past, not to know how a man becomes a murderer.How many cases of stabbing, shooting, and poisoning have there not been, in which the gain was entirely uncertain, and the conditions of danger extreme, merely to enable the perpetrators to go, presently, and expend the murder-money in some low haunt of depravity?

Fear of the scaffold? Then nobody would kill.Besides, debauchees, whether they stop short at vice or roll down the descent into crime, have no foresight of the future.Present sensation is too strong for them; its image abolishes all other images, and absorbs all the vital forces of the temperament and the soul.An old dying mother, children perishing of hunger, a despairing wife; have these pictures of their deeds ever arrested drunkards, gamblers, or profligates? No more have the tragic phantoms of the tribunal, the prison, and the guillotine, when, thirsting for gold, they kill to procure it.The scaffold is far off, the brothel is at the street corner, and the being sunk in vice kills a man, just as a butcher would kill a beast, that he may go thither, or to the tavern, or to the low gaming-house, with a pocket full of money.This is the daily mode of procedure in crime.

Why should not the desire of a more elevated kind of debauch possess the same wicked attraction for men who are indeed more refined, but are quite as incapable of moral goodness as the rascally frequenters of the lowest dens of iniquity?

Ah! the thought that my father's blood might have paid for suppers in a New York night-house was too cruel and unendurable.I lost courage to pursue my cold, calm, reasonable deductions, a kind of hallucination came upon me--a mental picture of the hideous scene--and I felt my reason reel.With a great effort I turned to the portrait of my father, gazed at it long, and spoke to him as if he could have heard me, aloud, in abject entreaty."Help me, help me!"And then, I once more became strong enough to resume the dreadful hypothesis, and to criticise it point by point.Against it was its utter unlikelihood; it resembled nothing but the nightmare of a diseased imagination.A brother who employs his brother as the assassin of a man whose wife he wants to marry! Still, although the conception of such a devilish plot belonged to the domain of the wildest fantasies, I said to myself: "This may be so, but in the way of crime, there is no such thing as unlikelihood.The assassin ceases to move in the habitual grooves of social life by the mere fact that he makes up his mind to murder." And then a score of examples of crimes committed under circumstances as strange and exceptional as those whose greater or less probability I was then discussing with myself recurred to my memory.

One objection arose at once.Admitting this complicated crime to be possible only, how came I to be the first to form a suspicion of it? Why had not the keen, subtle, experienced old magistrate, M.

Massol, looked in that direction for an explanation of the mystery in whose presence he confessed himself powerless? The answer came ready.M.Massol did not think of it, that was all.The important thing is to know, not whether the Judge of Instruction suspected the fact, or did not suspect it; but whether the fact itself is, or is not, real.

Again, what indications had reached M.Massol to put him on this scent? If he had thoroughly studied my father's home and his domestic life, he had acquired the certainty that my mother was a faithful wife and a good woman.He had witnessed her sincere grief, and he had not seen, as I had, letters written by my father in which he acknowledged his jealousy, and revealed the passion of his false friend.

But, even supposing the judge had from the first suspected the villainy of my future stepfather, the discovery of his accomplices would have been the first thing to be done, since, in any case, the presence of M.Termonde in our house at the time of the murder was an ascertained fact.