Then, when a streak of light crept across the ceiling and announced the coming of day, he felt himself released, alone at last, alone in his room; and he lay down to sleep. He slept now for some hours, a restless fevered sleep, and often in his dreams he again saw the frightful vision of his waking nights.
Afterwards, when he came downstairs for lunch, he felt bowed down like a man who has been enduring the most exhausting labour; he ate little, perpetually haunted by dread of what he would see when night fell again.
At the same time he knew quite well that it was not an apparition, that the dead do not return, and that it was his sick mind, obsessed by one thought and by one unforgettable memory, and only his mind that evoked the dead child itself had raised from the dead, had summoned and had set before his eyes, branded as they were with an ineffaceable sight. But he knew too that he would not be made whole again, that he would never escape from the frightful lash of this memory, and he determined to die rather than endure these torments any longer.
He began to seek a means of killing himself. He wanted to find some simple natural way that would not rouse suspicions of a suicide. For he valued his reputation and the name handed down by his ancestors, and if people found the manner of his death suspicious they would certainly recall the inexplicable crime, and the undiscovered murderer, and it would not be long before they were accusing him of the vile deed.
A strange thought came into his head: he would have himself crushed to death by the tree at whose foot he had killed little Roque. So he decided to have his copse cut down, and to stage an accident. But the beech refused to break his back.
Back in his house, he had endured a frightful despair; he had seized his revolver and then he had been afraid to fire.
Dinnertime came, he had eaten, and then come upstairs again. And he did not know what he was going to do. After escaping once, he felt a coward now. In that moment by the beech, he was ready, strengthened, resolute, master of his courage and his determination; now he was weak and as afraid of death as of the dead.
He stammered: “I daren’t do it now, I daren’t do it now,” and he looked with equal horror at the weapon on the table and the curtain that hid his window. He thought too that some frightful thing would have happened as soon as life had left him. Some thing? What? Perhaps he would have met her again? She was spying on him, waiting for him, calling him, and it was because she wanted to trap him now, to take him in the snare of her revenge and force him to die that she showed herself to him like this every evening.
He began to cry like a child, repeating: “I daren’t do it now, I daren’t do it now.” Then he fell on his knees, stammering: “My God, my God!” He did not believe in God, for all that. And now he dared neither look at the window where he knew the apparition crouched, nor at the table on which his revolver lay gleaming.
He stood up again and said aloud: “This can’t go on, I must put an end to it.” A shudder of fear ran through his limbs at the sound of his voice in the silent room; but he decided to make no more resolutions, knowing too well that the fingers of his hand would always refuse to press the trigger of the weapon, and so he took refuge with his head under the bedclothes, and considered what to do.
He must find some expedient that would compel him to die, he must plan a trick against himself that would remove every possibility of further hesitation, delay, or regret. He envied the condemned led to the scaffold in a guard of soldiers. Oh, if he could but implore someone to shoot him, if he could but confess his state of mind, confess his crime to some friend who would never divulge it, and take at his hands the boon of death! But from what man could he ask so terrible a service? What man? He sought among all the men he knew. The doctor? No. Wouldn’t he be sure to tell the whole story later? And all at once a fantastic thought flashed across his mind. He would write to the examining magistrate, who was his intimate friend, and denounce himself. He would tell him everything in the letter, the crime, the tortures he endured, his resolution to die, his hesitation, and the means he was employing to stimulate his weakening courage. He would beg him in the name of their old friendship to destroy the letter as soon as the news was brought him that the guilty man had done justice on himself. Renardet could count on the magistrate, he knew him steadfast, discreet, absolutely incapable of a careless speech. He was one of those men whose inflexible conscience is controlled and directed and ordered by pure reason.
The plan had hardly taken shape in his mind when a fantastic joy flooded his heart. Now he was at peace. He would write his letter, leisurely, then when day broke he would put it in the box nailed to the wall of his farm, then he would climb to the top of his tower so that he could see the postman come, and when that blue-bloused man had gone, he
