At the beginning of the summer, six months after my aunt's death, Iwas in exactly the same position with respect to my stepfather as on that already distant day when, maddened with suspicion by my father's letters, I entered his study, to play the part of the physician who examines a man's body, searching with his finger for the tender spot that is probably a symptom of a hidden abscess.
I was full of intuitions now, just as I was at the moment when he passed me in his carriage with his terrible face, but I did not grasp a single certainty.Would I have persisted in a struggle in which I felt beforehand that I must be beaten?
I cannot tell; for, when I no longer expected any solution to the problem set before me for my grief, a grief, too, that was both sterile and mortal, a day came on which I had a conversation with my mother so startling and appalling that to this hour my heart stands still when I think of it.I have spoken of dates; among them is the 25th of May, 1879.
My stepfather, who was on the eve of his departure for Vichy, had just had a severe attack of liver-complaint, the first since his illness after our terrible conversation in the month of January.Iknow that I counted for nothing--at least in any direct or positive way--in this acute revival of his malady.The fight between us, which went on without the utterance of a word on either side, and with no witnesses except ourselves, had not been marked by any fresh episode; I therefore attributed this complication to the natural development of the disease under which he labored.
I can exactly recall what I was thinking of on the 25th of May, at five o'clock in the evening, as I walked up the stairs in the hotel on the Boulevard de Latour-Marbourg.I hoped to learn that my stepfather was better, because I had been witnessing my mother's distress for a whole week, and also--I must tell all--because to know he was going to the watering-place was a great relief to me, on account of the separation it would bring about.I was so tired of my unprofitable pain! My wretched nerves were in such a state of tension that the slightest disagreeable impression became a torment.I could not sleep without the aid of narcotics, and such sleep as these procured was full of cruel dreams in which I walked by my father's side, while knowing and feeling that he was dead.