That voice pursued him into the darkness of his chilly room,--haunted him in the silence of his lodging. And then began within the man that ghostly struggle between courage and despair, between patient reason and mad revolt, between weakness and force, between darkness and light, which all sensitive and generous natures must wage in their own souls at least once--perhaps many times--in their lives. Memory, in such moments, plays like an electric storm;--all involuntarily he found himself reviewing his life.
Incidents long forgotten came back with singular vividness: he saw the Past as he had not seen it while it was the Present;--remembrances of home, recollections of infancy, recurred to him with terrible intensity,--the artless pleasures and the trifling griefs, the little hurts and the tender pettings, the hopes and the anxieties of those who loved him, the smiles and tears of slaves ... And his first Creole pony, a present from his father the day after he had proved himself able to recite his prayers correctly in French, without one mispronunciation--without saying crasse for grace,--and yellow Michel, who taught him to swim and to fish and to paddle a pirogue;--and the bayou, with its wonder-world of turtles and birds and creeping things;--and his German tutor, who could not pronounce the j;--and the songs of the cane-fields,--strangely pleasing, full of quaverings and long plaintive notes, like the call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays blanc! ... Afterward Camaniere had leased the place;--everything must have been changed; even the songs could not be the same. Tou', tou' pays blare!--Danie qui commande ...
And then Paris; and the university, with its wild under-life,--some debts, some follies; and the frequent fond letters from home to which he might have replied so much oftener;--Paris, where talent is mediocrity; Paris, with its thunders and its splendors and its seething of passion;--Paris, supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses of art, its frenzied striving to express the Inexpressible, its spasmodic strainings to clutch the Unattainable, its soarings of soul-fire to the heaven of the Impossible ...
What a rejoicing there was at his return!--how radiant and level the long Road of the Future seemed to open before him!
--everywhere friends, prospects, felicitations. Then his first serious love;--and the night of the ball at St. Martinsville, --the vision of light! Gracile as a palm, and robed at once so simply, so exquisitely in white, she had seemed to him the supreme realization of all possible dreams of beauty ... And his passionate jealousy; and the slap from Laroussel; and the humiliating two-minute duel with rapiers in which he learned that he had found his master. The scar was deep. Why had not Laroussel killed him then? ... Not evil-hearted, Laroussel, --they used to salute each other afterward when they met; and Laroussel's smile was kindly. Why had he refrained from returning it? Where was Laroussel now?
For the death of his generous father, who had sacrificed so much to reform him; for the death, only a short while after, of his all-forgiving mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him with her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress.
She had given him Zouzoune, the darling link between their lives,--Zouzoune, who waited each evening with black Eglantine at the gate to watch for his coming, and to cry through all the house like a bird, "Papa, lape vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ...
And once that she had made him very angry by upsetting the ink over a mass of business papers, and he had slapped her (could he ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through her sobs of astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!" (Thou lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...
A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it seemed to him that something within must burst, must break. He flung himself down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to stifle his outcry, to smother the sounds of his despair. What crime had he ever done, oh God! that he should be made to suffer thus?--was it for this he had been permitted to live? had been rescued from the sea and carried round all the world unscathed?
Why should he live to remember, to suffer, to agonize? Was not Ramirez wiser?
How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it was done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man.
For the first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and of human suffering had been revealed to him,--something of that larger knowledge without which the sense of duty can never be fully acquired, nor the understanding of unselfish goodness, nor the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a coward; he is an egotist.
A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed to the window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.
Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the vistas,--frost-haze; and in some queer way the mist had momentarily caught and held the very color of the sky. An azure fog! Through it the quaint and checkered street--as yet but half illumined by the sun,--took tones of impossible color; the view paled away through faint bluish tints into transparent purples;--all the shadows were indigo. How sweet the morning!--how well life seemed worth living! Because the sun had shown his face through a fairy veil of frost! ...
Who was the ancient thinker?--was it Hermes?--who said:--"The Sun is Laughter; for 'tis He who maketh joyous the thoughts of men, and gladdeneth the infinite world." ...
The Shadow of the Tide.
