The Red Inn | Page 8

predestination in this favor bestowed upon him by fate. He opened the

window, returned to the bedroom, took his case of instruments, and
selected the one most suitable to accomplish the crime.
"When I stood by the bed," he said to me, "I commended myself
mechanically to God."
At the moment when he raised his arm collecting all his strength, he
heard a voice as it were within him; he thought he saw a light. He flung
the instrument on his own bed and fled into the next room, and stood
before the window. There, he conceived the utmost horror of himself.
Feeling his virtue weak, fearing still to succumb to the spell that was
upon him he sprang out upon the road and walked along the bank of the
Rhine, pacing up and down like a sentinel before the inn. Sometimes he
went as far as Andernach in his hurried tramp; often his feet led him up
the slope he had descended on his way to the inn; and sometimes he
lost sight of the inn and the window he had left open behind him. His
object, he said, was to weary himself and so find sleep.
But, as he walked beneath the cloudless skies, beholding the stars,
affected perhaps by the purer air of night and the melancholy lapping of
the water, he fell into a reverie which brought him back by degrees to
sane moral thoughts. Reason at last dispersed completely his
momentary frenzy. The teachings of his education, its religious
precepts, but above all, so he told me, the remembrance of his simple
life beneath the parental roof drove out his wicked thoughts. When he
returned to the inn after a long meditation to which he abandoned
himself on the bank of the Rhine, resting his elbow on a rock, he could,
he said to me, not have slept, but have watched untempted beside
millions of gold. At the moment when his virtue rose proudly and
vigorously from the struggle, he knelt down, with a feeling of ecstasy
and happiness, and thanked God. He felt happy, light-hearted, content,
as on the day of his first communion, when he thought himself worthy
of the angels because he had passed one day without sinning in thought,
or word, or deed.
He returned to the inn and closed the window without fearing to make a
noise, and went to bed at once. His moral and physical lassitude was
certain to bring him sleep. In a very short time after laying his head on

his mattress, he fell into that first fantastic somnolence which precedes
the deepest sleep. The senses then grew numb, and life is abolished by
degrees; thoughts are incomplete, and the last quivering of our
consciousness seems like a sort of reverie. "How heavy the air is!" he
thought; "I seem to be breathing a moist vapor." He explained this
vaguely to himself by the difference which must exist between the
atmosphere of the close room and the purer air by the river. But
presently he heard a periodical noise, something like that made by
drops of water falling from a robinet into a fountain. Obeying a feeling
of panic terror he was about to rise and call the innkeeper and waken
Wahlenfer and Wilhelm, but he suddenly remembered, alas! to his
great misfortune, the tall wooden clock; he fancied the sound was that
of the pendulum, and he fell asleep with that confused and indistinct
perception.
["Do you want some water, Monsieur Taillefer?" said the master of the
house, observing that the banker was mechanically pouring from an
empty decanter.
Monsieur Hermann continued his narrative after the slight pause
occasioned by this interruption.]
The next morning Prosper Magnan was awakened by a great noise. He
seemed to hear piercing cries, and he felt that violent shuddering of the
nerves which we suffer when on awaking we continue to feel a painful
impression begun in sleep. A physiological fact then takes place within
us, a start, to use the common expression, which has never been
sufficiently observed, though it contains very curious phenomena for
science. This terrible agony, produced, possibly, by the too sudden
reunion of our two natures separated during sleep, is usually transient;
but in the poor young surgeon's case it lasted, and even increased,
causing him suddenly the most awful horror as he beheld a pool of
blood between Wahlenfer's bed and his own mattress. The head of the
unfortunate German lay on the ground; his body was still on the bed;
all its blood had flowed out by the neck.
Seeing the eyes still open but fixed, seeing the blood which had stained
his sheets and even his hands, recognizing his own surgical instrument

beside him, Prosper Magnan fainted and fell into the pool of
Wahlenfer's