Prosper rose slowly, making no noise.Certain of having waked no one, he dressed himself and went into the public room.There, with that fatal intelligence a man suddenly finds on some occasions within him, with that power of tact and will which is never lacking to prisoners or to criminals in whatever they undertake, he unscrewed the iron bars, slipped them from their places without the slightest noise, placed them against the wall, and opened the shutters, leaning heavily upon their hinges to keep them from creaking.The moon was shedding its pale pure light upon the scene, and he was thus enabled to faintly see into the room where Wilhelm and Wahlenfer were sleeping.There, he told me, he stood still for a moment.The throbbing of his heart was so strong, so deep, so sonorous, that he was terrified; he feared he could not act with coolness; his hands trembled; the soles of his feet seem planted on red-hot coal; but the execution of his plan was accompanied by such apparent good luck that he fancied he saw a species of 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.