The Sacrificial Altar

It was quite natural that this amiable gentleman should not choose to believe he had blindly nourished a viper. And not, perhaps, motivated by pride and affection alone. He was kind and charitable and a keen man of business, but pleasure was his god. No man had extracted more juice from the sweet apple of life than he, tasted less of its ashes. It was quite in keeping that he should refuse to have his pleasant pastures sown with horrors a second time.

M. Dupont rose. “I shall send you a sleeping-powder from the chemist’s. To-morrow you will take the eleven-thirty train for Santa Barbara, spend a month in my mother’s charming home at Montecito, and forget that you are a poor genius subject to plots at the wrong time. That, or a sanatorium. Do you comprehend, my friend?”

Louis turned away with a hopeless gesture. “Oh, very well. Have your own way.”

“And you will be ready when I call for you at ten minutes past eleven?”

“If I am awake.”

“I shall go out the back way and tell Seraphine to awaken you. Now I must leave you, as I have kept a very charming person waiting too long already.”

“Good night, Monsieur. I can tell Seraphine myself.”

“Very well. I trust you to do so.” Louis accompanied his guest with extreme courtesy to the door. On the threshold M. Cesar paused and looked back into the dark house with a shudder. “Ciel, but it is a tomb! I cannot take you with me this evening, but you can go to the club and sleep there.”

“Many thanks, Monsieur, but this house is not a tomb to me. It is my home.”

“True. A thousand pardons. Au revoir, mon fils.”

It was two o’clock in the morning when Louis laid down his pen. He had confessed in minute detail to the killing of Berthe Dupont, entering into an elaborate and brilliant analysis of the primary causes, the successive phases of a more extended psychological process than he had realized at the time, the final impulse, and, as far as possible, the pathological condition of his brain during the act and the minor acts that followed. He added that while he found it impossible to feel remorse in the common sense, as through this abominable crime he had achieved the passionate ambition and desire of his life and a period of indescribable joy, he felt that as a member of society, however indifferent, it was now his duty to make atonement. As M. Dupont had convinced him that his story would not be believed, that, in fact, the authorities would incarcerate him in a lunatic asylum if he persisted in declaring his guilt, he had determined to act for himself.

He made his confession, he further added, not to clear the name of the poor derelict who had paid the penalty for a crime of which he was innocent, but in the interest of science, which would welcome this voluntary revelation of creative psychology. He believed that other serious writers of fiction, those illustrious men who had written to him with a spontaneous sense of brotherhood, would understand and exonerate. He had cast his soul and his body on the altar of art, and no man had ever done more.