The Sacrificial Altar

But he did not want a wife. He wanted a grande passion. And he developed not a symptom. He felt not the least desire to impropriate her. Of course there was but one explanation. He was incapable of those profound and racking passions experienced once at least by ordinary men. He was nothing but an intellect with a rotten spot where fiction generated instead of those abnormal impulses that made of men so inflicted social outlaws. Otherwise, he should be quite mad over Berthe Dupont. Her beauty and charm were attracting attention far beyond the French colony. It was Berthe for him or no one. And alas! it was to be neither Berthe nor any one…

The moon flooded the sleeping city as the clocks struck one. Out of that vast composite below, its imagination liberated in dreams, a daring idea sprang, flew upward, darted into Louis’s relaxed brain. Its point wedged, quivered like an arrow. Louis himself quivered, but with fright. Of love and woman he had no personal knowledge save for his brief and shallow episode with Celeste, but of both he had the accumulated knowledge of the masters and the insight of genius.

It was night—a beautiful, romantic night. Berthe was beautiful, seductive at all times; what must she not be in the abandon of sleep? If he could steal to her chamber, gaze upon her unconscious loveliness, was it not categorical that he should be overwhelmed like any ordinary man? To defy her scorn for a few poignant moments, then rush forth repulsed and quite mad, to weep upon his floor until dawn! He stared at the boards of his ascetic chamber with fascinated eyes;…to writhe there, to beat the floor with his fists, to weep like a good Frenchman…And he knew that she had gone to bed early to-night, worn out with much gaiety.

He ran lightly down the stairs and let himself out of the house as silently, although his servants slept far in the rear. Even at the top of the hill not a policeman nor a chance pedestrian was in sight. San Francisco, he knew, had a roaring night life, but at this hour the domestic quarters were as silent as a necropolis.

Nor did he meet any one as he walked rapidly along Taylor Street past the dwellings of the rich to the old-fashioned row of houses perched high above the “cut.” As he was within a foot of the Dupont mansion he heard a taxicab in his wake, and darted within the sheltering walls of the covered stair. The cab came to a halt before the house opposite; a man with a black bag jumped out, and was immediately admitted.

A doctor, of course; but Louis, to his surprise, discovered that he was experiencing something like a thrill. If seen, he certainly would be handed over to the police. It was, therefore, a moment of real danger, and he almost laughed aloud as he discovered himself enjoying it. Many times he had described, with the most searching analysis, that sensation of fear during moments of imminent detection—even that subtle thrill along the nerves—but he was in search of an emotion that should shake his passions loose, and he ran lightly up the stairs, dismissing even the agreeable idea that he was also to experience the sensation of being his own housebreaker, so to speak. When he reached the upper terrace he took off his shoes and carried them to a little pagoda behind the house; it was possible that he would have to make a hasty exit by way of Jones Street. Before leaving his shelter he looked out warily; but the neighboring houses were black, and behind the windows of the Dupont library was a row of tall eucalyptus-trees planted as a windbreak. It was by one of the library windows that Louis purposed to enter, for he knew that its catch was broken; Jean-Marie’s memory was old and intermittent.