Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/371

Rh begun at the Hotel Saint-Antoine, and tomorrow there will not be one person in the whole of Antwerp, with the exception of my father and yourself, who is not persuaded of my relations with that Chilian! Ah! Laurent! To think that Bergmans himself will believe my traducers! And it is from my memory of him that I have drawn the strength to remain virtuous!

"It was he whom I loved; it was he whom I should have married! I discouraged him by my vanity, and when he had gone away, my conceit still got the better of my love, and I consented to the most disastrous of marriages. To irritate the one whom I loved, I made myself eternally unhappy!"

In vain had Paridael tried to wear out his passion, to make it more and more absurd by multiplying, with deliberate intention, the obstacles and barriers that separated him from his cousin; in vain had he descended so low that he could never raise himself up to her again.

He thought himself cured, but he had only brought his trouble to the boiling point once more. We know how, a few hours before, his animosity had been aroused against her.

The accidents, the intimacies, the promiscuities of his vagabond life, his commerce with the rebellious and the refractory fellows who were not ashamed of their nature, who were initiated in every form of turpitude, had stripped him, also, of all prejudice, had made him more daring and more expeditious.

While she was denouncing Béjard's brutalities to him, Paridael was strangely torn; one part of his being sympathized, from the depths of his soul, with so great a misfortune, and was revolted by so monstrous