Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/354

 he carried through his plans, and the unconquerable difficulty of tracing out the murderer. But let me proceed. What I have yet to add, will fully explain to you the mysteries in which this most unprincipled, and yet most unhappy of all mortals was involved."

"The situation in which I now found myself with Cardillac may be easily imagined. The decisive step was taken, and I could not retreat. Sometimes my gloomy imagination represented to me that I had become the assistant and accomplice of an assassin; only in my love for Madelon, I forgot at intervals the affliction that otherwise preyed on my spirits, and only in her presence was I able to conceal my feelings of abhorrence towards her father. If I joined with the old man in his professional labors, I could not bear to look on him, or to answer when he spoke to me, such was the indignation I felt against the vile hypocrite, who seemed to fulfil all the duties of an affectionate parent and good citizen, while the night veiled in its darkness his unparalleled iniquity. Madelon, pious, confiding, and innocent as an angel, looked up to him with unchanging love and affection! The thought often struck like a dagger to my heart, that if justice one day overtook the now masked and concealed assassin, this poor girl, so long deceived by his fiend-like cunning, would fall a victim to the most incurable despondency.

"Such apprehensions altogether prevented me from acting as I should otherwise have done, and even though I had been already condemned to the scaffold, I should have remained silent. Meanwhile I gained many hints from the conversation of the marechaussee, yet the motive of Cardillac's crimes, and the manner in which he carried them through, remained to me a complete riddle. The explanation, however, followed soon after.

"One day Cardillac, who generally excited my abhorrence