Page:Manzoni - The Betrothed, 1834.djvu/275

 deeds; and from an examination of the motives which had led him to commit a single deed, he was led to the retrospection of his whole life.

In looking back from year to year, from enterprise to enterprise, from crime to crime, from blood to blood, each one of his actions appeared abstracted from the feelings which had induced their perpetration, and therefore exposed in all their horrible deformity, but which those feelings had hitherto veiled from his view. They were all his own, he was responsible for all; they comprised his life; the horror of this thought filled him with despair; he grasped his pistol, and raised it to his head—but at the moment in which he would have terminated his miserable existence, his thoughts rushed onwards to the time that must continue to flow on after his end. He thought of his disfigured corpse, without sense or motion, in the power of the vilest men; the astonishment and confusion which would take place in the castle, the conversation it would excite in the neighbourhood and afar off, and, more than all, the rejoicing of his enemies. The darkness and silence of the night inspired him with other apprehensions still; it appeared to him that he would not have hesitated to perform the deed in open day, in the presence of others. "And, after all, what was it? but a moment, and all would be over." And now another thought rose to his mind: "If that other life, of which they tell, is an invention of priests, is a mere fabrication, why should I die? Of what consequence is all that I have done? It is a trifle—but if there should be another life!"

At such a doubt, he was filled with deeper despair, a despair from which death appeared no refuge. The pistol dropped from his grasp—both hands were applied to his aching head—and he trembled in every limb. Suddenly the words he had heard a few hours before came to his memory, "God pardons so many deeds for one act of mercy." They did not come to him clothed in the humble tone of supplication, with which he had heard them pronounced, but in one of authority which offered some gleam of hope. It was a moment of relief: he brought to mind the figure of Lucy, when she uttered them; and he regarded her, not