Can Such Things Be? eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 221 pages of information about Can Such Things Be?.

Can Such Things Be? eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 221 pages of information about Can Such Things Be?.

The next day I entered a large town which I shall not name.  Nor shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end—­a life of wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime.  Let me see if I can reduce it to narrative.

I seem once to have lived near a great city, a prosperous planter, married to a woman whom I loved and distrusted.  We had, it sometimes seems, one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise.  He is at all times a vague figure, never clearly drawn, frequently altogether out of the picture.

One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife’s fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who has acquaintance with the literature of fact and fiction.  I went to the city, telling my wife that I should be absent until the following afternoon.  But I returned before daybreak and went to the rear of the house, purposing to enter by a door with which I had secretly so tampered that it would seem to lock, yet not actually fasten.  As I approached it, I heard it gently open and close, and saw a man steal away into the darkness.  With murder in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had vanished without even the bad luck of identification.  Sometimes now I cannot even persuade myself that it was a human being.

Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial with all the elemental passions of insulted manhood, I entered the house and sprang up the stairs to the door of my wife’s chamber.  It was closed, but having tampered with its lock also, I easily entered and despite the black darkness soon stood by the side of her bed.  My groping hands told me that although disarranged it was unoccupied.

“She is below,” I thought, “and terrified by my entrance has evaded me in the darkness of the hall.”

With the purpose of seeking her I turned to leave the room, but took a wrong direction—­the right one!  My foot struck her, cowering in a corner of the room.  Instantly my hands were at her throat, stifling a shriek, my knees were upon her struggling body; and there in the darkness, without a word of accusation or reproach, I strangled her till she died!

There ends the dream.  I have related it in the past tense, but the present would be the fitter form, for again and again the somber tragedy reenacts itself in my consciousness—­over and over I lay the plan, I suffer the confirmation, I redress the wrong.  Then all is blank; and afterward the rains beat against the grimy window-panes, or the snows fall upon my scant attire, the wheels rattle in the squalid streets where my life lies in poverty and mean employment.  If there is ever sunshine I do not recall it; if there are birds they do not sing.

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Can Such Things Be? from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.