Nor shall I recount further incidents of
the life that is now to end--a life of wandering,
always and everywhere haunted by an overmaster-
ing 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 fa-
miliar to everyone who has acquaintance with the
literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, tell-
ing my wife that I should be absent until the follow-
ing 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 mur-
der 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.
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