"The love of Rosa is worth dying for, if you can win it. (I
could not even win it.) You will have to choose between Love
and Life. I do not counsel you either way. But I urge you to
choose. I urge you either to defy your foe utterly and to the
death, or to submit before submission is useless.
"Alresca."
I sat staring at the paper long after I had finished reading it,
thinking about poor Alresca. There was a date to it, and this date
showed that it was written a few days before his mysterious disease
took a turn for the better.
The communication accordingly needs some explanation. It seems to me
that Alresca was mistaken. His foe was not so implacable as Alresca
imagined. Alresca having surrendered in the struggle between them, the
ghost of Lord Clarenceux hesitated, and then ultimately withdrew its
hateful influence, and Alresca recovered. Then Rosa came again into
his existence that evening at Bruges. Alresca, scornful of
consequences, let his passion burst once more into flame, and the
ghost instantly, in a flash of anger, worked its retribution.
Day came, and during the whole of that day I pondered upon a phrase in
Alresca's letter, "You will have to choose between love and life." But
I could not choose. Love is the greatest thing in life; one may,
however, question whether it should be counted greater than life
itself. I tried to argue the question calmly, dispassionately. As if
such questions may be argued! I could not give up my love; I could not
give up my life; that was how all my calm, dispassionate arguments
ended. At one moment I was repeating, "The love of Rosa is worth dying
for;" at the next I was busy with the high and dear ambitions of which
I had so often dreamed. Were these to be sacrificed? Moreover, what
use would Rosa's love be to me when I was dead? And what use would my
life be to me without my love for her?
A hundred times I tried to laugh, and said to myself that I was the
victim of fancy, that I should see nothing further of this prodigious
apparition; that, in short, my brain had been overtaxed by recent
events, and I had suffered from delusions. Vain and conventional
self-deceptions! At the bottom of my soul lay always the secret and
profound conviction that I was doomed, cursed, caught in the toils of
a relentless foe who was armed with all the strange terrors of the
unknown; a foe whose onslaughts it was absolutely impossible for me to
parry.
As the hours passed a yearning to see Rosa, to be near her, came upon
me. I fought against it, fearing I know not what as the immediate
consequence. I wished to temporize, or, at any rate, to decide upon a
definite course of conduct before I saw her again. But towards evening
I felt that I should yield to the impulse to behold her. I said to
myself, as though I needed some excuse, that she would have a great
deal of trouble with the arrangements for Sir Cyril's funeral, and
that I ought to offer my assistance; that, indeed, I ought to have
offered my assistance early in the day.