"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.




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