VI. SHADOWS OF EVENTS

[116] We all feel, I suppose, the pathos of that mythic situation in
Homer, where the Greeks at the last throb of battle around the body
of Patroclus find the horror of supernatural darkness added to their
other foes; feel it through some touch of truth to our own experience
how the malignancy of the forces against us may be doubled by their
uncertainty and the resultant confusion of one's own mind--blindfold
night there too, at the moment when daylight and self-possession are
indispensable.

In that old dream-land of the Iliad such darkness is the work of a
propitiable deity, and withdrawn at its pleasure; in life, it often
persists obstinately. It was so with the agents on the terrible Eve
of St. Bartholomew, 1572, when a man's foes were those of his own
household. An ambiguity of motive and influence, a confusion of
spirit amounting, as we approach the centre of action, to physical
madness, encompasses [117] those who are formally responsible for
things; and the mist around that great crime, or great "accident," in
which the gala weather of Gaston's coming to Paris broke up, leaving
a sullenness behind it to remain for a generation, has never been
penetrated. The doubt with which Charles the Ninth would seem to
have left the world, doubt as to his own complicity therein, as well
as to the precise nature, the course and scope, of the event itself,
is still unresolved. So it was with Gaston also. The incident in
his life which opened for him the profoundest sources of regret and
pity, shaped as it was in a measure by those greater historic
movements, owed its tragic significance there to an unfriendly shadow