I should not wonder if Madame believed her husband guilty.
That is really comical, and she ought to know him better.
She has behaved very queerly ever since the news.
She has ways of looking at Monsieur that are not natural.
I have noticed that during meals, whenever the bell rings, she gives a little start.
After breakfast to-day, as Monsieur manifested an intention of going out, she prevented him.
"Really, you may as well remain here.
Why do you need to be always going out?"
She even walked with Monsieur for a full hour in the garden.
Naturally Monsieur perceives nothing; he does not lose a mouthful of food or a puff of tobacco-smoke. What a stupid blockhead!
I had a great desire to know what they could be saying to each other when they were alone,—the two of them.
Last night, for more than twenty minutes, I listened at the door of the salon.
I heard Monsieur crumpling a newspaper. Madame, seated at her little desk, was casting up her accounts.
"What did I give you yesterday?" Madame asked.
"Two francs," answered Monsieur.
"You are sure?"
"Why, yes, my pet."
"Well, I am short thirty-eight sous."
"It was not I who took them."
"No, it was the cat."
Of the other matter they said not a word. _____
In the kitchen Joseph does not like to have us talk about the little Claire.
When Marianne or I broach the subject, he immediately changes it, or else takes no part in the conversation.
It annoys him. I do not know why, but the idea has come to me—and it is burying itself deeper and deeper in my mind—that it was Joseph who did it.
I have no proofs, no clues to warrant my suspicion,—no other clues than his eyes, no other proofs than the slight movement of surprise that escaped him when, on my return from the grocer's, I suddenly, in the harness-room, threw in his face for the first time the name of the little Claire murdered and outraged.
And yet this purely intuitive suspicion has grown, first into a possibility, and then into a certainty.
Undoubtedly I am mistaken.
I try to convince myself that Joseph is a "pearl."
I say to myself over and over again that my imagination takes mad flights, obedient to the influence of the romantic perversity that is in me.
But all in vain; the impression remains, in spite of myself, never leaves me for a moment, and is assuming the tormenting and grimacing form of a fixed idea.
And I have an irresistible desire to ask Joseph:
"Say, Joseph, was it you who outraged the little Claire in the woods?
Was it you, old pig?"
The crime was committed on a Saturday. I remember that Joseph, at about that date, went to the forest of Raillon to get some heath mould.
He was absent all day, and did not return to the Priory with his load till late in the evening.
Of that I am sure.
And—an extraordinary coincidence—I remember certain restless movements, certain troubled looks, that he had that evening, when he came back.
I took no notice of them then. Why should I have done so?
But to-day these facial details come back to me forcibly. But was it on the Saturday of the crime that Joseph went to the forest of Raillon?
I seek in vain to fix the date of his absence.
And then, had he really the restless movements, the accusing looks, that I attribute to him, and which denounce him to me? Is it not I who am bent upon suggesting to myself the unusual strangeness of those movements and those looks?
Am I not determined, without reason and against all probability, that it shall be Joseph—a pearl—who did it? It irritates me, and at the same time confirms me in my apprehensions, that I cannot reconstruct before my eyes the tragedy of the forest.
If only the judicial examination had revealed fresh tracks of a cart on the dead leaves and on the heather in the neighborhood? But no; the examination revealed nothing of the kind; it revealed the outrage and murder of a little girl, and that is all.
Well, it is precisely that which so excites me.
This cleverness of the assassin in leaving not the slightest trace of his crime behind him, this diabolical invisibility,—I feel in it and see in it the presence of Joseph. Enervated, I make bold suddenly, after a silence, to ask him this question:
"Joseph, what day was it that you went to the forest of Raillon to get heath mould?
Do you remember?"
Without haste, without a start, Joseph puts down the newspaper that he was reading.
Now his soul is steeled against surprises.
"Why do you ask?" he says.