Little Roque
Médéric Rompel, postman, familiarly addressed as Méderi by the country folk, left the post office of Roüy-le-Tors at his usual hour. He passed through the little town with the long strides of an old campaigner, and cut across the meadows of Villaumes to reach the bank of the Brindille. Following the course of the stream, he reached the village of Carvelin, where his delivery began.
He went at a rapid pace, keeping alongside the narrow brook, which threaded its way, frothing, gurgling, and eddying, over a weedy bed, beneath an arch of willows. The great boulders that blocked its passage were each encircled by a little noose of water, a kind of cravat finished off with a knot of foam. Occasionally there were cascades a foot deep, often unseen, but falling on a sonorous note, fretful yet soothing, under the green roof of leaves and creepers. Further on, the banks widened out into a small quiet lake, where the trout swam through green tresses of weed that waved under the gentle current.
Médéric went steadily forward, observing nothing, and thinking only: “My first letter is for the Poivrons, and then I have one for Monsieur Renardet; I shall have to go through the copse, then.”
His blue blouse, caught tightly round his waist in a black leather belt, moved with steady speed past the green line of willows; his stick, a stout branch of holly, moved at his side with the same action as his legs.
He crossed the Brindille by a bridge made of a single tree-trunk, thrown across from one bank to the other; its only rail was a rope supported by stakes sunk into the banks.
The copse belonged to Monsieur Renardet, the mayor of Carvelin, and the most important landowner in the district. It was almost a wood of huge old trees, as straight as pillars, and stretched the length of half a league along the brook that bounded this vast leafy vault. Along the waterside large shrubs had sprung up under the sun’s heat, but deep in the copse nothing was to be found but moss, thick, sweet, and soft, filling the still air with a faint odour of decay and rotten wood.
Médéric slowed down, took off his black cap with its scarlet trimming, and wiped his brow, for, though it was not yet eight o’clock in the morning, it was already hot in the meadows. He had just put on his hat, and was resuming his rapid stride, when he noticed, at the foot of a tree, a small knife, a child’s knife. As he picked it up, he found a thimble too, then, two steps farther on, a needle case.
He picked them up and thought: “Better give them to the mayor”; and continued his journey, but now with his eyes wide open, expecting all the time to find something more.
Suddenly he stopped dead, as though he had bumped into a wooden barrier, for ten paces in front of him there lay upon its back the body of a child, stark naked on the moss. It was the body of a little girl about twelve years old; her arms were flung wide apart, her feet were separated, and her face was covered with a handkerchief. A little blood stained her legs.
Médéric crept forward on tiptoe, as though he feared to make a sound, scenting danger. His eyes were wide open.
What was this? She must be asleep. Then he reflected that people do not sleep naked like that at half past seven in the morning, in a cold wood. She was dead, then, and he was in the presence of a crime. At this thought, old soldier as he was, a cold shiver ran up his back. Murder, and child-murder at that, was so rare a happening in the district that he could not believe his eyes. But there was no wound upon her, nothing but the blood congealed upon her leg. How long had she been killed?
He had stopped quite close to her, and was looking at her, leaning on his stick. He must know her, since he knew all the local inhabitants, but, not being able to see her face, he could not guess her name. He bent down to remove the handkerchief from her face, then stopped, with outstretched hand, restrained by a sudden thought.
Had he the right to interfere in any way with the disposition of the body before the judicial inquiry? He imagined the law as a kind of general whose notice nothing can escape, and who attaches as much importance to a lost button as to a stab in the stomach. Beneath that handkerchief damning evidence might be found; a real clue, which might well lose its value if touched by a clumsy hand.
So he rose, to run to the mayor’s house. A second thought held him back. Suppose that by any chance the little girl were still alive, he could not leave her like this. Quickly he knelt down at a discreet distance from her and, thrusting out his hand, touched her foot. It was cold, frozen into that ghastly chill that makes dead flesh so terrifying, and leaves no room for doubt. The touch of it put the heart across him, as he expressed it later, and the saliva dried in his mouth. He rose at once and began to run through the wood towards Monsieur Renardet’s house.
He ran with the gait of an athlete, his stick under his arm, his fists closed, his head thrust forward; his leather bag, full of letters and newspapers, pounded rhythmically against his back.
The mayor’s house was at the end of the wood whose trees served as its park. One corner of the surrounding wall was washed by the Brindille, which here ran into a small pond.
It was a large square house of grey stone. It was very old, and in former times had been beseiged; at the far end of it was a huge tower, sixty feet high and built in the water. Once, from the summit of this keep, watch had been kept over all the district. It was called the Tower of Renard, no one knew quite why. It was doubtless from this name that the name Renardet came, borne by all the owners of this property, which had been in the same family, it was said, for more than two hundred years. For the Renardets belonged to that almost noble yeoman class so often found in the country before the Revolution. The postman rushed into the kitchen where the servants were having breakfast, shouting: “Is the Mayor up? I must speak to him at once.”
Médéric was known for a man of weight and authority, and they knew at once that something serious had happened.
Monsieur Renardet was notified, and ordered the man to be brought in. Pale and out of breath, the postman, cap in hand, found the mayor seated at a long table covered with scattered papers.
He was a tall, stout man, with an unwieldy figure and a ruddy skin. He was as strong as a bull, and much loved in the locality, for all his quick temper. About forty years of age, and for the past six months a widower, he lived on his land in the style of a country nobleman. His impetuous nature had landed him in many awkward places, from which he had always been rescued by his indulgent and tactful comrades, the magistrates of Roüy-le-Tors. Was it not he, indeed, who one fine day threw the driver of the mail coach from his box, because the fellow had almost run over his pointer Micmac? Had he not broken the ribs of a gamekeeper who prosecuted him for carrying his gun across a piece of land belonging to a neighbour? Had he not even arrested the subprefect who was stopping in the village in the pursuit of his administrative duties—styled by Monsieur Renardet an electioneering campaign, because it was opposed to the good old tradition of government by the family?
“What’s the matter, Médéric?” asked the mayor.
“I’ve found a little girl in your wood, dead.”
Renardet rose, his face brick-red.
“What did you say … a little girl?”
“Yes, sir, a little girl, quite naked, lying on her back, and there was some blood; she’s dead as a doornail.”
“My God,” swore the mayor, “I bet it’s Madame Roque’s little girl! I’ve just been told that last night she never came home to her mother’s. Where did you find her?”
The postman began a detailed explanation, and offered to guide the mayor to the spot.
But Renardet turned gruff. “No, I don’t need you. Send the constable, the town clerk, and the doctor to me as soon as you can, and go on with your delivery. Hurry, man, hurry, and tell them to meet me in the wood.”
The postman, accustomed to discipline, obediently withdrew, angry and disgusted at being excluded from the inquiry.
The mayor thereupon went too, taking his hat, a large soft hat of grey felt, with a very broad brim. He halted a moment upon the threshold of his dwelling. Before him stretched a wide lawn where gleamed three great splashes of red, blue, and white, three monstrous baskets of flowers in full bloom, one right opposite the house, the other two at the sides. In the background thrust the first few trees of the wood; on the left, on the far side of the Brindille which here widened into a pool, a wide expanse of meadows lay open to his view, a green, flat landscape intersected by ditches and hedges of pollard willows. These fantastic tree-creatures, standing there like ghosts or hunchbacks, bore upon their short thick trunks a waving fan of little branches.
On the right were the stables, the outhouses, and all the buildings dependent upon the property; behind them began the village, a prosperous little place chiefly inhabited by cattle-breeders.
Renardet walked slowly down his steps and, turning to the left, reached the bank of the stream, which he followed at a slow pace, his hands behind his back. His head was bent, and from time to time he sent a piercing glance round him in search of the men he had sent for.
When he reached the shelter of the trees, he stopped, took off his hat, and wiped his brow, as Médéric had done; for the blazing July sun fell like a rain of fire upon the earth. Then the mayor resumed his journey, stopped once more, and retraced his steps. Suddenly he bent down and soaked his handkerchief in the stream running at his feet. He spread it upon his head, under his hat; drops of water trickled over his temples, over his purple ears, over his strong red neck, and, one after another, ran beneath the white collar of his shirt.
As no one had yet appeared, he began to tap with his foot; then he shouted: “Hey! Hey!”
From the right a voice answered: “Hey! Hey!”
The doctor appeared under the trees. He was a small thin man, once an army surgeon, with a local reputation for great skill. He was lame, having been wounded on active service, and walked with a stick. The constable and the town clerk appeared next; they arrived together, having both received the news at the same time. They ran up panting, with scared faces, walking and running by turns in their haste, and waving their arms so wildly that they seemed to do more work with them than with their legs.
“You know what the trouble is?” said Renardet to the doctor.
“Yes, a dead child found in the wood by Médéric.”
“That’s right. Come along.”
They set off side by side, following the other pair. Their steps made no sound upon the moss, their eyes continually searched the ground in front of them.
Suddenly Doctor Labarbe stretched out his arm: “There it is.”
Far off, under the trees, something bright could be seen. Had they not known what it was, they would never have guessed. So shining white it looked that anyone would have thought it a sheet dropped on the ground, for a sunbeam came through the branches and lit up the pale flesh with a great ray flung obliquely over the stomach of the corpse. As they drew near, they gradually made out the form, the veiled head turned towards the water, and the two arms flung wide apart as in a crucifixion.
“I’m damned hot,” said the mayor, and, stooping down to the Brindille, he again wetted his handkerchief and replaced it on his head.
The doctor hurried on, interested by the discovery. As soon as he reached the corpse, he bent down to examine it, without touching it at all. He had put on his glasses, as one does when studying a curiosity, and he walked quietly round it.
Without rising he said: “Rape and murder. We’ll verify it directly. The girl’s almost a woman too: look at her throat.”
The two breasts, already well formed, sagged on the bosom that death had robbed of its firmness.
Carefully the doctor lifted the handkerchief that covered the head. The face was black and ghastly, with tongue and eyes protruding. “Strangled,” he said, “as soon as the job was done.”
He felt the neck: “Strangled with the bare hands; there’s no special trace besides, no nail-mark or fingerprint. That’s that, and it is Madame Roque’s little girl.”
Gingerly he replaced the handkerchief. “I can do nothing; she’s been dead for at least twelve hours. The police must be told.”
Renardet was standing up with his hands behind his back, gazing at the little body laid upon the ground. “Poor little thing!” he muttered. “We must find her clothes.”
The doctor felt her hands, her arms, her legs. “She’d just had a bathe,” he said. “They must be on the riverbank.”
The mayor gave his orders. “You, Principe”—this to the town clerk—“you hunt along the stream for her clothes. And you, Maxim”—this to the constable—“you run to Roüy-le-Tors and fetch me the examining magistrate and the police. They must be here within an hour. You understand?”
The two men departed quickly, and Renardet said to the doctor: “What blackguard in the district could do such a thing?”
“Who can say?” the doctor murmured. “Everyone is capable of it. Everyone in particular, and no one in general. It must have been a tramp, some fellow out of work. Now we’re a Republic, they are the only people you meet on the roads.”
Both were supporters of the Bonapartist cause.
“Yes,” answered the mayor, “it must have been a passing stranger, a vagabond without hearth or home.”
“Or wife,” added the doctor with a faint smile. “Having neither supper nor bed, he got himself the rest. There are I don’t know how many men on this earth who are capable, at any moment, of committing a crime. Did you know that the little girl was missing?”
With the end of his stick he touched, one after another, the dead child’s stiffened fingers, pressing on them as on the keys of a piano.
“Yes. The mother came to see me last night, about nine o’clock, as the child had not come in at seven for her supper. We shouted for her on the roads till midnight, but we never thought of the wood. Besides, we needed daylight to make a really effective search.”
“Have a cigar,” said the doctor.
“No, thanks. I don’t want to smoke. This business has given me rather a turn.”
The two remained standing, in front of the frail young body, so pale upon the dark moss. A great bluebottle walked up one thigh, stopped at the bloodstains, and went on up the body, running over the hip with its hurried, jerky little steps. It climbed up one breast, then came down again and explored the other, seeking for something to drink. The two men watched the roving black speck.
“How pretty it is,” said the doctor, “a fly on human skin! The ladies of the last century were quite right to wear them on their faces. I wonder why the custom has gone out.”
The mayor, lost in thought, appeared to hear nothing. Abruptly, he swung round, startled by a noise. A woman in a blue bonnet and apron came running through the trees. It was the mother, Madame Roque. As soon as she caught sight of Renardet she began to scream: “My little darling, where’s my little darling?” so wild with grief that she never looked down. Suddenly she saw her darling, and stopped dead. She clasped her hands and flung up her arms: piercing and heartrending screams came between her lips, the screams of a wounded animal.
She flung herself upon her knees beside the body, and snatched at the handkerchief with a violent gesture. When she saw that dreadful face, black and distorted, she drew back shuddering, then buried her face in the moss, her body shaken with ceaseless heartbreaking sobs.
The clothes clung round her tall bony frame that heaved and shook. They could see the ghastly quivering of her thin ugly ankles and her withered calves, in their coarse blue stockings. Her crooked fingers burrowed in the earth as though she would make a hole and hide in it.
The doctor, deeply moved, murmured: “Poor old thing!”
Renardet felt a curious disturbance in his stomach; then he uttered a sort of violent sneeze, vented simultaneously from nose and mouth. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and cried noisily into it, choking, sobbing, and blowing his nose. “M—m—m—my God,” he blubbered, “I’d I—I—like to see them g—guillotine the swine that did it!”
But Principe returned empty-handed and disconsolate. “I’ve found nothing, sir,” he muttered to the mayor, “nothing anywhere.”
“What can’t you find?” the other demanded thickly.
“The little girl’s clothes.”
“W—well, go on looking … and … and f—find them, or you’ll get into trouble with me.”
Knowing that there was no opposing the mayor, the fellow went off again with a discouraged air, casting a timid sideways glance at the body.
Distant voices were heard among the trees, a confused din, the uproar of an approaching crowd; for on his round Médéric had spread the news from door to door. The country folk, at first dumbfounded, had talked it over in the street on one another’s doorsteps. Then they gathered together, and, after twenty minutes’ chattering, discussion, and comment, were coming to see it for themselves.
They arrived in groups, a little hesitant and uneasy, fearing their own feelings at first sight of the body. When they saw it they stopped, not daring to come closer, and talking in low tones. Then they grew bold, advanced a few steps, stopped again, advanced a few more, and soon grouped themselves round the dead child, the mother, the doctor, and Renardet. They formed a deep circle, swaying and clamorous, and pushed ever closer by the sudden onrush of the latecomers. In a few moments they were touching the body; some of them even bent down to handle it. The doctor kept them at a distance. But the mayor, roused suddenly from his stupor, became furious; seizing Doctor Labarbe’s stick, he fell upon his subjects, stammering: “Clear out! … Clear out! … Pack of beasts! … Clear out! …” In one second the circle of inquisitive spectators widened by two hundred yards.
Madame Roque had risen and turned round, and was now sitting weeping, with her hands in front of her face.
The crowd was discussing the affair, and the boys’ greedy eyes devoured the nude young body. Renardet noticed it and, hastily tearing off his linen coat, he threw it over the girl’s form, which was completely hidden by that huge garment.
The inquisitive spectators drew quietly nearer; the wood was getting fuller and fuller; a continuous murmur of voices rose to the thick foliage of the tall trees.
The mayor stood there in his shirtsleeves, stick in hand, in a pugnacious attitude. He seemed exasperated by the curiosity of the crowd, and repeated: “If one of you comes a step nearer, I’ll break his head like a dog’s.”
The peasants had a wholesome dread of him, and kept clear. Doctor Labarbe, who was smoking, sat down beside Madame Roque and talked to her, trying to distract her attention. The old woman promptly took her hands from her face and answered him in a rush of tearful words, venting her grief in the sheer flood of her speech. She told him her whole life-history, her marriage, the death of her husband, a cowherd, gored to death, her daughter’s childhood, her wretched existence as a widow with a child and no resources. She was all she had, was little Louise, and now she’d been killed, killed here in this wood. Suddenly she felt a wish to see her child again and, dragging herself to the body upon her knees, she lifted a corner of the garment that covered it; then let it fall again and broke into fresh sobs. The crowd was silent, gazing eagerly at the mother’s every movement.
There was a sudden disturbance; and a cry of “The police, the police!”
Two policemen appeared in the distance, advancing at a rapid trot, escorting their captain and a short, ginger-whiskered gentleman, who bobbed up and down like a monkey on his big white mare.
The constable had found Monsieur Pictoin, the examining magistrate, at the very moment when he was mounting his horse to take his daily ride; it was his ambition to be taken for a smart young fellow, which vastly amused the officers.
He dismounted, with the captain, and shook hands with the mayor and the doctor, casting a sneaking glance at the linen coat on the ground, filled out as it was by the body lying beneath it.
When he had been thoroughly acquainted with the facts of the case, his first act was to disperse the crowd, which the police cleared out of the wood, but which soon reappeared in the meadow and formed a hedge, a long hedge of excited, moving heads, all along the Brindille, on the far side of the brook.
In his turn the doctor made his statement, and Renardet wrote it down with a pencil in his notebook. All the verifications were made, registered, and commented upon, without any discovery being made. Maxim had returned also, without finding a trace of the missing clothes.
Everyone was amazed at their disappearance; no one could explain it except by the theory of robbery, and, since the rags were not worth a shilling, even this theory was inadmissible.
The examining magistrate, the mayor, the captain, and the doctor searched in couples, looking between even the smallest twigs along the waterside.
“How is it,” said Renardet to the magistrate, “that the wretch hid or stole the clothes, yet left the body right in the open, in full view?”
The other was crafty and sagacious. “Aha,” he answered, “possibly a trick. This crime was committed either by a brute or by a very sly dog. Anyhow, we’ll soon find him all right.”
The sound of carriage wheels made them turn their heads. The deputy, the doctor, and the clerk of the police station were arriving. The search continued, amid animated conversation.
Renardet said suddenly: “You know you’re all lunching with me?”
Everyone accepted with smiles; the examining magistrate, thinking that they had had enough, for that day, of Madame Roque’s little girl, turned to the mayor.
“I can have the body taken to your house, can’t I? You have a room there where it can be kept till tonight.”
The mayor was distressed, and stammered: “Yes … no, no. To tell you the truth, I’d sooner not have it … on account of the servants, you know. They’re already talking of … of ghosts and things … in my tower, the tower of Renard. You know what it is. … I couldn’t get one to stay on. … No … I’d sooner not have it in the house.”
The magistrate smiled: “Very well. … I’ll get it taken straight to Roüy for the inquest.” And turning to the deputy, he said: “I may have the use of your carriage, may I not?”
“Certainly.”
They all came back to the body. Madame Roque was seated beside her daughter now, holding her hand and staring in front of her with wild, blurred eyes. The two doctors tried to lead her away, so that she should not see the child taken from her. But she understood at once what they were about to do and, throwing herself upon the body, seized it with both arms. Lying beside it, she shrieked: “You shan’t have it, it’s mine, mine, now. They’ve killed my child; I’ll keep her, you shan’t have her.”
The men, disturbed and irresolute, stood round her. Renardet went down on his knees to speak to her. “Listen, we must have her, so as to know who killed her. Otherwise we shan’t know; we must find him to punish him. You shall have her back when we’ve found him, I promise you.”
This reason moved her; hate burned in her crazed eyes. “Then he’ll be caught?” she said.
“Yes, I promise you he will.”
She rose, determined to let them have their own way. But, hearing the captain murmur, “Curious that her clothes can’t be found,” a new and strange idea entered the peasant woman’s brain.
“Where are her clothes?” she asked. “They’re mine, I want ’em. Where’ve they been put?”
It was explained to her that they were still lost, whereupon she persisted with despairing obstinacy, weeping and moaning, demanding: “They’re mine, I want ’em. Where are they? I want ’em.”
The more they tried to calm her, the more obstinately she sobbed. She did not want the body any longer, only the clothes, her daughter’s clothes, perhaps less from maternal affection than from the blind cupidity of a wretch to whom a single coin represents a fortune.
And when the little body, rolled in a wrap fetched from Renardet’s house, disappeared into the carriage, the old woman stood under the trees, supported by the mayor and the captain, and cried: “I’ve got nothing, nothing, nothing at all, nothing, not even her li’l bonnet! I’ve got nothing, nothing, nothing, not even her li’l bonnet!”
The parish priest had now come on the scene; he was still quite young but already very plump. He undertook to get Mother Roque away, and they set off together towards the village. The mother’s grief abated under the honeyed consolation of God’s servant, who promised her a thousand assuagements. But she repeated incessantly: “If only I had her li’l bonnet,” clinging stupidly to this thought, which now completely obsessed her.
Renardet shouted after them: “You’ll lunch with us, Father? In an hour’s time.”
The priest turned his head and replied: “Willingly, Mr. Mayor. I’ll be there about twelve.”
All the guests made their way towards the house that lifted over the trees its grey front and the great tower built beside the Brindille.
The meal was a long one: they talked about the crime. Everyone there held the same theory: it had been the work of some tramp, who had happened to wander that way while the child was bathing.
Then the magistrates returned to Roüy, after announcing that they would return early next day; the doctor and the parish priest went home, while Renardet took a long walk through the meadows and came back to the copse, where he walked up and down until nightfall, with slow steps, his hands clasped behind his back.
He went to bed very early and the next morning he was still asleep when the examining magistrate entered his bedroom. He was rubbing his hands, and his face expressed great satisfaction.
“Ah,” he said, “you’re still in bed. Well, my dear fellow, we’ve news this morning.”
The mayor sat up in bed.
“What is it?”
“Oh, an odd enough thing. You’ll remember that yesterday the mother was making a terrible fuss about wanting something to remind her of her daughter, particularly her little bonnet. Well, when she opened her door this morning, she found on the doorstep the child’s two little wooden shoes. This proves that the crime was committed by someone in the district, by someone who now feels sorry for her. Besides, postman Médéric has brought me the dead girl’s thimble, knife, and needle-case. There’s no doubt that the man was carrying off her clothes to hide them when he dropped the things in the pocket. For my part, I attach especial importance to the incident of the wooden shoes, which points to a degree of moral sensibility and a quality of compassion in the murderer. If you are ready, we will therefore consider in turn the leading people of your district.”
The mayor got out of bed. He rang for hot water to shave himself. “Very well,” he said, “but it will be a long job, and we can begin at once.”
Monsieur Pictoin straddled across his chair, indulging his passion for equestrian exercises even indoors.
Renardet, staring at himself in the glass, was now covering his chin with a white foam; then he drew his razor over the skin and went on: “The name of the leading citizen of Carvelin is Joseph Renardet, mayor, well-to-do landowner, a hot-tempered man who beats keepers and drivers. …”
The examining magistrate laughed aloud: “That’s enough; go on to the next.”
“The next in importance is Monsieur Pelledent, deputy mayor, cattle farmer, quite as well-to-do a landowner, a shrewd peasant, uncommon tricky, uncommon sharp in money matters, but in my opinion incapable of such a monstrous crime.”
“Next,” said Monsieur Pictoin.
So Renardet shaved and washed, and went through his inspection of the morals of all the inhabitants of Carvelin. After debating for two hours, their suspicions narrowed down to three sufficiently dubious characters: a poacher called Cavalle, one Paquet who dealt in trout and crabs, and a cowherd called Clovis.
II
The investigations went on all summer: the criminal was not discovered. The men suspected and arrested were easily able to prove their innocence, and the police had to abandon their search for the guilty man.
But this murder seemed in some strange fashion to have stirred the whole countryside. An uneasy feeling lurked in people’s hearts, a vague fear, an inexplicable sense of terror, sprung not only from the impossibility of discovering any clue, but also and in a special degree from that strange discovery of the wooden shoes at Mother Roque’s doorstep on the next morning. The certainty that the murderer had been present at the discussions, that he must still be living in the village, haunted and obsessed all minds, seemed to hover over the countryside like a perpetual menace.
The copse, besides, had become a terrifying place, it was avoided, and they believed it haunted. Before the murder, the villagers used to walk there every Sunday afternoon. They sat on the moss below great tall trees, or wandered contentedly along the stream, peering at the trout gliding under the grasses. The lads played at bowls, skittles, cork pool, and ball in special places which they had taken for themselves, levelling the ground and treading it down hard and firm; and the girls walked up and down, arms linked, in groups of four and five, twittering their village romances in shrill voices that grated on the ear: the tuneless notes shivered the quiet air and set the listeners’ teeth on edge like drops of vinegar. Nowadays the villagers ventured no more under the high thick vault, as if they expected to find dead bodies lying there every day.
Autumn came, the leaves were falling. Day and night they fell, curled and fluttering, twirling as they came down past the great trees. Sometimes, when a gust of wind swept over the tops of the trees, the slow ceaseless rain grew suddenly heavier and became a confused and rushing downpour covering the moss with a thick yellow carpet that crackled faintly under the feet. The almost inaudible murmuring, the fluttering ceaseless murmur of their falling, so sweet and so sad, seemed a lament, and these ever-dropping leaves seemed tears, great tears poured out by the great sad trees weeping day and night for the end of the year, for the end of warm dawns and quiet dusks, for the end of hot breezes and blazing suns, and perhaps too for the crime they had seen committed under their shadow, for the child violated and killed at their feet. They wept in the silence of the deserted empty wood, the shunned forsaken wood, where the soul, the little soul of the dead child surely wandered, lonely.
Tawny and angry-looking, swollen by the storms, the Brindille ran swifter between its dried-up banks, between two rows of slender bare willows.
Suddenly Renardet took to walking in the copse again. Every day at nightfall he left his house, slowly descended the steps of the terrace, and disappeared between the trees with a dreamy air, his hands in his pockets. He strode for a long time over the soft wet moss, while an army of crows who had gathered from the country round to nest in the lofty treetops, swept out across the sky like a vast mourning veil floating in the wind, with a monstrous sinister clamour.
Sometimes they settled, a horde of black spots clustered on the tangled branches against the red sky, the bloodred sky of an autumn twilight. Then all at once they flew off again, cawing frenziedly and spreading above the wood again the long sombre line of flying wings.
They sank at last in the highest tops and little by little ceased their crying while the advancing darkness merged their black feathers with the blackness of the hollow night.
Still Renardet wandered slowly under the trees; then, when the shadows drew so thickly down that he could no longer walk about, he returned home and fell heavily into his big chair before the glowing chimneypiece, stretching towards the hearth damp feet that steamed in front of the flames for hours.
Then, one morning, startling news ran through the countryside: the mayor had given orders to cut down his copse.
Twenty woodcutters were already at work. They had begun with the corner nearest the house, and under the master’s eye were progressing at a great rate.
First of all, the men who were to lop off the branches scrambled up the trunk.
Fastened to the tree by a rope round their bodies, they first take a grip of it with their arms, then raise one leg and drive the steel spike fixed to the soles of their boots firmly into the trunk. The point pierces the tree, and is wedged there, and as if he were walking the man raises himself and drives in the spike of the other foot: then he supports himself on this one and makes a fresh advance with the first foot.
And at each step he carries higher the rope that holds him to the tree; at his waist the steel hatchet dangles and glitters. He climbs gently and steadily like a parasite animal attacking a giant, he mounts clumsily up the vast column, twisting his arm round it and digging in his spurs to raise himself high enough to decapitate it.
As soon as he reaches the first branches, he stops, detaches the sharp ax from his thigh, and strikes. He strikes with slow regular blows, severing the limb close to the trunk; and all of a sudden the branch cracks, bends, hangs, tears apart, and rushes down, brushing past the surrounding trees in its fall. Then it is dashed on the earth with a crash of shattered wood, and for a long time all its smallest twigs quiver and shake.
The earth is covered with fallen branches that the rest of the men take and saw into smaller pieces, fastening them in bundles and piling them in heaps, while the trees still left standing look like monstrous pillars of wood, gigantic stakes amputated and shorn by the sharp steel of the axes.
And when the last branch has fallen, the woodman leaves the noose of rope he has carried up with him fastened to the peak of the straight slender pillar; then, digging in his spurs, he climbs down the pillaged trunk and the woodcutters proceed to attack it at the foot, striking heavy blows that echo all through the forest.
When the cut at the foot seems deep enough, a number of men haul on the rope fastened to the top, shouting all together with each heave, and the great mast suddenly cracks and falls to the earth with the hollow vibrating roar of a distant cannon-shot.
And day by day the wood grew less, losing its felled trees as an army loses its soldiers.
Renardet never left it; he stayed there from morning to evening, immobile, his hands clasped behind his back, contemplating the slow death of his forest. When a tree had fallen, he placed his foot on it as if it were a dead body. Then he turned his gaze to the next with a kind of secret and dispassionate impatience, as if he expected something, hoped for something to come of this massacre.
Meanwhile, they drew near the place where little Roque had been found. They came to it at last, one evening, at dusk.
As the shadows were drawing down under a darkened sky, the woodcutters wanted to stop work, and put off until tomorrow the felling of an enormous beech, but the owner refused to allow it and insisted that they should forthwith lop off its branches and haul down the monstrous tree that had lent its shadow to the crime.
When the man had stripped it bare of all its branches and made it ready for its doom, when the woodcutters had undermined its base, five men began to haul on the rope fastened to the summit.
The tree resisted; hacked half through as it was, the powerful trunk was rigid as an iron girder. The workmen, lying right back on the rope, pulled all together, heaving steadily, and accompanied every pull with a breathless shout.
Two woodcutters stood near the giant, grasping their axes, like two executioners ready to strike another blow, and Renardet, motionless, his hand on the bark, waited for the fall in the grip of a nervous agitation.
One of the men said to him: “You are standing too close, Mr. Mayor; when it falls, you might get hurt.”
He neither replied nor drew back; he looked prepared to fling himself upon the beech with both arms and throw it like a wrestler throwing his man.
At the foot of the great wooden column, there was a sudden rending that seemed to run through it to the very top like a mournful shudder; and it swayed a little, on the verge of falling, but resisting still.
With tense bodies and straining arms, the men gave another and mightier heave; and as the shattered tree swayed over, Renardet made a sudden step forward, then stopped, his shoulders braced to take the inevitable shock, the fatal shock that would crush him to the ground.
But the tree, falling a little to one side, only grazed his body, flinging him face downwards five yards away.
The workmen rushed forward to lift him up; he had already raised himself on his knees; he was dazed, with eyes staring wildly, and he drew his hand across his forehead as if he had come to his senses after an access of madness.
When they had helped him to his feet, the astonished men questioned him, unable to understand what he had done. Stammering, he told them that for a moment he had lost his head, or, rather, slipped for a second back into his childhood, and he had imagined that he had time to cross beneath the tree as youngsters rush across in front of hurrying carriages, that he had played at taking risks, that for a week he had felt the desire to do it growing in him, and every time a tree cracked as it fell had wondered if one could run under it without being touched. It was a fool’s trick, he admitted; but everyone has these moments of insanity and these puerile and idiotic temptations.
He explained all this very slowly in a muffled voice, hesitating for words; then he went off, saying: “We’ll be here again tomorrow, my men, tomorrow.”
As soon as he reached his room, he sat down at his table, flooded with light reflected from the shade of the lamp, and wept, his face between his hands.
He wept for a long time, then he dried his eyes, lifted his head, and looked at his clock. It was not yet six. He thought: “I have time before dinner,” and he went and locked his door. Then he came back and sat down again at his table. He pulled out the middle drawer, took a revolver from inside, and placed it on his papers, in the full glare of the lamp. The steel of the weapon gleamed, and threw out flashes of light like flames.
Renardet stared at it for a time with the uncertain eye of a drunken man; then he stood up and began to walk about.
He walked from one end of the room to the other, and from time to time he stopped, to begin again at once. Suddenly he opened the door of his dining room, soaked a napkin in the water jug, and wiped his forehead, as he had done on the morning of the crime. Then he began to walk about again. Every time he walked past his table, the shining weapon attracted his glance, almost fitted itself into his hand; but he kept his eye on the clock and thought: “I have still time.”
Half past six struck. Then he grasped the revolver, and, his face twisted into a horrible grimace, he opened his mouth and thrust the barrel inside as if he wanted to swallow it. He stood so for some moments, motionless, finger on the trigger; then, seized with a sudden shuddering horror, he spat the pistol out on to the carpet.
He dropped into his chair, shaken with sobs: “I can’t. I daren’t. My God, my God! What shall I do to get the courage to kill myself?”
There was a knock at the door; he leaped to his feet in a frenzy. A servant said: “Dinner is ready, sir.” “Very well,” he answered, “I’m coming down.”
So he picked up the weapon, shut it away in the drawer again, then looked at himself in the glass over the chimneypiece to assure himself that his face was not too convulsed. He was flushed, as always, a little more flushed perhaps. That was all. He went downstairs and sat down to dinner.
He ate slowly, like a man anxious to prolong a meal, anxious not to be left alone with himself. Then he smoked several pipes in the dining room while the table was cleared. Then he went back to his room.
As soon as he had shut himself in it, he looked under his bed, opened every cupboard, explored every corner, moved every piece of furniture to look behind it. After that he lit the wax candles on the chimneypiece, and swung round time and again, his eyes peering into every corner of the room in an agony of fear that distorted his face, for he knew that he would assuredly see, as every night he saw, little Roque, the little girl he had violated and after strangled.
Every night, the horrible scene enacted itself. It began with a sort of muttering in his ears, like the noise of a grinding-machine or the sound of a distant train crossing a bridge. Then his breath came in gasps; he stifled, and had to unbutton the collar of his shirt, and his belt. He walked about to stir the blood in his veins, he tried to read, he tried to sing; it was all in vain; willy-nilly, his mind went back to the day of the murder and forced him to live it over again in every secret detail, and to suffer again all its most violent emotions from the first minute of the day to the last.
When he rose that morning, the morning of that dreadful day, he had felt a slight dizziness and a headache which he attributed to the heat, and for that reason remained in his room until he was called for lunch. The meal over, he had taken a nap; then, towards the end of the afternoon, he had gone out to enjoy the fresh and cooling breeze under the trees of the copse.
But as soon as he was outside the house, the heavy burning air of the flat countryside oppressed him more than ever. The sun, still high in heaven, poured floods of blazing sunshine down on the burnt-up earth, dry and dying of thirst. No breath of wind stirred the leaves. Beasts, birds, even the grasshoppers were silent. Renardet reached the great trees and began to walk over the moss where a faint fresh odour rose from the Brindille under the vast roof of branches. But he felt ill at ease. It seemed to him that an unknown invisible hand was clutching his throat; and he hardly thought of anything, having at all times very few ideas in his head. Only, a vague thought had been obsessing him for three months, the thought of marrying again. He suffered from a solitary life, suffered in body and soul. Accustomed for ten years to feel a woman near him, accustomed to her constant presence, to her daily embrace, he felt the need, a confused and overmastering need, of her perpetual nearness and her habitual kiss. Since Madame Renardet’s death, he suffered all the time, hardly understanding why; he suffered because he missed her dress brushing past his leg every hour of the day, and especially because he could no longer find peace and ease of body in her arms. He had been a widower for barely six months and already he was looking round the neighbourhood for some young girl or some widow he might marry when his period of mourning was at an end.
His soul was chaste, but it was housed in the powerful body of a Hercules, and carnal visions began to trouble his sleep and the hours when he lay awake. He drove them from him; they returned; and now and then he murmured, smiling to himself: “I’m a Saint Anthony, I am.”
On this particular morning he had had several of these persistent visions, and a sudden desire seized him to bathe in the Brindille to refresh himself and cool the heat of his blood.
A little farther on, he knew a wide deep stretch of river where the country folk sometimes came to dip themselves in summer. He went there.
Thick-grown willows hid this clear pool, where the current paused and drowsed a little before rushing on again. As he drew near, Renardet thought he heard a slight sound, a faint lapping sound which was not the river lapping against its banks. He parted the leaves carefully and looked through. A very young girl, quite naked, showing white through the translucent water, was splashing the water with both hands, making little dancing movements in the water, turning and swaying with gracile gestures. She was no longer a child, and she was not yet a woman grown; she was plump and shapely, and had withal the air of a precocious child, developed beyond her years, almost mature. He did not stir, transfixed with amazement and a dreadful pain, the breath strangled in his throat by a strange and poignant emotion. He stood there, his heart beating as if one of his sensual dreams had just come to life, as if an evil faery had conjured up before him this disturbing and too youthful creature, this little peasant Venus, rising from the ripples of the stream as that other diviner Venus from the sea waves.
The child finished her bathe suddenly; she did not see him, and came towards him to get her clothes and dress herself. As she came nearer and nearer to him, taking little delicate steps to avoid the sharp stones, he felt himself driven towards her by an irresistible force, a mad animal lust that pricked his flesh, filled his mind with madness, and made him tremble from head to foot.
For a moment she stood still behind the willow where he was hiding. Then he lost all self-control, and, parting the branches, he flung himself on her and seized her in his arms. She fell down, too terrified to resist, too stunned to call out, and he possessed her without realising what he was doing.
He woke from his criminal madness like a man waking from a nightmare. The child began to cry.
“Hush,” he said, “hush then. I’ll give you some money.”
But she did not listen; she went on sobbing.
He began again: “Now hush then. Hush then. Hush then.”
She screamed and writhed in the effort to escape.
Abruptly he realised that he was lost; and he seized her by the throat to silence on her lips those terrible rending sounds. As she went on struggling with the desperate strength of a creature trying to fly from death, he tightened his great hand on the little throat swelling with her cries, and so savagely did he grip her that he had strangled her in a few seconds without ever dreaming of killing her, wanting only to silence her.
Then he got to his feet, dazed with horror.
She lay stretched out before him, stained with blood, and her face black. He was on the point of rushing away, when the confused mysterious instinct that prompts all human beings in their moments of peril, stirred in his distraught mind.
He was about to throw the body in the water, but a second impulse drove him to make a small parcel of the clothes. He had some string in his pockets, and he tied it up and hid it in the stream in a deep hole under the trunk of a tree whose foot was washed by the waters of the Brindille.
Then he strode rapidly away, reached the meadows, made a wide detour in order to be seen by the peasants living far from the place at the other side of the district, and returned home for dinner at the usual hour, telling his servants where his walk had taken him.
That night he slept; he fell into a profound sodden sleep, such a sleep as must sometimes visit men condemned to death. He did not open his eyes until the first gleams of dawn, and, tortured by fear of the discovery of the hideous crime, lay waiting for the hour at which he always rose.
Afterwards he had to be present at all the investigations. He went through these like a somnambulist, in a half-crazed state in which he saw men and things like the figments of a dream, his clouded mind hardly conscious, in the grip of that sense of unreality which oppresses all our faculties in times of appalling disaster.
Nothing but the mother’s agonised cry found its way to his heart. At that moment he was ready to fling himself at the old woman’s knees and cry: “I did it.” But he stifled the impulse. He did, however, go during the night to fish out the dead girl’s sabots and carry them to her mother’s doorstep.
So long as the inquest lasted, and so long as he had to direct and mislead justice, he was calm, master of himself, cunning and smiling. With the magistrates he discussed placidly all the theories which they conceived, disputed their opinions, confounded their reasoning. He even found a certain bitter and melancholy pleasure in upsetting their examinations of the accused, in confusing their ideas on the subject, and proving the innocence of the men they suspected.
But from the very day when the inquiries were given up, he became gradually more nervous, more excitable than ever before, carefully as he controlled his bursts of rage. Sudden noises made him start fearfully; he shuddered at the least thing, sometimes shaking from head to foot when a fly settled on his face. Then an overmastering desire for movement seized on him, impelled him to long, violent walks, kept him walking about his room through whole nights.
It was not that he was torn with remorse. His gross and unreasoning mind was not susceptible to any refinement of sentiment or moral fear. A man of action, even a violent man, born to fight, to ravage conquered countries and massacre the conquered, full of the savage instincts of the hunter and the soldier, he had little or no respect for human life. Although for political reasons he supported the Church, he believed neither in God nor the devil, and consequently did not look to any life after death for either punishment or reward for his deeds in this life. He believed in nothing but a vague philosophy made up of all the notions of the encyclopaedists of the previous century; and he regarded Religion as a moral sanction of the Law, both of them having been invented by men to regulate social relationships.
To kill a man in a duel, or in war, or in a quarrel, or by accident, or for revenge, or even in an ambush, he found an amusing and laudable affair, and it would have left no more impression on his mind than a shot fired at a hare; but the murder of this child had stirred the very depths of his heart. He had done the deed in a madness of uncontrollable lust, in something like a storm of physical desire that swept aside his reason. And he had kept still in his heart, kept in his flesh, kept on his lips, kept even in his murderous fingers, something like a gross and brutal love and a frightful horror of this young girl surprised and foully killed by him. His thoughts recurred perpetually to the horrible scene; and although he compelled himself to dismiss the vision, although he rejected it in terror and disgust, he felt it wandering in his mind, twisting in his thoughts, waiting relentlessly for the chance to reappear.
Then he grew afraid of the evenings, afraid of the darkness creeping round him. He did not know yet why he found the shadows terrifying; but he had an instinctive dread of them; he felt that they were peopled with frightful things. The light of day did not encourage horrors. Things and creatures alike were clearly visible in it; moreover, only such things and creatures as can show themselves in full light are ever encountered by day. But night, shadowy night, thicker than walls and empty, infinite night, so black, so vast, was filled with frightful things that brushed his skin in passing; he felt that a mysterious horror was abroad and roving about at night, and he thought the darkness hid an unknown danger, imminent and threatening. What was it?
Before long he knew. Late one sleepless night, as he sat in his chair, he thought he saw the curtains at his window move. He waited, uneasy, with a beating heart; the hangings stirred no more; then, all at once, they shook again; at least he thought they shook. He dared not rise from his chair; he did not dare even to breathe; and yet he was a brave man; he had fought many times and he would have rejoiced at finding thieves in the house.
Had the curtains really moved? He asked himself the question, afraid that his eyes were playing him tricks. Besides, it was the very least movement, a faint quiver of the drapery, a sort of trembling of the folds rather than such a lifting movement as the wind makes. Renardet sat there with staring eyes and outthrust neck; and abruptly, ashamed of his fear, he stood up, took four steps, seized the hangings in both hands and drew them wide apart. At first he saw nothing but the black panes, as black as squares of gleaming ink. Night, the vast impassable space of night, stretched beyond them to the unseen horizon. He stood thus looking out on to illimitable darkness; and suddenly he noticed a gleam, a gleam that moved and seemed a long way off. Then he pressed his face against the glass, thinking that a crab-fisher must be poaching in the Brindille, for it was past midnight, and this gleam was moving along the edge of the water under the trees of the copse. Renardet was still unable to make it out and he shaded his eyes with his hands; in a flash the gleam became a bright light, and he saw little Roque naked and bleeding on the moss.
He shrank back, convulsed with horror, hurling his chair aside and falling on his back. He lay there for some minutes, his brain reeling, then he sat up and began to reflect. He had had an hallucination, that was all, an hallucination caused by nothing more alarming than a night robber prowling along the edge of the stream with his lantern. What could be less surprising, indeed, than that the memory of his crime should sometimes call up in his mind the image of the dead girl?
He got up, drank a glass of water, and seated himself in his chair. He thought: “What shall I do, if it begins again?” And it would begin again: he felt it, he was sure of it. Even now the window was tempting him to lift his eyes, calling to them, drawing them. He turned his chair round so that he should not see it; then he took up a book and tried to read; but soon he thought he heard something moving behind him, and he swung his chair round violently on one leg. The curtain was moving again; there was no doubt this time that it had moved; he could doubt it no longer; he rushed at it and grasped it so violently that he tore it down, rod and all, then he pressed his face desperately against the pane. There was nothing to see. All outside was dark; and he drew his breath again as gladly as a man rescued from imminent death.
Then he went back and sat down again; but almost at once he was seized with a desire to look out of the window again. Now that the curtain was down, it looked like a shadowy hole opening on to the darkened countryside; it fascinated and terrified him. To keep himself from yielding to this fatal temptation, he undressed, blew out his light, lay down in bed, and closed his eyes.
Hot and wet with sweat, he lay there stiff on his back and waited for sleep. Suddenly a bright light fell on his eyelids. He opened them, thinking the house was on fire. All was dark, and he lifted himself on one elbow, and tried to make out the window that still beckoned him relentlessly. Straining his eyes to see it, he saw at last a few stars; and he got out of bed, groped across the room, found the windowpanes with his outstretched hands, and rested his forehead against them. There below, under the trees, the body of the young girl shone with a phosphorescent glow, lighting up the shadows round it.
With a great cry, Renardet rushed back to his bed, where he remained until morning, his head hidden under the pillow.
From that night, his life was intolerable. His days were filled with dread of his nights; and every night the vision came again. As soon as he had shut himself in his room, he tried to struggle against it; but in vain. An irresistible force dragged him to his feet and thrust him to the window as if to summon the phantom, and he saw it at once, lying at first in the place where he had commited the crime, lying with arms outstretched and legs apart, just as the body had lain when it was found. Then the dead child rose and drew near with little delicate steps, just as the child had done when she came out of the river. She drew near, very lightly, her straight small limbs moving over the grass and the carpet of drooping flowers; then she rose in the air towards Renardet’s window. She came towards him, as she had come on the day of the crime, towards her murderer. The man drew back before the apparition, he drew back as far as his bed and there collapsed, well knowing that the little girl had come in and now was standing behind the curtain that would move in a moment. He watched the curtain until daybreak, with staring eyes, waiting all the time to see his victim emerge. But she did not show herself any more; she stayed there, behind the hangings, and now and then a faint trembling shook them. Renardet, his fingers twisted in the bedclothes, gripped them as he had gripped little Roque’s throat. He listened to the striking of the hours: in the silence he heard the ticking of his clock and the loud beating of his heart. And he suffered, poor wretch, more than any man had ever suffered before.
Then, when a streak of light crept across the ceiling and announced the coming of day, he felt himself released, alone at last, alone in his room; and he lay down to sleep. He slept now for some hours, a restless fevered sleep, and often in his dreams he again saw the frightful vision of his waking nights.
Afterwards, when he came downstairs for lunch, he felt bowed down like a man who has been enduring the most exhausting labour; he ate little, perpetually haunted by dread of what he would see when night fell again.
At the same time he knew quite well that it was not an apparition, that the dead do not return, and that it was his sick mind, obsessed by one thought and by one unforgettable memory, and only his mind that evoked the dead child itself had raised from the dead, had summoned and had set before his eyes, branded as they were with an ineffaceable sight. But he knew too that he would not be made whole again, that he would never escape from the frightful lash of this memory, and he determined to die rather than endure these torments any longer.
He began to seek a means of killing himself. He wanted to find some simple natural way that would not rouse suspicions of a suicide. For he valued his reputation and the name handed down by his ancestors, and if people found the manner of his death suspicious they would certainly recall the inexplicable crime, and the undiscovered murderer, and it would not be long before they were accusing him of the vile deed.
A strange thought came into his head: he would have himself crushed to death by the tree at whose foot he had killed little Roque. So he decided to have his copse cut down, and to stage an accident. But the beech refused to break his back.
Back in his house, he had endured a frightful despair; he had seized his revolver and then he had been afraid to fire.
Dinnertime came, he had eaten, and then come upstairs again. And he did not know what he was going to do. After escaping once, he felt a coward now. In that moment by the beech, he was ready, strengthened, resolute, master of his courage and his determination; now he was weak and as afraid of death as of the dead.
He stammered: “I daren’t do it now, I daren’t do it now,” and he looked with equal horror at the weapon on the table and the curtain that hid his window. He thought too that some frightful thing would have happened as soon as life had left him. Some thing? What? Perhaps he would have met her again? She was spying on him, waiting for him, calling him, and it was because she wanted to trap him now, to take him in the snare of her revenge and force him to die that she showed herself to him like this every evening.
He began to cry like a child, repeating: “I daren’t do it now, I daren’t do it now.” Then he fell on his knees, stammering: “My God, my God!” He did not believe in God, for all that. And now he dared neither look at the window where he knew the apparition crouched, nor at the table on which his revolver lay gleaming.
He stood up again and said aloud: “This can’t go on, I must put an end to it.” A shudder of fear ran through his limbs at the sound of his voice in the silent room; but he decided to make no more resolutions, knowing too well that the fingers of his hand would always refuse to press the trigger of the weapon, and so he took refuge with his head under the bedclothes, and considered what to do.
He must find some expedient that would compel him to die, he must plan a trick against himself that would remove every possibility of further hesitation, delay, or regret. He envied the condemned led to the scaffold in a guard of soldiers. Oh, if he could but implore someone to shoot him, if he could but confess his state of mind, confess his crime to some friend who would never divulge it, and take at his hands the boon of death! But from what man could he ask so terrible a service? What man? He sought among all the men he knew. The doctor? No. Wouldn’t he be sure to tell the whole story later? And all at once a fantastic thought flashed across his mind. He would write to the examining magistrate, who was his intimate friend, and denounce himself. He would tell him everything in the letter, the crime, the tortures he endured, his resolution to die, his hesitation, and the means he was employing to stimulate his weakening courage. He would beg him in the name of their old friendship to destroy the letter as soon as the news was brought him that the guilty man had done justice on himself. Renardet could count on the magistrate, he knew him steadfast, discreet, absolutely incapable of a careless speech. He was one of those men whose inflexible conscience is controlled and directed and ordered by pure reason.
The plan had hardly taken shape in his mind when a fantastic joy flooded his heart. Now he was at peace. He would write his letter, leisurely, then when day broke he would put it in the box nailed to the wall of his farm, then he would climb to the top of his tower so that he could see the postman come, and when that blue-bloused man had gone, he would throw himself head first on to the rocks from which rose the foundations of the tower. He would take care to be seen first by the workmen who were cutting down his wood. Then he would climb out on to the jutting platform that carried the flagstaff for the flags on holidays. He would break the flagstaff with a sudden shake and crash to the ground along with it. Who would doubt that it was an accident? And considering his weight and the height of the tower, he would be killed on the spot.
He rose from his bed at once, went to his table, and began to write; he forgot nothing, no detail of the crime, no detail of his life of agony, no detail of the tortures his heart had endured, and he ended by declaring that he had sentenced himself to death, that he was going to execute the criminal, and he begged his friend, his old friend, to take care that no one ever insulted his memory.
As he finished the letter, he saw that day had come. He closed it, sealed it, wrote the address, then walked lightly downstairs and almost ran to the little white box nailed to the wall at the corner of the farm. The paper was heavy in his hand; he dropped it inside the box, came quickly back, drew the bolts of the great door, and climbed to the top of his tower to wait for the coming and going of the postman who would carry away his death sentence.
Now he felt calm, set free, saved!
A cold dry wind, an icy wind blew in his face. He drew a deep greedy breath, his mouth open, drinking in its bitter caress. The sky was red, with the fiery red of a winter sky, and all the white frost-bound plain glittered in the early rays as though it were powdered with crushed glass. Upright, bareheaded, Renardet looked out over the wide countryside; there were meadows on his left hand, and on his right lay the village; from its chimneys spirals of smoke rose from the fires lit for breakfast.
He saw the Brindille running below him, between the rocks where he would very soon lie crushed. He felt newborn in this lovely frozen dawn, full of vigour and full of life. He was bathed in light, wrapped round in it, filled with it as with hope. A thousand memories assailed him, memories of other such mornings, of swift walks over the hard earth that rang under his feet, of good sport on the edge of the marshes where the wild duck nested. All the pleasant things he loved, the pleasant things of life, rushed through his memory, stabbed him with fresh desires, woke all the sharp appetites of his powerful active body.
And he was going to die? Why? Was he going to kill himself violently because he was afraid of a shadow? Afraid of nothing? He was rich and still young. What madness! All he needed to help him to forget was some distraction, to go away for a while, to travel. This very night he had not seen the child, because his mind had been preoccupied and lost itself in other thoughts. Perhaps he would never see her again? And if she continued to haunt him in this house, she would certainly not follow him anywhere else. The earth was wide and the future long. Why should he die?
His glance wandered over the meadows, and he caught sight of a blue patch in the path that ran by the Brindille. It was Médéric coming to deliver the letters from town and take away the village letters.
Renardet started violently as a pang of grief ran through him, and he rushed down the winding staircase to take back his letter, to make the postman give it to him. Little he cared now whether he was seen or not; he ran across the grass covered with the frozen crystals of the night’s frosts and he reached the box at the corner of the farm at the same moment as the postman.
The man had opened the little wooden box and was taking out several letters put there by the people of the parish.
“Good day, Médéric,” Renardet said to him.
“Good day, Mr. Mayor.”
“I say, Médéric, I’ve dropped a letter in the box that I want. I’ve come to ask you to give it me back.”
“Certainly, Mr. Mayor, I’ll give it to you.”
And the postman raised his eyes. He was thunderstruck at the sight of Renardet’s face; his cheeks were purple, his eyes were restless, black-rimmed, and sunk in his head, his hair wild, his beard tangled, his tie awry. It was evident that he had not been to bed.
“Are you ill, Mr. Mayor?” the man demanded.
The other man realised in a flash that he must present an odd appearance; he became confused and stammered: “No … no. It’s only that I jumped out of bed to ask you for that letter. … I was asleep. … Don’t you see?”
A vague suspicion crossed the old soldiers’ mind.
“What letter?” he answered.
“The one you’re going to give me back.”
Médéric was hesitating now; he did not think the mayor’s manner was natural. Perhaps there was a secret, a political secret in the letter. He knew that Renardet was not a republican, and he knew all about the queer shifts and all about the underhand dealings in use at elections.
“Who’s this letter addressed to?” he demanded.
“To Monsieur Pictoin, the examining magistrate. You know him quite well, my friend Monsieur Pictoin.”
The postman sought among the letters and found the one he was being asked to return. Then he began to scrutinise it, turning it over and over in his fingers, very perplexed, very disturbed between his fear of committing a serious fault and his fear of making an enemy of the mayor.
Seeing his hesitation, Renardet made a movement to seize the letter and snatch it from him. This abrupt gesture convinced Médéric that he had stumbled on an important secret, and he decided to carry out his duty at all costs.
So he threw the envelope in his bag, shut it up, and answered:
“No, I can’t, Mr. Mayor. As soon as ever it’s been posted to the judge, I can’t do anything about it.”
Renardet’s heart contracted with a frightful anguish.
“But you know me quite well,” he babbled. “You can recognise my writing itself. I need that letter, I tell you.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Come, Médéric, you know that I’m not the sort of man to deceive you, and I tell you I need it.”
“No, I can’t.”
A sudden anger clouded Renardet’s violent mind.
“You’d better mind what you’re doing, damn you: I mean what I say and well you know it, and I can lose your job for you, my good man, and that before you’re much older, too. Besides, I’m mayor of the district after all, and I order you now to give me that letter.”
The postman answered firmly: “No, I can’t do it, Mr. Mayor.”
Then Renardet lost his head; he seized him by the arm and tried to snatch his bag; but the man shook himself free and, stepping back, lifted his thick holly stick. He was quite unmoved. “Don’t lay a hand on me, Mr. Mayor,” he said deliberately, “or I’ll lay this across you. Be careful. I intend to do my duty.”
Renardet felt that he was lost; suddenly he became humble, soft-voiced, imploring like a tearful child.
“Come, come, my friend, give me that letter, I’ll reward you, I’ll give you some money, wait, wait, I’ll give you a hundred francs—do you hear?—a hundred francs.”
The man swung on his heels and began to walk off.
Renardet followed him, panting, babbling.
“Médéric, Médéric, listen, I’ll give you a thousand francs—do you hear?—a thousand francs.”
The other man held on his way, without a word. Renardet went on: “I’ll make your fortune … do you hear? I’ll give you anything you like. … Fifty thousand francs. … Fifty thousand francs for that letter. … What do you say to that? You don’t want it? Well, a hundred thousand francs … do you understand? … a hundred thousand francs … a hundred thousand francs.”
The postman turned round, his face hard and his glance unrelenting. “And that’ll do, and I’ll take care to repeat to the judge all you’ve just been saying to me.”
Renardet stopped dead. It was all over. He had no hope left. He turned round and rushed towards the house, running like a hunted animal.
And now Médéric himself stood still and regarded his flight in amazement. He saw the mayor re-enter his house, and he went on waiting in the certain expectation of some astonishing happening.
And before long, indeed, the tall figure of Renardet appeared at the summit of Renard’s tower. He ran round the flat parapet like a madman; then he grasped the flagstaff and shook it furiously without managing to break it; then all at once, his hands flung out like a swimmer making a dive, he leaped into space.
Médéric rushed to his help. As he crossed the park, he saw the woodcutters going to work. He hailed them with shouts of the accident; and at the foot of the walls they found a bleeding body with its head crushed on a rock. The Brindille flowed round the rock, and just here, where its waters widened out, clear and calm, they saw, trickling through the water, a long scarlet thread of blood mixed with brains.