"What a wretch! We must find the clothes."
The doctor felt the hands, the arms, the legs. He said:
"She must have been bathing, no doubt. They ought to be at the water"s edge."
The Mayor thereupon gave directions:
"Do you, Princepe" (this was his secretary), "go and look for those clothes for me along the river. Do you, Maxime" (this was the steward), "hurry on towards Roug-le-Tors, and bring on here to me the examining magistrate with the gendarmes. They must be here within an hour. You understand."
The two men quickly departed, and Renardet said to the doctor:
"What miscreant has been able to do such a deed in this part of the country."
The doctor murmured:
"Who knows? Everyone is capable of that? Everyone in particular and n.o.body in general. No matter, it must be some prowler, some workman out of employment. As we live under a Republic, we must expect to meet only this kind of person along the roads."
Both of them were Bonapartists.
The Mayor went on:
"Yes, it can only be a stranger, a pa.s.ser-by, a vagabond without heart or home."
The doctor added with the shadow of a smile on his face:
"And without a wife. Having neither a good supper nor a good bed, he procured the rest for himself. You can"t tell how many men there may be in the world capable of a crime at a given moment. Did you know that this little girl had disappeared?"
And with the end of his stick he touched one after the other the stiffened fingers of the corpse, resting on them as on the keys of a piano.
"Yes, the mother came last night to look for me about nine o"clock, the child not having come home from supper up to seven. We went to try and find her along the roads up to midnight, but we did not think of the wood. However, we needed daylight to carry out a search with a practical result."
"Will you have a cigar?" said the doctor.
"Thanks, I don"t care to smoke. It gives me a turn to look at this."
They both remained standing in front of this corpse of a young girl, so pale, on the dark moss. A big fly with a blue belly that was walking along one of the thighs, stopped at the bloodstains, went on again, always rising higher, ran along the side with his lively, jerky movements, climbed up one of the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then came back again to explore the other, looking out for something to drink on this dead girl.
The two men kept watching this wandering black speck.
The doctor said:
"How pretty it is, a fly on the skin! The ladies of the last century had good reason to paste them on their faces. Why has this fashion gone out?"
The Mayor seemed not to hear, plunged as he was in deep thought.
But, all of a sudden, he turned round, for he was surprised by a shrill noise. A woman in a cap and a blue ap.r.o.n rushed up under the trees. It was the mother, La Roque. As soon as she saw Renardet she began to shriek:
"My little girl, where"s my little girl?" in such a distracted manner that she did not glance down at the ground. Suddenly, she saw the corpse, stopped short, clasped her hands, and raised both her arms while she uttered a sharp, heartrending cry--the cry of a mutilated animal.
Then she rushed towards the body, fell on her knees, and took off, as if she would have s.n.a.t.c.hed it away, the handkerchief that covered the face.
When she saw that frightful countenance, black and convulsed, she rose up with a shudder, then pressed her face against the ground, giving vent to terrible and continuous screams with her mouth close to the thick moss.
Her tall, thin frame, to which her clothes were clinging tightly, was palpitating, shaken with convulsions. They could see her bony ankles and her dried up calves covered with thick blue stockings, shivering horribly; and she went digging the soil with her crooked fingers as if in order to make a hole there to hide herself in it.
The doctor moved, said in a low tone:
"Poor old woman!"
Renardet felt a strange rumbling in his stomach; then he gave vent to a sort of loud sneeze that issued at the same time through his nose and through his mouth; and, drawing his handkerchief from his pocket, he began to weep internally, coughing, sobbing, and wiping his face noisily.
He stammered--
"d.a.m.n--d.a.m.n--d.a.m.ned pig to do this! I would like to see him guillotined."
But Princepe reappeared, with his hands empty. He murmured--
"I have found nothing, M"sieu le Maire, nothing at all anywhere."
The doctor, scared, replied in a thick voice, drowned in tears:
"What is that you could not find?"
"The little girl"s clothes."
"Well--well--look again, and find them--or you"ll have to answer to me."
The man, knowing that the Mayor would not brook opposition, set forth again with hesitating steps, casting on the corpse indirect and timid glances.
Distant voices arose under the trees, a confused sound, the noise of an approaching crowd; for Mederic had, in the course of his rounds carried the news from door to door. The people of the neighborhood, stupefied at first, had gone chatting from their own firesides into the street, from one threshold to another. Then they gathered together. They talked over, discussed, and commented on the event for some minutes, and they had now come to see it for themselves.
They arrived in groups a little faltering and uneasy through fear of the first impression of such a scene on their minds. When they saw the body they stopped, not daring to advance, and speaking low. They grew bold, went on a few steps, stopped again, advanced once more, and soon they formed around the dead girl, her mother, the doctor, and Renardet, a thick circle, agitated and noisy, which crushed forward under the sudden pushes of the last comers. And now they touched the corpse. Some of them even bent down to feel it with their fingers. The doctor kept them back.
But the mayor, waking abruptly out of his torpor, broke into a rage, and, seizing Dr. Labarbe"s stick, flung himself on his townspeople, stammering:
"Clear out--clear out--you pack of brutes--clear out!"
And in a second, the crowd of sightseers had fallen back two hundred meters.
La Roque was lifted up, turned round, and placed in a sitting posture, and she now remained weeping with her hands clasped over her face.
The occurrence was discussed among the crowd; and young lads" eager eyes curiously scrutinized this naked body of a girl. Renardet perceived this, and abruptly taking off his vest, he flung it over the little girl, who was entirely lost to view under the wide garment.
The spectators drew near quietly. The wood was filled with people, and a continuous hum of voices rose up under the tangled foliage of the tall trees.
The Mayor, in his shirt sleeves, remained standing, with his stick in his hands, in a fighting att.i.tude. He seemed exasperated by this curiosity on the part of the people, and kept repeating:
"If one of you come nearer, I"ll break his head just as I would a dog"s."
The peasants were greatly afraid of him. They held back. Dr. Labarbe, who was smoking, sat down beside La Roque, and spoke to her in order to distract her attention. The old woman soon removed her hands from her face, and she replied with a flood of tearful words, emptying her grief in copious talk. She told the whole story of her life, her marriage, the death of her man, a bullsticker, who had been gored to death, the infancy of her daughter, her wretched existence as a widow without resources and with a child to support. She had only this one, her little Louise, and the child had been killed--killed in this wood. All of a sudden, she felt anxious to see it again, and dragging herself on her knees towards the corpse, she raised up one corner of the garment that covered her; then she let it fall again, and began wailing once more.
The crowd remained silent, eagerly watching all the mother"s gestures.
But all of a sudden, a great swaying movement took place, and there was a cry of "the gendarmes! the gendarmes!"