He made this explanation in a slow tone, searching for his words, and speaking in a stupefied fashion.
Then, he went off, saying:
"Till to-morrow, my friends--till to-morrow."
As soon as he had got back to his room, he sat down before his table, which his lamp, covered with a shade, lighted up brightly, and, clasping his hands over his forehead, he began to cry.
He remained crying for a long time, then wiped his eyes, raised his head, and looked at the clock. It was not yet six o"clock.
He thought:
"I have time before dinner."
And he went to the door and locked it. He then came back, and sat down before his table. He pulled out a drawer in the middle of it, and taking from it a revolver, laid it down over his papers, under the glare of the sun. The barrel of the fire-arm glittered and cast reflections which resembled flames.
Renardet gazed at it for some time with the uneasy glance of a drunken man; then he rose by, and began to pace up and down the room.
He walked from one end of the apartment to the other, and stopped from time to time, and started to pace up and down again a moment afterwards.
Suddenly, he opened the door of his dressing room, steeped a napkin in a water-jug and moistened his forehead, as he had done on the morning of the crime.
Then he went walking up and down once more. Each time he pa.s.sed the table the gleaming revolver attracted his glance, tempted his hand; but he kept watching the clock, and reflected:
"I have still time."
It struck half-past six. Then he took up the revolver, opened his mouth wide with a frightful grimace, and stuck the barrel into it, as if he wanted to swallow it. He remained in this position for some seconds without moving, his finger on the lock, then, suddenly, seized with a shudder of horror, he dropped the pistol on the carpet.
And he fell back on his arm-chair, sobbing:
"I can"t. I dare not! My G.o.d! My G.o.d! How can I have the courage to kill myself?"
There was a knock at the door. He rose up in a stupefied condition. A servant said:
"Monsieur"s dinner is ready."
He replied:
"All right. I"m going down."
Then he picked up the revolver, locked it up again in the drawer, then he looked at himself in the gla.s.s over the mantelpiece to see whether his face did not look too much convulsed. It was as red as usual, a little redder perhaps. That was all. He went down, and seated himself before the table.
He ate slowly, like a man who wants to drag on the meal, who does not want to be alone with himself.
Then he smoked several pipes in the hall while the plates were being removed. After that, he went back to his room.
As soon as he was shut up in it, he looked under his bed, opened all his cupboards, explored every corner, rummaged through all the furniture.
Then he lighted the tapers over the mantelpiece, and, turning round several times, ran his eye all over the apartment with an anguish of terror that made his face lose its color, for he knew well that he was going to see her, as on every night--Little Louise Roque, the little girl he had violated and afterwards strangled.
Every night the odious vision came back again. First, it sounded in his ears like a kind of snorting such as is made by a threshing machine or the distant pa.s.sage of a train over a bridge. Then he commenced to pant, to feel suffocated, and he had to unb.u.t.ton his shirt-collar and his belt. He moved about to make his blood circulate, he tried to read, he attempted to sing. It was in vain. His thoughts, in spite of himself, went back to the day of the murder, and made him begin it all over again in all its most secret details, with all the violent emotions he had experienced from the first minute to the last.
He had felt on rising up that morning, the morning of the horrible day, a little stupefaction and dizziness which he attributed to the heat, so that he remained in his room till the time came for breakfast.
After the meal he had taken a siesta, then, towards the close of the afternoon, he had gone out to breathe the fresh, soothing breeze under the trees in the wood.
But, as soon as they were outside, the heavy, scorching air of the plain oppressed him more. The sun, still high in the heavens, poured out on the parched soil, dry and thirsty, floods of ardent light. Not a breath of wind stirred the leaves. Every beast and bird, even the gra.s.shoppers, were silent. Renardet reached the tall trees, and began to walk over the moss where the Brindelle sent forth a slight, cool vapor under the immense roof of trees. But he felt ill at ease. It seemed to him that an unknown, invisible hand, was squeezing his neck, and he scarcely thought of anything, having usually few ideas in his head. For the last three months, only one thought haunted him, the thought of marrying again. He suffered from living alone, suffered from it morally and physically.
Accustomed for ten years past to feeling a woman near him, habituated to her presence every moment, to her embrace each successive day, he had need, an imperious and perplexing need of incessant contact with her and the regular touch of her lips. Since Madame Renardet"s death, he had suffered continually without knowing why, he had suffered from not feeling her dress brush against his legs every day, and, above all, from no longer being able to grow calm and languid between her arms. He had been scarcely six months a widower, and he had already been looking out through the district for some young girl or some widow he might marry when his period of marrying was at an end.
He had a chaste soul, but it was lodged in a powerful Herculean body, and carnal images began to disturb his sleep and his vigils. He drove them away; they came back again; and he murmured from time to time, smiling at himself:
"Here I am, like St. Antony."
Having had this morning several besetting visions, the desire suddenly came into his breast to bathe in the Brindelle in order to refresh himself and appease the ardor of his heat.
He knew, a little further on, a large deep spot where the people of the neighborhood came sometimes to take a dip in summer. He went there.
Thick willow trees hid this clear volume of water where the current rested and went to sleep for a little while before starting its way again. Renardet, as he appeared, thought he heard a light sound, a faint smell which was not that of the stream on the banks. He softly put aside the leaves and looked. A little girl, quite naked in the transparent water, was beating the waves with both hands, dancing about in them a little and dipping herself with pretty movements. She was not a child nor was she yet a woman. She was plump and formed, while preserving an air of youthful precocity, as of one who had grown rapidly, and who was now almost ripe. He no longer moved, overcome with surprise, with a pang of desire, holding his breath with a strange poignant emotion. He remained there, his heart beating as if one of his sensual dreams had just been realized, as if an impure fairy had conjured up before him this creature so disturbing to his blood, so very young this little rustic Venus, was born in the waves of the sea.
Suddenly the little girl came out of the water, and without seeing came over to where he stood looking for her clothes in order to dress herself. While she was gradually approaching with little hesitating steps, through fear of the sharp pointed stones, he felt himself pushed towards her by an irresistible force, by a b.e.s.t.i.a.l transport of pa.s.sion, which stirred up all his flesh, stupefied his soul, and made him tremble from head to foot.
She remained standing some seconds behind the willow tree which concealed him from view. Then, losing his reason entirely, he opened the branches, rushed on her, and seized her in his arms. She fell, too scared to offer any resistance, too much terror-stricken to cry out, and he possessed her without understanding what he was doing.
He woke up from his crime, as one wakes out of a nightmare. The child burst out weeping.
He said:
"Hold your tongue! Hold your tongue! I"ll give you money."
But she did not hear him, she went on sobbing.
He went on:
"Come now, hold your tongue! Do hold your tongue. Keep quiet."
She still kept shrieking, writhing in the effort to get away from him.
He suddenly realized that he was ruined, and he caught her by the neck to stop her mouth from uttering these heartrending, dreadful screams. As she continued to struggle with the desperate strength of a being who is seeking to fly from death, he pressed his enormous hands on the little throat swollen with cries, and in a few seconds he had strangled her so furiously did he grip her, without intending to kill her but only to make her keep silent.
Then he rose up overwhelmed with horror.
She lay before him with her face bleeding and blackened. He was going to rush away when there sprang up in his agitated soul the mysterious and undefined instinct that guides all beings in the hour of danger.
It was necessary to throw the body into the water; but another impulse drove him towards the clothes, of which he made a thin parcel. Then as he had a piece of twine in his pocket, he tied it up and hid it in a deep portion of the stream, under the trunk of a tree, the foot of which was steeped in the Brindelle.
Then he went off at a rapid pace, reached the meadows, took a wide turn in order to show himself to some peasants who dwelt some distance away at the opposite side of the district, and he came back to dine at the usual hour, and told his servants all that was supposed to have happened during his walk.
He slept, however, that night; he slept with a heavy brutish sleep, such as the sleep of persons condemned to death must be occasionally. He only opened his eyes at the first glimmer of dawn, and he waited, tortured by the fear of having his crime discovered, for his usual waking hour.
Then he would have to be present at all the stages of the inquiry as to the cause of death. He did so after the fashion of a somnambulist, in a hallucination which showed him things and human beings in a sort of dream, in a cloud of intoxication, in that dubious sense of unreality which perplexes the mind at the time of the greatest catastrophe.
The only thing that pierced his heart was La Roque"s cry of anguish. At that moment he felt inclined to cast himself at the old woman"s feet, and to exclaim--