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Updated: May 7, 2025
Usually so respectful and so deferential in manner, he now seized M. Rambert by the arm, and imperiously waving Thérèse and Charles away, drew him aside. "It is awful, sir," he exclaimed: "horrible: a fearful thing has happened. We have just found Mme. la Marquise dead murdered in her room!"
"And I don't mind telling you that if I were not your banker, and so had a certain responsibility in your case, I should not hesitate to put a scheme before you that has been running in my head for a year or two now." "A scheme of your own, Barbey?" said M. Rambert. "How is it you have never told me about it? I should have thought we were close enough friends for that."
"No!" he repeated; "it is quite true that we can adduce perfectly logical arguments to show that the murder was committed by some member of the household and that, therefore, Charles Rambert is the only possible culprit; but we can adduce equally logical arguments to show that the crime was committed by some person who got in from outside: there is nothing to prove that he did not walk into the house through the front door."
"According to that, Charles Rambert is innocent?" "I don't say that." "What then? I suppose you don't think the father was the murderer?" "The hypothesis is not absurd! But there! What is the real truth of the whole affair? That is what I am wondering all the time. That murder is never out of my head; it interests me more and more every day.
The magistrate was the first to break the silence. "So it is finished?" he remarked. "So this Charles Rambert is the culprit?" Juve shook his head. "Charles Rambert? Well, he ought to be the culprit." "Why that reservation?" enquired the magistrate. "I say 'ought to be, for all the circumstances point to that conclusion, and yet in my bones I don't believe he is."
"It was not much trouble for me to wake up," Charles Rambert answered. "I hardly closed an eye all night." "But I promised to come and knock at your door myself, so you might have slept without any anxiety." "That's so, but to tell you the truth, Thérèse, I was regularly upset and excited by the thought of papa arriving this morning." They had both finished breakfast, and Thérèse got up.
There it is!" and she pointed to a slope in the distance where a slight trail of smoke rose white against the blue of the sky, now clear of cloud. "Can't you see it? That is the steam from the engine coming out of the tunnel." Ere she finished speaking the quivering whir of the bell echoed through the empty station. "Ah!" said Charles Rambert: "at last!"
With bent head and shoulders bowed as though beneath a too-heavy load, Etienne Rambert moved towards the dressing-room attached to the bedroom. "Come here," he said in an almost inaudible voice; "follow me." He went into the dressing-room, and picking up the towels that were heaped anyhow on the lower rail of the washstand, he selected a very crumpled one and held it out in front of his son.
She opened a little door half-hidden among the moss and ivy that clothed the wall surrounding the park, and making M. Rambert and Charles pass in before her, cried: "But Jean has gone with the brougham, for the horses are not in the stable. How was it we did not meet him?" Then she laughed. "Poor Jean! He is so muddle-headed!
But Charles Rambert put in his plea. "Oh, I am sure my father would be delighted to see Thérèse with me when he gets out of the train." "Very well, then," the kind old lady said; "arrange it as you please. But, Thérèse, before you go upstairs, tell our good steward, Dollon, to give orders for the carriage to be ready by six o'clock. It is a long way to the station."
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