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"There was nobody about. At least I saw no one." "How extraordinary! Literally nobody?" "Nobody but a lot of dogs a whole pack of them who seemed to have the place to themselves." Madame de Lanrivain let the embroidery slip to her knee and folded her hands on it. For several minutes she looked at me thoughtfully. "A pack of dogs you saw them?" "Saw them? I saw nothing else!" "How many?"
My friend had brought his solicitor back from Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat and affable stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol... But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted in the study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the drawing-room. "Well are you going to buy Kerfol?" she asked, tilting up her gay chin from her embroidery.
This seemed to show that things had not been going well at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say that there had been any signs of open disagreement between husband and wife. Anne de Cornault, when questioned as to her reason for going down at night to open the door to Hervé de Lanrivain, made an answer which must have sent a smile around the court.
The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that Herve de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been arrested for complicity in the crime.
It might be that her husband had killed him; or merely that he had been robbed of the necklet. Day after day by the hearth among the spinning maids, night after night alone on her bed, she wondered and trembled. Sometimes at table her husband looked across at her and smiled; and then she felt sure that Lanrivain was dead.
Anne de Cornault was finally handed over to the keeping of her husband's family, who shut her up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died many years later, a harmless mad-woman. So ends her story. As for that of Hervé de Lanrivain, I had only to apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details.
Lanrivain had said; and I was overcome by the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any living being that Kerfol was the place for him. "Is it possible that any one could not See ?" I wondered. I did not finish the thought: what I meant was undefinable. I stood up and wandered toward the gate.
I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses.
The women in Brittany drink dreadfully." She stooped to match a silk; then she lifted her charming inquisitive Parisian face: "Did you REALLY see a lot of dogs? There isn't one at Kerfol," she said. Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the back of an upper shelf of his library. "Yes here it is. What does it call itself? A History of the Assizes of the Duchy of Brittany.
If we'd remembered, we never should have sent you to-day but then, after all, one doesn't half believe that sort of thing, does one?" "What sort of thing?" I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to the level of hers. Inwardly I was thinking: "I knew there was something...." Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring smile. "Didn't Hervé tell you the story of Kerfol?
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