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Then the strange scent attracted her and she began to wonder what kind of spice was in the box. She opened it and found a grey bean rolled in a strip of paper; and on the paper she saw a sign she knew, and a message from Herve de Lanrivain, saying that he was at home again and would be at the door in the court that night after the moon had set... She burned the paper and then sat down to think.
She said nothing to her husband, then or later, and he said nothing to her; but that day he had a peasant hanged for stealing a faggot in the park, and the next day he nearly beat to death a young horse he was breaking. Winter set in, and the short days passed, and the long nights, one by one; and she heard nothing of Herve de Lanrivain.
But she went on to the end, with a kind of hypnotized insistence, as though the scenes she evoked were so real to her that she had forgotten where she was and imagined herself to be re-living them. "I did not murder my husband." "Who did, then? Herve de Lanrivain?" "No." "Who then? Can you tell us?" "Yes, I can tell you. The dogs " At that point she was carried out of the court in a swoon.
If we'd remembered, we never should have sent you today 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 Herve tell you the story of Kerfol?
It was nightfall, and her husband was at home.... She had no way of warning Lanrivain, and there was nothing to do but to wait.... At this point I fancy the drowsy court-room beginning to wake up.
They were so steep and winding that she had to go very slowly, for fear of stumbling. Her one thought was to get the door unbolted, tell Lanrivain to make his escape, and hasten back to her room.
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.
Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a narrow brow. Poor Herve de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate.
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 Hervé de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been arrested for complicity in the crime.
"But what did you want to say to Hervé de Lanrivain?" the court asked; and she answered: "To ask him to take me away." "Ah you confess that you went down to him with adulterous thoughts?" "Then why did you want him to take you away?" "Because I was afraid for my life." "Of whom were you afraid?" "Of my husband." "Why were you afraid of your husband?" "Because he had strangled my little dog."
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