Robbed—yes, robbed of his ‘Charles-the-Fifths,’ the three best things in his collection! But the assurance which made his attack so violent died out of his voice, and his suspicion hesitated, at the sight of Adelaide’s surprise. Meanwhile she recovered her self-possession. ‘But whom do you suspect?’ Corentine, she thought, was trustworthy. Teyssèdre? It was hardly likely that an ignorant——
Teyssèdre! He exclaimed at it, the thing seemed so obvious. Helped by his hatred for the man of polish, he soon began to see how the crime had come about, and traced it step by step from a chance allusion at dinner to the value of his documents, heard by Corentine and repeated in all innocence. Ah, the scoundrel! Why, he had the skull of a criminal! Foolish to struggle against the intimations of instinct! There must be something out of the common, when a floor-polisher could arouse so strange an antipathy in a member of the Institute! Ah, well, the dolt was done for now! He should catch it! ‘My three Charleses! Only fancy!’ He wanted to inform the police at once, before going home. His wife tried to prevent him. ‘Are you out of your mind? Go to the police-station after midnight?’ But he insisted, and thrust his great numskull out into the rain to give orders to the driver. She was obliged to pull him back with an effort, and feeling too much exhausted to carry on the lie, to let him say his say and bring him round gradually, she came out with the whole truth.
‘It’s not Teyssèdre—it’s I! There!’ At one breath she poured out the story of her visit to Bos, the money she had got, the 800L., and the necessity for it. The silence which ensued was so long that at first she thought he had had a fit of apoplexy. It was not that; but like a child that falls or hits itself, poor Crocodilus had opened his mouth so wide to let out his anger, and taken so deep a breath, that he could not utter a sound. At last came a roar that filled the Carrousel, where their cab was at that minute splashing through the pools.
‘Robbed, robbed! Robbed by my wife for the sake of her son!’ In his insane fury he jumbled together indiscriminately the abusive patois of his native hillside, ‘Ah la garso! Ah li bongri!’ with the classical exclamations of Harpagon bewailing his casket, Justice, justice du ciel!’ and other select extracts often recited to his pupils. It was as light as day in the bright rays of the tall electric lamps standing round the great square, over which, as the theatres were emptying, omnibuses and carriages were now passing in all directions.
‘Do be quiet,’ said Madame Astier; ‘everyone knows you.’
‘Except you, Madame!’
She thought he was going to beat her, and in the strained condition of her nerves it might perhaps have been a relief. But under the terror of a scandal he suddenly quieted down, swearing finally by his mother’s ashes that as soon as he got home he would pack up his trunk and go straight off to Sauvagnat, leaving his wife to depart with her scoundrelly prodigal and live on their spoils.
Once more the deep old box with its big nails was brought hastily from the anteroom into the study. A few billets of wood were still left in it from the winter’s supply, but the ‘deity’ did not change his purpose for that. For an hour the house resounded with the rolling of logs and the banging of cupboard doors, as he flung among the sawdust and bits of dry bark linen, clothes, boots, and even the green coat and embroidered waistcoat of the Academic full dress, carefully put away in napkins. His wrath was relieved by this operation, and diminished as he filled his trunk, till his last resentful grumblings died away when it occurred to him that, fixed as he was to his place, to uproot himself was utterly impossible. Meanwhile Madame Astier, sitting on the edge of an armchair in her dressing-gown, with a lace wrap round her head, watched his proceedings and murmured between yawn and yawn with placid irony, ‘Really, Léonard, really!’