He leant out of the window, touched the driver on the shoulder with his walking-stick and stopped the carriage. Julius prepared to get out with him.
“No! Let me be! I know all that’s necessary for my purpose. You can put the rest in a novel. As for me, I shall write to the Grand Master of the Order this very evening, and to-morrow I shall take up my scientific reviewing for the Dépêche. Fine fun it’ll be!”
“What!” said Julius, surprised to see that he was limping again. “You’re lame?”
“Yes, my rheumatism came back a few days ago.”
“Oh, I see! So that’s at the bottom of it!” said Julius, as he sank back into the corner of the carriage, without looking after him.
VII
Did Protos really intend to give Lafcadio up to the police as he had threatened? I cannot tell. The event proved at any rate that the police were not entirely composed of his friends. These gentlemen, who had been advised by Carola the day before, laid their mousetrap in the Vicolo dei Vecchierelli; they had long been acquainted with the house and knew that the upper floor had easy means of communication with the next-door house, whose exits also they watched.
Protos was not afraid of the detectives; nor of any particular accusation that might be brought against him; the machinery of the law inspired him with no terrors; he knew that it would be hard to catch him out; that he was innocent in reality of any crime and guilty only of misdemeanours too trifling to be brought home to him. He was therefore not excessively alarmed when he realised that he was trapped—which he did very quickly, having a particular flair for nosing out these gentry, in no matter what disguise.
Hardly more than slightly perplexed, he shut himself up in Carola’s room and waited for her to come in; he had not seen her since Fleurissoire’s murder, and was anxious to ask her advice and to leave a few instructions in the very probable event of his being run in.
Carola, in the meantime, in deference to Julius’s wishes, had not shown herself in the cemetery. No one knew that, hidden behind a mausoleum and beneath an umbrella, she was assisting at the melancholy ceremony from afar. She waited patiently, humbly, until the approach to the newly dug grave was free; she saw the procession re-form—Julius go off with Anthime and the carriages drive away in the drizzling rain. Then, in her turn, she went up to the grave, took out from beneath her cloak a big bunch of asters, which she put down a little way from the family’s wreaths; there she stayed for a long time, looking at nothing, thinking of nothing, and crying instead of praying.