CHAPTER XII
CHAUVELIN
§1
Theresia had opposed a stern refusal to Pepita's request that she might put her mistress to bed before she herself went to rest. She did not want to go to bed; she wanted to think. And now that that peculiar air of mystery, that silence and semi-darkness no longer held their gruesome sway in her apartment, she did not feel afraid.
Pepita went to bed. For awhile, Theresia could hear her moving about, with ponderous, shuffling footsteps; then, presently everything was still. The clock of old St. Roch struck three. Not much more than half an hour had gone by since her guests had departed. To Theresia it seemed like an infinity of time. The sense of a baffling mystery being at work around her had roused her ire and killed all latent fear.
But what was the mystery?
And was there a mystery at all? Or was Pepita's rational explanation of the occurrence of this night the right one after all?
Citoyenne Cabarrus, unable to sit still, wandered up and down the passage, in and out of the kitchen; in and out of her bedroom, and thence into the vestibule. Then back again. At one moment, when standing in the vestibule, she thought she heard some one moving on the landing outside the front door. Her heart beat a little more rapidly, but she was not afraid. She did not believe in housebreakers and she felt that Pepita, who was a very light sleeper, was well within call.
So she went to the front door and opened it. The quick cry which she gave was one of surprise rather than of fear. In her belated visitor she had recognised citizen Chauvelin; and somehow, by a vague process of reasoning, his presence just at this moment seemed quite rational—in keeping with the unsolved mystery that was so baffling to the fair Theresia.
"May I come in, citoyenne?" Chauvelin said in a whisper. "It is late, I know; but there is urgency."