“Mon Dieu! Madama, Madama,” he whispered excitedly: “What news! Christ in heaven, what news!”
She rose, trembling. Her heart, she felt, could not bear much more.
“What is it, Jacques?” she said faintly.
Balmat, iron-nerved, made but a sorry Mercury.
“It is only,” he said, “that the Marquess your husband was murdered—that is little—there was more than one of us had suspected it—but by whom? God be praised for enlightening us—for vindicating the innocent—it has all come out; and who do you think is the guilty one? No other than M. le Préfet himself, who is lying at this moment under arrest. Ah, ah! what have I blundered, great oaf! Madama, Madama!”
* * * * * * * *
That same night an express was despatched by Madame Saint-Péray to her husband in France, bidding him, for reasons of her own, not to return until he heard further from her.
CHAPTER VIII
That sunny forenoon on which Dr Bonito (carrying the King’s Commission in his pocket, and M. Léotade, whom he had taken up by the way, on the seat of the chaise beside him) came posting down the valley into Le Prieuré, found the whole village in a flutter of excitement, which the apparent opportuneness of his arrival was presently to inflame into a fervour.
Alighting at the doors of the Prefecture, and conning, acidly sardonic, the perturbed faces which, gathered about him, sought to reconcile this frowzy magnifico with an earlier familiar figure, he was conscious of a moral agitation in the atmosphere, which at first he was inclined to attribute to some shadow of the truth having run before him. But in that he was wrong. The announcement of his mission, when it was made, took the populace like a clap of wind at a street corner. The village staggered in it; then rallied hurriedly to appraise its significance. For the moment the fact was important only in its relation to another more instant and insistent. The two combined ran up the public temperature to fever-heat.