"We are as alone as we can well be. The old woman in the kitchen is as deaf as a post."
Now that he had been looking at Arlette closer the abbé felt a sort of dread. The carmine of those lips, the pellucid, unstained, unfathomable blackness of those eyes, the pallor of her cheeks, suggested to him something provokingly pagan, something distastefully different from the common sinners of this earth. And now she was ready to speak. He arrested her with a raised hand.
"Wait," he said. "I have never seen you before. I don't even know properly who you are. None of you belong to my flock – for you are from Escampobar. are you not?" Sombre under their bony arches, his eyes fastened on her face, noticed the delicacy of features, the naive pertinacity of her stare. She said:
"I am the daughter."
"The daughter! . . . Oh! I see . . . Much evil is spoken of you."
She said a little impatiently: "By that rabble?" and the priest remained mute for a moment. "What do they say? In my father's time they wouldn't have dared to say anything. The only thing I saw of them for years and years was when they were yelping like curs on the heels of Scevola."
The absence of scorn in her tone was perfectly annihilating. Gentle sounds flowed from her lips and a disturbing charm from her strange equanimity. The abbé frowned heavily at these fascinations, which seemed to have in them something diabolic.
"They are simple souls, neglected, fallen back into darkness. It isn't their fault. They have natural feelings of humanity which were outraged. I saved him from their indignation. There are things that must be left to divine justice."
He was exasperated by the unconsciousness of that fair face.
"That man whose name you have just pronounced and which I have heard coupled with the epithet of 'blood-drinker' is regarded as the master of Escampobar Farm. He has been living there for years. How is that?"