Still the despatch was drawn up and sent, at the very moment when a servant came in, and announced that dinner was ready. The meal was less sad than they had anticipated. Everybody, to be sure, felt a heaviness at heart as he thought that at the same hour a jailer probably brought Jacques his meal to his cell; nor could Dionysia keep from dropping a tear when she saw M. Folgat sitting in her lover’s place. But no one, except the young advocate, thought that Jacques was in real danger.
M. Seneschal, however, who came in just as coffee was handed round, evidently shared M. Folgat’s apprehensions. The good mayor came to hear the news, and to tell his friends how he had spent the day. The funeral of the firemen had passed off quietly, although amid deep emotion. No disturbance had taken place, as was feared; and Dr. Seignebos had not spoken at the graveyard. Both a disturbance and a row would have been badly received, said M. Seneschal; for he was sorry to say, the immense majority of the people of Sauveterre did not doubt M. de Boiscoran’s guilt. In several groups he had heard people say, “And still you will see they will not condemn him. A poor devil who should commit such a horrible crime would be hanged sure enough; but the son of the Marquis de Boiscoran—you will see, he’ll come out of it as white as snow.”
The rolling of a carriage, which stopped at the door, fortunately interrupted him at this point.
“Who can that be?” asked Dionysia, half frightened.
They heard in the passage the noise of steps and voices, something like a scuffle; and almost instantly the tenant’s son Michael pushed open the door of the sitting-room, crying out,—
“I have gotten him! Here he is!”
And with these words he pushed in Cocoleu, all struggling, and looking around him, like a wild beast caught in a trap.
“Upon my word, my good fellow,” said M. Seneschal, “you have done better than the gendarmes!”
The manner in which Michael winked with his eye showed that he had not a very exalted opinion of the cleverness of the gendarmes.
“I promised the baron,” he said, “I would get hold of Cocoleu somehow or other. I knew that at certain times he went and buried himself, like the wild beast that he is, in a hole which he has scratched under a rock in the densest part of the forest of Rochepommier. I had discovered this den of his one day by accident; for a man might pass by a hundred times, and never dream of where it was. But, as soon as the baron told me that the innocent had disappeared, I said to myself, ‘I am sure he is in his hole: let us go and see.’ So I gathered up my legs; I ran down to the rocks: and there was Cocoleu. But it was not so easy to pull him out of his den. He would not come; and, while defending himself, he bit me in the hand, like the mad dog that he is.”