“Very well,” said M. Magloire again approvingly.
“And your other charges,” continued M. Folgat, as if he were standing in court, and addressing the jury,—“your other charges have all the same weight. Our letter to Miss Dionysia—why do you refer to that? Because, you say, it proves our premeditation. Ah! there I hold you. Are we really so stupid and bereft of common sense? That is not our reputation. What! we premeditate a crime, and we do not say to ourselves that we shall certainly be convicted unless we prepare an alibi! What! we leave home with the fixed purpose of killing a man, and we load our gun with small-shot! Really, you make the defence too easy; for your charges do not stand being examined.”
It was Jacques’s turn, this time, to testify his approbation.
“That is,” he said, “what I have told Galpin over and over again; and he never had any thing to say in reply. We must insist on that point.”
M. Folgat was consulting his notes.
“I now come to a very important circumstance, and one which I should, at the trial, make a decisive question, if it should be favorable to our side. Your valet, my dear client,—your old Anthony,—told me that he had cleaned and washed your breech-loader the night before the crime.”
“Great God!” exclaimed Jacques.
“Well, I see you appreciate the importance of the fact. Between that cleaning and the time when you set a cartridge on fire, in order to burn the letters of the Countess Claudieuse, did you fire your gun? If you did, we must say nothing more about it. If you did not, one of the barrels of the breech-loader must be clean, and then you are safe.”
For more than a minute, Jacques remained silent, trying to recall the facts; at last he replied,—
“It seems to me, I am sure, I fired at a rabbit on the morning of the fatal day.”