Silence reigned. For a moment one only heard the working of Brother Archangias’s jaws, and the extraordinary rumbling of his gullet. Desirée, with her bare arms round the nest in her plate, smiled to the little ones, talking to them slowly and softly in a chirruping of her own which they seemed to understand.
‘People say what they have done when they have nothing to hide,’ suddenly cried La Teuse.
And then silence reigned again. What exasperated the old servant was the mystery the priest seemed to make about his visit to the Paradou. She deemed herself a woman who had been shamefully deceived. Her curiosity smarted. She again walked round the table, not looking at the Abbé, not addressing anybody, but comforting herself with soliloquy.
‘That’s it; that’s why we have lunch so late! We go gadding about till two o’clock in the afternoon. We go into such disreputable houses that we don’t even dare to tell what we’ve done. And then we tell lies, we deceive everybody.’
‘But nobody,’ gently interrupted Abbé Mouret, who was forcing himself to eat a little more, so as to prevent La Teuse from getting crosser than ever, ‘nobody asked me if I had been to the Paradou. I have not had to tell any lies.’
La Teuse, however, went on as if she had never heard him.
‘Yes, we go ruining our cassock in the dust, we come home rigged up like a thief. And if some kind person takes an interest in us, and questions us for our own good, we push her about and treat her like a good-for-nothing woman, whom we can’t trust. We hide things like a slyboots, we’d rather die than breathe a word; we’re not even considerate enough to enliven our home by relating what we’ve seen.’
She turned to the priest, and looked him full in the face.
‘Yes, you take that to yourself. You are a close one, you’re a bad man!’
Thereupon she fell to crying and the Abbé had to soothe her.