'You see he has got a candle,' whispered Aurélie.
No one dissented. The fact was quite incontrovertible; Mouret certainly was carrying a candle. He came slowly down the steps, turned to the left and then stood motionless before a bed of lettuces. Then he raised his candle to throw a light upon the plants. His face looked quite yellow amidst the black night.
'What a dreadful face!' exclaimed Madame de Condamin. 'I shall dream of it, I'm certain. Is he asleep, doctor?'
'No, no,' replied Doctor Porquier, 'he is not a somnambulist; he is wide awake. Do you notice how fixed his gaze is? Observe, too, the abruptness of his movements——'
'Hush! hush!' interrupted Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies; 'we don't require a lecture just now.'
The most complete silence then fell. Mouret had stridden over the box-edging and was kneeling in the midst of the lettuces. He held his candle down, and began searching along the trenches underneath the spreading leaves of the plants. Every now and then he made a slight examination and seemed to be crushing something and stamping it into the ground. This went on for nearly half an hour.
'He is crying; it is just as I told you,' Aurélie complacently remarked.
'It is really very terrifying,' Madame de Condamin exclaimed nervously. 'Pray let us go back into the house.'
Mouret dropped his candle and it went out. They could hear him uttering exclamations of annoyance as he went back up the steps, stumbling against them in the dark. The Rastoil girls broke out into little cries of terror, and did not quite recover from their fright till they were again in the brightly lighted drawing-room, where Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies insisted upon the company refreshing themselves with some tea and biscuits. Madame de Condamin, who was still trembling with alarm, huddled up on a couch, said, with a touching smile, that she had never felt so overcome before, not even on the morning when she had had the reprehensible curiosity to go and see a criminal executed.
'It is strange,' remarked Monsieur Rastoil, who had been buried in thought for a moment or two; 'but Mouret looked as if he were searching for slugs amongst his lettuces. The gardens are quite ravaged by them, and I have been told that they can only be satisfactorily exterminated in the night-time.'