[III]
Mouret spent the whole of the next morning in playing the spy on his new tenant. This espionage would now enable him to fill up the idle hours which he had hitherto spent in pottering about the house, in putting back into their proper places any articles which he happened to find lying about, and in picking quarrels with his wife and children. Henceforth he would have an occupation, an amusement which would relieve the monotony of his everyday life. As he had often said, he was not partial to priests, and yet Abbé Faujas, the first one who had entered into his existence, excited in him an extraordinary amount of interest. This priest brought with him a touch of mystery and secrecy that was almost disquieting. Although Mouret was a strong-minded man and professed himself to be a follower of Voltaire, yet in the Abbé's presence he felt the astonishment and uneasiness of a common bourgeois.
Not a sound came from the second floor. Mouret stood on the staircase and listened eagerly; he even ventured to go to the loft. As he hushed his steps while passing along the passage, a pattering of slippers behind the door filled him with emotion. But he did not succeed in making any new discovery, so he went down into the garden and strolled into the arbour at the end of it, there raising his eyes and trying to look through the windows in order to find out what might be going on in the rooms. But he could not see even the Abbé's shadow. Madame Faujas, in the absence of curtains, had, as a makeshift, fastened some sheets behind the windows.
At lunch Mouret seemed quite vexed.
'Are they dead upstairs?' he said, as he cut the children's bread. 'Have you heard them move, Marthe?'
'No, my dear; but I haven't been listening.'
Rose thereupon cried out from the kitchen: 'They've been gone ever so long. They must be far enough away now if they've kept on at the same pace.'
Mouret summoned the cook and questioned her minutely.
'They went out, sir: first the mother, and then the priest. They walked so softly that I should never have known anything about it if their shadows had not fallen across the kitchen floor when they opened the street door. I looked out into the street to see where they were going, but they had vanished. They must have gone off in a fine hurry.'