It was nearly midnight, though Mouret calculated that it could scarcely yet be eight o'clock. He passed through the deserted streets, feeling quite distressed that he had kept his wife waiting such a long time.
'She won't be able to understand it,' he thought. 'The dinner will be quite cold. Ah! I shall get a nice reception from Rose.'
At last he reached the Rue Balande and stood before his own door.
'Ah!' he said, 'I have not got my latchkey.'
He did not knock at the door, however. The kitchen window was quite dark, and the other windows in the front were equally void of all sign of life. A sense of deep suspicion then took possession of the madman; with an instinct that was quite animal-like, he scented danger. He stepped back into the shadow of the neighbouring houses, and again examined the house-front; then he seemed to come to a decision, and went round into the Impasse des Chevillottes. But the little door that led into the garden was bolted. At this, impelled by sudden rage, he threw himself against it with tremendous force, and the door, rotted by damp, broke into two pieces. For a moment the violence of the shock almost stunned Mouret, and rendered him unconscious of why he had broken down the door, which he tried to mend again by joining the broken pieces.
'That's a nice thing to have done, when I might so easily have knocked,' he said with a sudden pang of regret. 'It will cost me at least thirty francs to get a new door.'
He was now in the garden. As he raised his head and saw the bedroom on the first floor brightly lighted, he came to the conclusion that his wife was going to bed. This caused him great astonishment, and he muttered that he must certainly have dropped off to sleep under the bridge while he was waiting for the rain to stop. It must be very late, he thought. The windows of the neighbouring houses, Monsieur Rastoil's as well as those of the Sub-Prefecture, were in darkness. Then he again fixed his eyes upon his own house as he caught sight of the glow of a lamp on the second floor behind Abbé Faujas's thick curtains. That glow was like a flaming eye, and seemed to scorch him. He pressed his brow with his burning hands, and his head grew dizzy, racked by some horrible recollection like a vague nightmare, in which nothing was clearly defined, but which seemed to apply to some long-standing danger to himself and his family—a danger which grew and increased in horror, and threatened to swallow up the house unless he could do something to save it.
'Marthe, Marthe, where are you?' he stammered in an undertone. 'Come and bring away the children.'
He looked about him for Marthe. He could no longer recognise the garden. It seemed to him to be larger; to be empty and grey and like a cemetery. The big box-plants had vanished, the lettuces were no longer there, the fruit-trees had disappeared. He turned round again, came back, and knelt down to see if the slugs had eaten everything up. The disappearance of the box-plants, the death of their lofty greenery, caused him an especial pang, as though some of the actual life of the house had departed. Who was it that had killed them? What villain had been there uprooting everything and tearing away even the tufts of violets which he had planted at the foot of the terrace? Indignation arose in him as he contemplated all this ruin.
'Marthe, Marthe, where are you?' he called again.