"Be on your guard. He is a regular brute when he has been drinking."
But heavy footsteps could now be heard coming downstairs, and Philomène looked scared.
"It is my brother," said she. "Slip out quick! slip out quick!"
The two men were not twenty paces from the house when they heard slaps followed by yells. Philomène was being abominably chastised, like a little girl caught in the act, with her nose in the jam-pot. The driver stopped, ready to run to her assistance, but the fireman held him back.
"What are you going to do?" he inquired; "it is no business of yours. Ah! the slut! if he could only beat her to death!"
On reaching the Rue François-Mazeline, Jacques and Pecqueux went to bed without exchanging a word. The two bedsteads almost touched in the small room, and for a long time the men remained awake with their eyes open, listening to the breathing of one another.
It was on the Monday that the Roubaud trial was to commence at Rouen. This case proved a triumph for the examining-magistrate, Denizet, for there was no lack of praise in the judicial world as to the way in which he had brought the complicated and obscure business to a satisfactory issue. It was a masterpiece of clever analysis, said they; a logical substitution for the truth; in a word, a genuine creation.
First of all, M. Denizet had caused Cabuche to be arrested as soon as he had visited the house at La Croix-de-Maufras a few hours after the murder of Séverine. Everything pointed openly to this man as author of the crime: the blood trickling down him, the overwhelming evidence of Roubaud and Misard, who related how they had surprised him, alone with the corpse, and in a state of bewilderment. Questioned, pressed, to say in what manner and for what purpose he found himself in this room, the quarryman stammered out a story, which appeared so silly, and so like the usual run of such stories, that the examining-magistrate received it with a shrug of the shoulders.
He had been expecting this story, which was always the same, the tale of an imaginary murderer, the invented culprit, whom the real culprit pretended he had heard fleeing across the dark country. This bugbear must be a long way off, must he not, if he should still happen to be running? Besides, on Cabuche being asked what he was doing in front of the house at such a time, he became troubled, refused to answer, and ended by saying he was walking about. This was childish. How could anyone believe in the existence of this mysterious unknown, who came and committed a murder, and then ran off, leaving all the doors wide open without having searched a single article of furniture, or carried even a pocket-handkerchief away with him? Where did he come from? Why had he killed?