She smiled no more, and in her turn asked a question:
“I suppose a man like you, Bernard, always knows why he does a thing?”
“Naturally ... why, of course ... at least, I think so.”
“Indeed, I should so have wished you to know everything. If you only knew how I have tortured myself to try and see clearly.... But, you see, all the reasons I could have given you,—the moment I had uttered them, they would have seemed unconvincing....”
“But,” said Bernard, impatiently, “there must have been a day when you made up your mind ... when you actually did the thing?”
“Yes, the day of the great fire at Mano.”
Their heads were close together, and they were talking in low tones. As they sat there, at that meeting of the Paris highways, under the soft sunlight, and in a slightly chilly wind that smelt of foreign tobacco, and stirred the red and yellow awnings, it seemed so strange to recall that stifling afternoon, the horizon dense with smoke, the tarnished blue of the sky, the penetrating torch-like odour that rises from burning pine-forests,—and her own drowsy heart in which the crime began to take on the semblance of a purpose.
“This is how it happened: it was in the dining-room, which was dark, as it always is at midday: you were talking with your head slightly turned towards Balion, forgetting to count the drops that fell into your glass.” Thérèse was not looking at Bernard, absorbed in her anxiety not to omit the most trifling circumstances; but she heard him laugh and turned towards him: Yes, he was laughing in his stupid way: “No, what do you take me for,” he said! He did not believe her,—and indeed what she was saying was hardly credible. He grinned, and she recognised the old Bernard, full of self-confidence and worldly wisdom. He had recovered himself and once more she knew that she was lost.
“So the idea came to you,” he said jeeringly, “just like that, all of a sudden, by the intervention of the Holy Ghost.”
How he loathed himself for having questioned Thérèse. It meant the loss of all the accumulated contempt that he had heaped upon the wretched woman. She was raising her head again! Why had he yielded to that sudden longing to understand? Just as if there was anything to understand in these hysterical creatures. But he had spoken without thinking....