M. Ginory was not without uneasiness when he thought of the detention of Jacques Dantin. Without doubt, all prisoners, all accused persons are reticent; they try to hide their guilt under voluntary silence. They do not speak, because they have sworn not to. They are bound, one knows not by whom, by an oath which they cannot break. It is the ordinary system of the guilty who cannot defend themselves. Mystery seems to them safety.
But Dantin, intimately acquainted with Rovère's life, might be acquainted with some secret which he could not disclose and which did not pertain to him at all. What secret? Had not an examining magistrate a right to know everything? Had not an accused man a right to speak? Either Dantin had nothing to reveal and he was playing a comedy and was guilty, or, if by a few words, by a confidence made to the magistrate he could escape an accusation, recover his liberty, without doubt he would speak after having kept an inexplicable silence. How could one suppose that an innocent man would hold, for a long time, to this mute system?
The discovery of the portrait in Mme. Colard's shop ought, naturally, to give to the affair a new turn. The arrest of Charles Pradès brought an important element to these researches. He would be examined by M. Ginory the next morning, after having been questioned by the Commissary of Police.
Bernardet, spruce, freshly shaven, was there, and seemed in his well-brushed redingote, like a little abbé come to assist at some curious ceremony.
On the contrary, Pradès, after a sleepless night, a night of agony, paler than the evening before, his face fierce and its muscles contracted, had a haggard expression, and he blinked his eyes like a night bird suddenly brought into glaring sunlight. He repeated before the Examining Magistrate what he had said to the brigadier. But his voice, vibrant a few hours before, had become heavy, almost raucous, as the haughty expression of his face had become sullen and tragic.
The Examining Magistrate had cited Mme. Colard, the shopkeeper, to appear before him. She instantly recognized in this Pradès the man who had sold her the little panel by Paul Baudry.
He denied it. He did not know of what they were talking. He had never seen this woman. He knew nothing about any portrait.
"It belonged to M. Rovère," the magistrate replied, "M. Rovère, the murdered man; M. Rovère, who was consul at Buenos Ayres, and you spoke, yesterday, of Buenos Ayres, in the examination at the station house in the Rue de la Rochefoucauld."
"M. Rovère? Buenos Ayres?" repeated the young man, rolling his sombrero around his fingers.
He repeated that he did not know the ex-Consul, that he had never been in South America, that he had come from Sydney.