“Madame shall see the house from garret to cellar if she wishes,” she exclaimed. “I know the old woman in charge. She is as deaf as one of those stones yonder,” pointing to a block of blue-gray stone lying amidst the long rank grass upon the shelving ground between the road and the sea; “but if madame will permit I will show her the house. Madame is perhaps interested in the story of that poor lady who was murdered.”
“Why do you say that she was murdered?” asked Mildred indignantly. “You cannot know.”
The woman shrugged her shoulders with a dubious air.
“Mais, madame. Nobody but the good God can know: but most of us thought that the Englishman pushed his wife over the cliff. They did not live happily together. Their cook was a cousin of mine, a young woman who went regularly to confession, and would not have spoken falsely for all the world, and she told me there was great unhappiness between them. The wife was often in tears; the husband was often angry.”
“But he was never unkind. Your cousin must know that he was never unkind.”
“Alas! my cousin lies in the same burial-ground yonder with the poor lady,” answered the woman, pointing to the white crest of the hill above Villefranche, where the soldiers were being drilled in the dusty barrack-yard under the cloudless blue. “She is no more here to tell the story. But no, she did not say the husband was unkind; he was grave and sad; he was not happy. Tears, tears and reproaches, sad words from her, day after day; and from him silence and gloom. Poor people like us, who work for our bread, have no leisure for that kind of unhappiness. ‘I would rather stand over my casseroles than sit in a salon and cry,’ said my cousin.”
“It is cruel to say he caused her death, when you know he was never unkind to her,” said Mildred, as they walked side by side; “a patient, forbearing husband does not become a murderer all at once.”
“Ah, but continual dropping will wear a stone, madame. She may have tried him too much with her tears. He went out of his mind after her death. Would he have gone mad, do you think, if he had not been guilty?”
“He was all the more likely to go mad, knowing himself innocent, and finding himself accused of a dreadful crime.”
“Well, I cannot tell; I know most of us thought he had pushed her over the cliff. I know the young man who was their gardener said if he had had a wife with that kind of temper he would have thrown her down the well in his garden.”