There was an inquiry that evening before the Juge d’Instruction at Villefranche, and he was made to give an account of his wife’s death. He proved a very bad witness. The minute and seemingly frivolous questions addled his brain. He told the magistrate how he had looked round and found the path empty: but he could not say how his wife had fallen—whether she had flung herself over the edge or had fallen accidentally, whether her foot had slipped unawares, whether she had fallen face forward, or whether she had dropped backwards from the edge of the cliff.
“I tell you again that I did not see her fall,” he protested impatiently.
“Did you usually walk in advance of your wife?” asked the Frenchman. “It was not very polite to turn your back upon a lady.”
“I was worried, and out of temper.”
“For what reason?”
“My wife’s unhappy jealousy created reasons where there were none. The people who know me know that I was not habitually unkind to her.”
“Yet you gave her an answer which so maddened her that she flung herself over the cliff in her despair?”
“I fear that it was so,” he answered, with the deepest distress depicted in his haggard face. “She was in a nervous and irritable condition. I had always borne that fact in mind until that moment. She stung me past endurance by her groundless jealousies. I had been a true and loyal husband to her from the hour of our marriage. I had never wronged her by so much as a thought; and yet I could not talk to a pretty peasant-girl, or confess my admiration for any woman I met in society, without causing an outbreak of temper that was almost madness. I bore with her long and patiently. I remembered that the circumstances of her childhood and youth had been adverse, that her nature had been warped and perverted; I forgave all faults of temper in a wife who loved me; but this afternoon—almost for the first time since our marriage—I spoke unkindly, cruelly perhaps. I have no wish to avoid interrogation, or to conceal any portion of the truth.”
“You did not push her over the cliff?”
“I did not. Do I look like a murderer, or bear the character of a man likely to commit murder?”