Josephine too must have been suffering from it, to judge from certain moments of extreme lassitude in which she seemed on the verge of those confidences that draw lovers closer than do embraces. Once she began to weep in Ralph’s arms so bitterly that he looked for an access of surrender. But she recovered almost at once, and he felt her further away from him than ever.
“She cannot trust,” he told himself. “She is one of those beings who dwell apart from their fellows in a solitude that has no bounds. She is a prisoner of the image she has formed of herself, has forced herself to form of herself; indeed, a prisoner of the enigma she has elaborated and which holds her in its invisible meshes. As the daughter of Cagliostro she has acquired the habit of the darkness, of the intricate, of plots, intrigues, and subterranean operations. To tell anyone the story of one of these machinations is to give him the thread which will guide him through the labyrinth. She is afraid and withdraws into herself.”
By way of counter-stroke he kept silence himself and refrained from making any allusion to the adventure on which they had embarked, or to the problem of which they were seeking the solution. Had she obtained possession of the casket? Did she know the key-word? Had she plunged her hand into the hollow in that legendary block and emptied it of those thousands and thousands of precious stones?
On that matter, on every matter, silence.
Moreover, after they had passed Rouen, their intimacy slackened. Leonard, avoiding Ralph, reappeared again. The secret meetings began once more. The carriage and the untiring little horses every day carried Josine away. Whither? On what enterprises? Ralph observed that three of the abbeys, Saint-Georges, Jumièges, and Saint Wandrille, were close to the river. But then, if she were searching in this quarter, it must be that no solution had yet been found, and that she had simply failed.
This notion drove him abruptly to action. He sent to the inn near La Haie d’Etigues for his bicycle, and rode across the country to the outskirts of Lillebonne, in which Bridget Rousselin’s mother was living. There he learned that a fortnight before—which was about the time that Josine had taken the train from Paris—the Widow Rousselin had shut her house and gone, so they said, to join her daughter in Paris. The evening before a lady had come to see her.
It was ten o’clock at night before Ralph got back to the barge which was moored to the southwest of the first curve beyond Rouen. A little while before reaching it he passed Josine’s carriage, which the little horses, utterly exhausted, could scarcely drag along. When it came to the bank of the river Leonard jumped down from the box, opened the door, bent down, stood up with the inert body of the fainting Josine in his arms, and carried her to the barge. Ralph lent a hand, and the two of them carried her down to her cabin. The woman of the barge came to tend her.
“Look after her,” said Leonard roughly. “She has only fainted. But you’re all to stay on board, and don’t you forget it!”
He went back to the carriage and drove off.
Josine was delirious most of the night, but Ralph could make no sense of her incoherent utterances. Next morning she had nearly recovered. Next evening Ralph went to the nearest village to buy a newspaper. He read among the local news: