“What?”
“That poor woman’s hand.”
She looked as if she were going to faint and murmured, “Ah, I understand.... Leonard hurt her.... But I forbade him to do anything of the kind.... I thought she had yielded merely to threats.”
“You lie, Josine! You heard the woman’s cries, just as you heard them in Maulevrier Forest. Leonard acts, but the will to evil, the intention to murder is yours, Josine. It was you who sent your accomplice to the little house in Montmartre with instructions to kill Bridget Rousselin if she resisted. It was you who some time ago put the poisonous cachet among those which Beaumagnan would swallow. It was you who, during the years before that, destroyed Beaumagnan’s two friends, Denis Saint-Hébert and George d’Isneauval.”
“No, no! I won’t let you say so!” she broke out. “It isn’t true! And you know it isn’t!”
He shrugged his shoulders and said slowly: “Yes: the legend of the other woman created to meet the necessity of the case ... another woman who is your exact image and commits the crimes, while you, Josephine Balsamo, content yourself with less brutal adventures. I believe in that legend. I let myself get muddled up in all these stories of identical women, daughter, grand-daughter, and great grand-daughter of Cagliostro. But it’s all over, Josine. If my eyes deliberately closed themselves formerly in order not to see things, the sight of that mangled hand has definitely opened them to the truth.”
“You are acting on lies, Ralph! On wrong interpretations! I never knew the two men of whom you speak!”
He said wearily: “It may be so. It is not altogether impossible that I am making a mistake. But it is altogether impossible that I should henceforward see you through this fog of mystery in which you’ve hidden yourself. You are no longer mysterious to me, Josine. I see you as you are—that is to say as a criminal.”
He paused and added in a lower voice: “As a sick woman even. If there is a lie anywhere, it’s the lie of your beauty.”
She was silent. In the shadow of her straw hat her face was still sweet. The accusations of her lover did not ruffle her. She was altogether seductive, altogether enchanting.