“Am I to stay outside?” asked Leonard.
“Yes; I’ve no need of you at the moment,” said Josephine with an air which terrified Ralph. “Stay outside. And see that no one interrupts us—on any account.”
Leonard forced Clarice to sit down on one of the chairs and drew her arms behind her with the intention of tying her wrists to the back of it.
“There’s no need to do that,” said Josephine. “Leave us.”
He did as she bade him.
She looked from one to another of her three victims in turn. All three disarmed and reduced to impotence, she was mistress of the field of battle and on pain of death could impose her inflexible decrees.
Ralph’s eyes never left her; he was trying to discover her intentions and her plans. Her calmness impressed him more than anything. She showed none of that excitement and feverishness which would have, so to speak, disarticulated the conduct of any other woman in her place. There was not a trace of triumph in her attitude. There was rather a certain weariness, as if she had acted under the impulsion of inner forces, which she was not strong enough to discipline. For the first time he divined in her a careless fatalism, as a rule concealed by her smiling beauty, which was perhaps the very essence and explanation of her enigmatic nature.
She sat down on the other chair close to Clarice, and with her eyes on her face said slowly, with a certain dryness and monotony in her intonation: “Three months ago, Mademoiselle, a young woman was secretly abducted on getting out of a train and transported to the Château of La Haie d’Etigues, where there were gathered together, in a large isolated chamber, a dozen of the noblemen of the Caux country. Among them were Beaumagnan, whom you see here, and your father. I will not tell you everything which was said at this meeting and of all the ignominy that was heaped on that young woman by these people who pretended to be her judges. But it came about that after a pretense of a trial, that evening, when the rest of the guests had gone, your father and his cousin de Bennetot carried her to the bottom of the cliff, tied her down in the bottom of a boat with a hole in it and heavily loaded with a big boulder, rowed her out to sea, and there abandoned her.”
Breathless with amazement Clarice stammered: “It isn’t true! It isn’t true!... My father would never do such a thing!... It isn’t true!”
Without paying any heed to her indignant protest, Josephine quietly continued: “Without any of the conspirators being aware of it, there was a spectator at that meeting at the château. That spectator kept watch on the two murderers—there’s no other name for them, is there?—followed them, clung to the scuttled boat, and when they abandoned it, rescued their victim. From where did that spectator come? Everything leads us to believe that he passed the previous night and morning in your room, received by you not as a fiancé, since your father refused to hear of his marrying you, but as a lover.”