CHAPTER IV
THE ENQUIRIES
The tragedy enacted that night and morning was so harsh, so virulent and so swift that it left the inmates of the Old Mill as though stunned. Instead of uniting them in a common emotion, it scattered them, giving each of them an impression of discomfort and uneasiness.
In Philippe, this took the form of a state of torpor that kept him asleep until the next morning. He awoke, however, in excellent condition, but with an immense longing for solitude. In reality, he shrank from finding himself in the presence of his father and his wife.
He went out, therefore, very early, across the woods and fields, stopped at an inn, climbed the Ballon de Vergix and did not come home until lunch-time. He was very calm by then and quite master of himself.
To men like Philippe, men endowed with upright natures and generous minds, but not prone to waste time in reflecting upon the minor cases of conscience that arise in daily life, the sense of duty performed becomes, at critical periods, a sort of standard by which they judge their actions. This sense Philippe experienced in all its fulness. Placed by a series of abnormal circumstances between the necessity of betraying Suzanne or the necessity of swearing upon oath to a thing which he did not know, he felt that he was certainly entitled to lie. The lie seemed just and natural. He did not deny the fault which he had committed in succumbing to the young girl's fascinations and wiles: but, having committed the fault, he owed it to Suzanne to keep it secret, whatever the consequences of his discretion might be. There was no excuse that permitted him to break silence.
He found, on the drawing-room table, the three newspapers which were taken at the Old Mill: the Éclaireur des Vosges; a Paris evening-paper; and the Börsweilener Zeitung, a morning-paper printed in German, but French in tone and inspiration. A glance at these completely reassured him. Amid the confusion of the first reports devoted to the Jorancé case, his own part passed almost unnoticed. The Éclaireur des Vosges summoned up his evidence in a couple of lines. When all was said, he was and would be no more than a supernumerary.
"A walking gentleman, at the outside," he murmured, with satisfaction.