“No, madame, no,” gently responded Adrien Sixte, “I am not an enemy. I ask nothing better than to believe what you believe. But you will permit me to speak frankly? Facts are facts, and they are terribly against him. The poison bought clandestinely, the bottle thrown out of the window, the other bottle half emptied then refilled with water, the going out of the girl’s room on the night of her death; the false dispatch, his sudden departure, those burned letters, and then his denial of it all.”
“But, monsieur, there is no proof in all that,” interrupted the mother, “no proof at all. What of his sudden departure? He had been wishing for more than a month to get away from the place, I have a letter in which he speaks of his plan, and beside his engagement was almost at an end. He fancied that they wished to retain him and he was tired of the life of a tutor, and then, as he is so timid, he gave a false pretext and invented this unfortunate dispatch that is all. And as to the poison he did not buy it secretly. He has suffered for years from a stomach trouble. He has studied too hard immediately after his meals. Who saw him go out of that room? A servant! What if the real murderer paid this servant to accuse my son? Do we know anything about this girl’s intrigues and who were interested in killing her?”
“Do you not see that all these and the letters and the bottle are parts of the plan for making suspicion fall on him? How? Why? That will be found out some day. But what I do know is that my son is not guilty. I swear it by the memory of his father. Ah! do you believe I would defend him like this if I felt him to be a criminal? I would ask for pity, I would weep, I would pray, but now I cry for justice, justice! No, these people have no right to accuse him, to throw him into prison, to dishonor our name, for nothing, for nothing. You see, monsieur, I have shown you that they have not a single proof.”
“If he is innocent, why this obstinacy in keeping silent?” asked the philosopher, who thought that the poor woman had shown nothing except her desperation in struggling against the evidence.
“Ah! if he were guilty he would talk,” cried Mme. Greslon, “he would defend himself, he would lie! No,” added she in a hollow voice, “there is some mystery. He knows something, that I am sure of, something which he does not wish to tell. He has some reason for not speaking. Perhaps he does not wish to dishonor this young girl, for they claim that he loved her. Oh! monsieur, I have wanted to see you at any risk, for you are the only one who can make him speak, who can make him tell what he has resolved not to tell. You must promise me to write to him, to go to him. You owe this to me,” she insisted in a hard tone. “You have made me suffer so much.”
“I?” exclaimed the philosopher.
“Yes, you,” replied she bitterly, and as she spoke her face betrayed the strength of old grudges; “whose fault is it that he has lost faith? Yours, monsieur, through your books. My God! How I did hate you then! I can still see his face when he told me he would not commune on All-Soul’s day, because he had doubts. ‘And thy father?’ said I to him, ‘All-Soul’s day!’ said he: ‘Leave me alone, I do not believe in that any longer, that is done with.’ He was sitting at his table and he had a volume before him which he closed while he was talking to me. I remember. I read the name of the author mechanically. It was yours, monsieur.
“I did not argue with him that day; he was a great savant already, and I a poor, ignorant woman. But the next day, while he was at college I took M. the Abbé Martel, who had educated him, into his room to show him the library. I had a presentiment that it was the reading which had corrupted my son. Your book, monsieur, was still on the table. The abbé took it up and said to me: ‘This is the worst of them all.’
“Monsieur, pardon me, if I wound you, but do you see, if my son were still a Christian, I would go and pray his confessor to command him to speak. You have taken away his faith, monsieur, I do not reproach you any more; but what I would have asked of the priest, I have come to ask of you. If you had heard him when he came back from Paris! He said to me, speaking of you: ‘If you knew him maman, you would venerate him, for he is a saint.’ Ah! promise me to make him speak. Let him speak for me, for his father, for those who love him, for you, monsieur, who cannot have had an assassin for a pupil. For he is your pupil, you are his master; he owes it to you to defend himself, as much as to me his mother.”
“Madame,” said the savant with deep seriousness, “I promise you to do all that I can.” This was the second time to-day that this responsibility of master and pupil had been thrust upon him. Once by the judge, repelled by the resistance of the thinker who repels with disdain a senseless reproach. The words of this good woman, quivering with this human grief to which he was so little accustomed, touched other fibres than those of pride. He was still more strangely affected when Mme. Greslon, seizing his hand with a gentleness which contradicted the bitterness of her last words, said: