“A few minutes of your kind attention.”
“And with what object?”
“To establish the innocence of M. Vignal and Madame de Gorne.”
He was wearing that calm air, that sort of indifferent look which was peculiar to him in moments of actions when the crisis of the drama depended solely upon himself. Hortense felt a thrill pass through her and at once became full of confidence:
“They’re saved,” she thought, with sudden emotion. “I asked him to protect that young creature; and he is saving her from prison and despair.”
Jérôme and Natalie must have experienced the same impression of sudden hope, for they had drawn nearer to each other, as though this stranger, descended from the clouds, had already given them the right to clasp hands.
The deputy shrugged his shoulders:
“The prosecution will have every means, when the time comes, of establishing their innocence for itself. You will be called.”
“It would be better to establish it here and now. Any delay might lead to grievous consequences.”
“I happen to be in a hurry.”
“Two or three minutes will do.”
“Two or three minutes to explain a case like this!”
“No longer, I assure you.”
“Are you as certain of it as all that?”
“I am now. I have been thinking hard since this morning.”
The deputy realized that this was one of those gentry who stick to you like a leech and that there was nothing for it but to submit. In a rather bantering tone, he asked:
“Does your thinking enable you to tell us the exact spot where M. Mathias de Gorne is at this moment?”
Rénine took out his watch and answered:
“In Paris, Mr. Deputy.”
“In Paris? Alive then?”
“Alive and, what is more, in the pink of health.”
“I am delighted to hear it. But then what’s the meaning of the footprints around the well and the presence of that revolver and those three shots?”
“Simply camouflage.”
“Oh, really? Camouflage contrived by whom?”
“By Mathias de Gorne himself.”
“That’s curious! And with what object?”
“With the object of passing himself off for dead and of arranging subsequent matters in such a way that M. Vignal was bound to be accused of the death, the murder.”
“An ingenious theory,” the deputy agreed, still in a satirical tone. “What do you think of it, M. Vignal?”
“It is a theory which flashed through my own mind. Mr. Deputy,” replied Jérôme. “It is quite likely that, after our struggle and after I had gone, Mathias de Gorne conceived a new plan by which, this time, his hatred would be fully gratified. He both loved and detested his wife. He held me in the greatest loathing. This must be his revenge.”
“His revenge would cost him dear, considering that, according to your statement, Mathias de Gorne was to receive a second sum of sixty thousand francs from you.”
“He would receive that sum in another quarter, Mr. Deputy. My examination of the financial position of the de Gorne family revealed to me the fact that the father and son had taken out a life-insurance policy in each other’s favour. With the son dead, or passing for dead, the father would receive the insurance-money and indemnify his son.”
“You mean to say,” asked the deputy, with a smile, “that in all this camouflage, as you call it, M. de Gorne the elder would act as his son’s accomplice?”
Rénine took up the challenge:
“Just so, Mr. Deputy. The father and son are accomplices.”
“Then we shall find the son at the father’s?”
“You would have found him there last night.”
“What became of him?”
“He took the train at Pompignat.”
“That’s a mere supposition.”
“No, a certainty.”
“A moral certainty, perhaps, but you’ll admit there’s not the slightest proof.”
The deputy did not wait for a reply. He considered that he had displayed an excessive goodwill and that patience has its limits and he put an end to the interview:
“Not the slightest proof,” he repeated, taking up his hat. “And, above all, … above all, there’s nothing in what you’ve said that can contradict in the very least the evidence of that relentless witness, the snow. To go to his father, Mathias de Gorne must have left this house. Which way did he go?”
“Hang it all, M. Vignal told you: by the road which leads from here to his father’s!”
“There are no tracks in the snow.”
“Yes, there are.”
“But they show him coming here and not going away from here.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“What?”
“Of course it is. There’s more than one way of walking. One doesn’t always go ahead by following one’s nose.”
“In what other way can one go ahead?”
“By walking backwards, Mr. Deputy.”
These few words, spoken very simply, but in a clear tone which gave full value to every syllable, produced a profound silence. Those present at once grasped their extreme significance and, by adapting it to the actual happenings, perceived in a flash the impenetrable truth, which suddenly appeared to be the most natural thing in the world.
Rénine continued his argument. Stepping backwards in the direction of the window, he said:
“If I want to get to that window, I can of course walk straight up to it; but I can just as easily turn my back to it and walk that way. In either case I reach my goal.”
And he at once proceeded in a vigorous tone:
“Here’s the gist of it all. At half-past eight, before the snow fell, M. de Gorne comes home from his father’s house. M. Vignal arrives twenty minutes later. There is a long discussion and a struggle, taking up three hours in all. It is then, after M. Vignal has carried off Madame de Gorne and made his escape, that Mathias de Gorne, foaming at the mouth, wild with rage, but suddenly seeing his chance of taking the most terrible revenge, hits upon the ingenious idea of using against his enemy the very snowfall upon whose evidence you are now relying. He therefore plans his own murder, or rather the appearance of his murder and of his fall to the bottom of the well and makes off backwards, step by step, thus recording his arrival instead of his departure on the white page.”
The deputy
