Abruptly he realised that he was lost; and he seized her by the throat to silence on her lips those terrible rending sounds. As she went on struggling with the desperate strength of a creature trying to fly from death, he tightened his great hand on the little throat swelling with her cries, and so savagely did he grip her that he had strangled her in a few seconds without ever dreaming of killing her, wanting only to silence her.
Then he got to his feet, dazed with horror.
She lay stretched out before him, stained with blood, and her face black. He was on the point of rushing away, when the confused mysterious instinct that prompts all human beings in their moments of peril, stirred in his distraught mind.
He was about to throw the body in the water, but a second impulse drove him to make a small parcel of the clothes. He had some string in his pockets, and he tied it up and hid it in the stream in a deep hole under the trunk of a tree whose foot was washed by the waters of the Brindille.
Then he strode rapidly away, reached the meadows, made a wide detour in order to be seen by the peasants living far from the place at the other side of the district, and returned home for dinner at the usual hour, telling his servants where his walk had taken him.
That night he slept; he fell into a profound sodden sleep, such a sleep as must sometimes visit men condemned to death. He did not open his eyes until the first gleams of dawn, and, tortured by fear of the discovery of the hideous crime, lay waiting for the hour at which he always rose.
Afterwards he had to be present at all the investigations. He went through these like a somnambulist, in a half-crazed state in which he saw men and things like the figments of a dream, his clouded mind hardly conscious, in the grip of that sense of unreality which oppresses all our faculties in times of appalling disaster.
Nothing but the mother’s agonised cry found its way to his heart. At that moment he was ready to fling himself at the old woman’s knees and cry: “I did it.” But he stifled the impulse. He did, however, go during the night to fish out the dead girl’s sabots and carry them to her mother’s doorstep.
So long as the inquest lasted, and so long as he had to direct and mislead justice, he was calm, master of himself, cunning and smiling. With the magistrates he discussed placidly all the theories which they conceived, disputed their opinions, confounded their reasoning. He even found a certain bitter and melancholy pleasure in upsetting their examinations of the accused, in confusing their ideas on the subject, and proving the innocence of the men they suspected.
But from the very day when the inquiries were given up, he became gradually more nervous, more excitable than ever before, carefully as he controlled his bursts of rage. Sudden noises made him start fearfully; he shuddered at the least thing, sometimes shaking from head to foot when a fly settled on his face. Then an overmastering desire for movement seized on him, impelled him to long, violent walks, kept him walking about his room through whole nights.
It was not that he was torn with remorse. His gross and unreasoning mind was not susceptible to any refinement of sentiment or moral fear. A man of action, even a violent man, born to fight, to ravage conquered countries and massacre the conquered, full of the savage instincts of the hunter and the soldier, he had little or no respect for human life. Although for political reasons he supported the Church, he believed neither in God nor the devil, and consequently did not look to any life after death for either punishment or reward for his deeds in this life. He believed in nothing but a vague philosophy made up of all the notions of the encyclopaedists of the previous century; and he regarded Religion as a moral sanction of the Law, both of them having been invented by men to regulate social relationships.
To kill a man in a duel, or in war, or in a quarrel, or by accident, or for revenge, or even in an ambush, he found an amusing and laudable affair, and it would have left no more impression on his mind than a shot fired at a hare; but the murder of this child had stirred the very depths of his heart. He had done the deed in a madness of uncontrollable lust, in something like a storm of physical desire that swept aside his reason. And he had kept still in his heart, kept in his flesh, kept on his lips, kept even in his murderous fingers, something like a gross and brutal love and a frightful horror of this young girl surprised and foully killed by him. His thoughts recurred perpetually to the horrible scene; and although he compelled himself to dismiss the vision, although he rejected it in terror and disgust, he felt it wandering in his mind, twisting in his thoughts, waiting relentlessly for the chance to reappear.
Then he grew afraid of the evenings, afraid of the darkness creeping round him. He did not know yet why he found the shadows terrifying; but he had an instinctive dread of them; he felt that they were peopled with frightful things. The light of day did not encourage horrors. Things and creatures alike were clearly visible in it; moreover, only such things and creatures as can show themselves in full light are ever encountered by day. But night, shadowy night, thicker than walls and empty, infinite night, so black, so vast, was filled with frightful things that brushed his skin in passing; he felt that a mysterious horror was abroad and roving about at night, and he thought the darkness hid an unknown danger,
