Juana, Honoré de Balzac [top e book reader .txt] 📗

The pursuit kept on in the direction of the fugitive, who dragged it after him like the flame of a conflagration.

Diard, as he ran, had all the sensations of a dream when he heard a whole city howling, running, panting after him. Nevertheless, he kept his ideas and his presence of mind. Presently he reached the wall of the garden of his house. The place was perfectly silent, and he thought he had foiled his pursuers, though a distant murmur of the tumult came to his ears like the roaring of the sea. He dipped some water from a brook and drank it. Then, observing a pile of stones on the road, he hid his treasure in it; obeying one of those vague thoughts which come to criminals at a moment when the faculty to judge their actions under all bearings deserts them, and they think to establish their innocence by want of proof of their guilt.

That done, he endeavored to assume a placid countenance; he even tried to smile as he rapped softly on the door of his house, hoping that no one saw him. He raised his eyes, and through the outer blinds of one window came a gleam of light from his wife's room. Then, in the midst of his trouble, visions of her gentle life, spent with her children, beat upon his brain with the force of a hammer. The maid opened the door, which Diard hastily closed behind him with a kick. For a moment he breathed freely; then, noticing that he was bathed in perspiration, he sent the servant back to Juana and stayed in the darkness of the passage, where he wiped his face with his handkerchief and put his clothes in order, like a dandy about to pay a visit to a pretty woman. After that he walked into a track of the moonlight to examine his hands. A quiver of joy passed over him as he saw that no blood stains were on them; the hemorrhage from his victim's body was no doubt inward.

But all this took time. When at last he mounted the stairs to Juana's room he was calm and collected, and able to reflect on his position, which resolved itself into two ideas: to leave the house, and get to the wharves. He did not _think_ these ideas, he _saw_ them written in fiery letters on the darkness. Once at the wharves he could hide all day, return at night for his treasure, then conceal himself, like a rat, in the hold of some vessel and escape without any one suspecting his whereabouts. But to do all this, money, gold, was his first necessity,--and he did not possess one penny.

The maid brought a light to show him up.

"Felicie," he said, "don't you hear a noise in the street, shouts, cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me."

His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a table, reading aloud to Francisque and Juan from a Spanish Cervantes, while the boys followed her pronunciation of the words from the text. They all three stopped and looked at Diard, who stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets; overcome, perhaps, by finding himself in this calm scene, so softly lighted, so beautiful with the faces of his wife and children. It was a living picture of the Virgin between her son and John.

"Juana, I have something to say to you."

"What has happened?" she asked, instantly perceiving from the livid paleness of her husband that the misfortune she had daily expected was upon them.

"Oh, nothing; but I want to speak to you--to you, alone."

And he glanced at his sons.

"My dears, go to your room, and go to bed," said Juana; "say your prayers without me."

The boys left the room in silence, with the incurious obedience of well-trained children.

"My dear Juana," said Diard, in a coaxing voice, "I left you with very little money, and I regret it now. Listen to me; since I relieved you of the care of our income by giving you an allowance, have you not, like other women, laid something by?"

"No," replied Juana, "I have nothing. In making that allowance you did not reckon the costs of the children's education. I don't say that to reproach you, my friend, only to explain my want of money. All that you gave me went to pay masters and--"

"Enough!" cried Diard, violently. "Thunder of heaven! every instant is precious! Where are your jewels?"

"You know very well I have never worn any."

"Then there's not a sou to be had here!" cried Diard, frantically.

"Why do you shout in that way?" she asked.

"Juana," he replied, "I have killed a man."

Juana sprang to the door of her children's room and closed it; then she returned.

"Your sons must hear nothing," she said. "With whom have you fought?"

"Montefiore," he replied.

"Ah!" she said with a sigh, "the only man you had the right to kill."

"There were many reasons why he should die by my hand. But I can't lose time--Money, money! for God's sake, money! I may be pursued. We did not fight. I--I killed him."

"Killed him!" she cried, "how?"

"Why, as one kills anything. He stole my whole fortune and I took it back, that's all. Juana, now that everything is quiet you must go down to that heap of stones--you know the heap by the garden wall--and get that money, since you haven't any in the house."

"The money that you stole?" said Juana.

"What does that matter to you? Have you any money to give me? I tell you I must get away. They are on my traces."

"Who?"

"The people, the police."

Juana left the room, but returned immediately.

"Here," she said, holding out to him at arm's length a jewel, "that is Dona Lagounia's cross. There are four rubies in it, of great value, I have been told. Take it and go--go!"

"Felicie hasn't come back," he cried, with a sudden thought. "Can she have been arrested?"

Juana laid the cross on the table, and sprang to the windows that looked on the street. There she saw, in the moonlight, a file of soldiers posting themselves in deepest silence along the wall of the house. She turned, affecting to be calm, and said to her husband:--

"You have not a minute to lose; you must escape through the garden. Here is the key of the little gate."

As a precaution she turned to the other windows, looking on the garden. In the shadow of the trees she saw the gleam of the silver lace on the hats of a body of gendarmes; and she heard the distant mutterings of a crowd of persons whom sentinels were holding back at the end of the streets up which curiosity had drawn them. Diard had, in truth, been seen to enter his house by persons at their windows, and on their information and that of the frightened maid-servant, who was arrested, the troops and the people had blocked the two streets which led to the house. A dozen gendarmes, returning from the theatre, had climbed the walls of the garden, and guarded all exit in that direction.

"Monsieur," said Juana, "you cannot escape. The whole town is here."

Diard ran from window to window with the useless activity of a captive bird striking against the panes to escape. Juana stood silent and thoughtful.

"Juana, dear Juana, help me! give me, for pity's sake, some advice."

"Yes," said Juana, "I will; and I will save you."

"Ah! you are always my good angel."

Juana left the room and returned immediately, holding out to Diard, with averted head, one of his own pistols. Diard did not take it. Juana heard the entrance of the soldiers into the courtyard, where they laid down the body of the murdered man to confront the assassin with the sight of it. She turned round and saw Diard white and livid. The man was nearly fainting, and tried to sit down.

"Your children implore you," she said, putting the pistol beneath his hand.

"But--my good Juana, my little Juana, do you think--Juana! is it so pressing?--I want to kiss you."

The gendarmes were mounting the staircase. Juana grasped the pistol, aimed it at Diard, holding him, in spite of his cries, by the throat; then she blew his brains out and flung the weapon on the ground.

At that instant the door was opened violently. The public prosecutor, followed by an examining judge, a doctor, a sheriff, and a posse of gendarmes, all the representatives, in short, of human justice, entered the room.

"What do you want?" asked Juana.

"Is that Monsieur Diard?" said the prosecutor, pointing to the dead body bent double on the floor.

"Yes, monsieur."

"Your gown is covered with blood, madame."

"Do you not see why?" replied Juana.

She went to the little table and sat down, taking up the volume of Cervantes; she was pale, with a nervous agitation which she nevertheless controlled, keeping it wholly inward.

"Leave the room," said the prosecutor to the gendarmes.

Then he signed to the examining judge and the doctor to remain.

"Madame, under the circumstances, we can only congratulate you on the death of your husband," he said. "At least he has died as a soldier should, whatever crime his passions may have led him to commit. His act renders negatory that of justice. But however we may desire to spare you at such a moment, the law requires that we should make an exact report of all violent deaths. You will permit us to do our duty?"

"May I go and change my dress?" she asked, laying down the volume.

"Yes, madame; but you must bring it back to us. The doctor may need it."

"It would be too painful for madame to see me operate," said the doctor, understanding the suspicions of the prosecutor. "Messieurs," he added, "I hope you will allow her to remain in the next room."

The magistrates approved the request of the merciful physician, and Felicie was permitted to attend her mistress. The judge and the prosecutor talked together in a low voice. Officers of the law are very unfortunate in being forced to suspect all, and to imagine evil everywhere. By dint of supposing wicked intentions, and of comprehending them, in order to reach the truth hidden under so many contradictory actions, it is impossible that the exercise of their dreadful functions should not, in the long run, dry up at their source the generous emotions they are constrained to repress. If the sensibilities of the surgeon who probes into the mysteries of the human body end by growing callous, what becomes of those of the judge who is incessantly compelled to search the inner folds of the soul? Martyrs to their mission, magistrates are all their lives in mourning for their lost illusions; crime weighs no less heavily on them than on the criminal. An old man seated on the bench is venerable, but a young judge makes a thoughtful person shudder. The examining judge in this case was young, and he felt obliged to say to the public prosecutor,--

"Do you think that woman was her husband's accomplice? Ought we to take her into custody? Is it best to question her?"

The prosecutor replied, with a careless shrug of his shoulders,--

"Montefiore and Diard were two well-known scoundrels. The maid evidently knew nothing of the crime. Better let