第31章

With apparent indifference, she raised her arms and drew out her hat-pins.Rouletabille watched the pin without a word.The young girl hardly seemed aware of their presence.Entirely absorbed in strange thoughts, she replaced the pin in her hat and went to hang it in the veranda, which served also as vestibule.Rouletabille never quitted her eyes.Matrena watched the reporter with a stupid glance.Natacha crossed the drawing-room and entered her chamber by passing through her little sitting-room, through which all entrance to her chamber had to be made.That little room, though, had three doors.One opened into Natacha's chamber, one into the drawing-room, and the third into the little passage in a corner of the house where was the stairway by which the servants passed from the kitchens to the ground-floor and the upper floor.This passage had also a door giving directly upon the drawing-room.It was certainly a poor arrangement for serving the dining-room, which was on the other side of the drawing-room and behind the veranda, such a chance laying-out of a house as one often sees in the off-hand planning of many places in the country.

Alone again with Rouletabille, Matrena noticed that he had not lost sight of the corner of the veranda where Natacha had hung her hat.

Beside this hat there was a toque that Ermolai had brought in.The old servant had found it in some corner of the garden or the conservatory where he had been.A hat-pin stuck out of that toque also.

"Whose toque is that?" asked Rouletabille."I haven't seen it on the head of anyone here.""It is Natacha's," replied Matrena.

She moved toward it, but the young man held her back, went into the veranda himself, and, without touching it, standing on tiptoe, he examined the pin.He sank back on his heels and turned toward Matrena.She caught a glimpse of fleeting emotion on the face of her little friend.

"Explain to me," she said.

But be gave her a glance that frightened her, and said low:

"Go and give orders right away that dinner be served in the veranda.

All through dinner it is absolutely necessary that the door of Natacha's sitting-room, and that of the stairway passage, and that of the veranda giving on the drawing-room remain open all the time.

Do you understand me? As soon as you have given your orders go to the general's chamber and do not quit the general's bedside, keep it in view.Come down to dinner when it is announced, and do not bother yourself about anything further."So saying, he filled his pipe, lighted it with a sort of sigh of relief, and, after a final order to Matrena, " Go," he went into the garden, puffing great clouds.Anyone would have said he hadn't smoked in a week.He appeared not to be thinking but just idly enjoying himself.In fact, he played like a child with Milinki, Matrena's pet cat, which he pursued behind the shrubs, up into the little kiosque which, raised on piles, lifted its steep thatched roof above the panorama of the isles that Rouletabille settled down to contemplate like an artist with ample leisure.

The dinner, where Matrena, Natacha and Rouletabille were together again, was lively.The young man having declared that he was more and more convinced that the mystery of the bomb in the bouquet was simply a play of the police, Natacha reinforced his opinion, and following that they found themselves in agreement on about everything else.For himself, the reporter during that conversation hid a real horror which had seized him at the cynical and inappropriate tranquillity with which the young lady received all suggestions that accused the police or that assumed the general no longer ran any immediate danger.In short, he worked, or at least believed he worked, to clear Natacha as he had cleared Matrena, so that there would develop the absolute necessity of assuming a third person's intervention in the facts disclosed so clearly by Koupriane where Matrena or Natacha seemed alone to be possible agents.As he listened to Natacha Rouletabille commenced to doubt and quake just as he had seen Matrena do.The more he looked into the nature of Natacha the dizzier he grew.What abysmal obscurities were there in her nature!

Nothing interesting happened during dinner.Several times, in spite of Rouletabille's obvious impatience with her for doing it, Matrena went up to the general.She returned saying, "He is quiet.

He doesn't sleep.He doesn't wish anything.He has asked me to prepare his narcotic.It is too bad.He has tried in vain, he cannot get along without it.""You, too, mamma, ought to take something to make you sleep.They say morphine is very good.""As for me," said Rouletabille, whose head for some few minutes had been dropping now toward one shoulder and now toward another, "I have no need of any narcotic to make me sleep.If you will permit me, I will get to bed at once.""Eh, my little domovoi doukh, I am going to carry you there in my arms."Matrena extended her large round arms ready to take Rouletabille as though he had been a baby.

"No, no.I will get up there all right alone," said Rouletabille, rising stupidly and appearing ashamed of his excessive sleepiness.