The women screamed; the men ran forward to seize the would-be murderer. He offered no resistance, but said calmly:
"When one meets a viper one batters its head. It is the only safe thing to do, eh?"
He seemed to find comfort in the thought. He repeated it many times, in one form or another. When the police came, and a sergeant who happened to be a great friend of his had the miserable task of arresting him and charging him with murder,--for Rupert Fosdyke was dead; would have died under any one of those half-dozen fiercely vindictive blows,--Peridot was quite cheerful.
"_Cré nom!_" he cried. "It is not often one finds a snake hereabouts at Christmastime. This one made a mistake. It shouldn't have come to Pont Aven, where we wear stout sabots!"
Then he broke gaily into one of Albert Larrieu's Breton songs:
"_Toc! toc! toc! toc! C'est à Concarneau Qu'on voit de belles filles, Prestes et gentilles, Dans leur petits sabots!_"
"Shut up, Peridot, for the sake of the good God!" muttered his friend. "Come, Man! There's your mother looking out. She heard your voice!"
"Is that you, Jean Jacques?" came a shrill cry from a bent figure etched in the lighted rectangle of an open door in a cottage higher up the hill. "Time you were home and in bed!"
"Don't worry, Mother, I'm in good company," he shouted. "Here is the law on one side of me, and a dead viper on the other! I'll go straight tonight, never fear!"
Mère Larraidou saw her son walk off down the hill with his friend the sergeant. In pity the men who were lifting a corpse desisted from their gruesome labor till the door was closed again.
When Ingersoll carried the body of an insensible and half-drowned woman into Mère Pitou's there was a rare stir.
By chance the lesser tragedy which took place in the river beneath the line of dwarfed oaks had passed unnoticed by the villagers. Greatly wondering, and wholly at a loss to account for his wife's behavior, the artist had followed her into the main road, and kept her under close observation when she failed to cross the bridge and hurried along the narrow street leading to the harbor.
Once clear of the last mill, he could watch her from a greater distance, because the valley widens with the stream, and the hills are neither so high nor so precipitous. On and on she went, past Madame Maréchale's café, past the triangular grass plot where roundabouts and swings and canvas theaters stand in the summer, past the jolly little Hotel Terminus, and along the picturesque Chemin du Hallage; which is not a carriage road, but a pleasant footpath, bordered on the one hand by pretty villas and on the other by the tidal stream, with here and there beneath the stunted trees a rustic seat overlooking the water.