The Golden Triangle Part 35

Patrice picked himself up in a fury, hurled insults at the enemy and, as his rage increased, fired two revolver shots, which broke two of the panes. He next attacked the doors and windows, banging at them with the iron dog which he had taken from the fender. He hit the walls, he hit the floor, he shook his fist at the invisible enemy who was mocking him.

But suddenly, after a few blows struck at s.p.a.ce, he was compelled to stop. Something like a thick veil had glided overhead. They were in the dark.

He understood what had happened. The enemy had lowered a shutter upon the skylight, covering it entirely.

"Patrice! Patrice!" cried Coralie, maddened by the blotting out of the light and losing all her strength of mind. "Patrice! Where are you, Patrice? Oh, I'm frightened! Where are you?"

They began to grope for each other, like blind people, and nothing that had gone before seemed to them more horrible than to be lost in this pitiless blackness.

"Patrice! Oh, Patrice! Where are you?"

Their hands touched, Coralie's poor little frozen fingers and Patrice's hands that burned with fever, and they pressed each other and twined together and clutched each other as though to a.s.sure themselves that they were still living.

"Oh, don't leave me, Patrice!" Coralie implored.

"I am here," he replied. "Have no fear: they can't separate us."

"You are right," she panted, "they can't separate us. We are in our grave."

The word was so terrible and Coralie uttered it so mournfully that a reaction overtook Patrice.

"No! What are you talking about?" he exclaimed. "We must not despair.

There is hope of safety until the last moment."

Releasing one of his hands, he took aim with his revolver. A few faint rays trickled through the c.h.i.n.ks around the skylight. He fired three times. They heard the crack of the wood-work and the chuckle of the enemy. But the shutter must have been lined with metal, for no split appeared.

Besides, the c.h.i.n.ks were forthwith stopped up; and they became aware that the enemy was engaged in the same work that he had performed around the doors and windows. It was obviously very thorough and took a long time in the doing. Next came another work, completing the first. The enemy was nailing the shutter to the frame of the skylight.

It was an awful sound! Swift and light as were the taps of the hammer, they seemed to drive deep into the brain of those who heard them. It was their coffin that was being nailed down, their great coffin with a lid hermetically sealed that now bore heavy upon them. There was no hope left, not a possible chance of escape. Each tap of the hammer strengthened their dark prison, making yet more impregnable the walls that stood between them and the outer world and bade defiance to the most resolute a.s.sault:

"Patrice," stammered Coralie, "I'm frightened . . . That tapping hurts me so!" . . .

She sank back in his arms. Patrice felt tears coursing down her cheeks.

Meanwhile the work overhead was being completed. They underwent the terrible experience which condemned men must feel on the morning of their last day, when from their cells they hear the preparations: the engine of death that is being set up, or the electric batteries that are being tested. They hear men striving to have everything ready, so that not one propitious chance may remain and so that destiny may be fulfilled. Death had entered the enemy's service and was working hand in hand with him. He was death itself, acting, contriving and fighting against those whom he had resolved to destroy.

"Don't leave me," sobbed Coralie, "don't leave me! . . ."

"Only for a second or two," he said. "We must be avenged later."

"What is the use, Patrice? What can it matter to us?"

He had a box containing a few matches. Lighting them one after the other, he led Coralie to the panel with the inscription.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I will not have our death put down to suicide. I want to do what our parents did before us and to prepare for the future. Some one will read what I am going to write and will avenge us."

He took a pencil from his pocket and bent down. There was a free s.p.a.ce, right at the bottom of the panel. He wrote:

"Patrice Belval and Coralie, his betrothed, die the same death, murdered by Simeon Diodokis, 14 April, 1915."

But, as he finished writing, he noticed a few words of the former inscription which he had not yet read, because they were placed outside it, so to speak, and did not appear to form part of it.

"One more match," he said. "Did you see? There are some words there, the last, no doubt, that my father wrote."

She struck a match. By the flickering light they made out a certain number of misshapen letters, obviously written in a hurry and forming two words:

"_Asphyxiated. . . . Oxide. . . ._"

The match went out. They rose in silence. Asphyxiated! They understood.

That was how their parents had perished and how they themselves would perish. But they did not yet fully realize how the thing would happen.

The lack of air would never be great enough to suffocate them in this large room, which contained enough to last them for many days.

"Unless," muttered Patrice, "unless the quality of the air can be impaired and therefore . . ."

He stopped. Then he went on:

"Yes, that's it. I remember."

He told Coralie what he suspected, or rather what conformed so well with the reality as to leave no room for doubt. He had seen in old Simeon's cupboard not only the rope-ladder which the madman had brought with him, but also a coil of lead pipes. And now Simeon's behavior from the moment when they were locked in, his movements to and fro around the lodge, the care with which he had stopped up every crevice, his labors along the wall and on the roof: all this was explained in the most definite fas.h.i.+on. Old Simeon had simply fitted to a gas-meter, probably in the kitchen, the pipe which he had next laid along the wall and on the roof.

This therefore was the way in which they were about to die, as their parents had died before them, stifled by ordinary gas.

Panic-stricken, they began to run aimlessly about the room, holding hands, while their disordered brains, bereft of thought or will, seemed like tiny things shaken by the fiercest gale. Coralie uttered incoherent words. Patrice, while imploring her to keep calm, was himself carried away by the storm and powerless to resist the terrible agony of the darkness wherein death lay waiting. At such times a man tries to flee, to escape the icy breath that is already chilling his marrow. He must flee, but where? Which way? The walls are insurmountable and the darkness is even harder than the walls.

They stopped, exhausted. A low hiss was heard somewhere in the room, the faint hiss that issues from a badly-closed gas-jet. They listened and perceived that it came from above. The torture was beginning.

"It will last half an hour, or an hour at most," Patrice whispered.

Coralie had recovered her self-consciousness:

"We shall be brave," she said.

"Oh, if I were alone! But you, you, my poor Coralie!"

"It is painless," she murmured.

"You are bound to suffer, you, so weak!"

"One suffers less, the weaker one is. Besides, I know that we sha'n't suffer, Patrice."

She suddenly appeared so placid that he on his side was filled with a great peace. Seated on a sofa, their fingers still entwined, they silently steeped themselves in the mighty calm which comes when we think that events have run their course. This calm is resignation, submission to superior forces. Natures such as theirs cease to rebel when destiny has manifested its orders and when nothing remains but acquiescence and prayer.

She put her arm round Patrice's neck:

"I am your bride in the eyes of G.o.d," she said. "May He receive us as He would receive a husband and wife."

Her gentle resignation brought tears to his eyes. She dried them with her kisses, and, of her own seeking, offered him her lips.