He began to walk up and down, once more yielding to his anger:
“I shall save you, Coralie, I swear it. And what a delight it will then be to take our revenge! He shall have the same fate which he was devising for us. Do you understand, Coralie? He shall die here, here in this room. Oh, how my hatred will spur me to bring that about!”
He tore down more pieces of boarding, in the hope of learning something that might be useful to him, since the struggle was being renewed under exactly similar conditions. But the sentences that followed, like those which Patrice had just uttered, were oaths of vengeance:
“Coralie, he shall be punished, if not by us, then by the hand of God. No, his infernal scheme will not succeed. No, it will never be believed that we had recourse to suicide to relieve ourselves of an existence that was built up of happiness and joy. No, his crime will be known. Hour by hour I shall here set down the undeniable proofs. …”
“Words, words!” cried Patrice, in a tone of exasperation. “Words of vengeance and sorrow, but never a fact to guide us. Father, will you tell us nothing to save your Coralie’s daughter? If your Coralie succumbed, let mine escape the disaster, thanks to your aid, father! Help me! Counsel me!”
But the father answered the son with nothing but more words of challenge and despair:
“Who can rescue us? We are walled up in this tomb, buried alive and condemned to torture without being able to defend ourselves. My revolver lies there, upon the table. What is the use of it? The enemy does not attack us. He has time on his side, unrelenting time which kills of its own strength, by the mere fact that it is time. Who can rescue us? Who will save my darling Coralie?”
The position was terrible, and they felt all its tragic horror. It seemed to them as though they were already dead, once they were enduring the same trial endured by others and that they were still enduring it under the same conditions. There was nothing to enable them to escape any of the phases through which the other two, his father and her mother, had passed. The similarity between their own and their parents’ fate was so striking that they seemed to be suffering two deaths, and the second agony was now commencing.
Coralie gave way and began to cry. Moved by her tears, Patrice attacked the wainscoting with new fury, but its boards, strengthened by cross-laths, resisted his efforts:
At last he read:
“What is happening? We had an impression that someone was walking outside, in the garden. Yes, when we put our ears to the stone wall built in the embrasure of the window, we thought we heard footsteps. Is it possible? Oh, if it only were! It would mean the struggle, at last. Anything rather than the maddening silence and endless uncertainty!
“That’s it! … That’s it! … The sound is becoming more distinct. … It is a different sound, like that which you make when you dig the ground with a pickax. Someone is digging the ground, not in front of the house, but on the right, near the kitchen. …”
Patrice redoubled his efforts. Coralie came and helped him. This time he felt that a corner of the veil was being lifted. The writing went on:
“Another hour, with alternate spells of sound and silence: the same sound of digging and the same silence which suggests work that is being continued.
“And then someone entered the hall, one person; he, evidently. We recognized his step. … He walks without attempting to deaden it. … Then he went to the kitchen, where he worked the same way as before, with a pickax, but on the stones this time. We also heard the noise of a pane of glass breaking.
“And now he has gone outside again and there is a new sort of sound, against the house, a sound that seems to travel up the house as though the wretch had to climb to a height in order to carry out his plan. …”
Patrice stopped reading and looked at Coralie. Both of them were listening.
“Hark!” he said, in a low voice.
“Yes, yes,” she answered, “I hear. … Steps outside the house … in the garden. …”
They went to one of the windows, where they had left the casement open behind the wall of building-stones, and listened. There was really someone walking; and the knowledge that the enemy was approaching gave them the same sense of relief that their parents had experienced.
Someone walked thrice round the house. But they did not, like their parents, recognize the sound of the footsteps. They were those of a stranger, or else steps that had changed their tread. Then, for a few minutes, they heard nothing more. And suddenly another sound arose; and, though in their innermost selves they were expecting it, they were nevertheless stupefied at hearing it. And Patrice, in a hollow voice, laying stress upon each syllable, uttered the sentence which his father had written twenty years before:
“It’s the sound which you make when you dig the ground with a pickax.”
Yes, It must be that. Someone was digging the ground, not in front of the house, but on the right, near the kitchen.
And so the abominable miracle of the revived tragedy was continuing. Here again the former act was repeated, a simple enough act in itself, but one which became sinister because it was one of those which had already been performed and because it was announcing and preparing the death once before announced and prepared.
An hour passed. The work went on, paused and went on again. It was like the sound of a spade at work in a courtyard, when the gravedigger is in no hurry and takes a rest and then resumes his work.
Patrice and Coralie stood listening side by side, their eyes in each
