It was an absurd attempt to scale the ladder, to reach the skylight, to lay hold of the enemy and thus save himself and Coralie. If his father had failed before him, how could he hope to succeed?
It was all over in less than three seconds. The ladder was at once unfastened from the hook that kept it hanging from the skylight; and Patrice and the ladder came to the ground together. At the same time a strident laugh rang out above, followed the next moment by the sound of the skylight closing.
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 space, 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 assure 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 chinks around the skylight. He fired three times. They heard the crack of the woodwork and the chuckle of the enemy. But the shutter must have been lined with metal, for no split appeared.
Besides, the chinks 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 assault:
“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. Someone 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 space, right at the bottom of the panel. He wrote:
“Patrice Belval and Coralie, his betrothed, die the same death, murdered by Siméon 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
