“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 Siméon’s cupboard not only the rope-ladder which the madman had brought with him, but also a coil of lead pipes. And now Siméon’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 fashion. Old Siméon 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 shan’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 God,” 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.
They sat wrapped in an infinite silence. They perceived the first smell of gas descending around them, but they felt no fear.
“Everything will happen as it did before, Coralie,” whispered Patrice, “down to the very last second. Your mother and my father, who loved each other as we do, also died in each other’s arms, with their lips joined together. They had decided to unite us and they have united us.”
“Our grave will be near theirs,” she murmured.
Little by little their ideas became confused and they began to think much as a man sees through a rising mist. They had had nothing to eat; and hunger now added its discomfort to the vertigo in which their minds were imperceptibly sinking. As it increased, their uneasiness and anxiety left them, to be followed by a sense of ecstasy, then lassitude, extinction, repose. The dread of the coming annihilation faded out of their thoughts.
Coralie, the first to be affected, began to utter delirious words which astonished Patrice at first:
“Dearest, there are flowers falling, roses all around us. How delightful!”
Presently he himself grew conscious of the same blissful exaltation, expressing itself in tenderness and joyful emotion. With no sort of dismay he felt her gradually yielding in his arms and abandoning herself; and he had the impression that he was following her down a measureless abyss, all bathed with light, where they floated, he and she, descending slowly and without effort towards a happy valley.
Minutes or perhaps hours passed. They were still descending, he supporting her by the waist, she with her head thrown back a little way, her eyes closed and a smile upon her lips. He remembered pictures showing gods thus gliding through the blue of heaven; and, drunk with pure, radiant light and air, he continued to circle above the happy valley.
But, as he approached it, he felt himself grow weary. Coralie weighed heavily on his bent arm. The descent increased in speed. The waves of light turned to darkness. A thick cloud came, followed by others that formed a whirl of gloom.
And suddenly, worn out, his forehead bathed in sweat and his body shaking with fever, he pitched forward into a great black pit. …
XIV
A Strange Character
It was not yet exactly death. In his present condition of agony, what lingered of Patrice’s consciousness mingled, as in a nightmare, the life which he knew with the imaginary world in which he now found himself, the world which was that of death.
In this world Coralie no longer existed; and her loss distracted him with grief. But he seemed to hear and see somebody whose presence was revealed by a shadow passing before his closed eyelids. This somebody he pictured to himself, though without reason, under the aspect of Siméon, who came to verify the death of his victims, began by carrying Coralie away, then came back to Patrice and carried him away also and laid him down somewhere. And all this was so well-defined
