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 la.s.situde, 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 pa.s.sed. 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 G.o.ds 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. . . .

CHAPTER 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 pa.s.sing before his closed eyelids. This somebody he pictured to himself, though without reason, under the aspect of Simeon, 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 that Patrice wondered whether he had not woke up.

Next hours pa.s.sed . . . or seconds. In the end Patrice had a feeling that he was falling asleep, but as a man sleeps in h.e.l.l, suffering the moral and physical tortures of the d.a.m.ned. He was back at the bottom of the black pit, which he was making desperate efforts to leave, like a man who has fallen into the sea and is trying to reach the surface. In this way, with the greatest difficulty, he pa.s.sed through one waste of water after another, the weight of which stifled him. He had to scale them, gripping with his hands and feet to things that slipped, to rope-ladders which, possessing no points of support, gave way beneath him.

Meanwhile the darkness became less intense. A little m.u.f.fled daylight mingled with it. Patrice felt less greatly oppressed. He half-opened his eyes, drew a breath or two and, looking round, beheld a sight that surprised him, the embrasure of an open door, near which he was lying in the air, on a sofa. Beside him he saw Coralie, on another sofa. She moved restlessly and seemed to be in great discomfort.

"She is climbing out of the black pit," he thought to himself. "Like me, she is struggling. My poor Coralie!"

There was a small table between them, with two gla.s.ses of water on it.

Parched with thirst, he took one of them in his hand. But he dared not drink.

At that moment some one came through the open door, which Patrice perceived to be the door of the lodge; and he observed that it was not old Simeon, as he had thought, but a stranger whom he had never seen before.

"I am not asleep," he said to himself. "I am sure that I am not asleep and that this stranger is a friend."

And he tried to say it aloud, to make certainty doubly sure. But he had not the strength.

The stranger, however, came up to him and, in a gentle voice, said:

"Don't tire yourself, captain. You're all right now. Allow me. Have some water."

The stranger handed him one of the two gla.s.ses; Patrice emptied it at a draught, without any feeling of distrust, and was glad to see Coralie also drinking.

"Yes, I'm all right now," he said. "Heavens, how good it is to be alive!

Coralie is really alive, isn't she?"

He did not hear the answer and dropped into a welcome sleep.

When he woke up, the crisis was over, though he still felt a buzzing in his head and a difficulty in drawing a deep breath. He stood up, however, and realized that all these sensations were not fanciful, that he was really outside the door of the lodge and that Coralie had drunk the gla.s.s of water and was peacefully sleeping.

"How good it is to be alive!" he repeated.

He now felt a need for action, but dared not go into the lodge, notwithstanding the open door. He moved away from it, skirting the cloisters containing the graves, and then, with no exact object, for he did not yet grasp the reason of his own actions, did not understand what had happened to him and was simply walking at random, he came back towards the lodge, on the other front, the one overlooking the garden.

Suddenly he stopped. A few yards from the house, at the foot of a tree standing beside the slanting path, a man lay back in a wicker long-chair, with his face in the shade and his legs in the sun. He was sleeping, with his head fallen forward and an open book upon his knees.

Then and not till then did Patrice clearly understand that he and Coralie had escaped being killed, that they were both really alive and that they owed their safety to this man whose sleep suggested a state of absolute security and satisfied conscience.

Patrice studied the stranger's appearance. He was slim of figure, but broad-shouldered, with a sallow complexion, a slight mustache on his lips and hair beginning to turn gray at the temples. His age was probably fifty at most. The cut of his clothes pointed to dandyism.

Patrice leant forward and read the t.i.tle of the book: _The Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin_. He also read the initials inside a hat lying on the gra.s.s: "L. P."

"It was he who saved me," said Patrice to himself, "I recognize him. He carried us both out of the studio and looked after us. But how was the miracle brought about? Who sent him?"

He tapped him on the shoulder. The man was on his feet at once, his face lit up with a smile:

"Pardon me, captain, but my life is so much taken up that, when I have a few minutes to myself, I use them for sleeping, wherever I may be . . .

like Napoleon, eh? Well, I don't object to the comparison. . . . But enough about myself. How are you feeling now? And madame--'Little Mother Coralie'--is she better? I saw no use in waking you, after I had opened the doors and taken you outside. I had done what was necessary and felt quite easy. You were both breathing. So I left the rest to the good pure air."

He broke off, at the sight of Patrice's disconcerted att.i.tude; and his smile made way for a merry laugh:

"Oh, I was forgetting: you don't know me! Of course, it's true, the letter I sent you was intercepted. Let me introduce myself. Don Luis Perenna,[3] a member of an old Spanish family, genuine patent of n.o.bility, papers all in order. . . . But I can see that all this tells you nothing," he went on, laughing still more gaily. "No doubt Ya-Bon described me differently when he wrote my name on that street-wall, one evening a fortnight ago. Aha, you're beginning to understand! . . . Yes, I'm the man you sent for to help you. Shall I mention the name, just bluntly? Well, here goes, captain! . . . a.r.s.ene Lupin, at your service."

[Footnote 3: _The Teeth of the Tiger._ By Maurice Leblanc. Translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. "Luis Perenna" is one of several anagrams of "a.r.s.ene Lupin."]

Patrice was stupefied. He had utterly forgotten Ya-Bon's proposal and the unthinking permission which he had given him to call in the famous adventurer. And here was a.r.s.ene Lupin standing in front of him, a.r.s.ene Lupin, who, by a sheer effort of will that resembled an incredible miracle, had dragged him and Coralie out of their hermetically-sealed coffin.

He held out his hand and said:

"Thank you!"

"Tut!" said Don Luis, playfully. "No thanks! Just a good hand-shake, that's all. And I'm a man you can shake hands with, captain, believe me.

I may have a few peccadilloes on my conscience, but on the other hand I have committed a certain number of good actions which should win me the esteem of decent folk . . . beginning with my own. And so . . ."

He interrupted himself again, seemed to reflect and, taking Patrice by a b.u.t.ton of his jacket, said:

"Don't move. We are being watched."

"By whom?"

"Some one on the quay, right at the end of the garden. The wall is not high. There's a grating on the top of it. They're looking through the bars and trying to see us."