第36章 Above the Trap-Doors (3)

"You have shown me over the upper part of your empire, Christine, but there are strange stories told of the lower part.Shall we go down?"She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice, whispered:

"Never!...I will not have you go there!...Besides, it's not mine...EVERYTHING THAT IS UNDERGROUND BELONGS TO HIM!"Raoul looked her in the eyes and said roughly:

"So he lives down there, does he?"

"I never said so....Who told you a thing like that? Come away!

I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane, Raoul....You always take things in such an impossible way....Come along! Come!"And she literally dragged him away, for he was obstinate and wanted to remain by the trap-door; that hole attracted him.

Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not even see the hand that worked it; and they remained quite dazed.

"Perhaps HE was there," Raoul said, at last.

She shrugged her shoulders, but did not seem easy.

"No, no, it was the `trap-door-shutters.' They must do something, you know....They open and shut the trap-doors without any particular reason....It's like the `door-shutters:'

they must spend their time somehow."

"But suppose it were HE, Christine?"

"No, no! He has shut himself up, he is working.""Oh, really! He's working, is he?"

"Yes, he can't open and shut the trap-doors and work at the same time."She shivered.

"What is he working at?"

"Oh, something terrible!...But it's all the better for us.

...When he's working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time...he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap-doors."She shivered again.She was still holding him in her arms.

Then she sighed and said, in her turn:

"Suppose it were HE!"

"Are you afraid of him?"

"No, no, of course not," she said.

For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was careful to avoid the trap-doors.Her agitation only increased as the hours passed.At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her face so desperately pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed when he blurted out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition unless she first told him the secret of the man's voice.

"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name I Suppose HE heard you, you unfortunate Raoul!"And Christine's eyes stared wildly at everything around her.

"I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it.

And you shall not think of him any more.""Is it possible?"

She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragernent, while dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far, very far from the trap-doors.

"I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where HEcan not come to look for you.You will be safe; and then I shall go away...as you have sworn never to marry."Christine seized Raoul's hands and squeezed them with incredible rapture.

But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her head.

"Higher!" was all she said."Higher still!"And she dragged him up toward the summit.

He had a difficulty in following her.They were soon under the very roof, in the maze of timber-work.They slipped through the buttresses, the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have run from tree to tree in a forest.

And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.

As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.