It was no longer the meadows, the odour of the grass, the song of larks, the great yellow sun; it was the fallen, inundated mine, the stinking gloom, the melancholy dripping of this cellar where they had been groaning for so many days. Her perverted senses now increased the horror of it; her childish superstitions came back to her; she saw the Black Man, the old dead miner who returns to the pit to twist naughty girls' necks.
"Listen! did you hear?"
"No, nothing; I heard nothing."
"Yes, the Man—you know? Look! he is there. The earth has let all the blood out of the vein to revenge itself for being cut into; and he is there—you can see him—look! blacker than night. Oh, I'm so afraid, I'm so afraid!"
She became silent, shivering. Then in a very low voice she whispered:
"No, it's always the other one."
"What other one?"
"Him who is with us; who is not alive."
The image of Chaval haunted her, she talked of him confusedly, she described the dog's life she led with him, the only day when he had been kind to her at Jean-Bart, the other days of follies and blows, when he would kill her with caresses after having covered her with kicks.
"I tell you that he's coming, that he will still keep us from being together! His jealousy is coming on him again. Oh, push him off! Oh, keep me close!"