He seated himself on an old moss grown boulder by the chapel and said again, as if speaking to himself: “But I will snatch her away from this place—I cannot see her roaming about on the arm of her father—as if I were not in the world.”
And, while he said this, I looked up and I fancied that I beheld the shadow of the father and the daughter passing and repassing in the dawn, beneath the sombre height of the Tower of the North, and I likened them in my mind to the old Oedipus and his daughter, Antigone, walking under the walls of Colone, dragging with them the weight of a grief beyond human endurance.
And then suddenly, without my being able to recall myself to reason, perhaps because Darzac made again the gesture which had startled me before, the same frightful fancy assailed me, and I demanded:
“How did it happen that the sack was empty?”
He was not in the least confused or taken aback. He replied simply:
“Rouletabille must tell us that.” Then he pressed my hand and wandered away through the undergrowth of the garden. I looked after him and said to myself:
“I have gone mad!”
CHAPTER XVI
DISCOVERY OF “AUSTRALIA”
The moon was shining full on his face. He believed himself to be alone in the night and certainly it was one of the moments in which he would cast aside the mask of the day. First the black glasses had ceased to shade his eyes. And if his figure, during the hours of disguise, was more bent than nature had made it, if his shoulders were rounded by pretense instead of study, this was the moment when the magnificent body of Larsan, away from all observers, must relax itself. Would it relax now? I hid in the ditch behind the barberry hedge. Not one of his movements escaped me.
Now he was standing erect upon the western boulevard which looked like a pedestal beneath his feet; the rays of the moon enveloped him with a cold and mournful light. Is it you, Darzac? or your spectre? or the ghost of Larsan, come back from the house of the dead?