“Uneasy, no!” replied the danneman, who had just descended a dangerous mountain-road in this frightful weather to look for his child, but who considered it derogatory to his paternal dignity to acknowledge his solicitude. “I knew that our friends would not let you start alone; but, because of the horse, which might have been lamed—”
While the danneman was explaining his anxiety after this fashion, the lieutenant made a communication to the major, by which the latter seemed very much struck.
“What is the matter?” asked M. Goefle.
“The matter is,” replied Larrson, “that we have, one and all of us, given ourselves up to gloomy ideas that are making us very ridiculous. The lieutenant, while making his round, heard what seemed to be the lamentation of a human voice sweeping through the air, and the soldiers are so frightened at all that they have heard of the Gray Lady of Stollborg, that, but for their excellent discipline, they would already have decamped. It is time to have done with these dreams, and since there is no way of penetrating into this walled-up room from within, we must examine the outside of the building carefully, and see whether the brigands of the new chateau are not making use of this phantasmagoria at this very moment, to entrap us in some way. Come with us, Christian, since you are convinced, you say, that there must be some means of climbing up there.”
“No no!” replied Christian; “it would take too long to look, and perhaps we should not find a practicable ascent after all. It will be surer and quicker to break down this wall. It is only to knock out the first brick.”
Even while talking, Christian had torn the great map of Sweden from its rings, and, armed with the hammer that he used in his scientific excursions, he attacked the partition under it with desperate vigor, sometimes striking the resounding brick surface with the square end of the instrument, and sometimes thrusting the sharp edge into the holes he had succeeded in making, pulling down violently great masses of the wall, welded together with mortar, and which fell with a hollow sound upon the sonorous staircase. It would have been useless to oppose him. He was possessed, driven on by a sort of fury, that compelled him to escape from the inactivity to which he had been condemned. The strange suspicions he had already conceived that some person was imprisoned in this ruin, returned to him like a nightmare. He was under such excitement that he was even ready to admit the truth of the superstitious ideas to which M. Goefle had yielded belief in this very place, and to suppose that he had been summoned by a supernatural warning to discover the infernal secret which had enveloped his mother’s dying moments with gloom and mystery.
“Stand out of the way! stand out of the way!” he cried to M. Goefle, who, impelled by a similar anxiety, mingled with curiosity, was hurrying up every instant to the foot of the staircase; “if the wall should crumble and fall suddenly, I could not prevent it.”
In fact, the superadded partition, which extended over quite a large surface, was completely undermined by Christian’s furious onslaught; it was giving way, tottering, falling in every direction. The intrepid assailant was covered with dust, and seemed protected only by a miracle in the midst of a rain of bricks and cement. His friends dared not speak any longer; they scarcely dared to breathe; every instant they thought to see him buried under the falling fragments, or struck by some flying brick. A cloud enveloped him, when he cried:
“Victory! here is the continuation of the staircase. Bring a light, Monsieur Goefle!—”
And, without waiting, he rushed into the darkness. But in the few seconds that elapsed, while he was groping for the door, which he found half-open before him, the major had time to join him.