Onward they went, faster now, their footfalls sounding dull and leaden on the earthy floor, their breath coming--again they knew not why!--faster and faster.
Then--the passage traversed--the daylight now illuminating faintly a space some dozen feet square, Debrasques clutched Andrew's arm and pointed to a dark blur upon the ground before them--a heap of blackness that bore some resemblance to a crouching human form--it lying a little space outside the circle of dim light.
"Look! look!" He said, "it is a human figure. Ciel! is it he? Is he dead? See--the eyes glare at us!"
"Ay," replied Andrew, advancing to that blurred mass, "it is he."
While, stooping over the body of De Bois-Vallée, he added, "And he is dead."
Then he lifted his porte épée, and thrust back his sword into the scabbard gently, saying, "No more need for you now. Your work here is done."
[CHAPTER XXXIV.]
ADIEU
"How has he died?" asked Debrasques, avoiding those open, glaring orbs that looked out glassily from the dead man's face, the body lying on its side, the arms extended, the head turned up so that the eyes stared down the passage. "How?"
Andrew looked round the small space into which the passage, or vault, had widened at its end, lifted high his lantern with one hand above his head, then pointed with his hat which he held in the other--almost unknowingly, both had doffed their hats in the presence of that thing at their feet--towards the opening whence the light came from without. An opening many feet above his head, of about a foot in circumference, through which the daylight streamed murky and dull.