But how rare—how strange—the coincidence of chances here. For, if the trap-door was absolutely air-tight, I cannot think that the supply of oxygen in the cellar, large as it was, would have been sufficient to last the girl twenty years, to say nothing of what her mother used up before death: for I imagine that the woman must have continued to live some time in her dungeon, sufficiently long, at least, to teach her child to procure its food of dates and wine; so that the door must have been only just sufficiently hermetic to bar the poison, yet admit some oxygen; or else, the place may have been absolutely air-tight at the time of the cloud, and some crack, which I have not seen, opened to admit oxygen after the poison was dispersed: in any case—the all-but-infinite rarity of the chance!
Thinking these things I climbed out, and we walked to Pera, where I slept in a great white-stone house in five or six acres of garden overlooking the cemetery of Kassim, having pointed out to the girl another house in which to sleep.
This girl! what a history! After existing twenty years in a sunless world hardly three acres wide, she one day suddenly saw the only sky which she knew collapse at one point! a hole appeared into yet a world beyond! It was I who had come, and kindled Constantinople, and set her free.
Ah, I see something now! I see! it was for this that I was preserved: I to be a sort of new-fangled Adam—and this little creature to be my Eve! That is it! The White does not admit defeat: he would recommence the Race again! At the last, the eleventh hour—in spite of all—he would turn defeat into victory, and outwit that Other.
However, if this be so—and I seem to see it quite clearly—then in that White scheme is a singular flaw: at one point, it is obvious, that elaborate Forethought fails: for I have a free will—and I refuse, I refuse.
Certainly, in this matter I am on the side of the Black: and since it depends absolutely upon me, this time Black wins.
No more men on the earth after me, ye Powers! To you the question may be nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome of your aërial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness—the deep, deep pain—of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king named Galba, a horrid dog, and there was a French devil, Gilles de Raiz: and the rest were all much the same, much the same. Oh no, it was not a good race, that small infantry which called itself Man: and here, falling on my knees before God and Satan as I write, I swear, I swear: Never through me shall it spring and fester again.
I cannot realise her! Not at all, at all, at all! If she is out of my sight and hearing ten minutes, I fall to doubting her reality. If I lose her for half a day, all the old feelings, resembling certainties, come back, that I have only been dreaming—that this appearance cannot be an actual objective fact of life, since the impossible is impossible.