“She is lost, Patrice!” Siméon continued, raising his voice still louder. “Lost! There’s nothing to be done! And you will not find even her body in the bowels of the earth, where I buried her with the bags of gold. Under the tombstone? No, not such a fool! No, Patrice, you will never find her. The gold is stifling her. She’s dead! Coralie is dead! Oh, the delight of throwing that in your face! The anguish you must be feeling! Coralie is dead! Coralie is dead!”
“Don’t shout so, you’ll wake her,” said Don Luis, calmly.
The brief sentence was followed by a sort of stupor which paralyzed the two adversaries. Patrice’s arms dropped to his sides. Siméon turned giddy and sank into a chair. Both of them, knowing the things of which Don Luis was capable, knew what he meant.
But Patrice wanted something more than a vague sentence that might just as easily be taken as a jest. He wanted a certainty.
“Wake her?” he asked, in a broken voice.
“Well, of course!” said Don Luis. “When you shout too loud, you wake people up.”
“Then she’s alive?”
“You can’t wake the dead, whatever people may say. You can only wake the living.”
“Coralie is alive! Coralie is alive!” Patrice repeated, in a sort of rapture that transfigured his features. “Can it be possible? But then she must be here! Oh, I beg of you, say you’re in earnest, give me your word! . . . Or no, it’s not true, is it? I can’t believe it . . . you must be joking. . . .”
“Let me answer you, captain, as I answered that wretch just now. You are admitting that it is possible for me to abandon my work before completing it. How little you know me! What I undertake to do I do. It’s one of my habits and a good one at that. That’s why I cling to it. Now watch me.”