Then uttering a horrible cry, I fled, abandoning the horse, the carriage.  In less than twenty minutes, bounding over the rocks and brush, I reached the threshold of our house, and cried in a stifled voice: 

“Run!  Run!  Sir Hawerburch is dead!  Sir Hawerburch is in the cavern—!”

After these words, spoken in the presence of my tutor, of the old woman Agatha, and of two or three people invited in that evening by the doctor, I fainted.  I have learned since that during a whole hour I raved deliriously.

The whole village had gone in search of the commodore.  Christian Weber hurried them off.  At ten o’clock in the evening all the crowd came back, bringing the carriage, and in the carriage the clothes of Sir Hawerburch.  They had discovered nothing.  It was impossible to take ten steps in the cavern without being suffocated.

During their absence Agatha and I waited, sitting in the chimney corner.  I, howling incoherent words of terror; she, with hands crossed on her knees, eyes wide open, going from time to time to the window to see what was taking place, for from the foot of the mountain one could see torches flitting in the woods.  One could hear hoarse voices, in the distance, calling to each other in the night.

At the approach of her master, Agatha began to tremble.  The doctor entered brusquely, pale, his lips compressed, despair written on his face.  A score of woodcutters followed him tumultuously, in great felt hats with wide brims—­swarthy visaged—­shaking the ash from their torches.  Scarcely was he in the hall when my tutor’s glittering eyes seemed to look for something.  He caught sight of the negress, and without a word having passed between them, the poor woman began to cry: 

“No! no!  I don’t want to!”

“And I wish it,” replied the doctor in a hard tone.

One would have said that the negress had been seized by an invincible power.  She shuddered from head to foot, and Christian Weber showing her a bench, she sat down with a corpse-like stiffness.

All the bystanders, witnesses of this shocking spectacle, good folk with primitive and crude manners, but full of pious sentiments, made the sign of the cross, and I who knew not then, even by name, of the terrible magnetic power of the will, began to tremble, believing that Agatha was dead.

Christian Weber approached the negress, and making a rapid pass over her forehead: 

“Are you there?” said he.

“Yes, master.”

“Sir Thomas Hawerburch?”

At these words she shuddered again.

“Do you see him?”

“Yes—­yes,” she gasped in a strangling voice, “I see him.”

“Where is he?”

“Up there—­in the back of the cavern—­dead!”

“Dead!” said the doctor, “how?”

“The spider—­Oh! the spider crab—­Oh!—­”

“Control your agitation,” said the doctor, who was quite pale, “tell us plainly—­”