Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/77

Rh one by one the tremulous glimmering candles. And the shadows thickened, heavily weighted with the day's dead. A few steps away rose the factory, even darker than the surrounding gloom, like the temple of a malicious divinity. An excess of calamity: at that equivocal hour the terrible drain, rising higher than usual, neutralized by its murderous effluvia the increase of their prayers and the holy water of their tears.

To reinforce this impression of agony and despair, it seemed to Laurent, who was closely scrutinizing the smiling Madonna, that her face reproduced the imperious and too regular features of his Cousin Gina. Was it possible that, in order to make these devotions miscarry, the spirit of the Dobouziez factory had substituted itself for the Queen of Heaven? Just then the poor mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, children and grandmothers began to intone, after the vicar, a pleading and lamentable Regina Coeli!

Laurent could no longer doubt it. He recognized her overweening expression, her distant and mocking glance. He would have sworn that a breath escaped between the lips of the false Madonna, and that she was taking a crafty pleasure in blowing out the last candles!

He was tempted to throw himself between the crowd and the idol and to cry to them:

"Stop! You are deceiving yourselves cruelly, O poor women, my sisters! She whose aid you are invoking is the other Queen, as beautiful, but the most pitiless of all queens. Stop! She is Regina, the nymph of the drain, the flower of the cesspool; it nourishes her and makes her proud and strong. But you! You it poisons, and you it kills!"

But the canticle melted suddenly into a torrent of