Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/58

28 out of the window to draw to the shutter shaken by the wind, but she feared to do so. It seemed to her that the rain and the river, confounding their tumultous waters, were submerging the frail house, the planks of which were creaking in every direction. She would have flown from her chamber, but she saw below the flickering of a light which appeared to come from Master Zacharius's retreat, and in one of those momentary calms, during which the elements keep a sudden silence, her ear caught plaintive sounds. She tried to shut her window, but could not. The wind violently repelled her, like a villain who was introducing himself into a dwelling.

Gerande thought she would go mad from terror. What was her father doing? She opened the door, and it escaped from her hands, and shook loudly under the attack of the tempest. Gerande then found herself in the dark supper-room, succeeded in gaining, on tiptoe, the staircase which led to her father's shop, and, pale and fainting, glided down.

The old watchmaker was upright in the middle of the room, which was filled with the groans of the river. His bristling hair gave him a sinister aspect. He was talking and gesticulating, without seeing or hearing anything. Gerande arrested her steps on the threshold.

"It is death!" said Master Zacharius, in a thick voice; "it is death! Why should I live longer, now that I have dispersed my existence over the earth? For I, Master Zacharius, am really the creator of all the watches that I have fashioned! It is a part of my very soul that I have shut up in each of these boxes of iron, silver, or gold! Every time that one of these accursed watches stops, I feel my heart cease beating, for I have regulated them with its pulsations!"

As he spoke in this strange way, the old man cast his eyes on his bench. There lay all the pieces of a watch that he had carefully taken apart. He took up a sort of hollow cylinder, called a barrel, in which the spring is enclosed, and removed the steel spiral, which, instead of relaxing itself, according to the laws of its elasticity, remained coiled on itself, like a sleeping viper. It seemed knotted, like those impotent old men whose blood has long been congealed. Master Zacharius vainly essayed to uncoil it