A little before midnight two forms entered the south transept by a little wicket door. There was a black darkness over the heavens that night, and a high wind moaned and shrieked about the upper turrets of the stately fane. Oh, how solemn was the inner aspect at that dread hour, lighted only by the seven lamps, which, typical of the Seven Spirits of God, burned in the choir, pendent from the roof.
One timorous glance Hubert gave into the dark recesses of the aisles and transept, into the dim space overhead, as if he almost expected to hear the flapping of ghostly pinions in the portentous gloom. A sense of mystery daunted his spirit as he followed his sire by the light of a feeble lamp, carried in the hand, amidst the tall columns which rose like tree trunks around, each shaft appearing to rise farther than the sight could penetrate, ere it gave birth to the arch from its summit. Dead crusaders lay around in stone, and strove with grim visage to draw the sword and smite the worshippers of Mohammed, as if in the very act they had been petrified by a new Gorgon’s head. The steps of the intruders seemed sacrilegious, breaking the solemn stillness of the night as the father led the son into the chapel of the patron saint of his order:
Who propped the Virgin in her faint,
The loved Apostle John.
There the horror-stricken Hubert heard the dismal tale which we have already related, and that his unhappy father believed himself yet visited each night by the ghost of the man he had slain. And also that it was fixed in his poor diseased brain that the apparition would not rest until the crusade, vowed by the Sieur de Fievrault, but cut short by his fall, should be made by proxy, and that the proxy must be one sans peur et sans reproche. And that this reparation made, the poor spirit, according to the belief of the age, released from purgatorial fires, might enter Paradise and reappear no more between the hours of midnight and cock crowing to trouble the living.
“What an absurd story,” the sceptic may say. No doubt it is to us, but a man must live in his own age, and there was nought absurd or improbable to young Hubert in it all.
And when the weird tale was finished, and the hour of midnight tolled boom! boom! boom! from the tower above, every stroke sent a thrill through the heart of the youth. That dread hour, when, as men thought, the powers of darkness had the world to themselves, when a thousand ghosts shrieked on the hollow wind, when midnight hags swept through the tainted air, and goblins gibbered in sepulchres.
Just then Hubert caught his father’s glance, and it made each separate hair erect itself:
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
“Father,” cried the boy, “what art thou gazing at? what aileth thee? I see nought amiss.”
Words came from the father’s lips, not in reply to his son, but as if to some object unseen by all besides.