The blood on the white face! The priest blinked at the cresset flaming high across the yard. Surely it burned with a lurider glow? It was the wind fanning it. Wind? there was no breath of wind in all the dead night. What, then, if not the pipe of wind in passage or keyhole, was that sudden whine which rose upon the silence? With the sweat breaking out on his forehead, he seized a mattock, one of several which had been laid ready, and began frenziedly striking at the ground under the wall. Tyrrell, with a gasping oath, came hurrying to join him.
They dug like madmen, against their own terror and the vision to come. And when at last it announced itself with heave, and shuffle, and the grunting of brute lungs, they would not pause for a moment, but, reinforced, wrought and wrought until the grave was made, and closed in, and their sin covered. And then Tyrrell, summoning his vile grooms, delivered up his trust and rode away for York, with his soul rattling like a dried kernel within him.
The chaplain thought of a prayer for the dead, and bending, with an abject face, to kneel by the grave, saw dark stains on his sandalled feet. He glanced at the burning cresset, stooped and, touching them, looked at his fingers. To wade through blood! With a shudder he thrust his hands out of sight into the wide sleeves of his cassock, and went hurriedly away, drifting across the open ward like the black shadow of a cloud.
But the morning found him restored and unrepentant.
Abbot of St. Peter’s! Day by day, while that preferment was delayed, the hunger ravened in him and the conscience hardened, until his crime, going unrewarded, filled him with an insane and rageful joy. But one evening there came a secret message to him that the King, superstitious after the fashion of the sceptical and world-serving, had taken exception to the place of burial, and desired that the dead should be privately exhumed and reinterred in a place less unconsecrate. Flushed with renewed hope, then, he hugged his confidence, and went with burning eyes about his task.
God knows how he managed to perform it, and alone, and without exciting suspicion. He was lord of his own sacred domain. But, working with demoniac energy, he got out the spoiled young bodies, and conveyed them one by one to the new grave he had himself opened for them under the chapel stairs. There they might repose within sound of the Mass, at peace and at rest for evermore. His imagination, as with monomaniacs, could flow only in one direction. Each day he trod upon the stones that hid his secret, and never faltered or feared. And each day he waited, hungering, for his summons to Westminster.
It came at last—the prize for which he had wrought, and suffered, and bartered his priestly soul. He was in the chapel at the time, and he heard the voice of the Lieutenant calling to him. He hurried out, and saw Sir John standing, citation in hand, at the foot of the stairs.
“Hail, Father Abbot!” quoth the knight, in that derisory tone he had ever assumed towards him since their last interview.
The chaplain, his thin lips chewing out a smile, lingered on the top of the flight. And then, all in a moment, his eyes were seen to fix themselves in a stare of horror, as if some terrific vision opposed them.
“What’s this?” he whispered. “Who put it here?”