“What, the old dict was true after all?”
“So true that the workmen this very day found a skeleton erect in the pillar they are repairing. I had sent to my lord at once, but I knew he would be here.”
“It is he! 'Tis he!” said his descendant, quickening his pace. “Let us go see the old boy. This youth is a stranger, I think.”
Gerard bowed.
“Know then that my great-great-grandfather held his head high and being on the point of death, revolted against lying under the aisle with his forbears for mean folk to pass over. So, as the tradition goes, he swore his son (my great-grandfather), to bury him erect in one of the pillars of the church” (here they entered the porch). “'For,' quoth he, 'NO BASE MAN SHALL PASS OVER MY STOMACH.' Peste!” and even while speaking, his lordship parried adroitly with his stick a skull that came hopping at him, bowled by a boy in the middle of the aisle, who took to his heels yelling with fear the moment he saw what he had done. His lordship hurled the skull furiously after him as he ran, at which the cure gave a shout of dismay and put forth his arm to hinder him, but was too late.
The cure groaned aloud. And as if this had evoked spirits of mischief, up started a whole pack of children from some ambuscade, and unseen, but heard loud enough, clattered out of the church like a covey rising in a thick wood.
“Oh! these pernicious brats,” cried the cure. “The workmen cannot go to their nonemete but the church is rife with them. Pray Heaven they have not found his late lordship; nay, I mind, I hid his lordship under a workmen's jerkin, and—saints defend us! the jerkin has been moved.”
The poor cure's worst misgivings were realized: the rising generation of the plebians had played the mischief with the haughty old noble. “The little ones had jockeyed for the bones oh,” and pocketed such of them as seemed adapted for certain primitive games then in vogue amongst them.
“I'll excommunicate them,” roared the curate, “and all their race.”
“Never heed,” said the scapegrace lord: and stroked his hawk; “there is enough of him to swear by. Put him back! put him back!”