And as he spoke, the spectral train disappeared within the shadow of the hall door, and he was left alone with the long line of hearses and the skeleton servitors.
“So please ye, gentle sir, wilt thou not trip a measure in the joyous dance?” spoke a voice at his shoulder, “Lo! the peals of merry music, lo! the hum of the dancers feet, moving merrily over the floor. Wilt please thee to take my arm?”
Adrian turned and beheld the bowing Skeleton-Master of Ceremonies.
“I’ll e’en secure thee a fair partner!” whispered the skeleton as he led Adrian through the hall door and along the massive stairway. “Look, good youth, the paintings are somewhat tarnished, very little tarnished since we beheld them last, and, ha, ha, well, well, such things will come to pass, the marble steps of the staircase are cracked by the footstep of time. This way, this way, my good youth. Lo! we are in the festal hall!”
With a gaze of horror, Adrian beheld the hall, whose floor he had trodden some hundred years agone. He beheld the lofty pillars, the magnificent arch, the balcony for the minstrels, all illumined by the glare of pendent lamps, all, all the same, yet still all sadly and fearfully changed.
The lofty columns were decorated with evergreens, but flowers gathered by the hand of beauty from the wild wood glade no more adorned capital and frieze.
The ivy, green companion of old time, clomb round the towering pillars, and swept its canopy of leaves along the arching ceiling, while the night-wind rustling through the worm-eaten tapestries agitated the long tendrils of the trailing vine with a gentle yet solemn motion.
“Lo! the dancers—ha, ha, the dancers!”
Circling and whirling, grouping and clustering, the skeleton-band went swaying over the floor, their gay dresses fluttering in the light, while the ruddy lamp-beams fell quivering over each bared brow, tinting the hollow sockets with a crimson glow, and giving a more ghastly grimace to the array of whitened teeth.
“Lo! the minstrels—a skeleton-band, whose fleshless skulls appear above the lattice-work of yon balcony. Merry music they make—clank, clank, clank! They beat the hollow skull with the cross-bone—clank, clank, clank! Each skeleton minstrel waves on high a human bone, striking it on the hollow skull—clank, clank. Clank, clank. Clank, clank, clank!”