In the meantime his companions had made another sort of discovery: near the foot of the bed was a little table, on which were two drinking vessels, apparently of pewter, and a mouldering pack of cards! Card-playing and the hidden room did hold some relation with each other! The cards and the devil were real!
Donal took up the sheet—a light burden, and Arctura led the way. Arrived at her room, they went softly across to the door opening on Donal’s stair—not without fear of the earl, whom indeed they might meet anywhere—and by that descending, reached the open air, and took their way down the terraces and through the park to the place of burial.
It was a frosty night, with the waning sickle of a moon low in the heaven, and many brilliant stars above it. Followed by faint ethereal shadows, they passed over the grass, through the ghostly luminous dusk—of funereal processions one of the strangest that ever sought a tomb.
The ruin was in a hollow, surrounded by trees. Donal removed a number of fallen stones and dug a grave. They lowered into it the knotted sheet, threw in the earth again, heaped the stones above, and left the dust with its dust. Then silent they went back, straight along the green, moon-regarded rather than moon-lit grass: if any one had seen them through the pale starry night, he would surely have taken them for a procession of the dead themselves!
No dream of death sought Arctura that night, but in the morning she woke suddenly from one of disembodied delight.
CHAPTER LX.
A LESSON ABOUT DEATH.
Whatever lady Arctura might decide concerning the restoration of the chapel to the light of day, Donal thought it would not be amiss to find, without troubling her, what he could of its relation to the rest of the house: and it favoured his wish that Arctura was prevailed upon by the housekeeper to remain in bed the next day. Her strong will, good courage, and trusting heart, had made severe demands upon an organization as delicate as responsive. It was now Saturday: he resolved to go alone in the afternoon to explore—and first of all would try the door beside the little gallery.
As soon as he was free, he got the tools he judged necessary, and went down.
The door was of strong sound oak, with ornate iron hinges right across it. He was on the better side for opening it, that is, the inside, but though the ends of the hinges were exposed, the door was so well within the frame that it was useless to think of heaving them off the bearing-pins. The huge lock and its bolt were likewise before him, but the key was in the lock from the other side, so that it could not be picked; while the nails that fastened it to the door were probably riveted through a plate. But there was the socket into which the bolt shot! that was merely an iron staple! he might either force it out with a lever, or file it through! Having removed the roughest of the rust with which it was caked, and so reduced its thickness considerably, he set himself to the task of filing it through, first at the top then at the bottom. It was a slow but a sure process, and would make no great noise.
Although it was broad daylight outside, so like midnight was it here and the season that belongs to the dead, that he was haunted with the idea of a presence behind him. But not once did he turn his head to see, for he knew that if he yielded to the inclination, it would but return the stronger. Old experience had taught him that the way to meet the horrors of the fancy is to refuse them a single hair’s-breadth of obedience. And as he worked, the conviction grew that the only protection against the terrors of alien presence is the consciousness of the home presence of the eternal: if a man felt that presence, how could he fear any other? But for those who are not one with the source of being, every manifestation of that being in a life other than their own, must be more or less a terror to them; it is alien, antipathous, other,—it may be unappeasable, implacable. The time must even come when to such their own being will be a horror of repugnant consciousness; for God not self is ours—his being, not our own, is our home; he is our kind.