He started, closed his lantern, and concealed it behind the boards, held his breath and listened intently, for his hearing was a little dull and might deceive him as to the nature of the sounds.
Was it a door or a shutter closed by the wind?
He had not waited three minutes when the same groan was repeated, even more distinct, and at the same time it seemed to him that a faint ray of light, very far below him, illumined those depths, which, viewed from his position, were literally an abyss.
He knelt to avoid being seen, and looked between the boards which served him as a balustrade.
The light rapidly increased and soon became bright enough to enable him to see, or rather to divine, in a vague blending of light and shadow, the outline of a room on the ground floor, as large as that in which he was, but evidently much higher before the crumbling of the intermediate floors, as he could judge by the spring of the arched ceiling which rested upon bases embellished with fanciful human and animal figures, much larger and protruding farther than those he had previously seen on the stairway.
The only furniture consisted of several piles of dry forage, and boards arranged as a barrier near one end, with the broken remains of a number of mangers. The room had been used for a long time as a stable for cattle. Among the boards could be seen pieces of yokes and ploughshares. Then all these things were shrouded in shadow once more, and the light, ascending, struck the great stretch of wall which formed the gable end of the building, and which was directly opposite the marquis, some forty feet in height.
This light, now pale, now reddish, came from an invisible flame placed under the ceiling of the ground-floor apartment—that is to say, under that part of it which had not fallen, corresponding to that from which the marquis watched this gloomy, flickering tableau.
Suddenly there was a noise of doors closing, footsteps and voices under that ceiling, and a confused mass of moving shadows, sometimes of enormous size, sometimes stunted as it were, was thrown in the most curious fashion on the high wall, as if a great number of persons were passing back and forth in front of a great fire.
"This is a very strange game of hide-and-seek," thought the marquis, "and it is impossible to deny that this château is filled with wandering, chattering ghosts. Let us hear what they say."
He listened, but he could not succeed in distinguishing a single phrase, a word, a syllable, amid a loud murmur of words, songs, groans and laughter.