Then all the noises suddenly ceased, and naught could be heard save a low groaning, which resembled the groaning caused by physical pain, and which Bois-Doré had constantly detected, recurring at intervals, like a doleful chord on an organ, in the pauses of that wild charivari.
The tumult stilled, the shadow of a gigantic crucifix was thrown upon the wall.
The light seemed to change its position, and the cross became very small; at last it disappeared, and its place was taken by a single figure very sharply outlined, while a sepulchral voice recited in a monotonous tone a prayer which seemed to be the prayer for those who are in the death agony.
[XLVI]
Bois-Doré, who had held his place, detained by the amusement he derived from that phantasmagoric spectacle and those strange noises, was beginning to feel so cold that his teeth fairly chattered when this tedious ceremony began.
This time, although he had determined to go to see what was taking place, he was withheld by the appalling resemblance presented by the last apparition. It became more precise and more unmistakable as the sepulchral voice proceeded with its sepulchral prayer, and the marquis, as if fascinated, could not remove his eyes from it.
That head, so easily recognizable by the short hair, cut à la malcontent, by the Spanish ruff in which it was framed as it were, by its sharp and angular, yet refined outlines, and lastly by the peculiar shape of the beard and moustache, was the head of D'Alvimar, thrown back in the rigor of death.
At first Bois-Doré fought against the idea; then it took entire possession of him, became a certainty, a source of intense agitation and insurmountable terror.
He had never believed that he was in any danger from ghosts. He said and he thought that, having never put any man to death from revenge or from cruelty, he was quite sure that he should never be visited by any soul in anger or distress; but he was no more disposed than the majority of sensible men of his time to deny the return of spirits to earth, or the reality of the apparitions which so many persons entirely worthy of confidence described in detail.
"This D'Alvimar is surely dead," he thought; "I touched his cold limbs; I saw his body, already stiff in death, taken from his horse's back. He has been reposing underground for several weeks, and yet I see him here before me, I who have always refused to see anything supernatural where others saw terrible phantoms! Was this man, contrary to all appearances, innocent of the crime of which I accused him and for which I punished him? Is this a rebuke of my conscience? Is it a vision of my brain? Is it the chilling atmosphere of this ruin stealing over me and confusing my faculties? Whatever it may be," he thought, "I have had enough of it."