"Sister," said Marcus, "not only pure and generous wine, with white bread, do we offer you to restore your power, but the body and blood of the divine man as he understood it himself; that is to say, the celestial and also earthly sign of fraternal equality. Our fathers, the martyrs of the Taborite church, fancied that the intervention of impious and sacrilegious priests were not so effective as the pure hands of a woman or a child in the consecration of the sacrament. Commune then with us here until you sit at the banquet of the temple, where the great mystery of the supper will be more explicitly revealed to you. Take this cup, and first drink of it. If, when you do so, you have faith, a few drops will be a mighty tonic to your body, and your fervent soul will support you through your trial on its wings of flame. Consuelo having first drank of the cup, returned it to Leverani, who, after tasting it, handed it around to the other brethren. Marcus having swallowed the last drops, blessed Consuelo, and requested the assembly to pray for her. He then presented the neophyte with a silver lamp, and assisted her in placing her feet on the bars of a ladder.
"I need not," said he, "tell you that no danger menaces your life; but remember that you will never reach the door of the temple if you look but once behind as you proceed. You will have several pauses to make at different places, when you must examine all that terrifies you—but do not pause long. As a door opens before you, pass it, and you will never return. This is, as you know, the rigid requirement of the old initiations. You must also, in obedience to the rules of the old rites, diligently nurse the flame of your lamp. Go, my child, and may this idea give you superhuman power, that what you now are condemned to suffer is necessary to the development of your heart and mind in virtue and true faith."
When Marcus had ceased speaking, Consuelo carefully descended the stairs. When she was at the foot, the ladder was withdrawn, and she heard the heavy stones close over the entrance above her.
[CHAPTER XXXIX]
At first Consuelo, having passed from a room where a hundred torches burned, to a room lighted by a solitary lamp, saw nothing but a kind of mystic light around her, which her eyes could not penetrate. Gradually, however, they became used to darkness; and as she perceived nothing between her and the walls of a room of an octagonal form, like the one she left, she ventured to examine the characters on the wall. This was a solitary and long inscription, arranged in many circular lines around the room, which had no outlet. As she saw this, Consuelo asked herself, not how she could get out of the room, but for what purpose it could have been made. Thoughts of evil which she endeavored to repress, obtruded themselves upon her mind, and they were confirmed by the inscriptions she read, as lamp in hand she slowly walked around the room.
"Look at the beauty of these walls, cut in the rock, twenty-four feet thick, and which have stood for a thousand years uninjured by war, or the efforts of time. This model of architectural masonry was built by the hand of slaves, doubtless to contain the treasures of some mighty lord. Yes, to bury in the depths of the rock, in the bowels of the earth, the treasures of hatred and vengeance. Here twenty generations of men have suffered, wept and blasphemed. Some were innocent—some were heroic—all were victims or martyrs: prisoners of war—serfs who had revolted, or who were too much crushed by taxes to be able to pay more—religious innovators, sublime heretics, unfortunate men, conquered warriors, fanatics, saints, and criminals—men educated in the ferocity of camps to rapine and war, who had in return been subjected to horrible reprisals—such are the catacombs of feudality and military or religious despotism. Such are the abodes that the powerful made for their victims, to stifle their cries, and conceal their existence from the light of day. Here there is no air to breathe, no ray of light, no stone to rest the head—nothing but an iron ring fastened in the wall to hold the chain, and keep them from selecting their resting-place on the damp and icy floor. Here air, light and food are at the disposal of the guards posted in the upper room, where they pleased to open the door for a moment and throw in a morsel of bread to hundreds of victims chained and heaped together on the day after a battle. Often they wounded or murdered each other, and often, yet more horrible, one alone remained, stifled in suffering and despair, amid the loathsome carcases of his companions, and sometimes attacked by the worms before death, and sinking in putrefaction before life had become extinct. Behold! O neophyte, the source of human grandeur, which you perhaps have looked on with envy and admiration. Crushed skulls, human bones, dried and withered tears, blood-spots, are the translations of the coats of arms, if you have such bequeathed you by nobility. This is what should be quartered on the escutcheons of the princes you have served, or aspire to serve, if you be a man of the people. Yes, this is the foundation of noble titles, of the hereditary glory and riches of the world. Thus has been built up a caste, which all other classes of men yet venerate and preserve. Thus have men contrived to elevate themselves from father to son above their fellows."
Having passed thrice around the room, and read this inscription, Consuelo, filled with grief and terror, placed the lamp on the floor, to rest herself. The lonely place was as silent as the grave, and terrible thoughts arose in her mind. Her eager fancy evoked dark visions. She thought she saw livid shadows, covered with hideous wounds, flitting around the hall, and crawling on the floor beside her. She thought she heard their painful sighs, and the rattling of their chains. She evolved the past in her mind, as she had imagined it in the middle ages, and as it continued during the religious wars. She fancied she heard, in the guard-room above, the heavy tread of iron-shod men, the rattling of their pikes, their coarse laughter, their mad songs, their threats and oaths when the victims complaints reached them and interrupted their terrible sleep; for those jailors had slept over their prison, over that unhealthy abyss, whence the miasmata of the tombs, and of hell, were exhaled.
Pale, her eyes staring, her hair erect with terror, Consuelo saw and heard nothing. When she had recalled her own existence, and strove to shake off the chill which had seized her, she saw that a stone had been removed, and that another passage was opened for her. She approached, and saw a narrow and stiff stairway, which she descended with great difficulty, and which ended in another cavern, darker and smaller than the first. When she touched the floor, which was soft, and yielded under her feet, Consuelo put down her lamp, to see if she did not sink in mud. She saw naught hut a fine dust, smaller than the finest sand, containing here and there a broken rib, a piece of a thigh bone, fragments of a skull, a jaw, with teeth yet solid and white, exhibiting youth and power crushed by a violent death. A few skeletons, almost entire, had been taken from the dust, and were placed against the wall. One had been perfectly preserved, and was chained around the waist, as if the prisoner had been condemned to die without being able to lie down. The body, instead of inclining forward, was stiffened and drawn back, with an expression of utter disdain. The ligaments of the body and limbs were ossified. The head was thrown back, and seemed to look at the roof; the teeth, contracted by a last effort, smiled terribly with some outbreak of fanaticism. Above the body the name and story of the prisoner were written, in large red letters, on the wall. He was an obscure martyr of religious persecution, and the last victim immolated in this place. At his feet knelt a skeleton; the head, detached from the vertebræ, lay on the pavement, but the stiffened arms yet embraced the knees of the martyr: this was his wife. The inscription bore, among other details, the following—
"N——died here with his wife, his three brothers, and his two children, because they would not renounce Lutheranism, and maintained, even amid tortures, a denial of the infallibility of the pope. He died erect, without being able to see his family suffering at his feet, on the ashes of his friends and fathers."