"You shall not go away to-night," cried Monsieur Antoine; "it is impossible, it rains bucketfuls, the roads are drowned, and you couldn't see your own feet. If you persist in going, I never want to see you again."
He was so urgent and the storm was in fact so fierce that the young man was fain to accept the proffered hospitality.
Sylvain Charasson—that was the name of the page—brought a lantern, and Monsieur Antoine, taking the traveller's arm, guided him among the ruins of the manor-house in search of a bedroom.
All the floors of the square pavilion were occupied by the Châteaubrun family; but, in addition to that small wing which was intact and recently restored, there was an enormous tower on the other side of the courtyard, the oldest part, the highest, the thickest, the most impervious of the whole pile, the rooms which it contained, one above another, being arched with stone and even more solidly constructed than the square pavilion. The band of speculators who had purchased the château several years before for purposes of demolition, and had carried away all the wood and iron to the last door-hinge, had found nothing to demolish on the lower floors, and Monsieur Antoine had had one floor cleaned and closed, for use on the rare occasions when he had an opportunity to entertain a guest. It had been a great display of magnificence on the poor fellow's part to replace the doors and windows and put a bed and a few chairs in that apartment, which was not necessary for the accommodation of his family. He had made the effort cheerfully, saying to Janille: "It isn't everything to be comfortable yourself; you must think about being able to give your neighbor shelter." And yet, when the young man entered that dismal feudal donjon, and found himself, as it were, confined in a jail, his heart sank, and he would gladly have followed the peasant, who went, as his custom was, to lie on the fresh straw with Sylvain Charasson. But Monsieur Antoine was so pleased and so proud to be able to do the honors of a guest chamber, despite his poverty, that his young guest felt bound to accept for his lodgings one of the frowning prisons of the Middle Ages.
However, there was a good fire in the huge fireplace, and the bed, which consisted of a mattress of oat-chaff with a thick quilt spread upon it, was not to be despised. Everything was cheap and clean. The young man soon drove away the melancholy thoughts that assail every traveller quartered in such a place, and, despite the rumbling of the thunder, the cries of the night-birds and the roar of the wind and rain, which shook his windows, while the rats made furious assaults upon his door, he was soon sound asleep.
His sleep, however, was disturbed by strange dreams, and he had a sort of nightmare just before dawn, as if it were impossible to pass the night in a place stained with the mysterious crimes of feudal days without being made the victim of painful visions. He dreamed that Monsieur Cardonnet entered the room, and as he struggled to get out of bed and run to meet him, he made an imperative sign to him not to stir; then, coming to him with an impassive air, he climbed on his chest, paying no heed to his groans and giving no indication upon his stony face that he was aware of the agony he caused him.
Crushed beneath that terrible weight, the sleeper struggled in vain for a space that seemed to him more than a century, and he had the death-rattle in his throat when he succeeded in rousing himself. But, although the day was beginning to break, and he could see everything in the tower distinctly, he remained so completely under the influence of his dream that he fancied that he still saw that inflexible face before his eyes and felt the weight of a body as heavy as a mountain of brass on his crushed and sunken chest. He arose and walked around the room several times before returning to bed, for, although he was anxious to make an early start, he was overcome by an unconquerable feeling of prostration. But his eyes were no sooner closed than the spectre recurred to his determination to stifle him, until, feeling that he was at the point of death, the young man cried out in a broken voice: "Father! father! what have I done to you, and why have you determined to murder your own son?"
The sound of his own voice woke him, and, finding that he was still pursued by the apparition, he ran to the window and opened it. As soon as the cool outer air entered that low room, in the atmosphere of which there was something lethargic, the hallucination vanished, and he dressed in haste, in order to leave the place where he had been the plaything of such a cruel fancy. But, notwithstanding all his efforts to think of something else, he could not shake off a feeling of painful disquietude, and the guest-chamber of Châteaubrun seemed to him even more dismal than on the night before.
The dull, gray light enabled him at last to see the whole of the château from his window.
It was literally nothing but a heap of ruins, the still magnificent ruins of a seignorial abode built at different periods. The courtyard, overgrown with weeds, through which the infrequent going and coming of a family reduced to the strict necessaries of life had worn only two or three narrow paths, from the large tower to the small one, and from the well to the main entrance, was surrounded opposite his window by crumbling walls which could be recognized as the foundations and lower courses of several buildings, among others a dainty chapel, of which the pediment, with a pretty rose-window surrounded by festoons of ivy, was still standing. At the end of the courtyard, in the centre of which was a large well, rose the dismantled skeleton of what had once been the principal abiding-place of the lords of Châteaubrun from the time of François I. to the Revolution. This once sumptuous edifice was now naught but a shapeless skeleton, open on all sides, a strange mass of ruins to which the crumbling away of the interior partitions imparted an appearance of enormous height. Neither the towers in which the graceful spiral staircases were enclosed, nor the great frescoed rooms, nor the beautiful mantels of carved stone had been respected by the hammer of the demolisher, and some few vestiges of this splendor, which they had been unable to reach, some fragments of richly decorated friezes, some garlands of leaves carved by the skilful craftsmen of the Renaissance, and an escutcheon bearing the arms of France crossed by the baton of bastardy—all of fine white stone, which time had not yet been able to darken—presented the melancholy spectacle of a work of art remorselessly sacrificed to the brutal law of necessity.