With these last words, the two women turned the corner of the street and disappeared.
We count it needless to inform our readers who one of them was.
IV.
Another year had gone by. The abbess of the convent of Santa Inés and the daughter of Master Pérez, half hidden in the shadows of the church choir, were talking in low tones. The peremptory voice of the bell was calling from its tower to the faithful, and occasionally an individual would cross the portico, silent and deserted now, and after taking the holy water at the door, would choose a place in a corner of the nave, where a few residents of the neighborhood were quietly waiting for the Midnight Mass to begin.
“There, you see,” the mother superior was saying, “your fear is excessively childish. There is nobody in the church. All Seville is trooping to the cathedral to-night. Play the organ and play it without the least uneasiness. We are only the sisterhood here. Well? Still you are silent, still your breaths are like sighs. What is it? What is the matter?”
“I am—afraid,” exclaimed the girl, in a tone of the deepest agitation.
“Afraid? Of what?”
“I don’t know—of something supernatural. Last night, see, I had heard you say that you earnestly wished me to play the organ for the mass and, pleased with this honor, I thought I would look to the stops and tune it, so as to give you a surprise to-day. I went into the choir—alone—I opened the door which leads to the organ-loft. At that moment the clock of the cathedral struck the hour—what hour, I do not know. The peals were exceedingly mournful, and many—many. They kept on sounding all the time that I stood as if nailed to the threshold, and that time seemed to me a century.
“The church was empty and dark. Far away, in the hollow depth, there gleamed, like a single star lost in the sky of night, a feeble light, the light of the lamp which burns on the High Altar. By its faint rays, which only served to make more visible all the deep horror of the darkness, I saw—I saw—mother, do not disbelieve it—I saw a man who, in silence and with his back turned toward the place where I stood, was running over the organ-keys with one hand, while he tried the stops with the other. And the organ sounded, but it sounded in a manner indescribable. It seemed as if each of its notes were a sob smothered within the metal tube which vibrated with its burden of compressed air, and gave forth a muffled tone, almost inaudible, yet exact and true.
“And the cathedral clock kept on striking, and that man kept on running over the keys. I heard his very breathing.