The great hall, with its oak gallery and ceiling painted by Boucher, echoed our footsteps and our voices.
This echo was the defect of the hall, as I have often heard my father say. The builder of the place had, by some mischance, imprisoned an echo. She was there, and nothing would dislodge her—everything had been tried. Architects from Paris had been consulted—even the great Violette Le Duc himself—without avail. She was there like a ghost, and nothing would drive her out. Whether she was hiding in the gallery or the coigns of the ceiling, who can say? But one thing was certain: her voice changed. It was sometimes louder, sometimes lower, sometimes harsher, sometimes sweeter; a change caused, I believe, by atmospheric influence. But superstition takes no account of atmospheric influence or natural causes. Superstition said that the echo was the voice of Marianne de Saluce, a girl famed for her beautiful voice, who, like Antonina in the Violon de Cremone, had died singing, under tragic circumstances, one winter day here in the hall of the château, in the late years of the reign of his sun-like Majesty Louis XIV.
"The blood flowing from her mouth had mixed with her song," said the old chronicle; and this, with the fact that she was wild, wayward, and bad, gave superstition groundwork for a conceit not without charm.
"Marianne!" cried Eloise, when I had told her this tale; and "Marianna—Marianne!" the ghostly voice replied.
Eloise laughed, and Marianne laughed in reply all along the gallery, as though she were running from room to room; and, to my mind, made fanciful by the recollection of the old legend, it seemed that there was something sinister and sneering in the laughter of Marianne.
Then I called out myself, making my voice as deep as possible; and the answer was so horrible as to make us both start. For it was as though a woman, leaning over the gallery and imitating my man's voice, were mocking me.
I have never heard anything more hobgoblin, if I may use the expression.
"Ugh!" said Eloise. "Don't speak to her any more. Speak in whispers; don't give her the satisfaction of answering. Toto, are those men in armour your ancestors?"
"They are the shells of old Saluces," I replied. "Eloise, do you remember the man in armour in the tower of Lichtenberg—the one who struck the bell?"
"Don't speak of him," said Eloise; "at least, here. The place is ghostly enough. Shall we go upstairs?"