That night he roused as Melior slipped from their bed. Through discreetly half-closed eyelids Florian saw her take from the closet that queer carved staff which had once belonged to her sister Mélusine. Now Melior for a while regarded this staff dubiously. She replaced it in the closet. She took up the night-light from the green-covered table beside the bed, and she passed out of the room.
He lay still for a moment, then put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and followed her. Melior turned, with her lamp, at the second corridor, and went out into the enclosed Thoignet Court-yard, skirted the well, and so disappeared through the small porch into the Chapel. Florian followed, quite noiselessly. The paved court was chilly underfoot: as he went into the porch a spray of ivy brushed his cheek in the dark.
Inside the Chapel three hanging lamps burned before the altar, like red stars, but they gave virtually no illumination. Florian saw that Melior had carried her yellow lamp into the alcove where his earlier wives were buried. She knelt there. She was praying, no doubt, for the intercession of that meddlesome Hoprig. Florian was rather interested. Then his interest was redoubled, for of a sudden the place was flooded with a wan throbbing bluish luminousness. The effigies upon the tombs of Florian’s wives were changed; and the recumbent marble figures yawned and stretched themselves. Thus, then, began the unimaginative working of Hoprig’s holy ring, with a revamping of the affliction put upon Komorre the Cursed in the old nursery tale, Florian decided; and these retributory resurrections were rather naïve. He drew close his dressing-gown, and got well into the shadow of his great-grandfather’s tomb, the while that his four earlier wives sat erect and looked compassionately at Melior.
“Beware, poor lovely child,” said the likeness of Aurélie, “for it is apparent that Florian intends to murder you also.”
“I was beginning to think he had some such notion,” Melior replied, “for otherwise, of course, he would hardly be fetching home the sword Flamberge.”
She had arisen from her knees, and there was in the composure with which she now sat sociably beside the ghost of Carola, on top of Carola’s tomb, something that Florian found rather admirable. And he recalled too with admiration the innocence and the unconcern with which Melior had commented upon his having acquired such a delightfully quaint and old-fashioned looking sword....
“Yes, for, my dear,” said Carola, “you have permitted him to get tired of you. It was for that oversight he murdered all of us.”
“But I have no time to put up with the man’s foolishness just now, when I am going to have a baby,” said Melior, with unconcealed vexation.
“Go seek protection of St. Hoprig,” advised Hortense.
“And how may she escape,” asked Marianne, “when Florian’s lackeys are everywhere, and Florian’s great wolfhounds guard the outer courts?”