Still full of the wild sense of unreality, like a man walking or groping his way in a land of ghosts, Bradley walked on. Passing along a dismal stone corridor, where, at every step he took,
He dragged
Foot-echoes after him!
past passage after passage of vaulted stone, dimly conscious as he went of low doors opening into the gloomiest of cells, he hurried in the wake of his veiled guide. Was it only his distempered fancy, or did he indeed hear, from time to time, the sound of low wailings and dreary ululations proceeding from the darkness on every side of him? Once, as they crossed an open space dimly lit by dreary shafts of daylight, he saw a figure in sable weeds, on hands and knees, with her lips pressed close against the stone pavement; but at a word from his guide the figure rose with a feeble moan and fluttered away down a corridor into the surrounding darkness.
At last they seemed to pass from darkness into partial sunshine, and Bradley found himself standing in the open air. On every side, and high as the eye could reach, rose gloomy walls with overhanging caves and buttresses, leaving only one narrow space above where the blue of heaven was dimly seen. There was a flutter of wings, and the shadows of a flight of birds passed overhead—doves which made their home in the gloomy recesses of the roofs and walls.
Beneath was a sort of quadrangle, some twenty feet square, covered with grass, which for the most part grew knee-deep, interspersed with nettles and gloomy weeds, and which was in other places stunted and decayed, as if withered by some hideous mildew or blight. Here and there there was a rude wooden cross stuck into the earth, and indicating what looked to the eye like a neglected grave.
The Sister led the way through the long undergrowth, till she reached the side of a mound on which the grass had scarcely grown at all, and on which was set one of those coarse crosses.
‘You ask me what has become of the poor penitent you seek. She died in the holy faith, and her mortal body is buried here.’
With a wild shriek Bradley fell on his knees, and tearing the cross from the earth read the inscription rudely carved upon it:—
‘Sister Alma.