By the Author of “A Professor of Alchemy.”
(Continued.)
“Margaret had been in grief so sad and potent since her brother’s death, that it at last brought her into a fever, from which, with difficulty, she recovered, and which kept her long to her chamber.
“During this time the monk roamed like a restless spirit, seeming to seek her, and despairing because he found her not. Giles Hughson even went so far as to suspect he was no true priest at all, until he had seen his tonsure. Even then he was drawn into most sacrilegious surmises by what he beheld some few nights after.
“Having some work to do in Castle Troyes garden, he noted the White Monk, his lodger, glide noiselessly through the grounds, hidden behind the thick black walls of yew, and pause under the casement of Mistress Margaret and stand there listening intently for a certain space. At last, with a gesture of despair, he slung himself with infinite agile stillness up some feet of the ivy that covered the wall, from which insecure footing he did long and earnestly search if he might see her shadow cross the room. Giles, the gardener, swore afterwards that the sight of that priest, with his cowl fallen back from his dark face, and that look of straining, terrified attention had in it something so partaking of the unearthly, that for the life of him he dared not accost the daring intruder. ‘Time enough if there were need,’ he excused himself afterwards, ‘but Castle Troyes is ever well enow defended, and at that time there must have been enough of inmates watching over Margaret, the beautiful, to win her back to life.’
“The horrible recklessness of an act such as this, with the carbines of a round thirty men within a few yards of him, made the monk seem to Giles a creature of charmed life, who may not be addressed as ordinary mortals.
“But the White Monk saw his discoverer when he descended and glided away again, scared by some noise made by Margaret’s attendants. And thus there occurred a tragedy, which you shall learn as far as it was ever known.
“Now Giles Hughson had a young son afflicted with total dumbness, but whom Mistress Margaret de Troyes had taught to write; and it is through this scholarship of his that we come to know as much as we do of what really happened. The White Monk appeared fond of this boy, possibly because he had seen Margaret kiss him. Thus the lad had greater access to the monk’s small attic than any other; and this is the tale he tells of the night after Giles had espied his lodger clinging to the wall of Castle Troyes.
“The boy had noiselessly, so as not to disturb the often musings of the solitary one, stepped up the attic stairs to fetch some trifle he wanted of the monk. Pausing timidly at the door, he beheld the familiar white-clad figure, with an air of terrible malignity, mixing some powder of a greenish colour, which, at the sight of the intruder, he hastily laid aside, thinking it had not been seen.
“But the lad was unnerved by the expression he had caught on the monk’s face, and he forgot not so lightly.