The tapers flickered feebly on the coffins, and the white skulls grinned at him mockingly from their sable background. Bishop exhausted all his tactics in trying to induce Mr. Thompkins to taste his bran-died cherries, but that gentleman positively refused,—he seemed unable to banish the idea that they were laden with disease germs.
After we had been seated here for some time, getting no consolation from the utter absence of spirit and levity among the other guests, and enjoying only the dismay and trepidation of new and strange arrivals, a rather good-looking young fellow, dressed in a black clerical coat, came through a dark door and began to address the assembled patrons. His voice was smooth, his manner solemn and impressive, as he delivered a well-worded discourse on death. He spoke of it as the gate through which we must all make our exit from this world,—of the gloom, the loneliness, the utter sense of helplessness and desolation. As he warmed to his subject he enlarged upon the follies that hasten the advent of death, and spoke of the relentless certainty and the incredible variety of ways in which the reaper claims his victims. Then he passed on to the terrors of actual dissolution, the tortures of the body, the rending of the soul, the unimaginable agonies that sensibilities rendered acutely susceptible at this extremity are called upon to endure. It required good nerves to listen to that, for the man was perfect in his rôle. From matters of individual interest in death he passed to death in its larger aspects. He pointed to a large and striking battle scene, in which the combatants had come to hand-to-hand fighting, and were butchering one another in a mad lust for blood. Suddenly the picture began to glow, the light bringing out its ghastly details with hideous distinctness. Then as suddenly it faded away, and where fighting men had been there were skeletons writhing and struggling in a deadly embrace.
A similar effect was produced with a painting giving a wonderfully realistic representation of an execution by the guillotine. The bleeding trunk of the victim lying upon the flap-board dissolved, the flesh slowly disappearing, leaving only the white bones. Another picture, representing a brilliant dance-hall filled with happy revellers, slowly merged into a grotesque dance of skeletons; and thus it was with the other pictures about the room.
All this being done, the master of ceremonies, in lugubrious tones, invited us to enter the chambre de la mort. All the visitors rose, and, bearing each a taper, passed in single file into a narrow, dark passage faintly illuminated with sickly green lights, the young man in clerical garb acting as pilot. The cross effects of green and yellow lights on the faces of the groping procession were more startling than picturesque. The way was lined with bones, skulls, and fragments of human bodies.
"O Macchabées, nous sommes devant la porte de la chambre de la mort!" wailed an unearthly voice from the farther end of the passage as we advanced. Then before us appeared a solitary figure standing beneath a green lamp. The figure was completely shrouded in black, only the eyes being visible, and they shone through holes in the pointed cowl. From the folds of the gown it brought forth a massive iron key attached to a chain, and, approaching a door seemingly made of iron and heavily studded with spikes and crossed with bars, inserted and turned the key; the bolts moved with a harsh, grating noise, and the door of the chamber of death swung slowly open.
"O Macchabées, enter into eternity, whence none ever return!" cried the new, strange voice.
The walls of the room were a dead and unrelieved black. At one side two tall candles were burning, but their feeble light was insufficient even to disclose the presence of the black walls of the chamber or indicate that anything but unending blackness extended heavenward. There was not a thing to catch and reflect a single ray of the light and thus become visible in the blackness.