Chapter II

After walking for an hour or two, the mysterious personage, to whom they had given the degree of madman in the abbey, by following upstream the course of the rill which the story-telling shepherd had pointed out to him, reached the spot where rose the blackened, impressive ruins of the monastery.

The rain had ceased; the clouds were drifting in long, dark masses, from between whose shifting shapes there glided from time to time a furtive ray of doubtful, pallid light; and one would say that the wind, as it lashed the strong buttresses and swept with widening wings through the deserted cloisters, was groaning in its flight. Yet nothing supernatural, nothing extraordinary occurred to strike the imagination. To him who had slept more nights than one without other shelter than the ruins of an abandoned tower or a lonely castle,--to him who in his far pilgrimage had encountered hundreds on hundreds of storms, all those noises were familiar.

The drops of water which filtered through the cracks of the broken arches and fell upon the stones below with a measured sound like the ticking of a great clock; the hoots of the owl, screeching from his refuge beneath the stone nimbus of an image still standing in a niche of the wall; the stir of the reptiles that, wakened from their lethargy by the tempest, thrust out their misshapen heads from the holes where they sleep, or crawled among the wild mustard and the briers that grow at the foot of the altar, rooted in the crevices between the sepulchral slabs that form the pavement of the church,--all those strange and mysterious murmurs of the open country, of solitude and of night, came perceptibly to the ear of the pilgrim who, seated on the mutilated statue of a tomb, was anxiously awaiting the hour when the marvellous event should take place.

But still the time went by and nothing more was heard; those myriad confused noises kept on sounding and combining with one another in a thousand different ways, but themselves always the same.

“Ah, they have played a joke on me!” thought the musician; but at that moment he heard a new sound, a sound inexplicable in such a place, like that made by a clock a few seconds before striking the hour, a sound of whirring wheels, of stretching cords, of machinery secretly setting to work and making ready to use its mysterious mechanic vitality, and a bell rang out the hour--one, two, three, up to eleven.

In the ruined church there was no bell nor clock, not even a bell-tower.

The last peal, lessening from echo to echo, had not yet died away; the vibration was still perceptible, trembling in the air, when the granite canopies which overhung the sculptures, the marble steps of the altars, the hewn stones of the ogee arches, the fretted screens of the choir, the festoons of trefoil on the cornices, the black buttresses of the walls, the pavements, the vaulted ceiling, the entire church, began to be lighted by no visible agency, nor was there in sight torch or lamp or candle to shed abroad that unwonted radiance.

It suggested a skeleton over whose yellow bones spreads that phosphoric gas which burns and puts forth fumes in the darkness like a blue light, restless and terrible.

Everything seemed to be in motion, but with that galvanic movement which lends to death contractions that parody life, instantaneous movement more horrible even than the inertia of the corpse which stirs with that unknown force. Stones reunited themselves to stones; the altar, whose broken fragments had before been scattered about in disorder, rose intact, as if the artificer had just given it the last blow of the chisel, and simultaneously with the altar rose the ruined chapels, the shattered capitals and the great, crumbled series of arches which, crossing and interlacing at caprice, formed with their columns a labyrinth of porphyry.

As soon as the church was rebuilt there grew upon the hearing a distant harmony which might have been taken for the wailing of the wind, but which was a chorus of far-off, solemn voices, that seemed to come from the depths of the earth and rise to the surface little by little, continually growing more distinct.

The daring pilgrim began to fear, but with his fear still battled his passion for the bygone and the marvellous, and made valiant by the strength of his desire, he left the tomb on which he was resting, leaned over the brink of the abyss, amid whose rocks leapt the torrent, rushing over the precipice with an incessant and terrifying thunder, and his hair rose with horror.

Ill wrapped in the tatters of their habits, their cowls, beneath whose folds the dark eye-cavities of the skulls contrasted with the fleshless jaws and the white teeth, drawn forward over their heads, he saw the skeletons of the monks who had been thrown from the battlements of the church down that headlong steep, emerging from the depth of the waters and, clutching with the long fingers of their bony hands at the fissures in the rocks, clamber over them up to the brink, chanting in low, sepulchral voice, but with a heartrending intonation of anguish, the first verse of David’s Psalm:

_Miserere mei, Domine, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam!_

When the monks reached the peristyle of the church they arranged themselves in two rows and, entering, went in procession to the choir where they knelt in their places, while with voices louder and yet more solemn they continued to intone the verses of the psalm. The music sounded in accompaniment to their voices; that music was the distant roll of the thunder which sank into murmurs as the tempest subsided; it was the blowing of the wind which groaned in the hollow of the mountain; it was the monotonous splash of the cascade falling down the crag; and the drip of the filtered waterdrops, and the hoot of the hidden owl, and the gliding sound of the uneasy reptiles. All this was in the music, and something more that cannot be expressed nor scarcely conceived,--something more that seemed like the echo of an organ accompanying the verses of the Royal Psalmist’s giant hymn of contrition, with notes and chords as tremendous as the awful words.

The service proceeded; the musician who witnessed it, absorbed and terrified as he was, believed himself to be outside the actual world, living in that fantastic region of dreams where all things reclothe themselves in phenomenal and alien forms.

A terrible shock came to rouse him from that stupor which was clogging all the faculties of his mind. His nerves sprang to the thrill of a mighty emotion, his teeth chattered, shaking with a tremor he could in no wise repress, and the chill penetrated to the marrow of his bones.

At that instant the monks were intoning those dread words of the _Miserere_:

_In iniquitatibus conceptus sum; et in peccatis concepit me mater mea._

As the thunder of this verse went rolling in sonorous echo from vault to vault, there arose a terrible outcry which seemed a wail of agony breaking from all humanity for its sense of sin, a horrible wail made up of all the laments of the unfortunate, all the shrieks of despair, all the blasphemies of the impious, a monstrous consonance, fit interpreter of those who live in sin and were conceived in iniquity.

The chant went on, now sad and deep, now like a sunbeam which breaks through the dark storm cloud, succeeding the lightning-flash of terror by another flash of joy, until by grace of a sudden transformation the church stood resplendent, bathed in celestial light; the skeletons of the monks were again clothed in their flesh, about their brows shone lustrous aureoles, the roof vanished and above was seen heaven like a sea of light open to the gaze of the righteous.

Seraphim, archangels, angels and all the heavenly hierarchy accompanied with a hymn of glory this verse, which then rose sublime to the throne of the Lord like the rhythmical notes of a trumpet, like a colossal spiral of sonorous incense:

_Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam, et exultabunt ossa humiliata._

At this point the dazzling brightness blinded the pilgrim’s eyes, his temples throbbed violently, there was a roaring in his ears, he fell senseless to the ground and heard no more.