He had hardly gone a hundred yards before the clock at Saint-Just struck once; that of Montagnac answered like a bronze echo. It was half-past ten o’clock. At the pace the young man was walking he needed only twenty minutes to reach the Chartreuse; especially if, instead of skirting the woods, he took the path that led direct to the monastery2. Roland was too familiar from youth with every nook of the forest of Seillon to needlessly lengthen3 his walk ten minutes. He therefore turned unhesitatingly into the forest, coming out on the other side in about five minutes. Once there, he had only to cross a bit of open ground to reach the orchard4 wall of the convent. This took barely another five minutes.
At the foot of the wall he stopped, but only for a few seconds. He unhooked his cloak, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it over the wall. The cloak off, he stood in a velvet5 coat, white leather breeches, and top-boots. The coat was fastened round the waist by a belt in which were a pair of pistols. A broad-brimmed hat covered his head and shaded his face.
With the same rapidity with which he had removed his garment that might have hindered his climbing the wall, he began to scale it. His foot readily found a chink between the stones; he sprang up, seizing the coping, and was on the other side without even touching6 the top of the wall over which he bounded. He picked up his cloak, threw it over his shoulder, hooked it, and crossed the orchard to a little door communicating with the cloister7. The clock struck eleven as he passed through it. Roland stopped, counted the strokes, and slowly walked around the cloister, looking and listening.
He saw nothing and heard no noise. The monastery was the picture of desolation and solitude9; the doors were all open, those of the cells, the chapel10, and the refectory. In the refectory, a vast hall where the tables still stood in their places, Roland noticed five or six bats circling around; a frightened owl8 flew through a broken casement11, and perched upon a tree close by, hooting12 dismally13.
“Good!” said Roland, aloud; “I’ll make my headquarters here; bats and owls14 are the vanguards of ghosts.”
The sound of that human voice, lifted in the midst of this solitude, darkness and desolation, had something so uncanny, so lugubrious15 about it, that it would have caused even the speaker to shudder16, had not Roland, as he himself said, been inaccessible17 to fear. He looked about for a place from which he could command the entire hall. An isolated18 table, placed on a sort of stage at one end of the refectory, which had no doubt been used by the superior of the convent to take his food apart from the monks20, to read from pious21 books during the repast, seemed to Roland best adapted to his needs. Here, backed by the wall, he could not be surprised from behind, and, once his eye grew accustomed to the darkness, he could survey every part of the hall. He looked for a seat, and found an overturned stool about three feet from the table, probably the one occupied by the reader or the person dining there in solitude.
Roland sat down at the table, loosened his cloak to insure greater freedom of movement, took his pistols from his belt, laid one on the table, and striking three blows with the butt-end of the other, he said, in a loud voice: “The meeting is open; the ghosts can appear!”
Those who have passed through churches and cemeteries22 at night have often experienced, without analyzing23 it, the supreme24 necessity of speaking low and reverently25 which attaches to certain localities. Only such persons can understand the strange impression produced on any one who heard it by that curt26, mocking voice which now disturbed the solitude and the shadows. It vibrated an instant in the darkness, which seemed to quiver with it; then it slowly died away without an echo, escaping by all the many openings made by the wings of time.
As he had expected, Roland’s eyes had accustomed themselves to the darkness, and now, by the pale light of the rising moon, whose long, white rays penetrated27 the refectory through the broken windows, he could see distinctly from one end to the other of the vast apartment. Although Roland was as evidently without fear internally as externally, he was not without distrust, and his ear caught the slightest sounds.
He heard the half-hour strike. In spite of himself the sound startled him, for it came from the bell of the convent. How was it that, in this ruin where all was dead, a clock, the pulse of time, was living?
“Oh! oh!” said Roland; “that proves that I shall see something.”
The words were spoken almost in an aside. The majesty28 of the place and the silence acted upon that heart of iron, firm as the iron that had just tolled29 the call of time upon eternity30. The minutes slowly passed, one after the other. Perhaps a cloud was passing between earth and moon, for Roland fancied that the shadows deepened. Then, as midnight approached, he seemed to hear a thousand confused, imperceptible sounds, coming no doubt from the nocturnal universe which wakes while the other sleeps. Nature permits no suspension of life, even for
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