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By degrees, as Maltravers sobered down from the first shock of that unexpected meeting, and from the prolonged disappointment that followed it, he became sensible of a strange kind of happiness or contentment. Alice was not in poverty, she was not eating the unhallowed bread of vice, or earning the bitter wages of laborious penury. He saw her in reputable, nay, opulent circumstances.
But as the night wore on the three friends left their gin and stole away, and crept down to that graveyard where rested in his sepulchre Paul, Archbishop of Alois and Vayence. At the edge of the graveyard, but outside the consecrated ground, they dug a hasty grave, two digging while one watched in the wind and rain. And the worms that crept in the unhallowed ground wondered and waited.
He remembered a story a morbid, hideous, yet delicious story, which had once pleasantly congealed his blood on a social winter's evening the story of a man, monomaniac, perhaps, who had been haunted at every turn by the image of an unburied kinsman who could not rest in his unhallowed hiding-place. What if that dreadful story had its double in reality?
"There may be a little truth in that," said Chillingworth; "but now we had better quit the house, and make the best of our way to the spot where the unfortunate man lies buried in his unhallowed grave." "Come with me into the garden," said Henry Bannerworth; "we shall there be able to suit ourselves to what is required. I have a couple of lanterns."
From his prostrate position behind the seat he was unable to obtain a view of the lawn, and stopped ringing the bell to listen. He heard a faint cry in the distance, and then the flutter of skirts. The next instant Betty was bending over him, white and breathless. "Oh!" she cried, "how did it happen? Did the seat tip over backwards are you hurt?" and kneeling beside him raised his unhallowed head.
I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die.
There was a union, or poor-house in the neighbourhood, to which he would carry morsels of meat in his pocket on Friday, thinking that the poor wretches who had flown in the face of their priest by eating the unhallowed morsels, would then have made a first step towards Protestantism.
If you should mention the matter to any vulgar-mannered acquaintance given to the unhallowed practice of jeering, he would probably touch his nose with his extended palm and say, "Don't you wish you may get it?" True, the world at large has gained a brilliant essay on Euripides or Plato but what is that to the rightful owner of the lost sheep?
And as the stars rose, Harold and Edith joined them. Harold's face was serene in the starlight, for the pure soul of his betrothed had breathed peace into his own; and, in his willing superstition, he felt as if, now restored to his guardian angel, the dead men's bones had released their unhallowed hold. But suddenly Edith's hand trembled in his, and her form shuddered.
Still the Chevalier profanes not that pure form with his unhallowed touch; perchance some unseen power, the guardian of spotless innocence, restrains him. Placing himself before the splendid mirror, he begins to remove his superb garments with a deliberation and a composure that astonishes even himself.
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