“Hold,” thought he; “can it be midnight already?”

Mechanically he set himself to count.

“Three, four, five.”

He mused.

“At what long intervals this clock strikes! how slowly!  Six; seven!”

Then he remarked,—­

“What a melancholy sound!  Eight, nine!  Ah! nothing can be more natural; it’s dull work for a clock to live in a prison.  Ten!  Besides, there is the cemetery.  This clock sounds the hour to the living, and eternity to the dead.  Eleven!  Alas! to strike the hour to him who is not free is also to chronicle an eternity.  Twelve!”

He paused.

“Yes, it is midnight.”

The clock struck a thirteenth stroke.

Ursus shuddered.

“Thirteen!”

Then followed a fourteenth; then a fifteenth.

“What can this mean?”

The strokes continued at long intervals.  Ursus listened.

“It is not the striking of a clock; it is the bell Muta.  No wonder I said, ‘How long it takes to strike midnight!’ This clock does not strike; it tolls.  What fearful thing is about to take place?”

Formerly all prisons and all monasteries had a bell called Muta, reserved for melancholy occasions.  La Muta (the mute) was a bell which struck very low, as if doing its best not to be heard.

Ursus had reached the corner which he had found so convenient for his watch, and whence he had been able, during a great part of the day, to keep his eye on the prison.

The strokes followed each other at lugubrious intervals.

A knell makes an ugly punctuation in space.  It breaks the preoccupation of the mind into funereal paragraphs.  A knell, like a man’s death-rattle, notifies an agony.  If in the houses about the neighbourhood where a knell is tolled there are reveries straying in doubt, its sound cuts them into rigid fragments.  A vague reverie is a sort of refuge.  Some indefinable diffuseness in anguish allows now and then a ray of hope to pierce through it.  A knell is precise and desolating.  It concentrates this diffusion of thought, and precipitates the vapours in which anxiety seeks to remain in suspense.  A knell speaks to each one in the sense of his own grief or of his own fear.  Tragic bell! it concerns you.  It is a warning to you.

There is nothing so dreary as a monologue on which its cadence falls. 
The even returns of sound seem to show a purpose.

What is it that this hammer, the bell, forges on the anvil of thought?

Ursus counted, vaguely and without motive, the tolling of the knell.  Feeling that his thoughts were sliding from him, he made an effort not to let them slip into conjecture.  Conjecture is an inclined plane, on which we slip too far to be to our own advantage.  Still, what was the meaning of the bell?

He looked through the darkness in the direction in which he knew the gate of the prison to be.