He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the darkness.  He was on a plain and on a hill, and he was not.  He was palpable, yet vanished.  He was a shadow accruing to the night.  After the disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in lugubrious accord with all around him.  By his mere presence he increased the gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars.  The unutterable which is in the desert was condensed in him.  Waif of an unknown fate, he commingled with all the wild secrets of the night.  There was in his mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.

About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths.  Certainty and confidence appeared to diminish in his environs.  The shiver of the brushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a conscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain.  The presence of a spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.

He was a Sign.  Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable.  Perpetual shuddering made him terrible.  Fearful to say, he seemed to be a centre in space, with something immense leaning on him.  Who can tell?  Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcends human justice.  There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance of men and his own vengeance.  He was a testimony in the twilight and the waste.  He was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremble before the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul.  For dead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit.  He denounced the law of earth to the law of Heaven.  Placed there by man, he there awaited God.  Above him floated, blended with all the vague distortions of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.

Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom?  The illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by, was around the dead man.  When the unchangeable broods over us—­when Heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent—­then it is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed.  When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gate behind.

CHAPTER VI.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN DEATH AND LIFE.

The child was before this thing, dumb, wondering, and with eyes fixed.

To a man it would have been a gibbet; to the child it was an apparition.

Where a man would have seen a corpse the child saw a spectre.

Besides, he did not understand.

The attractions of the obscure are manifold.  There was one on the summit of that hill.  The child took a step, then another; he ascended, wishing all the while to descend; and approached, wishing all the while to retreat.

Bold, yet trembling, he went close up to survey the spectre.