Then he knelt and listened eagerly.  It was five days since he had knelt there last.  Perhaps they had sunk again to rest.  In a moment he wrung his hands and raised them to heaven.  All the earth beneath him was filled with lamentation.  They wailed for mercy, for peace, for rest; they cursed the foul fiend who had shattered the locks of death; and among the voices of men and children the priest distinguished the quavering notes of his aged predecessor; not cursing, but praying with bitter entreaty.  The baby was screaming with the accents of mortal terror and its mother was too frantic to care.

“Alas,” cried the voice of Jean-Marie, “that they never told us what purgatory was like!  What do the priests know?  When we were threatened with punishment of our sins not a hint did we have of this.  To sleep for a few hours, haunted with the moment of awakening!  Then a cruel insult from the earth that is tired of us, and the orchestra of hell.  Again! and again! and again!  Oh God!  How long?  How long?”

The priest stumbled to his feet and ran over graves and paths to the mound above the countess.  There he would hear a voice praising the monster of night and dawn, a note of content in this terrible chorus of despair which he believed would drive him mad.  He vowed that on the morrow he would move his dead, if he had to un-bury them with his own hands and carry them up the hill to graves of his own making.

For a moment he heard no sound.  He knelt and laid his ear to the grave, then pressed it more closely and held his breath.  A long rumbling moan reached it, then another and another.  But there were no words.

“Is she moaning in sympathy with my poor friends?” he thought; “or have they terrified her?  Why does she not speak to them?  Perhaps they would forget their plight were she to tell them of the world they have left so long.  But it was not their world.  Perhaps that it is which distresses her, for she will be lonelier here than on earth.  Ah!”

A sharp horrified cry pierced to his ears, then a gasping shriek, and another; all dying away in a dreadful smothered rumble.

The priest rose and wrung his hands, looking to the wet skies for inspiration.

“Alas!” he sobbed, “she is not content.  She has made a terrible mistake.  She would rest in the deep sweet peace of death, and that monster of iron and fire and the frantic dead about her are tormenting a soul so tormented in life.  There may be rest for her in the vault behind the castle, but not here.  I know, and I shall do my duty—­now, at once.”

He gathered his robes about him and ran as fast as his old legs and rheumatic feet would take him towards the chateau, whose lights gleamed through the rain.  On the bank of the river he met a fisherman and begged to be taken by boat.  The fisherman wondered, but picked the priest up in his strong arms, lowered him into the boat, and rowed swiftly towards the chateau.  When they landed he made fast.