"What do I hear?" said Ithuriel; "thy conversation has kept me long while in these caves."
As the angel of the moon asks this question, the silvery chime of a distant clock is heard striking one, and the reverberation is repeated in echoes again and again.
All the tombs open as the hour sounds; pale shades rise half out of their graves and then fall back under their monumental stones as the sound of the echoes dies away.
A SPECTRE, clad in a shroud, escapes from the most conspicuous of these tombs: his face is exposed; he glides to the place where Miss Aubrey sleeps, exclaiming--
Oscar puts his arms round the sleeping girl. "She belongs to God, and thou wilt soon belong to the regions of nothingness."
The Spectre retires, but repeats threateningly, "To nothingness."
The scene changes and represents an apartment in the house of Sir Aubrey.
"Absurd! absurd!" exclaimed my neighbour. And he resumed his reading of _le Pastissier françois._
I did not at all agree with him: I thought the staging magnificent; I had nothing to say about Malvina, for she had not spoken; but Philippe seemed to me exceedingly fine, notwithstanding his paleness, and Moessard very good. Moreover, crude as it was, it was an attempt at Romanticism--a movement almost entirely unknown at that time. This intervention of immaterial and superior beings in human destiny had a fanciful side to it which pleased my imagination, and maybe that evening was responsible for the germ in me from which sprang the _Don Juan de Marana_ of eleven years later. The play began.
_Sir_ Aubrey (the reader will see presently why I underline the word _Sir)--Sir_ Aubrey met Lord Ruthven, a rich English traveller, at Athens, and they became friends. During their wanderings about the Parthenon and their day-dreams by the seashore, they planned means for tying the bonds of their friendship more firmly, and, subject to Malvina's consent, they decided upon a union between the young girl, who was at home in the castle of Staffa, and the noble traveller, who had become her brother's closest friend. Unfortunately, during an excursion which Aubrey and Ruthven made to the suburbs of Athens, to attend the wedding of a young maiden endowed privately by Lord Ruthven, the two companions were attacked by brigands: a sharp defence put the assassins to flight; but Lord Ruthven was struck down mortally wounded. His last words were a request that his friend would place him on a hillock bathed by the moon's rays. Aubrey carried out this last request, and laid the dying man on the place indicated; then, as his friend's eyes closed and his breathing ceased, Aubrey began to search for his scattered servitors; but when he returned with them, an hour later, the body had disappeared. Aubrey fancied that the assassins must have taken the body away to remove all traces of their crime.
