There the horror-stricken Hubert heard the dismal tale which we
have already related, and that his unhappy father believed himself
yet visited each night by the ghost of the man he had slain. And
also that it was fixed in his poor diseased brain that the
apparition would not rest until the crusade, vowed by the Sieur de
Fievrault, but cut short by his fall, should be made by proxy, and
that the proxy must be one sans peur et sans reproche. And that
this reparation made, the poor spirit, according to the belief of
the age, released from purgatorial fires, might enter Paradise and
reappear no more between the hours of midnight and cock crowing to
trouble the living.

"What an absurd story," the sceptic may say. No doubt it is to us,
but a man must live in his own age, and there was nought absurd or
improbable to young Hubert in it all.

And when the weird tale was finished, and the hour of midnight
tolled boom! boom! boom! from the tower above, every stroke sent a
thrill through the heart of the youth. That dread hour, when, as
men thought, the powers of darkness had the world to themselves,
when a thousand ghosts shrieked on the hollow wind, when midnight
hags swept through the tainted air, and goblins gibbered in
sepulchres.

Just then Hubert caught his father's glance, and it made each
separate hair erect itself:

Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

"Father," cried the boy, "what art thou gazing at? what aileth
thee? I see nought amiss."

Words came from the father's lips, not in reply to his son, but as
if to some object unseen by all besides.

"Yes, unhappy ghost, I may dare thy livid terrors now. My son, thy
proxy, is by my side, pure and shameless, brave and trustworthy. He
shall carry thy sword to the holy soil and dye it 'deep in Paynim
blood.' Then thou and I may rest in peace."

"Father, I see nought."

"Not there, between those pillars?"

"What is it?"

"A dead man, with a sword wound in his open breast, which he
displays. His eyes live, yea, and the wound lives."

"No, father, there is nothing."

"Then go and stand between those pillars, and prove it to me to be
void."

Hubert hesitated. He would sooner have fought a hundred boyish
battles with fist, quarterstaff, or even deadly weapons--but this--

"Ah, thou darest not. Nay, I blame thee not, yet thou didst say
there was nothing."

Hubert could not resist that pleading tone in which the sire seemed
to ask release from his own