Eight Strokes of the Clock | Page 6

"Logic tells us that there must have been some
gap through which the country could be seen and this was the spot
where the telescope was used."
He hoisted himself by his wrists to the top of the parapet and then saw
that this point of vantage commanded the whole of the valley, including
the park, with its tall trees marking the horizon; and, beyond, a
depression in a wood surmounting a hill, at a distance of some seven or

eight hundred yards, stood another tower, squat and in ruins, covered
with ivy from top to bottom.
Rénine resumed his inspection. He seemed to consider that the key to
the problem lay in the use to which the telescope was put and that the
problem would be solved if only they could discover this use.
He studied the loop-holes one after the other. One of them, or rather the
place which it had occupied, attracted his attention above the rest. In
the middle of the layer of plaster, which had served to block it, there
was a hollow filled with earth in which plants had grown. He pulled out
the plants and removed the earth, thus clearing the mouth of a hole
some five inches in diameter, which completely penetrated the wall. On
bending forward, Rénine perceived that this deep and narrow opening
inevitably carried the eye, above the dense tops of the trees and through
the depression in the hill, to the ivy-clad tower.
At the bottom of this channel, in a sort of groove which ran through it
like a gutter, the telescope fitted so exactly that it was quite impossible
to shift it, however little, either to the right or to the left.
Rénine, after wiping the outside of the lenses, while taking care not to
disturb the lie of the instrument by a hair's breadth, put his eye to the
small end.
He remained for thirty or forty seconds, gazing attentively and silently.
Then he drew himself up and said, in a husky voice:
"It's terrible ... it's really terrible."
"What is?" she asked, anxiously.
"Look."
She bent down but the image was not clear to her and the telescope had
to be focussed to suit her sight. The next moment she shuddered and
said:

"It's two scarecrows, isn't it, both stuck up on the top? But why?"
"Look again," he said. "Look more carefully under the hats ... the
faces...."
"Oh!" she cried, turning faint with horror, "how awful!"
The field of the telescope, like the circular picture shown by a magic
lantern, presented this spectacle: the platform of a broken tower, the
walls of which were higher in the more distant part and formed as it
were a back-drop, over which surged waves of ivy. In front, amid a
cluster of bushes, were two human beings, a man and a woman, leaning
back against a heap of fallen stones.
But the words man and woman could hardly be applied to these two
forms, these two sinister puppets, which, it is true, wore clothes and
hats--or rather shreds of clothes and remnants of hats--but had lost their
eyes, their cheeks, their chins, every particle of flesh, until they were
actually and positively nothing more than two skeletons.
"Two skeletons," stammered Hortense. "Two skeletons with clothes on.
Who carried them up there?"
"Nobody."
"But still...."
"That man and that woman must have died at the top of the tower,
years and years ago ... and their flesh rotted under their clothes and the
ravens ate them."
"But it's hideous, hideous!" cried Hortense, pale as death, her face
drawn with horror.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, Hortense Daniel and Rénine left the Château de
Halingre. Before their departure, they had gone as far as the ivy-grown
tower, the remains of an old donjon-keep more than half demolished.

The inside was empty. There seemed to have been a way of climbing to
the top, at a comparatively recent period, by means of wooden stairs
and ladders which now lay broken and scattered over the ground. The
tower backed against the wall which marked the end of the park.
A curious fact, which surprised Hortense, was that Prince Rénine had
neglected to pursue a more minute enquiry, as though the matter had
lost all interest for him. He did not even speak of it any longer; and, in
the inn at which they stopped and took a light meal in the nearest
village, it was she who asked the landlord about the abandoned château.
But she learnt nothing from him, for the man was new to the district
and could give her no particulars. He did not even know the name of
the owner.
They turned their horses' heads towards La Marèze. Again and again
Hortense recalled the