Chapter 26 - Page 2

cognizance of the murder; but
disappearing, the young man, to all external appearance, was left in the
solitary possession of the pass. Even the dogs had been kennelled, and the
pious monks were healthfully occupied in the religious offices of the
vespers.

Sigismund turned his eye upward to the apartment in which Adelheid and his
sister dwelt, but as the solemn moment in which so much was to be decided
drew nearer, they also had withdrawn into themselves, ceasing to hold
communion, even by means of the eyes, with aught that might divert their
holy and pure thoughts from ceaseless and intense devotional reflections.
Until now he had been occasionally favored with an answering and kind look
from one or the other of these single hearted and affectionate girls, both
of whom he so warmly loved, though with sentiments so different. It seemed
that they too had at last left him to his isolated and hopeless existence.
Sensible that this passing thought was weak and unmanly, the young man
renewed his walk, and instead of turning as before, he moved slowly on,
stopping only when he had reached the opening of the little chapel of the
dead.

Unlike the building lower down the path, the bone-house at the convent is
divided into two apartments; the exterior, and one that may be called the
interior, though both are open to the weather. The former contained piles
of disjointed human bones, bleached by the storms that beat in at the
windows, while the latter is consecrated to the covering of those that
still preserve, in their outward appearance at least, some of the more
familiar traces of humanity. The first had its usual complement of
dissevered and confounded fragments, in which the remains of young and
old, of the two sexes, the fierce and the meek, the penitent and the
sinner, lay in indiscriminate confusion--an eloquent reproach to the pride
of man; while the walls of the last supported some twenty blackened and
shrivelled effigies of the race, to show to what a pass of disgusting and
frightful deformity the human form can be reduced, when deprived of that
noble principle which likens it to its Divine Creator. On a table, in the
centre of a group of black and grinning companions in misfortune, sat all
that was left of Jacques Colis, who had been removed from the bone-house
below to this at the convent for purposes connected with the coming
investigation. The body was accidentally placed in such an attitude that
the face was brought within the line of the parting light, while it had no
other covering than the clothes worn by the murdered man in life.
Sigismund gazed long at the pallid lineaments. They were still distorted
with the agony produced by separating the soul from the body. All feeling
of resentment for his