trong relief
by the lantern-light, had something fearsome in it which enhanced the
unpleasant fancy. I felt an icy sweat come out upon my forehead in huge
beads, and my hair stood up with a hideous fear. Within the depths of my
own heart I felt that the act of the austere Serapion was an abominable
sacrilege; and I could have prayed that a triangle of fire would issue
from the entrails of the dark clouds, heavily rolling above us,
to reduce him to cinders. The owls which had been nestling in the
cypress-trees, startled by the gleam of the lantern, flew against it
from time to time, striking their dusty wings against its panes, and
uttering plaintive cries of lamentation; wild foxes yelped in the far
darkness, and a thousand sinister noises detached themselves from the
silence. At last Sera-pion's mattock struck the coffin itself, making
its planks re-echo with a deep sonorous sound, with that terrible sound
nothingness utters when stricken. He wrenched apart and tore up the
lid, and I beheld Clarimonde, pallid as a figure of marble, with hands
joined; her white winding-sheet made but one fold from her head to her
feet. A little crimson drop sparkled like a speck of dew at one corner
of her colourless mouth. Serapion, at this spectacle, burst into fury:
'Ah, thou art here, demon! Impure courtesan! Drinker of blood and gold!
'And he flung holy water upon the corpse and the coffin, over which he
traced the sign of the cross with his sprinkler. Poor Clarimonde had
no sooner been touched by the blessed spray than her beautiful body
crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frightful mass of
cinders and half-calcined bones.

'Behold your mistress, my Lord Romuald!' cried the inexorable priest, as
he pointed to these sad remains. 'Will you be easily tempted after this
to promenade on the Lido or at Fusina with your beauty?' I covered my
face with my hands, a vast ruin had taken place within me. I returned
to my presbytery, and the noble Lord Romuald, the lover of Clarimonde,
separated himself from the poor priest with whom he had kept such
strange company so long. But once only, the following night, I saw
Clarimonde. She said to me, as she had said the first time at the
portals of the church: 'Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done?
Wherefore have hearkened to that imbecile priest? Wert thou not happy?
And what harm had I ever done thee that thou shouldst violate my poor
tomb, and lay bare the miseries of my n