"but how will you clear that grating which prevented your father from entering the underground passage? Is it not above your strength?"
"That grating has been fastened in the rock, it can be unfastened with my iron pick and hammer. I have the requisite strength for that job."
"Once in the passage, what will you do?"
"Last evening I took from the wooden casket, hidden yonder under the rubbish, a few strips of the parchment where Den-Brao had traced the plan of the buildings; I have posted myself on the localities. The secret gallery, in its ascent towards the castle, comes out, on the other side of the donjon, upon a secret staircase built in the thick of the wall. That leads, from the lowest of the three rows of subterranean dungeons, up to the turret that rises to the north of the platform."
"The turret," queried Joan, growing pale, "the turret, whence occasionally strange lights issue at night?"
"It is there that Azenor the Pale, the sorceress of Neroweg, carries on her witchcraft," answered the quarryman in a hollow voice. "It is in that turret that Colombaik must be, provided he still lives. It is there I shall go in search of our child."
"Oh, my poor man," murmured Joan, "I faint at the thought of the perils you are about to face!"
"Joan," suddenly interjected the serf, raising his hands towards the starry sky, visible through rifts in the roof, "before an hour the moon will have set; I must go now."
The quarryman's wife, after making a superhuman effort to overcome her terror, said in a voice that was almost firm: "I do not ask to accompany you, Fergan; I might be an encumbrance in this enterprise. But I believe, as you do, that at all costs we must try to save our child. If in three days you are not back – "
"It will mean that I have encountered death in the castle of Plouernel."
"I shall not be behind you a day, my dear husband. Have you weapons to defend yourself?"
"I have my iron pick and my hammer."
"And bread? You must have some provisions."
"I have still a big piece of bread in my wallet; you will fill my gourd with water; that will suffice me."
While his wife was attending to these charges, the serf provided himself with a long rope which he wound around him; he also placed a tinder-box in his wallet, a piece of punk, and a wick, steeped in resin, of the kind that quarrymen use to light their underground passages. These preparations being ended, Fergan silently stretched his arms towards his wife. The brave and sweet creature threw herself into them. The couple prolonged this painful embrace a few moments, as if it were a last adieu. The serf then, swinging his heavy hammer on his shoulder and taking up his iron pick, started towards the rocks where the secret issue of the seigniorial manor ran out.
CHAPTER III.
AT THE CROSS-ROAD
The day after Fergan the Quarryman decided to penetrate into the castle of Plouernel, a considerable troop of travelers, men of all conditions, who had left Nantes the day before, were journeying towards the frontier of Anjou. Among them were found pilgrims, distinguishable by the cockle-shell attached to their clothes, vagabonds, beggars, peddlers loaded with their bundles of goods. Among the latter a man of tall stature, with light blonde hair and beard, carried on his back a bundle surmounted with a cross and covered with coarse pictures representing human bones, such as skulls, thighs, arms, and fingers. This man, named Harold the Norman, devoted himself, like many other descendants of the pirates of old Rolf,2 to the trade of relics, selling to the faithful the bones which they stole at night from the seigniorial gibbets. By the sides of Harold marched two monks, who called each other Simon and Jeronimo. The cowl of the frock of Simon was pulled over his head and completely concealed his face; but that of Jeronimo, thrown back over his shoulder, exposed the monk's dark and lean visage, whose thick eye-brows, as black as his beard, imparted to it a savage hardness.
A few steps behind these priests, mounted on a fine white mule, of well-fed form and skin sleek and shining like silver, came a merchant of Nantes, named from his great wealth, Bezenecq the Rich. Still in the vigor of years, of open, intelligent and affable mien, he wore a hood of black felt, a robe of fine blue cloth, gathered around his waist by a leathern belt, from which hung an embroidered purse. Behind him, and on a part of the saddle contrived for such service, rode his daughter Isoline, a lass of about eighteen years, with blue eyes, brown hair, white teeth and a face like a rose of May, as pretty as she was attractive. Isoline's long pearl-grey robe hid her little feet; her traveling cloak, made of a soft green fabric, enveloped her elegant and supple waist; under the hood of the mantle, lined in red, her fresh visage was partially seen. The feelings of tender solicitude between father and daughter could be divined by the looks and smiles of affection that they often exchanged, as well as by the little attentions that they frequently bestowed upon each other. The serenity of unalloyed happiness, the sweet pleasures of the heart, could be read upon their visages, which bore the impress of radiant bliss. A well-clad servant, alert and vigorous, led on foot a second mule, loaded with the baggage of the merchant. On either side of the saddle hung a sword in its scabbard. In those days, one never traveled unarmed. Bezenecq the Rich had conformed to the usage, although that good and worthy townsman was of a nature little given to strife.
The travelers had arrived at a cross-road where the highway of Nantes to Angers forked off. At the juncture of the two roads there rose a seigniorial gibbet, symbol and speaking proof of the supreme jurisdiction exercised by the lords in their domains. That massive pile of stones bore at its top four iron forks fastened at right angles, gibbet-shaped. From the gibbet that rose over the western branch of the road three corpses hung by the neck. The first was reduced to the condition of a skeleton; the second was half putrified. The crows, disturbed in their bloody quarry by the approach of the travelers, still circled in the air over the third corpse, that of a young girl, completely stripped, without even the shred of a rag. It was the body of Pierrine the Goat, tortured and executed in the early morning of that day, as threatened by Garin the Serf-eater. The thick black hair of the victim fell over her face, pinched with agony and furrowed with long traces of clotted blood that had flowed from her eyeless sockets. Her teeth still held a little wax figure, two or three inches long, clad in a bishop's gown with a miniature mitre on its head, made out of a bit of gold foil. The witches, to carry out their diabolical incantations, often had several of these little figures placed between the teeth of the hanged at the moment when they expired. They called this magic "spell throwing." Beside this gibbet rose the seigniorial post of Neroweg VI, lord and count of the lands of Plouernel. The post indicated the boundaries of the domain traversed by the western road, and was surmounted by a red escutcheon, in the middle of which were seen three eagle's talons painted in yellow – the device of the Nerowegs. Another post, bearing for emblem a dragon-serpent of green color painted on a white background, marked the eastern route which traversed the domains of Draco, Lord of Castel-Redon, and flanked another gibbet with four patibulary forks. Of these only two were furnished; from one hanged the corpse of a child of fourteen years at the most, from the other the corpse of an old man, both half pecked away by the crows. Isoline, the daughter of Bezenecq the Rich, uttered a cry of horror at the sight of these bodies, and huddling close to the merchant, behind whom she was on horseback, whispered in a low voice: "Father! oh, father! Look at those bodies. It's a horrible spectacle!"
"Look not in that direction, my child," answered sadly the townsman of Nantes, turning around to his daughter. "More than once on our road shall we make these mournful encounters. The patibulary forks are found on the confines of every seigniorial estate. Often even the trees are decked out with hanging bodies!"
"Oh, father," replied Isoline, whose face, so full of smiles a minute before, had painfully saddened, "I fear this encounter may be of sad omen to our voyage!"
"Beloved daughter," the merchant put in with suppressed agony, "be not so quick to take alarm. No doubt we live in days when it is impossible to leave the city and undertake a long trip with safety. It is that that kept me from paying a visit in the city of Laon to my good brother Gildas, whom I have not seen for many years. It is unfortunately a long way to Picardy, and I have not dared to venture on such a ride. But our trip will hardly take two days. We should not apprehend a sad issue to this visit to your grandmother, who