CHAPTER XIII HOW THEY BRAKE OPE THE DUNGEON OF BELSAYE Being yet in the shade of the woods, Beltane paused, hearkening to the distant uproar of Belsaye town and watching the torches that hovered upon its walls and the cressets that glowed on tower and bartizan.

But now from hill and turret high the flaming cressets stream And watch-fires blaze on every hill and helm and hauberk gleam.

Height upon height they mount to heaven, while glittering from afar Each cresset on the watch-towers burns like to a baleful star.

Before thee Pallas Athene bore a golden cresset and cast a most lovely light.

Art thou not, in this thy mood, One of evil, priestly band, With dark robes and lifted hand, Square-faced, stony-visaged men, In a narrow vaulted den, Watching, by the cresset dun, A wild-eyed, pale-faced, staring nun, Who beholds, as, row by row, Grows her niche's choking wall, The blood-red tide of hell below Surge in billowy rise and fall?

He then bade me kneel, that I might see the spot where the angel stood, and devoutly repeated a paternoster while I contemplated the pure plate of snowy marble, surrounded with vases of fragrant flowers, between which hung cressets of gold, wherein perfumed oils were burning.

Forth with its light and minstrelsy A lordly troop came speeding by, And joyed to see each cresset sphere So gloriously burn.

The tall turrets shone and shimmered in the moonlight, and over the gateway of the drawbridge hung a lighted cresset that is, a beautiful wrought-iron basket, in which blazed a ruddy torch of oil to light them on their way.

Like a summer wind That threads the grove, yet never turns a leaf, I stole from shadow unto shadow forth; Crossed all the marble court-yard, swung the door, Like a soft gust, a little way ajar, My body's narrow width, no more,and stood Beneath the cresset in the painted hall.

The hall may have made a splendid appearance, when it was decorated with rich tapestry, and illuminated with chandeliers, cressets, and torches glistening upon silver dishes, while King James sat at supper among his brilliantly dressed nobles; but it has come to base uses in these latter days,being improved, in Yankee phrase, as a brewery and wash-room, and as a cellar for the brethren's separate allotments of coal.

Here are the "stately height," the "ample spaces," the "arched roof," the rows of "starry lamps and blazing cressets" of Satan's hall of council; and by the excited fancy the dim distance is easily peopled with gigantic forms and filled with the "rushing of congregated wings.

Now I would not go back the long way to the ship, but struck a match, and went lighting up girandoles, cressets, candelabra, into a confusion of lights among great numbers of pale-tinted pillars, rose and azure, with verd-antique, olive, and Portoro marble, and serpentine.

The baron was seated alone in his hall, illuminated with cressets and torches.

This forms a receptacle for various curiosities, including several brasses, a stone cresset, a Roman lamp and a stone bearing a Scandinavian inscription, besides the piscina and sedilia that belong to the structure itself.

Had I a knowledge equal to my will, With airy Chansons I your leaves would fill; With Fabliaux, that should emulate the vein Of sprightly Cresset, or of La Fontaine; Or Scenes Comiques, that should approach the air Of your own favouriterenowned Moliere.

I could hear the prisoners leaping from their couches within as the light of his cresset filtered beneath their doors.

The jailer had stuck the cresset in its niche behind the door, and its glow filled the little cell.

But as the cresset burned up more clearly, and my eyes became accustomed to the bleared and streaky light, I saw Helene, my love, kneeling at her bed's head.

CHAPTER XLI THE MASTER'S PRICE A dim and subtly perfumed corridor opened out before them, its walls hung with tapestries, between which, by the light of sandal-oil mash'als, or cressets, the glimmer of the dull-gold walls could be distinguished.

All were unarmed; but the muscles of their heavy shoulders, the gorilla-like dangle of their steel-fingered hands produced an effect more ominous even than the gleam of simitars in the dim cressets' light would have been.

Not even the censers, depending from the dim roof, far above, could freshen it; nor could the cressets' light make more than a kind of ghostly aura through the gloom.

The tremor of this shock, like that of an earthquake, trembled the cressets on the walls and made the huge ebony door, ajar into a dim-lighted hall, groan on its hinges.

The smell of dust and blood mingled with the aromatic perfume of the cressets.

The pillars are of weather-stained marble, and four in number, the two major ones surrounded by antlered stags, the two minor by cressets of carved flame, symbolising the human soul, and the whole illustrating the singular motto of the Chandons, "As the hart desireth."

As the music rolls down the pillared nave out into the crowded piazza, where it dies away in harmonious murmurs, an iron cresset, suspended from the vaulted ceiling of the nave, filled with a bundle of flax, is fired.