“I call this Emmie’s boudoir; but she insists that it shall be your study, Bruce,” cried Vibert. “It’s a pretty fairy-like retreat for you to read or for her to sing in.”
“Surely this must be—the haunted chamber!” exclaimed the astonished Bruce.
“The disenchanted chamber, without its gloom or its spectres,” observed the smiling Emmie.
“But there was a codicil to the old lady’s will which obliged us to keep this room bricked up,” observed Bruce.
“That codicil was a forgery,” interrupted Mr. Trevor. “Harper, as unprincipled in devising schemes of fraud as he was skilful in carrying them out, had in this forged codicil attempted to achieve a double purpose. He made over to his wife a house and property to which she had no real claim, and he for a while contrived to secure to himself what was called the haunted chamber. Here were left his graving tools, his printing-press, and whatever else was required for his nefarious work; and here he pursued his occupation, shielded from interruption by the superstitious fears which his wife took pains to instil. The guilty man, with his associates, now reaps the reward of his crimes.”
Bruce looked around him with admiring wonder. It was impossible to recognize the place, which he had only once seen before, when fire and lamp-light threw a red glare on instruments of guilt, and the threatening countenances of ruffians disturbed at their unhallowed work. Turning towards his sister with a brightening countenance, young Trevor exclaimed, “What a change is made by admitting the pure light of heaven!”
And it is with these words, taken in a loftier sense, that I would now close my story. Its object has been to lead the reader to search the haunted chamber of his own heart, to discover there the lurking ministers of evil who may, unknown even to himself, have made it their secret abode. Let us resolutely and prayerfully resolve, at whatever cost of humiliation or shame, to know ourselves, to recognize and face the sin that so easily besets us. Let the brickwork of ignorance be thrown down, and let not spiritual sunshine be shut out from the self-deceived heart. Pride, Self-love, cowardly Mistrust of God’s wisdom and goodness, are natural to our fallen nature; but the entrance of His Word into the heart is as that of the glorious beams of the day,—joy, brightness, and holiness follow the admission into its deepest recesses of the pure, life-giving light of Heaven!
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious punctuation errors have been repaired.