James Harrington saw the furnace standing on the hearth with a handful of white ashes at the bottom.
"It is the fumes of charcoal—he has been smothered—who brought this here?" he exclaimed, looking at the woman.
If he expected to see that ashen grey upon her cheek, which is the nearest approach to pallor that her race can know, he was disappointed. She neither changed color nor moved, but a gleam of horrible intelligence came into her eyes, and as her lips closed, a faint quiver stirred them.
She did not heed his question, but turned in silence and went out.
Half an hour after, when the first great shock was over, and James Harrington sent to have the movements of this woman watched, she was nowhere to be found. The servants had seen a handsome and richly dressed lady pass through the front door, and walk swiftly toward the highway. The chambermaid could not have passed without being observed. Yet no human being ever saw her afterward.
* * * * * * * * *
The day on which General Harrington was buried, the funeral procession passed by the house in which Lina had lived during her painful sojourn in the city. As it went by, a woman rushed to and fro in the house, uttering the most piteous cries, and tearing at everything within her reach. From that little fairy-like conservatory she had torn down the blossoming vines, and broken the plants, crowning herself fantastically with the trailing garlands, and trampling the blossoms beneath her feet with bursts of wild laughter, alternated with groans, that seemed to rend her heart asunder. As the funeral cortége went by, these groans and shrieks of laughter aroused the neighborhood. Some members of the police entered, and took the maniac away.
* * * * * * * * *
It was a year after General Harrington's death, a steamer was passing through a channel of the East River, leaving Blackwell's Island on the left. Sitting upon the deck was a bridal party: that morning had made Lina, Ralph Harrington's wife. James Harrington had given her away, having first richly endowed the young couple, and Mabel made one of the wedding party.
Upon the shore near the end of Blackwell's Island, stands that most painful appendage to a lunatic asylum, the mad-house; looming over the water like a huge menagerie, in which wild animals are kept. Through the iron lattices, which gird in the granite walls of this building, you may at any time see the maniacs roaming to and fro, sometimes in sullen silence, sometimes shrieking out their fantasies or their rage to the winds as they whistle by, and the waters that flow on forever and ever, unconscious of the miserable secrets given to their keeping.