The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

He looked at me keenly, holding up the torch till its blaze flamed across my eyes. This scrutiny of my features seemed to satisfy him, for his lip curved till the white teeth gleamed through, and he muttered to himself, “It is right—the blood that has left her face burns in the heart—she is one of us.”

Muttering thus, he led the way from the chamber, sending a lurid glare backward from his torch along the damp walls of the circular staircase. Thus breaking through the shadows that gathered thick and close in the old building, he led me on. The tread of his heavy boots resounded through the vast apartments with a defiant clamor. He took no precaution to conceal his torch, which glared back from the closed windows as if the dull glass had been on fire.

We threaded galleries hung with grim old pictures, and peopled with statues, some antiques, some of bronze, and others simply of armor, the iron shells from which warriors had perished. A thrill of awe crept over me as I passed these stern counterfeits of humanity, with their grim hollows choked up with shadows. As the torchlight fell now upon the limb of a statue, now across the fierce visage of a picture, now upon the dull carvings of oak, my imagination increased the desolate grandeur, till marble, iron, and canvas seemed instinct with vitality.

This effect was not diminished by the wild look which Chaleco sent back from time to time, as I followed him.

At last we reached a door, inlaid and empanelled with precious woods. Chaleco attempted to turn the lock. It resisted, and after shaking it fiercely, he dashed one foot against it, which forced the bolt that had rusted in its socket.

“Come in,” he said, “you shall see how the widow had prepared for her young bridegroom.”

I entered, but the dull atmosphere, the damp, mouldly smell was like that of a tomb. Chaleco held up his torch, throwing its strong light in glaring flashes through the darkness. It had been a superb suit of apartments, hangings of azure silk, stained and black with mildew; Parisian carpets, from which clouds of dust rose at every foot-tread; gildings that time had blackened into bronze, filled my gaze with a picture of silent desolation, that made my already worn heart sink heavier and heavier in my bosom.

I shrank back. Chaleco saw it, and urged me on with a grim smile. I remembered the scene of death he had revealed to me in my unnatural sleep, and feared to look upon the place of its actual perpetration.

The chamber we entered had once been all white and superb in its adornments. The walls were yet hung with fluted satin, once rich in snowy gloss but now striped with black, for accumulations of dust had filled all the flutings. Masses of dusky lace flowed down the windows, and were entangled over the bed with many a dim cobweb, that the spiders had been years weaving among their delicate meshes. Dust and mildew had crept over the bridal whiteness of everything. The couch seemed heaped with shadows; cobwebs hung low from the gilded cornices that gleamed through them here and there with ghastly splendor.

As Chaleco lifted his torch above the couch, a bat rent its way through the lace, scattering a cloud of dust over us, and remained overhead drearily flapping his impish wings among the cobwebs, till they swayed over us like a thunder-cloud.