She sat like a dazed creature, looking down into the casket which lay open in her lap, with ten thousand rainbow fires leaping out of it, as the blaze in the chimney quivered and danced and blazed over the diamonds. That morning the old woman had crept out of prison in her moth-eaten garments, and a little charity money in her bosom. Now a fortune blazed up from her lap.
There was money, too, a purse heavy with sovereigns, dropped there from the gold contained in that malachite box, from which all her awful sorrows had sprung. She gathered up these things in the skirt of her dress and sat brooding over them a long time, while the fire rose and crackled, and shed warm floods of light all around her, and the rain poured down in torrents. She was completely worn out at last, and thought itself became a burden; then her head fell back upon the ruined cushions of the chair, which held her in a half-sitting position, as the heaviest sleep that ever came to mortal eyes fell upon her.
Still the rain poured down continually upon the roof and overran the gutters in torrents. Up from the darkness of a hollow near by, the rush and roar of a stream, swollen into a torrent, came through the beating storm like a heavy bass voice pouring its low thunders through a strain of music. The great elm tree at the end of the house tossed its streaming branches, and beat them upon the roof, till a host of warriors seemed breaking their way through, while the old vines were seized by the wind and ripped from the sides of the house, as the storm seizes upon the cords of a vessel, and tears them up into a net work of tangled floss.
The old woman who had left her stone cell in the prison for the first time in fourteen years, heard nothing of this, but lay half upon the floor half on the broken chair, with the broad blaze of the fire flashing over her white hair, and kindling up the diamonds in her lap to a bed of living coals. She was perfectly safe with those treasures, even in that lonely house, for in the pouring rain no human being was likely to go about from his own free will. But one poor fellow, whose child was desperately sick, did pass the house, and saw the blaze of a fire breaking through a window, where the shutters were dashing to and fro on their hinges, and found breath to say, as he sped on in search of a doctor:
"So the cedar cottage has got another tenant at last. I wonder who it is?"
When the man went by to his work, the next morning, he saw the shutters swaying to and fro yet, and wondering at it, went into the enclosure, in hopes of meeting some of the new inmates; but everything was still, the doors were fastened, and through the kitchen window he saw nothing but a heap of ashes on the hearth, and an old chair, torn to pieces, standing before it.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE OLD COUNTESS.
When the old countess of Carset threw out her flag from the battlements of Houghton castle, it could be seen from all the country around, for the grim old pile was built upon the uplands, and the gray towers rose up from the groves of the park like the peaks of a mountain.
For many a long year that broad flag had streamed like a meteor over the intense greenness of oaks and chestnuts; for, when the head of the house was at home, the crimson pennant was always to be seen floating against the sky, and over that sea of billowy foliage. The old lady of Houghton had not been absent from the castle in many years, for she was a childless woman, and so aged, that a home among her own people was most befitting her infirmities and her pride.