Cruel as the grave

by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

Sybil followed him with two towels. They washed their hands and faces in the stream, and dried them on the towels. And then they went higher up the glen, and caught a bucketful of delightful water from the crystal spring that issued from the rocks.

They returned to the chapel, and together they made the fire and prepared the breakfast.

It was not until they were seated at their primitively arranged breakfast, which was laid upon the flagstones of the chapel floor—it was not, in fact, until they had nearly finished their simple meal, that Sybil told Lyon of the apparition she had seen in the early dawn, to come up as if from the floor to the right of the altar, and glide along the east wall of the chapel, past the four gothic windows, and disappear through the door.

“It was a morning dream, dear Sybil; nothing more,” said Lyon, sententiously; for in the broad daylight he believed in nothing supernatural, even upon the evidence of his own senses.

“If that were a morning dream, then the sight that we saw together yesterday was but a dream, and you are but a dream, and life itself is but a dream,” replied Sybil, earnestly.

“Well, at all events, what we have both, either separately or together, seen and experienced, must be something perfectly natural and commonplace, although we may not either of us be able to understand or explain it. My private opinion and worse misgiving is, that there is some woman concealed about the place. If ever I find myself in arm’s length of that little gipsy, I shall intercept her, even at the risk of receiving such a spiritual-shock as that which struck Mrs. Alicia Dubarry to the ground,” said Lyon, facetiously; for he might well make a jest of this lighter affair of the chapel mystery to veil the deep anxiety he felt in the heavy matter of their affliction.

The husband and wife passed this second day of hiding tediously enough. She made the little housekeeping corner of the chapel tidy, by folding up and putting aside all their bedclothes and garments, and by washing and arranging their few cooking utensils. He brought in wood and brush, which he broke up and piled in another corner, to have it near at hand to replenish the fire. Also, he brought water from the spring; and then with no other instrument than his pocket-knife, he made a trap and set it to catch rabbits.

Then they rambled together through the wilderness around the chapel, and the better they grew acquainted with the wild neighborhood, the surer they felt of their safety in its profound solitude.

Their only anxiety connected with their security in this place, was upon the subject of the mysterious visitant. It was incomprehensible by any known law of nature.

They talked of this mystery. They reverted to all the so-called “authenticated ghost stories” that they had ever read or heard, and that they had hitherto set down to be either impostures or delusions.