And what did they see?
A long, low room, hung with moth-eaten, mouldering tapestry, whose every thread exhaled a moist rank odour of forgotten years; black festoons of ancient cobwebs in the rattling casement and round the carved work of the open cornice; carved oak chairs, and wardrobe, and round table; black, too, and rickety, and dust-covered, and worm-eaten; the white ashes of a wood fire on a cracked hearth-stone; and a bed. The embroidered hangings were drawn closely round the oaken posts, and rustled shiveringly in the gust of fresh air which wandered round the room.
“Draw un, Jan, if thee beest a mon,” whispered the dame under her breath, looking round anxiously in the direction of the gap at which she had entered.
John screwed up all his courage, and with a desperate hand tore down the hangings on the side which was nearest the window.
In that dim half-light, for the night was closing in rapidly and the shadows falling heavily, they saw a white and grinning skull gazing grimly at them from the hollowed pillow, and one white and polished arm-bone lying idly on the crimson quilt, and clutching the silken fringe with its crooked fingers.
The dame swooned with a great cry, and her husband, stunned and sickened, dashed to the casement, and, swinging it back on its creaking hinges, leant out, for the sake of a breath of pure air.
Horror of horrors! The garden was alive with ghastly forms; ill-shapen, unearthly, demon-like heads rose and fell with threatening gestures, and mopped and mowed at him from among the flowers of that quiet plesaunce.
Hastily raising his wife in his strong arms, he made his way as best he could through the welcome breach, nor did he rest that night till he had walled up and secured, for a future generation, the terrors of the Haunted Room.
“I should love thee, Jewel, wert thou not a Zwinglian. In thy faith thou art a heretic, but in thy life thou art an angel”—in such terms did Dr John Harding address his former school-fellow at Barnstaple, but at that time his great antagonist—Bishop Jewel, whom Westcote describes, with punning enthusiasm, as “a perfect rich gem and true jewel indeed.” This ornament of the English Church was born at Bowden, in the parish of Berry Narbor, which has the reputation of being about the healthiest in the country—a place where only old people die. The seventeenth-century writer, evidently a lover of puns, quotes the following epitaph on one, Nicholas Harper, who lies buried in the church:—
“Harper, the musique of thy life,
So sweet, so free from jarr or strife,
To crowne thy skill hath raysed thee higher
And placed thee in angels’ quier,
For though that death hath throwen thee down,
In heaven thou hast thy harpe and crowne.”