“This way, if you please, ma’am;” and on they went, through one corridor, then another, the massive doors swinging heavily to on their hinges, and fastening behind them as they closed.
“Hark!” said Ruth, with a quick, terrified look, “what’s that?”
“Oh, nothing,” replied the matron, “only a crazy woman in that room yonder, screaming for her child. Her husband ran away from her and carried off her child with him, to spite her, and now she fancies every footstep she hears is his. Visitors always thinks she screams awful. She can’t harm you, ma’am,” said the matron, mistaking the cause of Ruth’s shudder, “for she is chained. She went to law about the child, and the law, you see, as it generally is, was on the man’s side; and it just upset her. She’s a sight of trouble to manage. If she was to catch sight of your little girl out there in the garden, she’d spring at her through them bars like a panther; but we don’t have to whip her very often.”
“Down here,” said the matron, taking the shuddering Ruth by the hand, and descending a flight of stone steps, into a dark passage-way. “Tired arn’t you?”
“Wait a bit, please,” said Ruth, leaning against the stone wall, for her limbs were trembling so violently that she could scarcely bear her weight.
“Now,” said she, (after a pause,) with a firmer voice and step.
“This way,” said Mrs. Bunce, advancing towards a rough deal box which stood on a table in a niche of the cellar, and setting a small lamp upon it; “she didn’t look no better than that, ma’am, for a long while before she died.”
Ruth gave one hurried glance at the corpse, and buried her face in her hands. Well might she fail to recognize in that emaciated form, those sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, the beautiful Mary Leon. Well might she shudder, as the gibbering screams of the maniacs over head echoed through the stillness of that cold, gloomy vault.
“Were you with her at the last?” asked Ruth of the matron, wiping away her tears.