Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.
A Figure in the Gallery
“Aye, there is perhaps scarcely a room under the palace roof where some heart is not trembling to-night with ghostly fear, nor a peasant’s thatch where the death of Matthan and the Arabian has not made pale faces; and where men tell of the bridegroom stricken in his hour of pride. But—— powers of Heaven preserve us! look there!”
I looked, but it was to the old man, whose countenance alarmed me with the idea that he had wrought his imagination to a hazardous extreme. I took his cold hand, and telling him that I felt unable to sleep, gently laid his stiffened limbs on the couch and bade him try to rest. But his eye stared through the casement till I followed its direction, yet with only the added belief that he was overcome by the common terrors of the household; for to me tenfold darkness lay upon every object from the ground to the battlements.
I accidentally glanced at the gallery, and there I saw a figure, slight and shadowy, passing backward and forward in front of a quivering lamp! My surprise was more startling than I would venture to communicate to my companion, already almost paralyzed with fear. But if I had conjured up a phantom to give force to the tale, none could have been more closely similar. The figure was enveloped in robes whose richness I could perceive even across the court; the gestures, the wild hurry of the pacings through the chamber, the general air of wo and distraction, were not to be mistaken. In the midst of the silence I heard the creaking of bolts and the fall of chains that seemed to be at my side. A single word followed, but that word was terribly comprehensive—“Death!” The sound was uttered in a sepulchral tone, that left the imagination free to shape the picture with what sullenness it willed!
But the sound was scarcely uttered when I heard a shriek, wild as ever told of wo; saw the figure sink down, and the lamp quiver and expire! The old man had seen what I had seen, but the natural feebleness of age left him a mere helpless prey to superstitious fear, and no attempt to explain these singular coincidences could calm him. He was convinced that the vengeance that had stricken his master’s house was still abroad, and that he had beheld its minister. Remonstrance was in vain, and he sank alternately into reveries and the stupefaction of spiritual terror.
Naomi, the Specter
I tended him with the more interest from my being not altogether unimpressed with the possibility that his alarms were just. I was no believer in the vulgar narratives of superstition. But nature has her mysteries!