“So I returned, and advanced towards the stairs, quite coolly and resolutely, I give you my word. And exactly at this moment it was that the hallucination took place. There, stay a moment, Christian! Look at that portrait; to the right of the window.”
“I have already tried to see it,” said Christian, “but the light is so bad where it hangs, and the flies or the damp have defaced it so much, that I could hardly make it out at all.”
“Well, then, take a light and look at it. It is getting dark, at any rate, and will soon be time to light up.”
Christian lit the three-branched candlestick that had been left on the table, stood up on a chair, and with the help of his album, which he held between his eyes and the flickering lights, proceeded to examine the picture carefully.
“I see it very indistinctly still,” he said. “It is a portrait of a rather tall woman, elegantly formed; she is seated, and wears a black veil, as is the custom with Swedish ladies in winter, to protect their eyes from the glare of the snow. I can see her hands, which are very well painted, and very beautiful. Ah! ah! the dress is pearl-gray satin, with bows of black velvet. Is it the portrait of the Gray Lady?”
“Exactly. It is the Baroness Hilda.”
“Let me see the face, then. There, I catch it now; it is handsome—an agreeable and sweet countenance. Stay, wait a moment, M. Goefle! That face inspires me with a feeling of sympathy; it moves me.”
“So you don’t care to listen to my story any longer?”
“That’s all;—yes, indeed I do. I am pressed for time, and yet your adventure interests me so much that I must hear the end of it. I’m ready.”
“Well, then,” continued the lawyer, “as my eyes again fell upon that great map of Sweden which is now so still, a human figure came out from under it, lifting it aside as one does a tapestry curtain. It was the figure of a tall and thin woman, not slender and beautiful, as the original of the portrait must have been, but livid and wasted, as if she had just risen from the tomb; and the gray dress, too, soiled, worn, and with the black ribbons unfastened and hanging loose, seemed to be trailing with it the very earth of the grave. My dear friend, so horrible, so frightful was this painful vision, that I closed my eyes to avoid seeing it. When I opened them again—but whether in a moment or in a second, I cannot say, for I took no account of time—the figure was standing upon the floor directly before me. She had descended the stairs—I had heard them creaking again—and was staring at me with haggard eyes, and with a fixity that I can only call cadaverous; so totally was it devoid of thought, interest, or even life. It was really a corpse standing upright there within two steps of me! As for me, I remained motionless, like one fascinated—a very ugly-looking object myself, probably—and with my hair standing up on my head, for what I know—”