“What is believed?”
“I see that these peasant’s stories have never reached you, Monsieur Goefle, or else you laugh at them, since you have quietly taken up your quarters in this room.”
“In fact there is some story connected with it,” replied Cristiano, as a remark that he had recently heard flashed into his mind. “The people at the farm said to me this evening,—‘Go there, and let us know in the morning how you passed the night.’ The room is haunted, then, by a goblin—a ghost—”
“There must be something strange here, whether a phantom or a real being, for old M. Stenson himself believes so, and the baron also, perhaps. It is said that he has never entered the room since his sister-in-law’s death, and he has had a certain door walled up—”
“Yonder,” said Cristiano, pointing to the top of the staircase.
“It is possible,” replied Margaret, “I don’t know. It is all very mysterious, and I thought you would be well informed about matters that I am ignorant of. I don’t believe in ghosts. Still, I shouldn’t like to see one, and nothing in the world would induce me to sleep here, as you are going to do. As for the baron, whether the story of the diamond ring is true or false—”
“What! another story—”
“Yes, and the most improbable one of all, I confess; I cannot help laughing as I repeat it. They say, in the cottages of the neighborhood, that the baron loved his wife—who was as wicked himself—so well, that he gave her body, when she died, to an alchemist, who reduced it in an alembic, and turned it into a great black diamond. It is certain, at any rate, that he wears a strange ring upon his finger, which I cannot look at without terror and disgust.”
“That is a good proof!” said Cristiano, laughing; “but only think if a similar fate should be reserved for you. They would find nothing, I know, in the alembic where you were baked, but a pretty rose diamond of the purest water, but that would not be any more cheerful for you, and I advise you not to run the risk of being crystallized.”
Margaret burst out laughing, but it frightened her to hear her fresh, childlike voice echoed mysteriously through the old room. She became sad, and said in a tone of discouragement: