CHAPTER IV. THE SHAME-BORN CHILD.
Calm Death,—Thou comest not to such as these,—
Their griefs affright thee,—their sad faces fail to please.
Probably the length of time that elapsed (which seemed like an eternity to Elizabeth,) was, in reality, not more than half an hour before a ray of light greeted her eyes, coming through a ragged chink in the crumbling masonry of the heavy walls.
Creeping cautiously forward she put her eye to the crevice and looked eagerly into the inner room.
The scene she witnessed was well calculated to chill the blood of an able bodied man, but to a delicate woman, still trembling from the effects of her awful plunge into the river;—hampered by dripping garments and nearly frantic with the fear of momentary violence, the sight was more than doubly horrible.
The room was nothing more than a large vault or closet built into the solid walls, probably for no definite purpose, but so well adapted to its present use that one would think its designer must have foreseen its ultimate fate.
Several battered and smoking lanterns hung on nails, which had been wedged firmly between loose bricks in the decaying walls, their outlines appearing to her excited imagination not unlike the red eye balls and smoke begrimed faces of the score of beings upon whom their dismal glimmer fell.
This score of individuals, representing a class of monsters, born in the slime of cellars; nourished on the odors of decomposition and trained to accomplishments of vice and evil, were busy at the ghoulish work of robbing two human bodies, whose swollen and livid members plainly proclaimed them trophies from the river's unfailing supply.