“Who can express the horror of that night, When darkness lent his robes to monster fear? And heaven’s black mantle, banishing the light, Made everything in ugly form appear.”
Miss Petronilla Lawless having, as Ranty would have expressed it, got the steam up to a high pressure, thundered over the heath, entered the forest road, and looked with eyes sparkling with defiance at the dark, gloomy pine woods on either hand. The bright morning sunshine, falling in a radiant shower through the waving boughs of the pines, gilded the crimson glow on her thin cheeks and lips, and brought fiery circlets of flame through all her short, crisp, jetty curls. Darkly beautiful looked the little wilful elf, as she slackened her pace through the narrow, sylvan forest path, as if to give any hidden enemy, if such lurked there, a full opportunity of making his appearance. None came, however; and twenty minutes brought her in sight of the gloomy gorge in the cleft mountain, so appropriately named Dismal Hollow.
Pet slackened the mad pace at which she had started still more, and loosening her bridle-reins, allowed her sure-footed pony, Starlight, to choose his own way down the narrow, unsafe bridle-path.
As she approached the house, she ran her eye, with a critical look, over it, and muttering, “Miss Priscilla’s been making improvements,” prepared to alight.
A great change for the better, too, had taken place in the appearance of Dismal Hollow, since the advent of Miss Priscilla. The great pools of green slimy water were no longer to be seen before the door; the receptacles for mud and filth had vanished, as if by magic. A clean, dry platform spread out where these had once been; the windows were no longer stuffed full of rags and old hats, but with glass panes, that fairly glittered with cleanliness; broken fences were put up, outhouses were repaired, and the whole house had evidently undergone a severe course of regeneration. Inside, the improvements were still more remarkable. Every room had undergone a vigorous course of scrubbing, washing, papering, and plastering, and the doors and windows had been closed, and hermetically sealed, and no sacrilegious foot was ever permitted to enter and “muss up,” as Miss Priscilla expressed it, those cherished apartments wherein her soul delighted. The only rooms in the old house which she permitted to be profaned by use were a couple of sleeping apartments, a little sitting-room, and the kitchen. The servants, for so long a time accustomed to do as they liked, and lazy about as they pleased, were struck with dismay at Miss Priscilla’s appalling vigor and neatness. That worthy lady declared it was not only a shame, but a sin, to be eaten out of house and home by a parcel of “shiftless niggers;” and one of her very first acts was to hire half of them out to any one who would employ them. The remainder were then informed, in very short terms, that if they did not mind their P’s and Q’s, they’d be “sold to Georgy”—a threat sufficient to terrify them into neatness and order sufficient even to satisfy “Miss ’Silly,” as they called her.
On this particular morning, Miss Priscilla sat up in her sitting-room—a little, stiff, square, prim, upright and downright sort of an apartment, with no foolery in the shape of little feminine nicknacks or ornaments about it, but everything as distressingly clean as it was possible to be. Miss Priscilla herself, radiant in a scanty, fady calico gown, reaching to her ankles, a skimpy black silk apron, and a stiff, solemn, grim-looking mob-cap, was ensconced in a rocking-chair, that kept up an awful “screechy-scrawchy,” as she rocked backward and forward, knitting away as if her life depended on it. Very hard, and grim, and sour looked Miss Priscilla, as she sat there with her sharp, cankerous lips so tightly shut that they reminded one of a vise, and her long, bony nose running out everlastingly into the thin regions of space.
The sharp clatter of horse’s hoofs arrested her attention, and she turned and looked sharply out of the window. The sour scowl deepened on her vinegar phiz, as she perceived Pet in the act of alighting.
“That sharp little wiper of a Lawless girl,” muttered Miss Priscilla, “coming here, with a happetite that’s hawful to contemplate, when she’s not wanted; turning heverything topsy-turvy, not to speak of that there pigeon-pie what’s for dinner being honly henough for one. Wah! wah!”
And with a look that seemed the very essence of distilled vengeance, and everything else sour, sharp and cankerous, Miss Priscilla went to the head of the stairs and called:
“Kupy! Kupy!” (her abbreviation of Cupid), “go and hopen the door for that Lawless girl, which is come, and bring her pony hinto the barn, and show her hup ’ere; hand don’t mind a-givin’ hof her hany hoats. Be quick there!”