Anne Hereford: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

"I will be true as heaven," I answered in my earnestness. "I will seem to forget that I know it myself."

"Thank you, my best friend. Good-night."

I had come up earlier than usual; it was not ten o'clock; and I thought I might read for half an hour without transgressing any good rule. But where had I left my book? Looking about, I could not see it.

It occurred to me then. I had been sitting reading in the gallery window for some minutes before dinner; and must have left the book there. It was but a few steps, and I went to fetch it.

There it was. I found it by feel, not by sight. The moon was bright again, but the window-shutters were closed and barred. It was that beautiful story, the "Heir of Redclyffe." Madame de Mellissie had bought the Tauchnitz edition of it in Paris, and had left it behind her at Chandos. Soon after she departed, I had found it and read it; and was now dipping into it again.

But now—as I took it in my hand, there occurred a very strange thing, frightening me nearly to death. Turning from the window, the whole length of gallery was before me up to the door of the west wing, the moonlight shining into it in places from the high windows above. There, midway in the passage, the moonlight revealing it, was a shadowy sort of form; looking like nothing on earth but an apparition.

I was in the shade; in the dark; remember that. Gliding along slowly, one of its arms stretched out, looking just as if it were stretched out in warning to me to escape—and I had not the sense then to remember that I must be invisible—on it came. A tall, thin skeleton of a form, with a white and shadowy face. There was no escape for me: to fly to my own room would be to meet it; and no other door of refuge was open.

It has never been your fate as I feel sure, my gentle reader, to be at one end of a gallery in a haunted house at night and see a ghost gliding towards you from the other; so please don't laugh at me. What my sensations were I can neither describe nor you conceive: I cannot bear to think of them even now. That I beheld the ghost, said to haunt Chandos, my sick heart as fully believed, in that moment, as it believed in Heaven. Presence of mind forsook me; all that the wildest imagination can picture of superstitious terror assailed me: and I almost think—yes, I do think—that I might have lost my senses or died, but for the arrival of succour.

Oh, believe me! In these awful moments, which have on occasion come to people in real life far more certainly and terribly than anything ever represented in fiction, believe me, God is ever at hand to send relief. The overstrung mind is not abandoned to itself: very, very rarely indeed are our guardian angels absent, or unready to work by an earthly instrument.

It came to me in the person of Mr. Chandos. Ascending the stairs, a candle in his hand, softly whistling in unconcern, he came. It was no moment for deliberation: had it been a king or emperor, it had been all the same to me. With a great cry of anguish; with a low prolonged shriek, that burst from me in the tension of nerves and brain; with a clasp of his arm, as if I dare not let him go again, I laid hold of him; dropping the book on the carpet of the gallery.