Oh these faithful servitors, they would die for us children of the house, I believe, and yet they have ever this curious bent to terrify the childish minds. I know not when it was precisely that I thus first heard the White Monk’s story, but this I know, I was young enough to sit with my clenched fistlets supporting my chin, and my eyes and mouth very wide open.
“And was he always in white, that fearful man?” I asked, somewhere toward the middle of the story. “Always in white?” I know not why, but this detail struck my child’s phantasy more powerfully than all the rest; this was awful, this was the pith of the whole matter, and from that moment I sat trembling, and drinking in the history with reluctant suspense, until it became the bane of my life for a term of years.
For hours I lay shuddering ofttimes in my bed, dreading with my body and my soul lest the Monk should appear to me! And never had I courage to speak of this to anyone of the many loving house mates who would so promptly have put an end to my fears by leaving me no more alone at night. There is a keen, hard honour for children to maintain, and to them the confession of nocturnal terror is as flight to the soldier. So, as the banquet sped its course below, I shuddered lonely in my bed in the oaken room, often weeping angrily amidst my fears because I alone, the only son of the house, was the only soul in it left desolate.
A little later I was comforted in some sort by my baby sister Margaret, who was put to sleep in an adjacent cot, and being too tiny for Fear to reach, would sleep secure, all gold and white in the dusky gleam of our rushlight—the one oasis of hope throughout the terrible oaken room. Yet she in her turn, became a source of fear to me. Should the Monk appear, and should the dire extremity cause me to shriek, what would become of Marguerite? She would die of sudden terror. Worse—if he should stand by her bedside, raising his cowl off the awful face, and her blue eyes should open at that instant? How should I protect her?
But before I wander further, I must begin straight and tell how we lived, and where, and to what end.
Percy Ross.
(To be continued.)
AN AUTO-HYPNOTIC RHAPSODY.
“When all desires that dwell in the heart cease, then the mortal becomes immortal, and obtains Brahman.
When all the fetters of the heart here on earth are broken;