had been rifled from the body of Charles Weedon, for it had been soaked in blood, and his fingers rested on the dull dry stains. He dropped it as though it had been an adder, and the crackle of papers within struck on his hearing as the knapsack fell back into its dark hiding-place. For a moment he stood irresolute. A fearful curiosity prompted him to drag it out again, empty it, and examine its contents, but, withheld by a species of guilty shame from prying into the secrets of the dead, he determined to leave the responsibility of such an action with his father, turned, and with slow steps retraced his way towards the outer crypt. The remembrance that Granny Weedon alone was cognizant of his whereabouts quickened the uneasiness that began to stir within him. Were she really false and bad as appearances seemed to show; might she not be impelled by motives of fear to keep him fast in the trap into which he had rushed perhaps at this very moment be barring his means of exit? But Josceline, after all, had a clue by which her knavery could be confounded; in him he had a dependable ally; supported by which comforting reflection he suppressed his impulse to rush up stairs, and paused before the still unexplored dungeon a few steps below the floor. Holding out his candle, and bending low, he peered with strained eyes into its sombre recesses. Here also he could detect signs of past human habitation. Fragments of rotten wainscot were dropping from green and reeking walls, in one corner lay piled a heap of empty bottles, while, scattered on the floor was a quantity of stale straw which exhaled a nauseous odour. In the further wall was built a low arch, which, by its round shape. and unadorned severity of style, was evidently Saxon. Within this arch some hand had laboriously carved a rude inscription, and Ralph, gazing intently as he bent over the brink, succeeded in deciphering the words: "Jno. Holles, Clerk, An. Dom. 1620," and beneath: "Ad. majoram Dei gloriam "—the well-known Jesuit motto. It gave him a sense of companionship thus to touch, as it were, another human mind across the gulf of centuries, and he pondered sympathetically on the probable fate of the hunted writer. "Sleep there, ferret! since you are bent on prying!" hissed a voice in his ears, and before he had time to breathe a grasp of iron was laid upon his neck, and he was forced downwards into the dungeon below. "Stay there, sneaking spy ! it is less than you deserve!" Recovering himself after the sudden fall, Ralph had but a second in which to recognise the face of his father, literally black and convulsed with passion, before the door closed, the key turned in the lock, and he was left alone in pitchy darkness. CHAPTER XIX. And let the day be time enough to mourn S. DANIEL. HALF-PAST twelve on a January night! The keen air makes the darkness pungent, the very stars are sharp as needles, cold as steel. The wind, when it stirs momentarily in its sleep, cuts like an unsheathed sword; its lowest breath is a whistle. The night seems like a Pagan god who has stolen back to the scene of his former cultus, and whom the frost has surprised and benumbed into imprisonment. Too cold to move, too stupified to complain, he remains dull and silent, gazing at the ice-bound earth and lightless heaven. All refuge is denied him, the house is closely shuttered, and he dares not venture into its curtained shelter where human beings lie warmly beneath quilts of down, and the flames leap high in cheery strength. Stay a bit! The Black Spirit fears, indeed, the happy light, on whose red jovial face he may not look, but he scorns such obstacles to ingress as bars and masonry. Staring, voiceless, idiotic, he stands in the gloomy dungeon, which thirty feet below ground is shut away from sight, stands and gapes at that which, albeit invisible to mortal vision-his cat-like eyes can see; a shivering form on a couch of straw, a pale, small face, with closed eyes and long folded lashes. Unconscious, that face yet seems to express a kind of consciousness-to be uneasy beneath the fixed stare of the Black Night-spirit. At intervals the brows contract, the lips twitch nervously, and once even a tear, slow as a half-frozen stream, forces its way through the tightly locked eyelids, and rolls coldly down the blanched cheeks. Even in slumber the human soul of the sleeper, formed for freedom, gladness and kindred companionship, shudders at its isolation, seems to know that it is parted from its kind, that it is alone in that darkness, where only the unclean can flourish. Through the thick mass of masonry that separates the dungeon from the upper world, the painful breathing of the ice-laden wind can no longer be heard. Silence, only less profound than the darkness in which it is buried, lies heavy as lead upon the imprisoned air. To be shut up in the dark and in a contracted space, is to the imaginative no less an ordeal than suffocation. Parted from freedom the nerves become unmanageable, the fancy shoots up a weedy growth, whose unwholesome luxuriance chokes the force of reasonable reflection. Darkness is an enemy invincible because impersonal, awful because unbodied. Ralph had by turns tried to for VOL. I. Y get, to defy, to struggle with it. In all these methods of warfare it had met and had defeated him. It had seemed to creep nearer and nearer, nearer and nearer, to let his thrusts pass freely through its ghostly substance, to close in upon, and choke him. It had lain weighty, cold and stifling, upon his heart, pressing more frightfully with each wild pant for freedom. At last his agitation had exhausted itself, and a kind of stupor had supervened. For near an hour he had lain back upon his straw pillow, trembling, and the perspiration bursting from his face. He had given up the attempt to reason down his panic; it was more than half physical and could not comprehend the expostulations of the understanding. The awful and inexplicable change in his father's face and manner haunted and bewildered him. He felt as if the solid foundation of his past life had given way, as if he had slipped unawares into a quicksand. To face the problem of the murderer Tibbetts' presence beneath the floors of the house, whose every hole and corner he had known by heart from childhood, was, in such a state of nerves, impossible. Somewhere, in the darkest chamber of his brain, lurked the amazing conviction that his father's interests were in some unknown manner involved in his safe concealment, and this greater mystery shut out all lesser ones into a background, and completed the paralysis of his reasoning faculties. |