OF A FIGURE SEEN BY MY AUNT.
MY Aunt opened the door, very angry. She was about to walk down stairs to insist on trying the delinquent by court-martial before the “Proprietor;” but she recollected that he was probably in his bed and asleep by this time. She contented herself, therefore, by calling after her.
“Rely on it, I’ll complain in the morning — so sure as I live.”
And so she shut the door, and the candle making a glorious blaze in the grate my Aunt thought the chambermaid’s advice worth following, and did get into her bed while there was light I dare say her collision with the chambermaid cost her more than twenty minutes’ sleep. When her anger subsided there remained a different sort of uneasiness, for there was something ill-omened and menacing in the unintelligible ways of this inn and its people. My Aunt Margaret, however, was really tired, and eventually fell into a slumber, deep and dreamless, from which she awakened with a start.
She fancied that she had been disturbed by a sound as of some heavy weight pulled along the floor close to the room in which she slept The sound had ceased before she was fully awake; but it left her with a most disagreeable sensation of fear and uncertainty, for, undefinably, it was connected in her mind with the idea of mischief designed to herself.
All of a sudden she remembered her trunk, left at the head of the staircase, and the idea rushed upon her, “They are stealing my trunk!” The sound resembled the rumble of it along the floor.
My Aunt had a keen sense of property, and was not wanting in pluck. She jumped out of bed, opened her door softly, and listened. But everything was perfectly quiet “It was in order to confine me to my room that that odious woman deprived me of my candle,” thought my Aunt, although even if she had had it at her bedside she could not have lighted it, for the fire had gone quite out She listened, but there was nothing stirring; and, in extreme déshabille, as she was, my Aunt, full of anxieties, crept out on the lobby, and made her way through the passages to the stairhead.
There stood the old hair trunk on its end, with its rows of dim brass nails, plain enough in the faint light from the lobby window. My Aunt was relieved. She would have been very glad to pull it into her room; but the distance was considerable, and the noise would have brought the people about her, and she was in no state to receive company.
Having stood affectionately and anxiously by the friendly trunk for a minute or two, irresolute, she began to find it too cold to stay longer; so, with an easier mind, she groped her way back again.
It was easier to find the lobby than to discover in the dark her own bedroom door. She groped along the passages; she had counted the steps, but now was not quite sure whether it was thirty-five, or forty-five; she stopped now and then to listen in her groping return, and began to grow rather confused; and wished, as active-minded persons not unfrequently do, that she had remained quietly as she was.
In fact, she was precisely in the situation to lose her way, and step into a wrong bedroom, and was extremely uncomfortable in mind and cold in body; and very nervous beside, lest any one should chance to come that way with a candle, and discover the nakedness of the land.
In this state my Aunt’s deliberations were of the very fussiest sort, and her exertions great; but I doubt if she could hare recovered her room, at least at the first venture, without light. Light, however, did come, and this was the manner of its arrival On a sudden a door opened below stairs — near the foot of the staircase it must have been, she heard so clearly; and voices, before inaudible, now reached her ear.
A female was weeping loudly, and uttering broken sentences through her sobs.
“They’ve killed him — he’s murdered — they’ve murdered him!” and similar ejaculations came rapidly tumbling one over the other in her ululation.
“Arra, ma’am, go back again, and stay where ye wor. We’ll be even wid them yet, for it is murdher, the villians! said a voice, which my Aunt had no difficulty in recognising as that of the Irish chambermaid. “Bud don’t be rousin’ the people — it must be done quiet.”
There was more sobbing, and more talk, and the weeping female gave way, and was again shut into her room, and a gleam of an approaching candle sent an angular shadow on the ceiling at the end of the passage in which my Aunt stood Extremely frightened, she crouched down close to the ground, and the forbidding-looking woman, with the high cheek bones, walked stealthily in from the stair-head passage, and stood, as pale as death, with her shoes off, and a candle in her hand, listening, as it seemed, at the far end of the gallery. She looked over her shoulder, and said, in a hard whisper —
“Stop there, wid their heavy shoes.” She had a hammer in her hand, and looked unspeakably repulsive in her pallor. She lifted the candle above her head and listened. My Aunt was staring full at her from her place of semi-concealment, in a recess of one of the doors, with her face close to the ground.
If the woman saw her, she had presence of mind to make no sign; but with the hand in which the hammer was, she drew her dress up a little to enable her to step more freely, and, with a light, soft tread, passed across the entrance of the gallery.