The Argosy — page 311: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

294 Erna. ‘So that,” I said, catching at her meaning, “if the old steward were really his master’s only confidant, the poor prisoner would in the present case have been buried alive.” Erna did not answer: she drew closer to me, and looked round her with a shudder. ‘‘ Come away,” she said, catching at my arm. ‘““T feel as though if I stayed here longer the air would choke me. Let us get away from these frightful memories and this horrid room. I would not sleep here for the world—I should wake up with a start at midnight, and see the old steward standing at my bedside, and beckoning me to follow him, that he might show me where his master’s bones are hidden.” ‘They are hidden, then, to this day?” ‘So the legend says ; but when I begged my father to have all this. part of the old house pulled down that they may be found and buried, he only laughed at me But till they ave found and buried, I feel that this will bea haunted room. ‘The man who was killed here will never rest in his grave till he knows that his master has one too.” I laughed at her wild suggestion ; and she turned indignantly from me, and flitted like a sunbeam from the quaint, dark chamber ; leaving me to turn on its ghosts and its silence a key that grated eerily in the rusty lock, and to follow her at my leisure to the garden. ‘“‘ Gerald,” my entertainer said to me, curtly, that evening, after dinner, “‘ you’re a fool, and this little daughter of mine’s a goose ; and if the goose must needs tempt the fool into ghost-hunting, by raking up for his benefit some of the ridiculous old legends that are sure to cling about a tumble-down place like this, why, I don’t know that I feel called upon to interfere. J’ll put no more serious obstacle in your way than a promise of laughing at you when you catch a cold, instead of your ghost. You'll find the quarters you want to occupy rather damp, and there’s more than a suspicion of rats about them ; but try them by all means—try them,” concluded Mr. Heath- cott, with a yawn; “‘and if you can stand the damp and the rats for a night or two, let me know at the end of the time how you liked your bed-room.”’ I dreamed that night of having fallen asleep in the great old bed in the haunted room, and of waking with a start and a shiver to find a skeleton lying beside me. I had taken, I scarcely knew why, a violent aversion to that bed. ‘‘ Luckily,” I murmured to myself, as I woke in reality, and found the bright June sunlight shining through the venetians of my room, and falling on gaily-tinted wall-paper and the glittering brass of my bedstead, ‘‘I’ve given no pledge to sleep in it. It’s enough, surely, to be about to occupy for a week a family vault, without one’s also becoming the tenant of a hearse.” And when I had, with the old gardener to help me, dragged the cumbrous, funereal thing into a smaller room adjoining the ghostly one, and my own smart French bedstead had been carried up to COMIC LDOO;KS, EO)