CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE THUNDER-STORM--THE EBONY STICK--THE UNSEEN VISITANT--TERROR.
At length the uproar in Sir Richard"s room died away. The hoa.r.s.e voice in furious soliloquy, and the rapid tread as he paced the floor, were no longer audible. In their stead was heard alone the stormy wind rushing and yelling through the old trees, and at intervals the deep volleying thunder. In the midst of this hubbub the Italian rubbed his hands, tripped lightly up and down his room, placed his ear at the keyhole, and chuckled and rubbed his hands again in a paroxysm of glee--now and again venting his gratification in brief e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of intense delight--the very incarnation of the spirit of mischief.
The sounds in Sir Richard"s room had ceased for two hours or more; and the piping wind and the deep-mouthed thunder still roared and rattled.
The Neapolitan was too much excited to slumber. He continued, therefore, to pace the floor of his chamber--sometimes gazing through his window upon the black stormy sky and the blue lightning, which leaped in blinding flashes across its darkness, revealing for a moment the ivied walls, and the tossing trees, and the fields and hills, which were as instantaneously again swallowed in the blackness of the tempestuous night; and then turning from the cas.e.m.e.nt, he would plant himself by the door, and listen with eager curiosity for any sound from Sir Richard"s room.
As we have said before, several hours had pa.s.sed, and all had long been silent in the baronet"s apartment, when on a sudden Parucci thought he heard the sharp and well-known knocking of his patron"s ebony stick upon the floor. He ran and listened at his own door. The sound was repeated with unequivocal and vehement distinctness, and was instantaneously followed by a prolonged and violent peal from his master"s hand-bell. The summons was so sustained and vehement, that the Italian at length cautiously withdrew the bolt, unlocked the door, and stole out upon the lobby. So far from abating, the sound grew louder and louder. On tip-toe he scaled the stairs, until he reached to about the midway; and he there paused, for he heard his master"s voice exerted in a tone of terrified entreaty,--
"Not now--not now--avaunt--not now. Oh, G.o.d!--help," cried the well-known voice.
These words were followed by a crash, as of some heavy body springing from the bed--then a rush upon the floor--then another crash.
The voice was hushed; but in its stead the wild storm made a long and plaintive moan, and the listener"s heart turned cold.
"_Malora_--_Corpo di Pluto!_" muttered he between his teeth. "What is it? Will he reeng again? _Santo gennaro!_--there is something wrong."
He paused in fearful curiosity; but the summons was not repeated. Five minutes pa.s.sed; and yet no sound but the howling and pealing of the storm. Parucci, with a beating heart, ascended the stairs and knocked at the door of his patron"s chamber. No answer was returned.
"Sir Richard, Sir Richard," cried the man, "do you want me, Sir Richard?"
Still no answer. He pushed open the door and entered. A candle, wasted to the very socket, stood upon a table beside the huge hea.r.s.e-like bed, which, for the convenience of the invalid, had been removed from his bed-chamber to his dressing-room. The light was dim, and waved uncertainly in the eddies which found their way through the c.h.i.n.ks of the window, so that the lights and shadows flitted ambiguously across the objects in the room. At the end of the bed a table had been upset; and lying near it upon the floor was some-thing--a heap of bed-clothes, or--could it be?--yes, it _was_ Sir Richard Ashwoode.
Parncci approached the prostrate figure: it was lying upon its back, the countenance fixed and livid, the eyes staring and glazed, and the jaw fallen--he was a corpse. The Italian stooped down and took the hand of the dead man--it was already cold; he called him by his name and shook him, but all in vain. There lay the cunning intriguer, the fierce, fiery prodigal, the impetuous, unrelenting tyrant, the unbelieving, reckless man of the world, a ghastly lump of clay.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Parucci approached the prostate figure."
_To face page 156._]
With strange emotions the Neapolitan gazed upon the lifeless effigy from which the evil tenant had been so suddenly and fearfully called to its eternal and unseen abode.
"Gone--dead--all over--all past," muttered he, slowly, while he pressed his foot upon the dead body, as if to satisfy himself that life was indeed extinct--"quite gone. _Canchero!_ it was ugly death--there was something with him; what was he speaking with?"
Parucci walked to the door leading to the great staircase, but found it bolted as usual.
"Pshaw! there was nothing," said he, looking fearfully round the room as he approached the body again, and repeating the negative as if to rea.s.sure himself--"no, no--nothing, nothing."
He gazed again on the awful spectacle in silence for several minutes.
"_Corbezzoli_, and so it _is_ over," at length he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed--"the game is ended. See, see, the breast is bare, and there the two marks of Aldini"s stiletto. Ah! _briccone_, _briccone_, what wild faylow were you--_panzanera_, for a pretty ankle and a pair of black eyes, you would dare the devil. _Rotto di collo_, his face is moving!--pshaw! it is only the light that wavers. _Diamine!_ the face is terrible. What made him speak? nothing was with him--pshaw! nothing could come to him here--no, no, nothing."
As he thus spoke, the wind swept vehemently upon the windows with a sound as if some great thing had rushed, against them, and was pressing for admission, and the gust blew out the candle; the blast died away in a lengthened wail, and then again came rushing and howling up to the windows, as if the very prince of the powers of the air himself were thundering at the cas.e.m.e.nt; then again the blue dazzling lightning glared into the room and gave place to deeper darkness.
"Pah! that lightning smells like brimstone. _Sangue d"un dua_, I hear something in the room."
Yielding to his terrors, Parucci stumbled to the door opening upon the great lobby, and with cold and trembling fingers drawing the bolt, sprang to the stairs and shouted for a.s.sistance in a tone which speedily a.s.sembled half the household in the chamber of death.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE CRONES--THE CORPSE, AND THE SHARPER.
Haggard, exhausted, and in no very pleasant temper, Henry Ashwoode rode up the avenue of Morley Court.
"I shall have a blessed conference with my father," thought he, "when he learns the fate of the thousand pounds I was to have brought him--a pleasant interview, by ----. How shall I open it? He"ll be no better than a Bedlamite. By ----, a pretty hot kettle of fish this--but through it I must flounder as best I may--curse it, what am I afraid of?"
Thus muttering, he leaped from the saddle, leaving the well-trained steed to make his way to the stable, and entered at the half open door.
In the hall he encountered a servant, but was too much occupied by his own busy reflections to observe the earnest, awe-struck countenance of the old domestic.
"Mr. Henry--Mr. Henry--stay, sir--stay--one moment," said the man, following and endeavouring to detain him.
Ashwoode, however, without heeding the interruption, hastened by him, and mounted the stairs with long and rapid strides, resolved not unnecessarily to defer the interview which he believed must come sooner or later. He opened Sir Richard"s door, and entered the chamber. He looked round the room for the object of his search in vain; but to his unmeasured astonishment, beheld instead three old shrivelled hags seated by the hearth, who all rose upon his entrance, except one, who was warming something in a saucepan upon the fire, and each and all resumed respectively the visages of woe which best became the occasion.
"Eh! How is this? What brings you here, nurse?" exclaimed the young man, in a tone of startled curiosity.
The old lady whom he addressed thought it advisable to weep, and instead of returning any answer, covered her face with her ap.r.o.n, turned away her head, and shook her palsied hand towards him with a gesture which was meant to express the mute anguish of unutterable sorrow.
"What _is_ it?" said Ashwoode. "Are you all tongue-tied? Speak, some of you."
"Oh, musha! musha! the crathur," observed the second witch, with a most lugubrious shake of the head, "but it is _he_ that"s to be pitied. Oh, wisha--wisha--wiristhroo!"
"What the d----l ails you? Can"t you speak out? Where"s my father?"
repeated the young man, with impatient perplexity.
"With the blessed saints in glory," replied the third hag, giving the saucepan a slight whisk to prevent the contents from burning, "and if ever there was an angel on earth, _he_ was one. Well, well, he has his reward--that"s one comfort, sure. The crown of glory, with the holy apostles--it"s _he"s_ to be envied--up in heaven, though he wint mighty suddint, surely."
This was followed by a kind of semi-dolorous shake of the head, in which the three old women joined.
With a hurried step, young Ashwoode strode to the bedside, drew the curtain, and gazed upon the sharp and fixed features of the corpse, as it leered with unclosed eyes from among the bed-clothes. It would not have been easy to a.n.a.lyze the feelings with which he looked upon this spectacle. A kind of incredulous horror sate upon his compressed features. He touched the hand, which rested stiffly upon the coverlet, as if doubtful that the old man, whom he had so long feared and obeyed, was actually _dead_. The cold, dull touch that met his was not to be mistaken, and he gazed fixedly with that awful curiosity with which in death the well-known features of a familiar face are looked on. There lay the being whose fierce pa.s.sions had been to him from his earliest days a source of habitual fear--in childhood, even of terror--henceforth to be no more to him than a thing which had never been. There lay the scheming, busy head, but what availed all its calculations and its cunning now! No more thought or power has it than the cushion on which it stiffly rests. There lies the proud, worldly, unforgiving, violent man, a senseless effigy of cold clay--a grim, impa.s.sive monument of the recent presence of the unearthly visitant.
"It"s a beautiful corpse, if the eyes were only shut," observed one of the crones, approaching; "a purty corpse as ever was stretched."
"The hands is very handsome entirely," observed another of them, "and so small, like a lady"s."
"It"s himself was the good master," observed the old nurse, with a slow shake of the head; "the likes of him did not thread in shoe leather.
Oh! but my heart"s sore for you this day, Misther Harry."
Thus speaking, with a good deal of s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g and puckering, she succeeded in squeezing a tear from one eye, like the last drop from an exhausted lemon, and suffering it to rest upon her cheek, that it might not escape observation, she looked round with a most pity-moving visage upon her companions, and an expression of face which said as plainly as words, "What a faithful, attached, old creature I am, and how well I deserve any little token of regard which Sir Richard"s will may have bequeathed me."
"Ah! then, look at him," said the matron of the saucepan, gazing with the most touching commiseration upon Henry Ashwoode, "see how he looks at it. Oh, but it"s he that adored him! Oh, the crathur, what will he do this day? Look at him there--he"s an orphan now--G.o.d help him."
"Be off with yourselves, and leave me here," said Henry (now Sir Henry) Ashwoode, turning sharply upon them. "Send me some one that can speak a word of sense: call Parucci here, and get out of the room every one of you--away!"
With abundance of muttering and grumbling, and many an indignant toss of the head, and many a dignified sniff, the old women hobbled from the room; and Henry Ashwoode had hardly been left alone, when the small private door communicating with Parucci"s apartment, opened, and the valet peeped in.