第22章

"You would cut off the telegraph wires.Try it.I am so persuaded that I am right, that I will pay half the expense if you will allow me to direct the operations.""Nay, I am well able to afford the cost; for the rest allow me to write to you."About ten days after I received a letter from Mr.J---- telling me that he had visited the house since I had seen him; that he had found the two letters I had described, replaced in the drawer from which I had taken them; that he had read them with misgivings like my own; that he had instituted a cautious inquiry about the woman to whom I rightly conjectured they had been written.It seemed that thirty-six years ago (a year before the date of the letters)she had married, against the wish of her relations, an American of very suspicions character; in fact, he was generally believed to have been a pirate.She herself was the daughter of very respectable tradespeople, and had served in the capacity of a nursery governess before her marriage.She had a brother, a widower, who was considered wealthy, and who had one child of about six years old.A month after the marriage the body of this brother was found in the Thames, near London Bridge; there seemed some marks of violence about his throat, but they were not deemed sufficient to warrant the inquest in any other verdict that that of "found drowned."The American and his wife took charge of the little boy, the deceased brother having by his will left his sister the guardian of his only child,--and in event of the child's death the sister inherited.The child died about six months afterwards,--it was supposed to have been neglected and ill-treated.The neighbors deposed to have heard it shriek at night.The surgeon who had examined it after death said that it was emaciated as if from want of nourishment, and the body was covered with livid bruises.It seemed that one winter night the child had sought to escape; crept out into the back yard; tried to scale the wall; fallen back exhausted; and been found at morning on the stones in a dying state.But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder; and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared to be half-witted.Be that as it may, at the orphan's death the aunt inherited her brother's fortune.

Before the first wedded year was out, the American quitted England abruptly, and never returned to it.He obtained a cruising vessel, which was lost in the Atlantic two years afterwards.The widow was left in affluence, but reverses of various kinds had befallen her:

a bank broke; an investment failed; she went into a small business and became insolvent; then she entered into service, sinking lower and lower, from housekeeper down to maid-of-all-work,--never long retaining a place, though nothing decided against her character was ever alleged.She was considered sober, honest, and peculiarly quiet in her ways; still nothing prospered with her.And so she had dropped into the workhouse, from which Mr.J---- had taken her, to be placed in charge of the very house which she had rented as mistress in the first year of her wedded life.

Mr.J---- added that he had passed an hour alone in the unfurnished room which I had urged him to destroy, and that his impressions of dread while there were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared and the floors removed as I had suggested.He had engaged persons for the work, and would commence any day I would name.

The day was accordingly fixed.I repaired to the haunted house,--we went into the blind, dreary room, took up the skirting, and then the floors.Under the rafters, covered with rubbish, was found a trapdoor, quite large enough to admit a man.It was closely nailed down, with clamps and rivets of iron.On removing these we descended into a room below, the existence of which had never been suspected.In this room there had been a window and a flue, but they had been bricked over, evidently for many years.By the help of candles we examined this place; it still retained some moldering furniture,--three chairs, an oak settle, a table,--all of the fashion of about eighty years ago.There was a chest of drawers against the wall, in which we found, half rotted away, old-fashioned articles of a man's dress, such as might have been worn eighty or a hundred years ago by a gentleman of some rank; costly steel buckles and buttons, like those yet worn in court dresses, a handsome court sword; in a waistcoat which had once been rich with gold lace, but which was now blackened and foul with damp, we found five guineas, a few silver coins, and an ivory ticket, probably for some place of entertainment long since passed away.But our main discovery was in a kind of iron safe fixed to the wall, the lock of which it cost us much trouble to get picked.

In this safe were three shelves and two small drawers.Ranged on the shelves were several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stopped.They contained colorless, volatile essences, of the nature of which I shall only say that they were not poisons,--phosphor and ammonia entered into some of them.There were also some very curious glass tubes, and a small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock crystal, and another of amber,--also a loadstone of great power.