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Above the grand old chimney-piece was a noble stag's head, with huge, spreading antlers, and on the walls hung rows of ancient family portraits, so faded and mouldy now that most of the faces had a ghastly hue, and at night, by the dim, flickering lamp-light, they looked like a company of spectres.
I had found my way down through a wooden door half ajar; and I thought of the possibility of some one's shutting it for the night, and leaving me a prisoner to await the spectres which I have no doubt throng here when it grows dark. Hastening up out of these chambers of the past, I escaped into the upper air, and walked rapidly home through the narrow orange lanes.
The room was close and dark, filled with the smoke from a defective chimney. A tiny boudoir, once the dainty sanctum of imperious Marie Antoinette; a faint and ghostly odour, like unto the perfume of spectres, seemed still to cling to the stained walls, and to the torn Gobelin tapestries. Everywhere lay the impress of a heavy and destroying hand: that of the great and glorious Revolution.
It was evening. I stood on the heights of Trollhätta's old sluices, and saw the ships with outspread sails glide away through the meadows like spectres, large and white. The sluice gates were opened with a ponderous and crashing sound, like that related of the copper gates of the secret council in Germany.
Those who had loved her had been like spectres, and now, like spectres, had faded away. And all through their spectral love she had clung to Fritz. She had clasped the sand like a mad-woman, and never felt the treacherous grains shifting between her arms at the touch of every wind.
Pitichinaccio had stuck his head, with the flower-bed that was on it, under Capuzzi's mantle, and clung so fast round his neck that all efforts to shake him off proved futile. "Pluck up your spirits," Capuzzi exhorted Marianna, when nothing more was to be seen of the spectres or of the Pyramid Doctor; "pluck up your spirits, and come to me, my sweet little ducky bird!
Before that cheerful red light how swiftly the trooping spectres and grim phantoms that had peopled the gloom fled away for ever! What a blessed, comforting atmosphere of love and protection seemed to encompass her, when, after handing one of the pew cushions to the sexton, Mr. Lindsay came to the spot where she lay. "How are your wounds?"
No, all these things were not shadows of the past, spectres of ancient hours. They were the present reality of her love. And a word stupidly cast by a stranger would destroy these beautiful things! Happily, it was not possible. Her love, her lover, did not depend on such insignificant matters. If only she could run to his house!
I ca'ms 'em not bein' subject to nerve stampedes myse'f, an' that same midnight when the sperits comes ha'ntin' about ag'in, I turns outen my blankets an' lays said spectres with the butt of my mule whip the same when we strikes a light an' counts 'em up bein' a couple of kangaroo rats.
Solemnly, yet graciously, Aslauga warned her knight with a motion of her fair right hand, and vanished. "What have I done to you?" said Hildegardis when recovered from her swoon by his care, "what have I done to you, evil-minded knight, that you call up your northern spectres before me, and well-nigh destroy me through terror of your magic arts?"
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