The moonbeams came through two deep and narrow windows and showed a
spacious chamber richly furnished in an antique fashion. From one
lattice the shadow of the diamond panes was thrown upon the floor; the
ghostly light through the other slept upon a bed, falling between the
heavy silken curtains and illuminating the face of a young man. But how
quietly the slumberer lay! how pale his features! And how like a shroud
the sheet was wound about his frame! Yes, it was a corpse in its
burial-clothes.
Suddenly the fixed features seemed to move with dark emotion. Strange
fantasy! It was but the shadow of the fringed curtain waving betwixt
the dead face and the moonlight as the door of the chamber opened and a
girl stole softly to the bedside. Was there delusion in the moonbeams,
or did her gesture and her eye betray a gleam of triumph as she bent
over the pale corpse, pale as itself, and pressed her living lips to
the cold ones of the dead? As she drew back from that long kiss her
features writhed as if a proud heart were fighting with its anguish.
Again it seemed that the features of the corpse had moved responsive to
her own. Still an illusion. The silken curtains had waved a second time
betwixt the dead face and the moonlight as another fair young girl
unclosed the door and glided ghostlike to the bedside. There the two
maidens stood, both beautiful, with the pale beauty of the dead between
them. But she who had first entered was proud and stately, and the
other a soft and fragile thing.
“Away!” cried the lofty one. “Thou hadst him living; the dead is mine.”
“Thine!” returned the other, shuddering. “Well hast thou spoken; the
dead is thine.”
The proud girl started and stared into her face with a ghastly look,
but a wild-and mournful expression passed across the features of the
gentle one, and, weak and helpless, she sank down on the bed, her head
pillowed beside that of the corpse and her hair mingling with his dark
locks. A creature of hope and joy, the first draught of sorrow had
bewildered her.
“Edith!” cried her rival.
Edith groaned as with a sudden compression of the heart, and, removing
her cheek from the dead youth’s pillow, she stood upright, fearfully
encountering the eyes of the lofty girl.
“Wilt thou betray me?” said the latter, calmly.
“Till the dead bid me speak I will be silent,” answered Edith. “Leave
us alone together. Go and live many years, and then return and tell me
of thy life. He too will be here. Then, if thou tellest of sufferings
more than death, we will both forgive thee.”
“And what shall be the token?” asked the proud girl, as if her heart
acknowledged a meaning in these wild words.
“This lock of hair,” said Edith, lifting one of the dark clustering
curls that lay heavily on the dead man’s brow.
The two maidens joined their hands over the bosom of the corpse and
appointed a day and hour far, far in time to come for their next
meeting in that chamber. The statelier girl gave one deep look at the
motionless countenance and departed, yet turned again and trembled ere
she closed the door, almost believing that her dead lover frowned upon
her. And Edith, too! Was not her white form fading into the moonlight?
Scorning her own weakness, she went forth and perceived that a negro
slave was waiting in the passage with a waxlight, which he held between
her face and his own and regarded her, as she thought, with an ugly
expression of merriment. Lifting his torch on high, the slave lighted
her down the staircase and undid the portal of the mansion. The young
clergyman of the town had just ascended the steps, and, bowing to the
lady, passed in without a word.
Years—many years—rolled on. The world seemed new again, so much older
was it grown since the night when those pale girls had clasped their
hands across the bosom of the corpse. In the interval a lonely woman
had passed from youth to extreme age, and was known by all the town as
the “Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.” A taint of insanity had affected
her whole life, but so quiet, sad and gentle, so utterly free from
violence, that she was suffered to pursue her harmless fantasies
unmolested by the world with whose business or pleasures she had naught
to do. She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight except to
follow funerals. Whenever a corpse was borne along the street, in
sunshine, rain or snow, whether a pompous train of the rich and proud
thronged after it or few and humble were the mourners, behind them came
the lonely woman in a long white garment which the people called her
shroud. She took no place among the kindred or the friends, but stood
at the door to hear the funeral prayer, and walked in the rear of the
procession as one whose earthly charge it was to haunt the house of
mourning and be the shadow of affliction and see that the dead were
duly buried. So long had this been her custom that the inhabitants of
the town deemed her a part of every funeral, as much as the coffin-pall
or the very corpse itself, and augured ill of the sinner’s destiny
unless the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet came gliding like a ghost
behind. Once, it is said, she affrighted a bridal-party with her pale
presence, appearing suddenly in the illuminated hall just as the priest
was uniting a false maid to a wealthy man before her lover had been
dead a year. Evil was the omen to that marriage. Sometimes she stole
forth by moonlight and visited the graves of venerable integrity and
wedded love and virgin innocence, and every spot where the ashes of a
kind and faithful heart were mouldering. Over the hillocks of those
favored dead would she stretch out her arms with a gesture as if she
were scattering seeds, and many believed that she brought them from the
garden of Paradise, for the graves which she had visited were green
beneath the snow and covered with sweet flowers from April to November.
Her blessing was better than a holy verse upon the tombstone. Thus wore
away her long, sad, peaceful and fantastic life till few were so old as
she, and the people of later generations wondered how the dead had ever
been buried or mourners had endured their grief without the Old Maid in
the Winding-Sheet. Still years went on, and still she followed funerals
and was not yet summoned to her own festival of death.
One afternoon the great street of the town was all alive with business
and bustle, though the sun now gilded only the upper half of the
church-spire, having left the housetops and loftiest trees in shadow.
The scene was cheerful and animated in spite of the sombre shade
between the high brick buildings. Here were pompous merchants in white
wigs and laced velvet, the bronzed faces of sea-captains, the foreign
garb and air of Spanish Creoles, and the disdainful port of natives of
Old England, all contrasted with the rough aspect of one or two
back-settlers negotiating sales of timber from forests where axe had
never sounded. Sometimes a lady passed, swelling roundly forth in an
embroidered petticoat, balancing her steps in high-heeled shoes and
courtesying with lofty grace to the punctilious obeisances of the
gentlemen. The life of the town seemed to have its very centre not far
from an old mansion that stood somewhat back from the pavement,
surrounded by neglected grass, with a strange air of loneliness rather
deepened than dispelled by the throng so near it. Its site would have
been suitably occupied by a magnificent Exchange or a brick block
lettered all over with various signs, or the large house itself might
have made a noble tavern with the “King’s Arms” swinging before it and
guests in every chamber, instead of the present solitude. But, owing to
some dispute about the right of inheritance, the mansion had been long
without a tenant, decaying from year to year and throwing the stately
gloom of its shadow over the busiest part of the town.
Such was the scene, and such the time, when a figure unlike any that
have been described was observed at a distance down the street.
“I espy a strange sail yonder,” remarked a Liverpool captain—“that
woman in the long white garment.”
The sailor seemed much struck by the object, as were several others who
at the same moment caught a glimpse of the figure that had attracted
his notice. Almost immediately the various topics of conversation gave
place to speculations in an undertone on this unwonted occurrence.
“Can there be a funeral so late this afternoon?” inquired some.
They looked for the signs of death at every door—the sexton, the
hearse, the assemblage of black-clad relatives, all that makes up the
woeful pomp of funerals. They raised their eyes, also, to the sun-gilt
spire of the church, and wondered that no clang proceeded from its
bell, which had always tolled till now when this figure appeared in the
light of day. But none had heard that a corpse was to be borne to its
home that afternoon, nor was there any token of a funeral except the
apparition of the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.
“What may this portend?” asked each man of his neighbor.
All smiled as they put the question, yet with a certain trouble in
their eyes, as if pestilence, or some other wide calamity, were
prognosticated by the untimely intrusion among the living of one whose
presence had always been associated with death and woe. What a comet is
to the earth was that sad woman to the town. Still she moved on, while
the hum of surprise was hushed at her approach, and the proud and the
humble stood aside that her white garment might not wave against them.
It was a long, loose robe of spotless purity. Its wearer appeared very
old, pale, emaciated and feeble, yet glided onward without the unsteady
pace of extreme age. At one point of her course a little rosy boy burst
forth from a door and ran with open arms toward the ghostly woman,
seeming to expect a kiss from her bloodless lips. She made a slight
pause, fixing her eye upon him with an expression of no earthly
sweetness, so that the child shivered and stood awestruck rather than
affrighted while the Old Maid passed on. Perhaps her garment might have
been polluted even by an infant’s touch; perhaps her kiss would have
been death to the sweet boy within the year.
“She is but a shadow,” whispered the superstitious. “The child put
forth his arms and could not grasp her robe.”
The wonder was increased when the Old Maid passed beneath the porch of
the deserted mansion, ascended the moss-covered steps, lifted the iron
knocker and gave three raps. The people could only conjecture that some
old remembrance, troubling her bewildered brain, had impelled the poor
woman hither to visit the friends of her youth—all gone from their home
long since and for ever unless their ghosts still haunted it, fit
company for the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.
An elderly man approached the steps, and, reverently uncovering his
gray locks, essayed to explain the matter.
“None, madam,” said he, “have dwelt in this house these fifteen years
agone—no, not since the death of old Colonel Fenwicke, whose funeral
you may remember to have followed. His heirs, being ill-agreed among
themselves, have let the mansion-house go to ruin.”
The Old Maid looked slowly round with a slight gesture of one hand and
a finger of the other upon her lip, appearing more shadow-like than
ever in the obscurity of the porch. But again she lifted the hammer,
and gave, this time, a single rap. Could it be that a footstep was now
heard coming down the staircase of the old mansion which all conceived
to have been so long untenanted? Slowly, feebly, yet heavily, like the
pace of an aged and infirm person, the step approached, more distinct
on every downward stair, till it reached the portal. The bar fell on
the inside; the door was opened. One upward glance toward the
church-spire, whence the sunshine had just faded, was the last that the
people saw of the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet.
“Who undid the door?” asked many.
This question, owing to the depth of shadow beneath the porch, no one
could satisfactorily answer. Two or three aged men, while protesting
against an inference which might be drawn, affirmed that the person
within was a negro and bore a singular resemblance to old Cæsar,
formerly a slave in the house, but freed by death some thirty years
before.
“Her summons has waked up a servant of the old family,” said one, half
seriously.
“Let us wait here,” replied another; “more guests will knock at the
door anon. But the gate of the graveyard should be thrown open.”
Twilight had overspread the town before the crowd began to separate or
the comments on this incident were exhausted. One after another was
wending his way homeward, when a coach—no common spectacle in those
days—drove slowly into the street. It was an old-fashioned equipage,
hanging close to the ground, with arms on the panels, a footman behind
and a grave, corpulent coachman seated high in front, the whole giving
an idea of solemn state and dignity. There was something awful in the
heavy rumbling of the wheels.
The coach rolled down the street, till, coming to the gateway of the
deserted mansion, it drew up, and the footman sprang to the ground.
“Whose grand coach is this?” asked a very inquisitive body.
The footman made no reply, but ascended the steps of the old house,
gave three taps with the iron hammer, and returned to open the coach
door. An old man possessed of the heraldic lore so common in that day
examined the shield of arms on the panel.
“Azure, a lion’s head erased, between three flowers de luce,” said he,
then whispered the name of the family to whom these bearings belonged.
The last inheritor of its honors was recently dead, after a long
residence amid the splendor of the British court, where his birth and
wealth had given him no mean station. “He left no child,” continued the
herald, “and these arms, being in a lozenge, betoken that the coach
appertains to his widow.”
Further disclosures, perhaps, might have been made had not the speaker
been suddenly struck dumb by the stern eye of an ancient lady who
thrust forth her head from the coach, preparing to descend. As she
emerged the people saw that her dress was magnificent, and her figure
dignified in spite of age and infirmity—a stately ruin, but with a look
at once of pride and wretchedness. Her strong and rigid features had an
awe about them unlike that of the white Old Maid, but as of something
evil. She passed up the steps, leaning on a gold-headed cane. The door
swung open as she ascended, and the light of a torch glittered on the
embroidery of her dress and gleamed on the pillars of the porch. After
a momentary pause, a glance backward and then a desperate effort, she
went in.
The decipherer of the coat-of-arms had ventured up the lower step, and,
shrinking back immediately, pale and tremulous, affirmed that the torch
was held by the very image of old Cæsar.
“But such a hideous grin,” added he, “was never seen on the face of
mortal man, black or white. It will haunt me till my dying-day.”
Meantime, the coach had wheeled round with a prodigious clatter on the
pavement and rumbled up the street, disappearing in the twilight, while
the ear still tracked its course. Scarcely was it gone when the people
began to question whether the coach and attendants, the ancient lady,
the spectre of old Cæsar and the Old Maid herself were not all a
strangely-combined delusion with some dark purport in its mystery. The
whole town was astir, so that, instead of dispersing, the crowd
continually increased, and stood gazing up at the windows of the
mansion, now silvered by the brightening moon. The elders, glad to
indulge the narrative propensity of age, told of the long-faded
splendor of the family, the entertainments they had given and the
guests, the greatest of the land, and even titled and noble ones from
abroad, who had passed beneath that portal. These graphic reminiscences
seemed to call up the ghosts of those to whom they referred. So strong
was the impression on some of the more imaginative hearers that two or
three were seized with trembling fits at one and the same moment,
protesting that they had distinctly heard three other raps of the iron
knocker.
“Impossible!” exclaimed others. “See! The moon shines beneath the
porch, and shows every part of it except in the narrow shade of that
pillar. There is no one there.”
“Did not the door open?” whispered one of these fanciful persons.
“Didst thou see it too?” said his companion, in a startled tone.
But the general sentiment was opposed to the idea that a third visitant
had made application at the door of the deserted house. A few, however,
adhered to this new marvel, and even declared that a red gleam like
that of a torch had shone through the great front window, as if the
negro were lighting a guest up the staircase. This too was pronounced a
mere fantasy.
But at once the whole multitude started, and each man beheld his own
terror painted in the faces of all the rest.
“What an awful thing is this!” cried they.
A shriek too fearfully distinct for doubt had been heard within the
mansion, breaking forth suddenly and succeeded by a deep stillness, as
if a heart had burst in giving it utterance. The people knew not
whether to fly from the very sight of the house or to rush trembling in
and search out the strange mystery. Amid their confusion and affright
they were somewhat reassured by the appearance of their clergyman, a
venerable patriarch, and equally a saint, who had taught them and their
fathers the way to heaven for more than the space of an ordinary
lifetime. He was a reverend figure with long white hair upon his
shoulders, a white beard upon his breast and a back so bent over his
staff that he seemed to be looking downward continually, as if to
choose a proper grave for his weary frame. It was some time before the
good old man, being deaf and of impaired intellect, could be made to
comprehend such portions of the affair as were comprehensible at all.
But when possessed of the facts, his energies assumed unexpected vigor.
“Verily,” said the old gentleman, “it will be fitting that I enter the
mansion-house of the worthy Colonel Fenwicke, lest any harm should have
befallen that true Christian woman whom ye call the ‘Old Maid in the
Winding-Sheet.’”
Behold, then, the venerable clergyman ascending the steps of the
mansion with a torch-bearer behind him. It was the elderly man who had
spoken to the Old Maid, and the same who had afterward explained the
shield of arms and recognized the features of the negro. Like their
predecessors, they gave three raps with the iron hammer.
“Old Cæsar cometh not,” observed the priest. “Well, I wot he no longer
doth service in this mansion.”
“Assuredly, then, it was something worse in old Cæsar’s likeness,” said
the other adventurer.
“Be it as God wills,” answered the clergyman. “See! my strength, though
it be much decayed, hath sufficed to open this heavy door. Let us enter
and pass up the staircase.”
Here occurred a singular exemplification of the dreamy state of a very
old man’s mind. As they ascended the wide flight of stairs the aged
clergyman appeared to move with caution, occasionally standing aside,
and oftener bending his head, as it were in salutation, thus practising
all the gestures of one who makes his way through a throng. Reaching
the head of the staircase, he looked around with sad and solemn
benignity, laid aside his staff, bared his hoary locks, and was
evidently on the point of commencing a prayer.
“Reverend sir,” said his attendant, who conceived this a very suitable
prelude to their further search, “would it not be well that the people
join with us in prayer?”
“Well-a-day!” cried the old clergyman, staring strangely around him.
“Art thou here with me, and none other? Verily, past times were present
to me, and I deemed that I was to make a funeral prayer, as many a time
heretofore, from the head of this staircase. Of a truth, I saw the
shades of many that are gone. Yea, I have prayed at their burials, one
after another, and the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet hath seen them to
their graves.”
Being now more thoroughly awake to their present purpose, he took his
staff and struck forcibly on the floor, till there came an echo from
each deserted chamber, but no menial to answer their summons. They
therefore walked along the passage, and again paused, opposite to the
great front window, through which was seen the crowd in the shadow and
partial moonlight of the street beneath. On their right hand was the
open door of a chamber, and a closed one on their left.
The clergyman pointed his cane to the carved oak panel of the latter.
“Within that chamber,” observed he, “a whole lifetime since, did I sit
by the death-bed of a goodly young man who, being now at the last
gasp—” Apparently, there was some powerful excitement in the ideas
which had now flashed across his mind. He snatched the torch from his
companion’s hand, and threw open the door with such sudden violence
that the flame was extinguished, leaving them no other light than the
moonbeams which fell through two windows into the spacious chamber. It
was sufficient to discover all that could be known. In a high-backed
oaken arm-chair, upright, with her hands clasped across her breast and
her head thrown back, sat the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet. The
stately dame had fallen on her knees with her forehead on the holy
knees of the Old Maid, one hand upon the floor and the other pressed
convulsively against her heart. It clutched a lock of hair—once sable,
now discolored with a greenish mould.
As the priest and layman advanced into the chamber the Old Maid’s
features assumed such a semblance of shifting expression that they
trusted to hear the whole mystery explained by a single word. But it
was only the shadow of a tattered curtain waving betwixt the dead face
and the moonlight.
“Both dead!” said the venerable man. “Then who shall divulge the
secret? Methinks it glimmers to and fro in my mind like the light and
shadow across the Old Maid’s face. And now ’tis gone!”