The Light in the Bell Tower
Shortly after the discontinuance of the priest's visits, old Laurence,
one night, to his surprise, saw light issuing from a window in the Bell
Tower. It was at first only a tremulous red ray, visible only for a few
minutes, which seemed to pass from the room, through whose window it
escaped upon the courtyard of the castle, and so to lose itself. This
tower and casement were in the angle of the building, exactly
confronting that in which the little outlawed family had taken up their
quarters.
The whole family were troubled at the appearance of this dull red ray
from the chamber in the Bell Tower. Nobody knew what to make of it. But
Laurence, who had campaigned in Italy with his old master, the young
ladies' grandfather--"the heavens be his bed this night!"--was resolved
to see it out, and took his great horse-pistols with him, and ascended
to the corridor leading to the tower. But his search was vain.
This light left a sense of great uneasiness among the inmates, and most
certainly it was not pleasant to suspect the establishment of an
independent and possibly dangerous lodger or even colony, within the
walls of the same old building.
The light very soon appeared again, steadier and somewhat brighter, in
the same chamber. Again old Laurence buckled on his armour, swearing
ominously to himself, and this time bent in earnest upon conflict. The
young ladies watched in thrilling suspense from the great window in
_their_ stronghold, looking diagonally across the court. But as
Laurence, who had entered the massive range of buildings opposite, might
be supposed to be approaching the chamber from which this ill-omened
glare proceeded, it steadily waned, finally disappearing altogether,
just a few seconds before his voice was heard shouting from the arched
window to know which way the light had gone.
This lighting up of the great chamber of the Bell Tower grew at last to
be of frequent and almost continual recurrence. It was, there, long ago,
in times of trouble and danger, that the De Lacys of those evil days
used to sit in feudal judgment upon captive adversaries, and, as
tradition alleged, often gave them no more time for shrift and prayer,
than it needed to mount to the battlement of the turret over-head, from
which they were forthwith hung by the necks, for a caveat and admonition
to all evil disposed persons viewing the same from the country beneath.
Old Laurence observed these mysterious glimmerings with an evil and an
anxious eye, and many and various were the stratagems he tried, but in
vain, to surprise the audacious intruders. It is, however, I believe, a
fact that no phenomenon, no matter how startling at first, if prosecuted
with tolerable regularity, and unattended with any new circumstances of
terror, will very long continue to excite alarm or even wonder.
So the family came to acquiesce in this mysterious light. No harm
accompanied it. Old Laurence, as he smoked his lonely pipe in the
grass-grown courtyard, would cast a disturbed glance at it, as it softly
glowed out through the darking aperture, and mutter a prayer or an oath.
But he had given over the chase as a hopeless business. And Peggy
Sullivan, the old dame of all work, when, by chance, for she never
willingly looked toward the haunted quarter, she caught the faint
reflection of its dull effulgence with the corner of her eye, would sign
herself with the cross or fumble at her beads, and deeper furrows would
gather in her forehead, and her face grow ashen and perturbed. And this
was not mended by the levity with which the young ladies, with whom the
spectre had lost his influence, familiarity, as usual, breeding
contempt, had come to talk, and even to jest, about it.