The Haunted Room: A Tale. A. L. O. E.

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      Emmie sits at the table with her lace-work beside her, but her needle is idle. Bruce, the most actively occupied of the party, is drawing plans of cottages, and jotting down in his note-book estimates of expenses. The captain has a book in his hand, but makes slow progress with its contents. Vibert is glancing over a number of Punch. The party have been for the last ten minutes so silent that the pattering of the November rain on the window-panes is distinctly heard.

      “I hope that we shall not have such weather as this when we go to our new home,” said Vibert, as with a yawn he threw down his paper. “The place will need at least sunshine to make it look a degree more lively than a lunatic asylum. ’Tis lucky that our queer old great-aunt did not take it into her head to paint the house black, inside and outside, and put in her will that it must remain so, as a compliment to her husband, who has been dead for the last fifty years. Fancy bricking up the best bed-room!”

      “Such an act proves that Mrs. Myers was in a very morbid state of mind,” said the captain.

      “What a misfortune!” observed Emmie.

      “Misfortune! I should rather call it weakness—absurdity,” said Bruce, sternly glancing up from his drawing.

      “I should call it a sin, a downright sin,” cried Vibert. “Such a shame it is to make what might have been a jolly country-house into a sort of rural Newgate! I’m afraid that even our best friends will not care to visit us there. Why, I asked pretty little Alice to-day whether she were coming to brighten us up at Christmas, and she actually answered that she was rather afraid of haunted houses, especially on dark winter nights.”

      Bruce smiled a little disdainfully; and the captain suggested that perhaps the fair lady was jesting.

      “Not a bit of it,” answered Vibert; “Alice was as much in earnest as were all our servants when they gave us warning, because not one of them but plucky Susan would go to Myst Court. Why, I’d bet that Emmie herself is shivery-shakery at the idea of the house being haunted, and that she’ll not care to walk at night along the passages lest she should meet some tall figure in white.”

      Emmie coloured, and looked so uncomfortable, that her uncle, who noticed her embarrassment, effected a diversion in her favour by giving a turn to the conversation.

      “I have been tracing a parallel in my mind,” he observed, “between the human soul and the so-called haunted dwelling. Most persons have in the deepest recess of the spiritual man some secret chamber, where prejudice shuts out the light, where self-deception bricks up the door. Into this chamber the possessor himself in some cases never enters to search out and expel the besetting sin, which, unrecognized, perhaps lurks there in the darkness.”

      “You speak of our hearts?” asked Emmie.

      “I do,” replied her uncle. “It is my belief that not one person in ten thousand knows the ins and outs, the dark corners, the hidden chambers, of that which he bears in his own bosom.”

      “Every Christian must,” said Bruce; “for every Christian is bound to practise the duty of self-examination.”

      “I hope that you don’t call every one who does not practise it a heathen or a Turk,” cried Vibert. “All that dreadful hunting up of petty peccadilloes, and confessing a string of them at once, is, at least to my notion, only fit work for hermits and monks!”

      “We are not talking about confession, but simply about self-knowledge,” observed the captain.

      “Oh, where ignorance is bliss,” began Vibert gaily; but his brother cut short the misapplied quotation with the remark, “Ignorance of ourselves must be folly.”

      Vibert took up again the comic paper which he had laid down, and pretended to re-examine the pictures. But for the captain’s presence the youth would have begun to whistle, to show how little he cared for Bruce’s implied rebuke; for, as Vibert had often told Emmie, he had no notion of being “put down” by his brother.

      “Do you think it easy to acquire self-knowledge?” asked Arrows, fixing his penetrating glance upon Bruce, who met it with the calm steadiness which was characteristic of the young man.

      “Like any other kind of knowledge, it requires some study,” replied Bruce Trevor; “but it is not more difficult to acquire than those other kinds of knowledge would be.”

      “In that you come to a different conclusion from that of the writer of this book,” observed Arrows; and he read aloud the following lines from Dr. Goulburn’s “Thoughts on Personal Religion,” the volume which he held in his hand:—

      “‘One of the first properties of the bosom sin with which it behoves us to be well acquainted, as our first step in the management of our spiritual warfare, is its property of concealing itself. In consequence of this property, it often happens that a man, when touched in his weak point, answers that whatever other faults he may have, this fault, at least, is no part of his character.’”

      The captain read the quotation so emphatically that Vibert again threw down his paper, and listened whilst Arrows thus went on:—

      “‘This circumstance, then, may furnish us with a clue to the discovery: of whatever fault you feel that, if accused of it, you would be stung and nettled by the apparent injustice of the charge, suspect yourself of that fault, in that quarter very probably lies the black spot of the bosom sin. If the skin is in any part sensitive to pressure, there is probably mischief below the surface.’”

      “I doubt that the author is right,” observed Bruce. “Besetting sins cannot hide themselves thus from those who honestly search their own hearts.”

      “Perhaps some search all but the haunted chamber,” suggested Vibert. Captain Arrows smiled assent to the observation.

      “By way of throwing light on the question,” said he, “suppose that each of you were to set down in writing what you suppose to be your besetting sin; and that I—who have watched your characters from your childhood—should also put down on paper what I believe to be the bosom temptation of each. Is it likely that your papers and mine would agree; that the same ‘black spot’ would be touched by your hands and mine; that we should point out the same identical fault as the one which most easily and frequently besets the soul of each of you three?”

      “It would be curious to compare the two papers,” cried Vibert. “I wish, captain, that you really would write down what you think of us all. It would be like consulting a phrenological professor, without the need of having a stranger’s fingers reading off our characters from the bumps on our heads.”

      “I am not speaking of the whole character, but of the one sin that most easily besets,” said the captain. “Would a close observer’s view of its nature agree with that held by the person within whose heart it might lurk?”

      “Perhaps not,” said Bruce, after a pause for reflection. “But the person beset by the sin would know more about its existence than the most acute observer, who could judge but by outward signs.”

      “That is the very point on which we differ,” remarked Captain Arrows. “The property of the bosom СКАЧАТЬ