Glancing in the
direction of the noise, she saw, looking at her, two eyes--two
obliquely set, lurid, light eyes, full of the utmost devilry. Sick
with terror and utterly unable to account for what she beheld, she
stood stock-still, her limbs refusing to move, her throat parched, her
tongue tied. The clanging was repeated, and a shadowy form began
slowly to crawl towards her. She dared not afterwards surmise what
would have happened to her, had not the Laird himself come down at
this moment. At the sound of his stentorian voice the phantasm
vanished. But the shock had been too much for Letty; she fainted, and
the Admiral, carrying her upstairs as carefully as if she had been his
own daughter, gave peremptory orders that she should never again be
allowed to go into the cellar alone.
But now that Letty herself had witnessed a manifestation, the other
servants no longer felt bound to secrecy, and soon poured into her
ears endless accounts of the hauntings.
Every one, they informed her, except Master Gregory and Perkins (the
butler) had seen one or other of the ghosts, and the cellar
apparition was quite familiar to them all. They also declared that
there were other parts of the house quite as badly haunted as the
cellar, and it might have been partly owing to these gruesome stories
that poor Letty always felt scared, when crossing the passages leading
to the attics. As she was hastening down one of them, early one
morning, she heard some one running after her.
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