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Chapter XXXI
With steps more faltering and unsteady than those with which she
had approached the room, the child withdrew from the door, and
groped her way back to her own chamber. The terror she had lately
felt was nothing compared with that which now oppressed her. No
strange robber, no treacherous host conniving at the plunder of his
guests, or stealing to their beds to kill them in their sleep, no nightly
prowler, however terrible and cruel, could have awakened in her
bosom half the dread which the recognition of her silent visitor
inspired. The grey-headed old man gliding like a ghost into her room
and acting the thief while he supposed her fast asleep, then bearing
off his prize and hanging over it with the ghastly exultation she had
witnessed, was worse - immeasurably worse, and far more dreadful,
for the moment, to reflect upon - than anything her wildest fancy
could have suggested. If he should return - there was no lock or bolt
upon the door, and if, distrustful of having left some money yet
behind, he should come back to seek for more - a vague awe and
horror surrounded the idea of his slinking in again with stealthy
tread, and turning his face toward the empty bed, while she shrank
down close at his feet to avoid his touch, which was almost
insupportable. She sat and listened. Hark! A footstep on the stairs,
and now the door was slowly opening. It was but imagination, yet
imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the
reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in
imagination it was always coming, and never went away.
The feeling which beset the child was one of dim uncertain horror. She
had no fear of the dear old grandfather, in whose love for her this
disease of the brain had been engendered; but the man she had seen
that night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking in her room, and
counting the money by the glimmering light, seemed like another
creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his image, a
something to recoil from, and be the more afraid of, because it bore a
likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he did. She could
scarcely connect her own affectionate companion, save by his loss,
with this old man, so like yet so unlike him. She had wept to see him
dull and quiet. How much greater cause she had for weeping now!
The child sat watching and thinking of these things, until the
phantom in her mind so increased in gloom and terror, that she felt it
would be a relief to hear the old man's voice, or, if he were asleep,
even to see him, and banish some of the fears that clustered round his
image. She stole down the stairs and passage again. The door was still
ajar as she had left it, and the candle burning as before.
She had her own candle in her hand, prepared to say, if he were
waking, that she was uneasy and could not rest, and had come to see
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