22. CHAPTER TWENTY-SECOND.
THE IRON ROOM.
Charles Lester, unconscious of threatened
evil, passed through the narrow doorway, and
surveyed the place, which was disclosed in all
its details, by the light of his candle.
It was a room or closet not more than six
feet square. The walls, the ceiling and the
floor were formed by solid panels or plates of
iron. There was no window in these iron
walls; no other entrance to the closet, than the
doorway through which Charles had passed.
“It looks like a coffin,” said Charles with a
smile, as the flame of his upraised candle, well-nigh
touched the ceiling: “It was doubtless
built into the thick walls, long ago, as a place
of safety for title deeds and gold. But now,
there is nothing in the place that I can see,
neither chest nor money-bag. Not even a
window — yes! upon my word there
is an aperture near the ceiling, about a foot
square. Does it open in the neighboring closet
Goodleigh?”
He turned on his heel, surprised by the silence
of Goodleigh, and beheld — with what
emotions you may imagine — that not only
Goodleigh, but also, the secret door had disappeared.
The wall before his gaze was composed
of iron panels of equal dimensions,
reaching from the iron ceiling to the iron floor,
but all traces of the secret passage had been
suddenly obliterated.
Charles slowly paced the narrow space, in
which he found himself a prisoner, examining
with a careful scrutiny every point of the iron
panels, every foot of the iron floor. The only
opening in the walls — that aperture twelve
inches square, in one corner, and near the
ceiling — did not escape his observation.
“What does Goodleigh mean? To make
me a prisoner in this closet? The idea seems
incredible, and yet the man is capable of almost
anything in the form of treachery.”
He soon became conscious that the candle
which he held, began to loose the brightness of
its rays, burning dim and faint, as with the
pressure of a confined and unwholesome atmosphere.
And then his chest began to heave and
swell, and an uneasy sensation agitated the
muscles of his throat.
He cast an affrighted glance over the sombre
walls which enclosed him, above, around, and
below, as a coffin shuts in the dead.
He beat his clenched hand against the panels,
seeking with a pallid cheek and brightening
eye, the spring or lock which commanded the
secret door. Holding the light in one hand,
he thrust the other through the square aperture
near the ceiling, but it encountered nothing
but the air. All his exertions to discover a
mode of egress from this “vault above ground,”
were in vain. The air became more dense
and difficult to breathe. The light, every
instant, burned with a fainter lustre. Charles
Lester, imprisoned within these iron walls,
felt a chill creep through every vein, while his
brain swam, as in a deadly vertigo.
“Goodleigh! Goodleigh!” he shouted, but
the iron ceiling flung back his voice without an
echo. “Goodleigh! Release me, and I promise
eternal silence.”
He spoke with difficulty. There was, of
course, no answer to his frenzied exclamations.
“Death in any form but this,” he gasped,
“But here it seems I am buried alive. And
while I am dying here, the poor girl, perchance
in the next room, is listening to the voice of
Edmund Jervis — listening to the voice, which
once spoke Ellen's death-sentence, and which
never speaks, save to betray!”
Let us draw the veil over the mental agonies
of the imprisoned man.
No words can depict the horror which palsied
his soul while an hour passed away.
At the end of the hour, behold him, prostrate
on the iron floor, his eyes feverish with
despair, uplifted to the solitary aperture near
the ceiling.
Near his arm stood the candle, its pale light
illumining with but a faint glare the surface
of the iron panels.
Was it the sound of human voices, that
reached the ears of the bewildered man?
Voices, heard through the aperture, and broken
in their distinctness by walls of brick and
stone? Was it the voice of Fanny, or the
accents of the Preacher, which came faint
and murmuring to the leaden ear of Charles
Lester?
Even as he listened, his consciousness slowly
faded from him. He sank on his back, with
his hands outspread, and his face toward the
ceiling. The dim light glowed faintly upon
his pale face, and tinted with faint color the
masses of his dark brown hair. Overpowered
as much by the disease, which had for months
been slowly working at his heart-strings, as by
the confined atmosphere of the Iron Room,
Charles Lester has laid himself down to die.
That disease, solely the result of long continued
mental anguish, defies all medical analysis.
It kills its victim by slow degrees. What
Physicians call it, I cannot tell; but to me it
seems to be only the destruction of the body,
by the silent action of the soul. The soul, by
its will, desires to surrender to earth, its earthborn
organization. It wishes to be free: sick
of earth, it pants for the pure air of a Better
World.
And brave Charles Lester, whose life has
been wrecked in its youth of hope, by the
deliberate crime of a consecrated Minister, has
laid himself down to die. His lip moves, his
eyes unclose, his hand is stretched forth toward
the light, and then he is motionless as stone.
The candle sheds only a feeble and dying
ray.
Meanwhile, in the next room the Preacher
is alone with the daughter of Alice Bayne.
Not in the room through which Lester reached
the closet of Iron. But in the chamber which
lies beyond yonder the aperture in the panels.
That aperture opens into a closet, and beyond
the closet, lies the room which we are about to
enter.
While Charles Lester is dying, let us slowly
lift the curtain from one of the most glorious
scenes in the Preacher's life.
