On every side the aspect was the same,
All ruined, desolate, forlorn and savage,
No hand or foot within the precinct came
To rectify or ravage!
Here Echo never mocked the human tongue;
Some weighty crime that Heaven could not pardon.
A secret curse on that old Building hung
And its deserted garden!
—Hood's Haunted House.
Cap was a bit of a Don Quixote! The stirring incidents of the last few months had spoiled her; the monotony of the last few weeks had bored her; and now she had just rode out in quest of adventures.
The Old Hidden House, with its mysterious traditions, its gloomy surroundings and its haunted reputation, had always possessed a powerful attraction for one of Cap's adventurous spirit. To seek and gaze upon the somber house, of which, and of whose inmates, such terrible stories had been told or hinted, had always been a secret desire and purpose of Capitola.
And now the presence there of a beautiful girl near her own age was the one last item that tipped the balance, making the temptation to ride thither outweigh every other consideration of duty, prudence and safety. And having once started on the adventure, Cap felt the attraction drawing her toward the frightful hollow of the Hidden House growing stronger with every step taken thitherward.
She reached the banks of the "Demon's Run" and took the left-hand road down the stream until she reached the left point of the Horse-Shoe Mountain, and then going up around the point, she kept close under the back of the range until she had got immediately in the rear of the round bend of the "Horse Shoe," behind Hurricane Hall.
"Well," said Cap, as she drew rein here, and looked up at the lofty ascent of gray rocks that concealed Hurricane Hall, "to have had to come such a circuit around the outside of the 'Horse Shoe,' to find myself just at the back of our old house, and no farther from home than this! There's as many doubles and twists in these mountains as there are in a lawyer's discourse! There, Gyp, you needn't turn back again and pull at the bridle, to tell me that there is a storm coming up and that you want to go home! I have no more respect for your opinion than I have for Mrs. Condiment's. Besides, you carry a damsel-errant in quest of adventures, Gyp, and so you must on, Gyp—you must on!" said Capitola, forcibly pulling her horse's head around, and then taking a survey of the downward path.
It was a scene fascinating from its very excess of gloom and terror!
It was a valley so deep and dark as to merit the name of the hollow, or hole, but for its great extent and its thick growth of forest, through which spectral-looking rocks gleamed, and moaning waters could be heard but not seen.
"Now, somewhere in that thick forest, in the bottom of that vale, stands the house—well called the Hidden House, since not a chimney of it can be seen even from this commanding height! But I suppose this path that leads down into the valley may conduct me to the building! Come along, Gyp! You needn't turn up your head and pull at the bit! You've got to go! I am bound this night to see the outside of the Hidden House, and the window of the haunted chamber at the very least!" said Cap, throwing her eyes up defiantly toward the darkening sky, and putting whip to her unwilling horse.
As the path wound down into the valley the woods were found deeper, thicker and darker. It occupied all Cap's faculties to push her way through the overhanging and interlacing branches of the trees.
"Good gracious," she said, as she used her left arm rather vigorously to push aside the obstructions to her path, "one would think this were the enchanted forest containing the castle of the sleeping beauty, and I was the knight destined to deliver her! I'm sure it wouldn't have been more difficult."
Still deeper fell the path, thicker grew the forest and darker the way.
"Gyp, I'm under the impression that we shall have to turn back yet!" said Cap, dolefully stopping in the midst of a thicket so dense that it completely blockaded her farther progress in the same direction. Just as she came to this very disagreeable conclusion she spied an opening on her left, from which a bridle-path struck out. With an exclamation of joy she immediately turned her horse's head and struck into it. This path was very rocky, but in some degree clearer than the other, and she went on quickly, singing to herself, until gradually her voice began to be lost in the sound of many rushing waters.
"It must be the Devil's Punch Bowl! I am approaching!" she said to herself, as she went on.
She was right. The roaring of the waters grew deafening and the path became so rugged with jagged and irregularly piled rocks, that Cap could scarcely keep her horse upon his feet in climbing over them. And suddenly, when she least looked for it, the great natural curiosity—the Devil's Punch Bowl—burst upon her view!
It was an awful abyss, scooped out as it were from the very bowels of the earth, with its steep sides rent open in dreadful chasms, and far down in its fearful depths a boiling whirlpool of black waters.
Urging her reluctant steed through a thicket of stunted thorns and over a chaos of shattered rocks, Capitola approached as near as she safely could to the brink of this awful pit. So absorbed was she in gazing upon this terrible phenomenon of natural scenery that she had not noticed, in the thicket on her right, a low hut that, with its brown-green moldering colors, fell so naturally in with the hue of the surrounding scenery as easily to escape observation. She did not even observe that the sky was entirely overcast, and the thunder was muttering in the distance. She was aroused from her profound reverie by a voice near her asking:
"Who are you, that dares to come without a guide to the Devil's Punch Bowl?"
Capitola looked around and came nearer screaming than she ever had been in her life, upon seeing the apparition that stood before her. Was it man, woman, beast or demon? She could not tell! It was a very tall, spare form, with a black cloth petticoat tied around the waist, a blue coat buttoned over the breast, and a black felt hat tied down with a red handkerchief, shading the darkest old face she had ever seen in her life.
"Who are you, I say, who comes to the Devil's Punch Bowl without leave or license?" repeated the frightful creature, shifting her cane from one hand to the other.
"I? I am Capitola Black, from Hurricane Hall; but who, in the name of all the fates and furies, are you?" inquired Capitola, who, in getting over the shock, had recovered her courage.
"I am Harriet the Seeress of Hidden Hollow!" replied the apparition, in a melodramatic manner that would not have discredited the queen of tragedy herself. "You have heard of me?"
"Yes, but I always heard you called Old Hat, the Witch," said Cap.
"The world is profane—give me your hand!" said the beldame, reaching out her own to take that of Capitola.
"Stop! Is your hand clean? It looks very black!"
"Cleaner than yours will be when it is stained with blood, young maiden!"
"Tut! If you insist on telling my fortune, tell me a pleasant one, and I will pay you double," laughed Capitola.
"The fates are not to be mocked. Your destiny will be that which the stars decree. To prove to you that I know this, I tell you that you are not what you have been!"
"You've hit it this time, old lady, for I was a baby once and now I am a young girl!" said Cap, laughing.
"You will not continue to be that which you are now!" pursued the hag, still attentively reading the lines of her subject's hand.
"Right again; for if I live long enough I shall be an old woman."
"You bear a name that you will not bear long!"
"I think that quite a safe prophecy, as I haven't the most distant idea of being an old maid!"
"This little hand of yours—this dainty woman's hand—will be—red with blood!"
"Now, do you know, I don't doubt that either? I believe it altogether probable that I shall have to cook my husband's dinner and kill the chickens for his soup!"
"Girl, beware! You deride the holy stars—and already they are adverse to you!" said the hag, with a threatening glare.
"Ha, ha, ha! I love the beautiful stars but did not fear them I fear only Him who made the stars!"
"Poor butterfly, listen and beware! You are destined to imbrue that little hand in the life current of one who loves you the most of all on earth! You are destined to rise by the destruction of one who would shed his heart's best blood for you!" said the beldame, in an awful voice.
Capitola's eyes flashed! She advanced her horse a step or two nearer the witch and raised her riding whip, saying:
"I protest! If you were only a man I should lay this ash over your wicked shoulders until my arms ached! How dare you? Faith, I don't wonder that in the honest old times such pests as you were cooled in the ducking pond! Good gracious, that must have made a hissing and spluttering in the water, though!"
"Blasphemer, pay me and begone!"
"Pay you? I tell you I would if you were only a man; but it would be sinful to pay a wretched old witch in the only way you deserve to be paid!" said Cap, flourishing her riding whip before a creature tall enough and strong enough to have doubled up her slight form together and hurled it into the abyss.
"Gold! gold!" said the hag curtly, holding out black and talon-like fingers, which she worked convulsively.
"Gold! gold, indeed! for such a wicked fortune! Not a penny!" said Cap.
"Ho! you're stingy; you do not like to part with the yellow demon that has bought the souls of all your house!"
"Don't I? You shall see! There! If you want gold, go fish it from the depth of the whirlpool," said Cap, taking her purse and casting it over the precipice.
This exasperated the crone to frenzy.
"Away! Begone!" she cried, shaking her long arm at the girl. "Away! Begone! The fate pursues you! The badge of blood is stamped upon your palm!"
"Fee—faw—fum" said Cap.
"Scorner! Beware! The curse of the crimson hand is upon you!"
—"'I smell the blood of an Englishman'"—continued Cap.
"Derider of the fates, you are foredoomed to crime!"
—"'Be he alive or be he dead, I'll have his brains to butter my bread!'" concluded Cap.
"Be silent!" shrieked the beldame.
"I won't!" said Cap. "Because you see, if we are in for the horrible, I can beat you hollow at that!"
"'Avaunt! and quit my sight!
Let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless! Thy blood is cold!
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with?'"
"Begone! You're doomed! doomed! doomed!" shrieked the witch, retreating into her hut.
Cap laughed and stroked the neck of her horse, saying:
"Gyp, my son, that was old Nick's wife, who was with us just this instant, and now, indeed, Gyp, if we are to see the Hidden House this afternoon, we must get on!"
And so saying she followed the path that wound half-way around the Punch Bowl and then along the side of a little mountain torrent called the Spout, which, rising in an opposite mountain, leaped from rock to rock, with many a sinuous turn, as it wound through the thicket that immediately surrounded the Hidden House until it finally jetted through a subterranean channel into the Devil's Punch Bowl.
Capitola was now, unconsciously, upon the very spot, where, seventeen years before, the old nurse had been forcibly stopped and compelled to attend the unknown lady.
As Capitola pursued the path that wound lower and lower into the dark valley the gloom of the thicket deepened. Her thoughts ran on all the horrible traditions connected with the Hidden House and Hollow—the murder and robbery of the poor peddler—the mysterious assassination of Eugene Le Noir; the sudden disappearance of his youthful widow; the strange sights and sounds reported to be heard and seen about the mansion; the spectral light at the upper gable window; the white form seen flitting through the chamber; the pale lady that in the dead of night drew the curtains of a guest that once had slept there; and above all Capitola thought of the beautiful, strange girl, who was now an inmate of that sinful and accursed house! And while these thoughts absorbed her mind, suddenly, in a turning of the path, she came full upon the gloomy building.
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