Romances of the old town of EdinburghLeighton, Alexander
General
Romances of the old town of Edinburgh
Leighton, Alexander
Edinburgh (Scotland) -- Fiction; Short stories, English -- Scottish authors
Morgan’s warehouse, where he stored his wool, entered from a close to
the west, through a pend, between Peddie’s Land and the large tenement
adjoining. The run of the warehouse was thus at right angles to that
of the dwelling-house, and Morgan was thereby enabled to knock out a
small door at the back of a press, through which he could conveniently
pass to his place of business without being at the trouble of going
down the close to the main entry. After Morgan’s death, the house and
warehouse went to his heirs, from whom Halliday rented the former,
the other having been let to some other person for three years, after
which it had been without a tenant. We may state also that Halliday
was at first quite aware of the existence of the door at the back of
the press, and had even taken the precaution of getting it locked; but
as no requisition had been made by the tenant of the warehouse to have
the communication more securely barred, the door had been left in the
condition we have described.
Resuming our story: the servant, when she came to the point where we
left her, stopped and trembled; but by this time Halliday had begun to
see whither these pointings tended, and pushing the girl aside with
a view to examine the door, he was astonished to find that it opened
to his touch--a fact better known by Nettle, his dog, who had, as the
shoes testified, been there before.
On entering the warehouse, all the windows of which were shut except
one, through which a ray of light struggled to illuminate merely a
part of the room, the party beheld a sight which in all likelihood
would retain a vividness in their memories after all other images of
earthly things had passed away. Right in the middle of the partial
light admitted by the solitary window lay the bodies of two persons--a
man and a woman. The latter had on her a yellow morning gown trimmed
with green. One slipper was on, the other off; her head, which was
uncovered, was surmounted by the high toupee of the times, which
consisted of the collected hair brushed up and supported by a concealed
cushion. The man had on a morning dress, with a round felt hat, which
still retained its place on his head. There was no corruption in the
bodies of that kind called moist. They were nearly shrivelled, but that
to an extent which reduced them to little other than skeletons covered
with a brown skin--a state of the bodies which probably resulted
from the dry air of the wareroom, heated as it was by a smithy being
immediately below it, the smoke of which was conveyed by a flue up the
side of the tenement. The two bodies lay clasped in each other’s arms,
the faces were so close that the noses almost met; the eyes were open,
and though the balls were shrunk so much that they could not be seen,
the lids, which had shrunk also, were considerably apart. These were
the bodies of Julia Halliday and Archibald Blair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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