Great Britain -- History -- Civil War, 1642-1649 -- Fiction
I have already mentioned that one peculiarity of Raglan was a distinct
moat surrounding its keep. Immediately from the outer end of the
archway, a Gothic bridge of stone led across this thirty-foot moat to a
narrow walk which encompassed the tower. The walk was itself encompassed
and divided from the moat by a wall with six turrets at equal distances,
surmounted by battlements. At one time the sole entrance to the tower
had been by a drawbridge dropping across the walk to the end of the
stone bridge, from an arched door in the wall, whose threshold was some
ten or twelve feet from the ground; but another entrance had since been
made on the level of the walk, and by it the two ladies now entered.
Passing the foot of a great stone staircase, they came to the door of
what had, before the opening of the lower entrance, been a vaulted
cellar, probably at one time a dungeon, at a later period a place of
storage, but now put to a very different use, and wearing a stranger
aspect than it could ever have borne at any past period of its story--a
look indeed of mystery inexplicable.
When Dorothy entered she found herself in a large place, the form of
which she could ill distinguish in the dull light proceeding from the
chinks about the closed doors of a huge furnace. The air was filled with
gurglings and strange low groanings, as of some creature in dire pain.
Dorothy had as good nerves as ever woman, yet she could not help some
fright as she stood alone by the door and stared into the gloomy
twilight into which her companion had advanced. As her eyes became used
to the ruddy dusk, she could see better, but everywhere they lighted on
shapes inexplicable, whose forms to the first questioning thought
suggested instruments of torture; but cruel as some of them looked, they
were almost too strange, contorted, fantastical for such. Still, the
wood-cuts in a certain book she had been familiar with in childhood,
commonly called Fox's Book of Martyrs, kept haunting her mind's eye--and
were they not Papists into whose hands she had fallen? she said to
herself, amused at the vagaries of her own involuntary suggestions.
Among the rest, one thing specially caught her attention, both from its
size and its complicated strangeness. It was a huge wheel standing near
the wall, supported between two strong uprights--some twelve or fifteen
feet in diameter, with about fifty spokes, from every one of which hung
a large weight. Its grotesque and threatful character was greatly
increased by the mingling of its one substance with its many shadows on
the wall behind it. So intent was she upon it that she started when lady
Margaret spoke.
'Why, mistress Dorothy!' she said, 'you look as if you had wandered into
St. Anthony's cave! Here is my lord Herbert to welcome his cousin.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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