The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English
General
The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction; Ghost stories
Equally mysterious it seemed, that about this time Miss Liebenheim
began to receive anonymous letters, written in the darkest and most
menacing terms. Some of them she showed to me. I could not guess
at their drift. Evidently they glanced at Maximilian, and bade her
beware of connection with him; and dreadful things were insinuated
about him. Could these letters be written by Ferdinand? Written
they were not, but could they be dictated by him? Much I feared
that they were; and the more so for one reason.
All at once, and most inexplicably, Margaret's grandfather showed a
total change of opinion in his views as to her marriage. Instead
of favoring Harrelstein's pretensions, as he had hitherto done, he
now threw the feeble weight of his encouragement into Maximilian's
scale; though, from the situation of all the parties, nobody
attached any PRACTICAL importance to the change in Mr. Liebenheim's
way of thinking. Nobody? Is that true? No; one person DID attach
the greatest weight to the change--poor, ruined Ferdinand. He, so
long as there was one person to take his part, so long as the
grandfather of Margaret showed countenance to himself, had still
felt his situation not utterly desperate.
Thus were things situated, when in November, all the leaves daily
blowing off from the woods, and leaving bare the most secret haunts
of the thickets, the body of the jailer was left exposed in the
forest; but not, as I and my friend had conjectured, hanged. No;
he had died apparently by a more horrid death--by that of
crucifixion. The tree, a remarkable one, bore upon a part of its
trunk this brief but savage inscription:--"T. H., jailer at -----;
Crucified July 1, 1816."
A great deal of talk went on throughout the city upon this
discovery; nobody uttered one word of regret on account of the
wretched jailer; on the contrary, the voice of vengeance, rising up
in many a cottage, reached my ears in every direction as I walked
abroad. The hatred in itself seemed horrid and unchristian, and
still more so after the man's death; but, though horrid and
fiendish for itself, it was much more impressive, considered as the
measure and exponent of the damnable oppression which must have
existed to produce it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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