Читать книгу Maid Marian, and Other Stories онлайн

44 страница из 59

"Thank God!" was all Macfarren answered.

ssss1

Do you know the feeling of living in a house pervaded by an unseen presence—a person who has lived there once, and whose spirit seems to dwell there forever afterward? That was what Mrs. Jack Hereford felt when she and her husband took refuge from New York and Newport and Tuxedo at Malvern, the old Virginia plantation, with its tumbledown house, full of rickety furniture, and staring daubs of family portraits in every room in it. The house and everything in it, and six hundred acres of land grown up with pine saplings, had been bought for a song from the heirs of the estate, who had never seen it, and never wanted to see it.

Colonel Baskerville had been the last owner of the place, and he had been dead ten years; also Mrs. Baskerville. And there had been three children—two sons, one of whom was shot dead at Gettysburg, and the other had died of wounds and exposure. The daughter, Amy Baskerville, too, was no more. All this Mrs. Hereford gathered from the one or two persons she had met, and the old doctor who was her nearest and only neighbor.