When twelve months were come and gone since his departure, the earl
one bright morning approached the door of the castle, half doubting,
half believing it his own: he was determined on dismissing the
factor after rigorous examination of his accounts; and he wanted to
see Davie. He had driven to the stables, and thence walked out on
the uppermost terrace, passing the chapel without observing its
unmasked windows. The great door was standing open: he went in, and
up the stair, haunted by sounds of music he had been hearing ever
since he stepped on the terrace.
But on the stair was a door he had never seen! Who dared make
changes in his house? The thing was bewildering! But he was
accustomed to be bewildered.
He opened the door--plainly a new one--and entered a gloomy little
passage, lighted from a small aperture unfit to be called a window.
The under side of the bare steps of a narrow stone stair were above
his head. Had he or had he not ever seen the place before? On the
right was a door. He went to it, opened it, and the hitherto muffled
music burst loud on his ear. He started back in dismal
apprehension:--there was the chapel, wide open to the eye of
day!--clear and clean!--gone the hideous bed! gone the damp and the
dust! while the fresh air trembled with the organ-breath rushing and
rippling through it, and setting it in sweetest turmoil! He had
never had such a peculiar experience! He had often doubted whether
things were or were not projections from his own brain; he moved and
acted in a world of subdued fact and enhanced fiction; he knew that
sometimes he could not tell the one from the other; but never had he
had the apparently real and the actually unreal brought so much face
to face with each other! Everything was as clear to his eyes as in
their prime of vision, and yet there could be no reality in what he
saw!
Ever since he left the castle he had been greatly uncertain whether
the things that seemed to have taken place there, had really taken
place.
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