For so
long it was to him like a page in a book of horrors: to go to the
other end of it, and in particular to approach the heavily
curtained bed, was more than he cared to do without cogent reason.
At the same time he rejoiced to think there was such a room in the
house, and attached to it an idea of measureless value--almost as
if it had a mysterious window that looked out upon the infinite.
The cause of this feeling was not to himself traceable. Until old
Grannie's story, he had heard no tale concerning it that he
remembered: he may have heard hints--a word dropped may have made
its impression, and roused fancies outlasting the memory of their
origin; for feelings, like memories of scents and sounds, remain,
when the related facts have vanished. What it was about the room
that scared him, he could not tell, but the scare was there. With a
companion like Aggie, however, even after hearing Grannie's
terrible reminiscence, he was able to be in the room without
experiencing worse than that same milder, almost pleasant degree of
dread, caused by the mere looking through the door into the strange
brooding silence of the place. But, I must confess, this applies
only to the space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed
itself--not to mention the shadowy region beyond it--on which the
body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of
the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness
of the fact, and of the feeling it caused in the beholder.
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