The Haunted Hotel quotes

Neither her language nor her action had the slightest effect in inclining him to grant her request. The influence that instantly stopped him, on the way to his carriage, was the silent influence of her face.

The startling contrast between the corpse-like pallor of her complexion and the overpowering life and light, the glittering metallic brightness in her large black eyes, held him literally spellbound.

She was dressed in dark colours, with perfect taste; she was of middle height, and (apparently) of middle age—say a year or two over thirty.

She perceived that she had produced a strong impression of some kind upon him, and dropped her hold on his arm.

“You have comforted many miserable women in your time,” she said. “Comfort one more, today.”

Without waiting to be answered, she led the way back into the room.

Her eyes travelled slowly from the window to the doctor’s face. Without the slightest outward appearance of agitation, she put the “painful question” in these extraordinary words:

“I want to know, if you please, whether I am in danger of going mad?”

Some men might have been amused, and some might have been alarmed. Doctor Wybrow was only conscious of a sense of disappointment. Was this the rare case that he had anticipated, judging rashly by appearances?

After a moment’s hesitation he said, “No: I shall dine at the club.”

The most easily deteriorated of all the moral qualities is the quality called “conscience.”

In one state of a man’s mind, his conscience is the severest judge that can pass sentence on him. In another state, he and his conscience are on the best possible terms with each other in the comfortable capacity of accomplices.

He heard her say to her husband, “One moment; I see a friend.” Lord Montbarry bowed and waited. She stepped up to the doctor, took his hand, and wrung it hard. He felt her overpowering black eyes looking at him through her veil.

“One step more, you see, on the way to the end!”

She whispered those strange words, and returned to her husband. Before the doctor could recover himself and follow her, Lord and Lady Montbarry had stepped into their carriage, and had driven away.

Left alone for a few moments, Agnes took a turn in the room, trying to compose herself. She paused before a little watercolour drawing on the wall, which had belonged to her mother: it was her own portrait when she was a child.

“How much happier we should be,” she thought to herself sadly, “if we never grew up!”

The courier’s wife was shown in—a little meek melancholy woman, with white eyelashes, and watery eyes, who curtseyed deferentially and was troubled with a small chronic cough. Agnes shook hands with her kindly. “Well, Emily, what can I do for you?”

The maid vanished. Lady Montbarry surveyed herself in the glass, and wheeled round again, with her catlike suddenness, to Mrs. Ferrari.

“I look more than half dead already, don’t I?” she said with a grim outburst of irony.

“Give me your arm.”

(Agnes instantly looked up, interested in the matter for the first time. Henry went on.) “His will leaves legacies to the surviving old servants of the family. There is a letter from his lawyers, authorising you to apply to them for the money.”

In every class of society, gratitude is the rarest of all human virtues.

In the nurse’s class it is extremely rare. Her opinion of the man who had deceived and deserted her mistress remained the same opinion still, perfectly undisturbed by the passing circumstance of the legacy.

Big bushy eyebrows, an awfully deep and solemn voice, a harsh unbending manner, a complete absence in her figure of the undulating lines characteristic of the sex, presented Virtue in this excellent person under its least alluring aspect.

Strangers, on a first introduction to her, were accustomed to wonder why she was not a man.

“Are you pretty well, Mrs. Rolland?”

Mrs. Rolland suddenly opened her eyes again. “I speak harshly of nobody without reason,” she said. “Mr. Ferrari behaved to me, Miss Lockwood, as no man living has ever behaved—before or since.”

Mrs. Rolland answered, with a stony stare of horror:⁠—“He took liberties with me.”

Young Lady Montbarry suddenly turned aside, and put her handkerchief over her mouth in convulsions of suppressed laughter.

When his brother and sister first told him what their experience had been, he instantly declared that he would go to Venice in the interest of his theatre. The circumstances related to him contained invaluable hints for a ghost-drama.

The title occurred to him in the railway: “The Haunted Hotel.”

Post that in red letters six feet high, on a black ground, all over London—and trust the excitable public to crowd into the theatre!

“What does all this matter to me?” Francis thought to himself. She paused, evidently expecting him to say something. “So you have come to Venice?” he said carelessly. “Why?”

“Because I couldn’t help it,” she answered.

Francis looked at her with cynical curiosity. “That sounds odd,” he remarked. “Why couldn’t you help it?”

“I never saw the old church look so beautiful by moonlight,” the Countess said quietly; speaking, not to Francis, but to herself.

“Goodbye, St. Mark’s by moonlight! I shall not see you again.”

She turned away from the church, and saw Francis listening to her with wondering looks.

She abruptly pulled down her veil. “Destiny may do that yet!” she said. “The Palace Hotel?” she repeated, speaking once more to herself.

“The old hell, transformed into the new purgatory. The place itself! Jesu Maria! the place itself!”

She paused and laid her hand on her companion’s arm. “Perhaps Miss Lockwood is not going there with the rest of you?” she burst out with sudden eagerness. “Are you positively sure she will be at the hotel?”

Now and then, the nearer dip of an oar in the water told of the viewless passage of other gondolas bringing guests back to the hotel.

Excepting these rare sounds, the mysterious night-silence of Venice was literally the silence of the grave.

Leaning on the parapet of the balcony, Agnes looked vacantly into the black void beneath. Her thoughts reverted to the miserable man who had broken his pledged faith to her, and who had died in that house.

Abruptly closing the window, she threw aside her shawl, and lit the candles on the mantelpiece, impelled by a sudden craving for light in the solitude of her room.

The cheering brightness round her, contrasting with the black gloom outside, restored her spirits. She felt herself enjoying the light like a child!

Would it be well (she asked herself) to get ready for bed? No! The sense of drowsy fatigue that she had felt half an hour since was gone. She returned to the dull employment of unpacking her boxes.

Suddenly conscious of this bold question, and of the self-abandonment which it implied, she returned mechanically to her book, distrusting the unrestrained liberty of her own thoughts.

What lurking temptations to forbidden tenderness find their hiding-places in a woman’s dressing-gown, when she is alone in her room at night!

With her heart in the tomb of the dead Montbarry, could Agnes even think of another man, and think of love? How shameful! how unworthy of her! For the second time, she tried to interest herself in the guidebook—and once more she tried in vain.

As the welcome light diffused itself over the room, she turned from the table and looked towards the other side of the bed.

In the moment when she turned, the chill of a sudden terror gripped her round the heart, as with the clasp of an icy hand.

She was not alone in her room!

She had seen another intruder in her room.

Midway between her face and the ceiling, there hovered a human head⁠—severed at the neck, like a head struck from the body by the guillotine.

Nothing visible, nothing audible, had given her any intelligible warning of its appearance. Silently and suddenly, the head had taken its place above her. No supernatural change had passed over the room, or was perceptible in it now. The dumbly-tortured figure in the chair;

‘If you have a third attack of bronchitis, as certainly as two and two make four, you will be a dead man. I feel the same inward shivering, my Lady, that I felt on those two former occasions—and I tell you again,

I have caught my death in Venice.

’

Looking at the writing-table as he went out, Henry saw the sheet of paper on which the Countess had traced her last lines of writing. The characters were almost illegible. Henry could just distinguish the words, “First Act,” and “Persons of the Drama.”

The lost wretch had been thinking of her play to the last, and had begun it all over again!