But still the Bloody Hand shone strangely out
With vehemence of color.
The Bloody Hand that with a lurid stain
Shone on the dusty floor, a dismal token,
Projected from the casement's painted pane,
Where all beside was broken,
The Bloody Hand, significant of crime,
That, glaring on the old heraldic banner,
Had kept its crimson unimpaired by time,
In such a wondrous manner.
O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear,
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted!
The death-watch ticked behind the panelled oak,
Inexplicable tremors shook the arras,
And echoes strange and mystical awoke,
The fancy to embarrass,
Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread,
But through one gloomy entrance pointing mostly, The while some secret inspiration said,
That chamber is the ghostly!
Across the door no gossamer festoon
Swung pendulous, no web, no dusty fringes,
No silky chrysalis or white cocoon
About its nooks and hinges.
The spider shunned the interdicted room,
The moth, the beetle, and the fly were banished, And where the sunbeam fell athwart the gloom The very midge had vanished.
One lonely ray that glanced upon a bed,
As if with awful aim direct and certain,
To show the Bloody Hand in burning red
Embroidered on the curtain.
And yet no gory stain was on the quilt;
The pillow in its place had slowly rotted;
The floor alone retained the trace of guilt,
Those boards obscurely spotted,
Obscurely spotted to the door, and thence,
With mazy doubles, to the grated casement, -
O, what a tale they told of fear intense,
Of horror and amazement !
What human creature in the dead of night
Had coursed like hunted hare that cruel distance? Had sought the door, the window, in his flight, Striving for dear existence?
What shrieking spirit in that bloody room
Its mortal frame had violently quitted? -
Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom,
A ghostly shadow flitted,
Across the sunbeam, and along the wall,
But painted on the air so very dimly
It hardly veiled the tapestry at all,
Or portrait frowning grimly.
O'er all there hung the shadow of a fear, A sense of mystery the spirit daunted, And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is haunted!
N half-forgotten days of old,
As by our fathers we were told,
Within the town of Rome there stood
An image cut of cornel-wood,
And on the upraised hand of it
Men might behold these letters writ:
PERCUTE HIC," - which is to say,
In that tongue that we speak to-day,
Strike here! nor yet did any know
The cause why this was written so.
Thus in the middle of the square,
In the hot sun and summer air,
The snow-drift and the driving rain,
That image stood, with little pain,
For twice a hundred years and ten;
While many a band of striving men
Were driven betwixt woe and mirth
Swiftly across the weary earth,
From nothing unto dark nothing;
And many an emperor and king,
Passing with glory or with shame,
Left little record of his name,
And no remembrance of the face
Once watched with awe for gifts or grace.
Fear little, then, I counsel you,
What any son of man can do ;
Because a log of wood will last
While many a life of man goes past,
And all is over in short space.
Now so it chanced that to this place
There came a man of Sicily,
Who, when the image he did see,
Knew full well who, in days of yore,
Had set it there; for much strange lore,
In Egypt and in Babylon,
This man with painful toil had won;
And many secret things could do;
So verily full well he knew
That master of all sorcery
Who wrought the thing in days gone by,
And doubted not that some great spell
It guarded, but could nowise tell
What it might be. So, day by day,
Still would he loiter on the way,
And watch the image carefully,
Well mocked of many a passer-by.
And on a day he stood and gazed
Upon the slender finger, raised
Against a doubtful cloudy sky,
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