Emily, attended by Annette, continued at the casement, for some time,
but all remained still; they heard neither lute or voice again, and
Emily was now as much oppressed by anxious joy, as she lately was by a
sense of her misfortunes. With hasty steps she paced the room, now half
calling on Valancourt's name, then suddenly stopping, and now going to
the casement and listening, where, however, she heard nothing but
the solemn waving of the woods. Sometimes her impatience to speak to
Ludovico prompted her to send Annette to call him; but a sense of the
impropriety of this at midnight restrained her. Annette, meanwhile, as
impatient as her mistress, went as often to the casement to listen, and
returned almost as much disappointed. She, at length, mentioned
Signor Verezzi, and her fear, lest he should enter the chamber by the
staircase, door. 'But the night is now almost past, Mademoiselle,' said
she, recollecting herself; 'there is the morning light, beginning to
peep over those mountains yonder in the east.'
Emily had forgotten, till this moment, that such a person existed as
Verezzi, and all the danger that had appeared to threaten her; but the
mention of his name renewed her alarm, and she remembered the old chest,
that she had wished to place against the door, which she now, with
Annette, attempted to move, but it was so heavy, that they could not
lift it from the floor. 'What is in this great old chest, Mademoiselle,'
said Annette, 'that makes it so weighty?' Emily having replied, 'that
she found it in the chamber, when she first came to the castle, and had
never examined it.'--
'Then I will, ma'amselle,' said Annette, and she
tried to lift the lid; but this was held by a lock, for which she had
no key, and which, indeed, appeared, from its peculiar construction, to
open with a spring. The morning now glimmered through the casements, and
the wind had sunk into a calm. Emily looked out upon the dusky woods,
and on the twilight mountains, just stealing in the eye, and saw the
whole scene, after the storm, lying in profound stillness, the woods
motionless, and the clouds above, through which the dawn trembled,
scarcely appearing to move along the heavens. One soldier was pacing the
terrace beneath, with measured steps; and two, more distant, were sunk
asleep on the walls, wearied with the night's watch. Having inhaled, for
a while, the pure spirit of the air, and of vegetation, which the late
rains had called forth; and having listened, once more, for a note of
music, she now closed the casement, and retired to rest.