The Old Stone House and Other Stories

The Old Stone House and Other
Stories, by

Anna Katharine Green
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Title: The Old Stone House and Other Stories
Author: Anna Katharine Green

Release Date: June 13, 2007 [eBook #21824]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE OLD STONE HOUSE AND OTHER STORIES
by
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
Short Story Index Reprint Series

Books for Libraries Press Freeport, New York First Published 1891

CONTENTS.
THE OLD STONE HOUSE
A MEMORABLE NIGHT
THE BLACK CROSS
A MYSTERIOUS CASE
SHALL HE WED HER?

THE OLD STONE HOUSE.
I was riding along one autumn day through a certain wooded portion of
New York State, when I came suddenly upon an old stone house in
which the marks of age were in such startling contrast to its unfinished
condition that I involuntarily stopped my horse and took a long survey
of the lonesome structure. Embowered in a forest which had so grown
in thickness and height since the erection of this building that the
boughs of some of the tallest trees almost met across its decayed roof, it
presented even at first view an appearance of picturesque solitude
almost approaching to desolation. But when my eye had time to note
that the moss was clinging to eaves from under which the scaffolding

had never been taken, and that of the ten large windows in the
blackened front of the house only two had ever been furnished with
frames, the awe of some tragic mystery began to creep over me, and I
sat and wondered at the sight till my increasing interest compelled me
to alight and take a nearer view of the place.
The great front door which had been finished so many years ago, but
which had never been hung, leaned against the side of the house, of
which it had almost become a part, so long had they clung together
amid the drippings of innumerable rains. Close beside it yawned the
entrance, a large black gap through which nearly a century of storms
had rushed with their winds and wet till the lintels were green with
moisture and slippery with rot. Standing on this untrod threshold, I
instinctively glanced up at the scaffolding above me, and started as I
noticed that it had partially fallen away, as if time were weakening its
supports and making the precipitation of the whole a threatening
possibility. Alarmed lest it might fall while I stood there, I did not
linger long beneath it, but, with a shudder which I afterwards
remembered, stepped into the house and proceeded to inspect its rotting,
naked, and unfinished walls. I found them all in the one condition. A
fine house had once been planned and nearly completed, but it had been
abandoned before the hearths had been tiled, or the wainscoting nailed
to its place. The staircase which ran up through the centre of the house
was without banisters but otherwise finished and in a state of fair
preservation. Seeing this and not being able to resist the temptation
which it offered me of inspecting the rest of the house, I ascended to
the second story.
Here the doors were hung and the fireplaces bricked, and as I wandered
from room to room I wondered more than ever what had caused the
desertion of so promising a dwelling. If, as appeared, the first owner
had died suddenly, why could not an heir have been found, and what
could be the story of a place so abandoned and left to destruction that
its walls gave no token of ever having offered shelter to a human being?
As I could not answer this question I allowed my imagination full play,
and was just forming some weird explanation of the facts before me
when I felt my arm suddenly seized from behind, and paused aghast.

Was I then not alone in the deserted building? Was there some solitary
being who laid claim to its desolation and betrayed jealousy at any
intrusion within its mysterious precincts? Or was the dismal place
haunted by some uneasy spirit, who with long, uncanny fingers stood
ready to clutch the man who presumed to bring living hopes and fears
into a spot dedicated entirely to memories? I had scarcely the courage
to ask, but when I turned and saw what it was that had alarmed me, I
did not know whether to laugh