The Witch of Prague by Francis Marion Crawford

Author:Francis Marion Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620125090
Publisher: Duke Classics

Chapter XV

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Unorna's voice sank from the tone of anger to a lower pitch. She spoke quietly and very distinctly as though to impress every word upon the ear of the man who was in her power. The Wanderer listened, too, scarcely comprehending at first, but slowly yielding to the influence she exerted until the vision rose before him also with all its moving scenes, in all its truth and in all its horror. As in a dream the deeds that had been passed before him, the desolate burial-ground was peopled with forms and faces of other days, the gravestones rose from the earth and piled themselves into gloomy houses and remote courts and dim streets and venerable churches, the dry and twisted trees shrank down, and broadened and swung their branches as arms, and drew up their roots out of the ground as feet under them and moved hither and thither. And the knots and bosses and gnarls upon them became faces, dark, eagle-like and keen, and the creaking and crackling of the boughs and twigs under the piercing blast that swept by, became articulate and like the voices of old men talking angrily together. There were sudden changes from day to night and from night to day. In dark chambers crouching men took counsel of blood together under the feeble rays of a flickering lamp. In the uncertain twilight of winter, muffled figures lurked at the corner of streets, waiting for some one to pass, who must not escape them. As the Wanderer gazed and listened, Israel Kafka was transformed. He no longer stood with outstretched arms, his back against a crumbling slab, his filmy eyes fixed on Unorna's face. He grew younger; his features were those of a boy of scarcely thirteen years, pale, earnest and brightened by a soft light which followed him hither and thither, and he was not alone. He moved with others through the old familiar streets of the city, clothed in a fashion of other times, speaking in accents comprehensible but unlike the speech of to-day, acting in a dim and far-off life that had once been.

The Wanderer looked, and, as in dreams, he knew that what he saw was unreal, he knew that the changing walls and streets and houses and public places were built up of gravestones which in truth were deeply planted in the ground, immovable and incapable of spontaneous motion; he knew that the crowds of men and women were not human beings but gnarled and twisted trees rooted in the earth, and that the hum of voices which reached his ears was but the sound of dried branches bending in the wind; he knew that Israel Kafka was not the pale-faced boy who glided from place to place followed everywhere by a soft radiance; he knew that Unorna was the source and origin of the vision, and that the mingling speeches of the actors, now shrill in angry altercation, now hissing in low, fierce whisper, were really formed

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