The old fortress had thus been suffered to fall into decay. Grass grew in the courtyard; the wallflower clung to the battlements; the winter snow and the summer rain made their way through the broken casements, and no hand had removed the mass of wreck which lay where a furious storm had thrown down one of the ancient chimneys. Parties of tourists occasionally visited the gloomy place, trod the long, dreary corridors, and heard from a wrinkled woman accounts of the moth-eaten tapestry, and the time-darkened family portraits that grimly frowned from the walls. They heard tales of the last Mr. Bardon, the proud owner of the pile; how he had been wont to sit long and late over his bottle, carousing with jovial companions, till the hall resounded with their oaths and their songs; and how, more than thirty years back, he had disinherited his only son for marrying a farmer’s daughter. Then the old woman would, after slowly showing the way up the worn stone steps which led round and round till they opened on the summit of the tower, direct her listener’s attention to a small grey speck in the wide-spreading landscape below, and tell them that Dr. Bardon lived there in needy circumstances, in actual sight of the place where, if every man had his right, he would now be dwelling as his fathers had dwelt. And the visitors would sigh, shake their heads, and moralize on the strange changes in human fortunes.
The old woman who showed strangers over Nettleby Tower lived in a cottage hard by; neither she nor any other person was ever to be found in the old halls after the sun had set. The place had the repute of being haunted, and was left after dark to the sole possession of the rooks, the owls, and the bats. I must tax the faith of my readers to believe that the old tower _was_ actually haunted; not by the ghosts of the dead, but by the spirits of evil that are ever moving amongst the living. I must attempt with a bold hand to draw aside the mysterious veil which divides the invisible from the visible world, and though I must invoke imagination to my aid, it is imagination fluttering on the confines of truth. Bear with me, then, while I personify the spirits of Pride and Intemperance, and represent them as lingering yet in the pile in which for centuries they had borne sway over human hearts.